The Second Science Fiction Megapack

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  Dalgetty’s view in all directions was cut off by the other stations, the rising streamlined hulks which were Pacific Colony. A few airy flex-strung bridges had been completed to link them, but there was still an extensive boat traffic. To the south he could see a blackness on the water that was a sea ranch. His trained memory told him, in answer to a fleeting question, that according to the latest figures eighteen-point-three percent of the world’s food supply was now being derived from modified strains of seaweed. The percentage would increase rapidly, he knew.

  Elsewhere were mineral-extracting plants, fishery bases, experimental and pure-research stations. Below the floating city, digging into the continental shelf, was the underwater settlement—oil wells to supplement the industrial synthesizing process, mining, exploration in tanks to find new resources, a slow growth outward as men learned how to go deeper into cold and darkness and pressure. It was expensive but an over-crowded world had little choice.

  Venus was already visible, low and pure on the dusking horizon. Dalgetty breathed the wet pungent sea-air into his lungs and thought with some pity of the men out there—and on the Moon, on Mars, between worlds. They were doing a huge and heart-breaking job—but he wondered if it were bigger and more meaningful than this work here in Earth’s oceans.

  Or a few pages of scribbled equations, tossed into a desk drawer at the Institute. Enough. Dalgetty brought his mind to heel like a harshly