by Terry James
Wilson calmed again and became reflective, rolling the glass between his hands. "There's something afoot that's evil, okay. It's in that dangerous kind of thinking that promotes fanaticism--anarchy under the guise of religious freedom. There's the real enemy to worry about."
"Maybe I should have you talk to Karen," Jacob said, half-seriously. "Here I am involved in some of the very things she's so concerned about, and I can't discuss them with her — to help her understand that these things are for the best."
"She'll know in time, Son," the old diplomat said comfortingly. "Everyone will reap the benefits of the new ways of doing things, and still be able to keep most of the values that matter to us. That's why we've worked so hard, you and I and the others on the project."
"Project Eagle has to succeed. Then all the Orwellian fears can be put to rest for good," Wilson said, then finished the scotch.
Karen checked her watch against the antique grandfather clock that stood on an equally ancient, multi-hued oriental rug in the rectangular foyer. Hugo Marchek appeared in the arched, oak-framed doorway that provided entrance to his den. "Come, come, my dear Karen. There are others besides Mr. Jacob Zen in this world." The small, balding man of 78 years peered over the wire-rimmed glasses riding low on the bridge of his thin nose. "Come. We've much to discuss tonight. Mr. Zen will be here in time," he said, his Polish-accented English rendered with good-natured inflection.
She checked her watch a last time before following him into the room which was alive with diverse conversations carried on by men and women in their late twenties to middle forties.
"Your attention, please!" Marchek clapped his hands several times and the room quieted.
"Thank you," he said, adjusting the glasses with his right hand while straining to see the words on the single sheet of paper he held in his left.
"I have before me a memorandum of a highly confidential nature, which a friend managed to bring out of a certain file. It is disturbing, I am afraid, because it confirms our fears that the new controlling machinery is in place, and that we are very near the time it will be put into use in this nation.
"Details are quite sketchy. The information from this single document, of course, does not tell all. It is self-evident, however, that it was authorized in high places, and that makes it doubly significant. It reads:
“A universal standard of law and order being our ultimate objective, the United States must begin now to put aside provincial interests of all kinds and move into the New paradigm— socially, culturally, politically, and religiously. We have the technology for bringing us into that brilliant future, and we must provide leadership in marching to that future- Only those who can accept the required changes, only those who can adapt to the mix of policies capable of nurturing the New technologies, will achieve a place in the world that is to come. We will do whatever is necessary to claim our portion when the time is right. We must not fail, We shall not fail..”
Marchek's voice trailed off wearily while he removed the glasses, shut his eyes, and rubbed the reddened indentations they left on his nose. "The document is directed to a number of this country's most influential people in business, government, and the media. It is signed by the President of the United States."
"Interface Response Unity is the New Earth. You are either IN or you are lost. Mankind cannot serve two masters! Mankind must serve mankind, because mankind is one with God! Mankind is God. We are one through INterface Unity. INterface is salvation! TRINITY Loves You."
Jacob Zen struggled to his feet upon hearing the mechanized proclamation that snatched his mind from his semiconsciousness. His head spun, his vision blurred and went dark before clearing enough to see the screen and the image of the face.
"TRINITY forever!
Six Ways to Law!
Six Ways to Order!
Six Ways to Peace!
Six! Six! Six!"
The INRU Scanner Eye was alive, panning the room in search of anything not within INterface tolerance. He sat in the console chair holding the back of his head rigidly against the slotted headrest.
"Now is the time for joining spirits. For becoming one with TRINITY. Time for committing the ultimate trust, one to another, to INterface in love"
He performed his required functions when the computer devices had completed theirs, obediently reading aloud the message on the screen: "I, six, six, six, I N three, one, eight, eight, eight, two, seven, one, am one with INterface, as are all within Sector five, five, zero. We have and shall have no other allegiance."
With his thumbprint and index fingerprint confirmed, the Identifier deactivated the INRU. Jacob groped under the console chair with his right hand for the hidden writing pad and book, and, finding them, he thumbed through the old volume and copied the passages quickly.
"How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! How art thou cut down to the ground, who didst weaken the nations! For thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God; I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north,I will ascend above the heights of the clouds, I will be like the Most High. Yet thou shalt be brought down to Hell, to the sides of the pit" Isaiah 14:12-15.
"And the woman said unto the serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden; But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die. And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die; For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as God, knowing good and evil" Genesis 3:2-5.
Now was the worst time--the time after being in the half-dream, half-memory state when Karen again traversed his thoughts, dynamic with life. Always, the emptiness raked at his guts, a hollowness that slowly filled with the urge to end it all.
But he must survive TRINITY'S soul-exposing machinery, whose power he witnessed now, the INRU monitor again alive and displaying INterface society at its totalitarian worst. The faces looked the same. Emaciated faces of the dying, like those on the archival films of the Holocaust many decades earlier. But these — in ghastly color. He fought the urge to retch, seeing tiny, naked children, their ribs straining to punch through pasty-white skin, eyes bulging hugely from their sockets. Past hunger. Awaiting the final convulsive throes of what would for them be blessed relief.
"Jewry has brought its plight upon itself. They are plunderers and usurpers! Now they are reaping the bitter harvest of their own making. They have created their own hell, these Jews who defy INterface."
The screen continued to display barely alive people who stared unblinkingly into the panning cameras. "Even these subhumans, who have perpetrated conflicts around the world, even these have a place in the Six Ways Plan.
"TRINITY speaks from Jerusalem at the appointed hour of six!"
The Six Ways Plan — the ever-evolving social, political, and religious blueprint of INterface's reach for perfection. There would be more didactic barrages about the Universal Mind, the need of Oneness with the great Cosmic Organism of which every individual spirit was a cellular part. More assurances that the indwelling Spirit, the God within each person, would guide the Whole to the ultimate Evolutional Apex of Ascension.
Evidence that perfection was not yet attained burned now into his realization, while the scenes of the "Apostate Amputation," as TRINITY termed it, continued with a baby being torn from its mother's arms by a black-uniformed controller. The infant's head then bashed into a bloody, shapeless mass against a concrete wall moments before the mother was herself decapitated. But TRINITY would make it all understandable; TRINITY would explain the reasons for the "Amputations" — why babies and mothers must be butchered for the good of all.
Chapter 3
Withdrawal clutched at his intestines. Craving for the drug superseded any other need, even the need to escape through the mind-tunnel into his former existence, and it called to him now from a
cross the room, dark and oval and bitter.
Citizens of INterface were promised relief from the abrasive atmosphere through use of the chemical. Relief from throat disorders which brought on painful spasms, paralysis of the larynx, and even death from respiratory system collapse. The drug's primary by-product, however, was the personality-changing effect it produced; like everything INterface offered, Trachetrol II was designed to contribute to the process of subjugation.
John I. Carver was luckier than most, being part of the controlling apparatus provided generous access to the drug. The average citizen could claim a ration of no more than a dozen capsules each 30-day period. Jacob Zen had vowed to keep his use to a minimum, but the gripping pain of addiction more and more frequently drew him to the walnut-veneered cabinet and the bottle with the liquid-filled capsules.
He opened the container and downed one of the dark maroon Trachetrols, grimacing because of its bitterness and his difficulty in swallowing it. He partially filled a glass with water from the tap, the liquid brownish with impurities because those in charge of the system were unable to keep the pumps and filters functioning properly. His stomach calmed within seconds after the water washed the capsule down, his nerves steadying, but his mind becoming surrealistic in its ruminations. He cursed beneath his breath his lack of willpower.
From the wall above the INRU, the gray-black clock's amber readout, displayed:
"5:50 p.m. ... TRINITY speaks at six."
Jacob shook his head and tried to loosen his body with light calisthenics, moving his arms, head and legs to get back some of the feeling the Trachetrol II was withholding from him. Of all people under INterface tyranny, it was most imperative that he have full command of his faculties; the slightest error, the most minuscule deviation from the routine or unanticipated tasks thrust upon John I, Garver by INterface, would bring a face-to-face investigation by the controllers, discovery, and the end of Jacob Zen. The terror police were too busy most of the time, rounding up uncooperative Jews, to investigate minor officials with INterface.
Only a mistake would stimulate a half-biological, half-machine cell somewhere within the brain of the ever-vigilant computer network, alerting one of the controllers that the matter must be seen after. Soon, though, the Jewish problem would be cleared up to TRINITY'S satisfaction; all other facets of INterface would then be dealt with. He would be found out and eliminated. Meanwhile, his safest bet was the assumed identity and the job that went with it. There were ways to use the machinery at his command to manipulate the hated enemy. The trick was to know when to pull out in time to save himself.
"Interface is the New Earth!
You are either IN, or you are lost!
Mankind cannot serve two masters-Mankind must serve INterface to be one with God!
Master Manya is one with TRINITY!
TRINITY is INterface God!"
Jacob Zen's mind cleared with the forceful words that assaulted him from the INterface Response Unit, different words that grabbed his thoughts and shook them into sudden realization. He was now to equate Master Manya with TRINITY! Part of the INterface Godhead!
"To Caesar that which is Caesar's and to God that which is God's! Master Manya speaks!"
What did it mean? The scene of the INRU screen, too, was different. Instead of the revolving, crisscrossing triple image of the face he expected to see, the slow camera zoom drew his attention toward an illuminated edifice surrounded by the black night sky.
It was, he determined in the next instant, the recently completed temple atop Mount Moriah in Jerusalem, sitting beside the Moslem Mosque of Omar. The rebuilding of the temple was allowed as part of the peace accords between Israel and the neighboring Arab nations. The Jews had given up much for the privilege of rebuilding on this holy site. Israel had agreed to disband her army--at the time the third-most powerful in the world--in return for guaranteed protection by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, a guarantee that was forgotten the day Russians stormed into Palestine with all the others.
The scene dissolved to another—inside the temple, he surmised, sitting forward in the console chair, straining to see details with drug-affected eyes that worked against each other in the attempt to focus. The camera drew him down the empty corridor that narrowed in perspective, the hallway bounded by high granite walls made eerie by light from a single point which etched stark shadows around and between the walls ornately carved and scrolled surfaces.
"Master Manya loves you," the voice of INterface said solemnly, while yet another dissolve took place on the screen—to the innermost room of the temple, the Holy of Holies.
"The hour is six! Master Manya speaks!"
Indistinguishable at first, a silhouette of a man gradually became identifiable. The several cameras focused on the figure, giving the viewer different angles through a series of dissolves, the camera directly in front of the standing figure finally claiming exclusive possession and drawing it toward the viewer's screen. Still, the draped man was not completely distinguishable, the contrasting shadows obscuring his facial features.
"I and the Cosmogonal Mind, Father of all but the Jew, are One. Those who are IN are One with me, as I am One with the Father. All are parts of the Universal Body of pure existence, linking cells which comprise the great Cosmogonal Organism within which I am eternally at work, taking each of you upward to the supreme level of universal mind-consciousness."
Unlike TRINITY'S mechanized preachments, the words were softly spoken and reassuring in tone.
"The Six Ways Plan edicts that these must be excised. They are as lesions on an otherwise healthy organ, malignant and parasitic, draining the whole's vitality, keeping mankind from reaching the highest order of evolution.
"The disappearance mystery was part of that excision, carried out by natural evolution, similar to dissipation of illness and fever in the body as one becomes whole again. Part of the disappearance was glorious for those involved. A quantum evolutionary leap to the highest Universal Mind Order by those who earned that existence through their many incarnations, always using their time on earth for the good of their fellow man. Each citizen of INterface who follows the examples of selfless devotion to humanity is even now in the evolutionary process of becoming one, in the eternal sense, with God, with Master Manya."
The camera angle changed, the figure taking on a more ominous appearance; the voice became angry.
"The greatest act you can perform, in earning your elevation to the higher evolutionary order, is to devote yourself to eradicating all who are not IN! From this moment make this your consuming desire! Find them in their nests, wherever they are.
"Kill them! Or call controllers to their places of hiding. Only when this scourge is wiped from our midst can there truly be heaven on earth!"
A cold wash of fear soaked Jacob's thought processes while he watched and heard the call for genocide. How he hated them.
Karen... beautiful Karen. To see this beast die for what it did, whatever it did to her. To see it dead—as dead as the rabbis, whose bodies were being shown now, minus the heads which were already within the white Decap Unit van.
"The leadership of these parasites has been eliminated! Witness their bodies! Soon their disciples will follow them."
Two front-end loaders driven by controllers scooped the robed bodies and dumped them into a chute that closed to form an outer wall of the van. Other black-uniformed men clubbed and kicked men and women, herding them through a small opening into another van. Many who took the blows lay where they fell and were hit repeatedly until they either got up or were bludgeoned to death. "We must do our part in the Amputation begun with the dissipation! The two great commandments from this evolutionary moment forward are:
1. Thou shall worship the Lord, thy God, Interface. E.
2. Thou shall kill illegal Jews and all other enemies of Interface."
The screen again filled with the shadowy image of the self-proclaimed deity, the three cameras in the Holy of Holies taking turns s
howing Master Manya from different angles through a series of dissolves. The INRU screen went black, returning to life momentarily with a still shot of Master Manya's darkened form. Etched in bright yellow characters above the image were the words:
"MASTER MANYA LOVES YOU!"
Below the image were the Roman numerals:
"VI VI VI
Six Ways to Law!
Six Ways to Order!
Six Ways to Peace!"
Paralysis gripped Jacob and he sat transfixed. It was madness beyond even the insanity he always knew festered at the core of INterface! When he again became aware of the screen, it was dark and inactive, and his automatic reaction was to look to the Scanner atop the INRU to determine whether it was betraying his temporary lapse. One was expected to be active; inactivity allowed time to think, breeding discontent. Watchers became instantly disturbed when they observed thinking; they became especially disturbed when a Sector Coordinator was caught in the act of inactivity at times other than the permitted periods of rest.
The Scanner's smoke-gray convex lens was, for the moment, motionless. He moved from the console chair, watching, although not too overtly, to see if the camera's eye followed him about the room. It did not. His body ached, and he stretched to limber its stiffness, contemplating things he had just seen. Memories emerged to the surface of his conscious thought, drawn by the horrors he had witnessed. He retrieved the old Bible and the legal pad from their hiding place beneath the console chair, then moved to near the room's only window. If the Scanner was activated by Controller Central, the lens would have to swing sharply to put him within its view, giving him time to get the materials out of sight, and to become active.
After a final glance at the snooping camera, he began thumbing through the old book, checking first its concordance. Then, turning to the passages of his search, he copied the Scriptures: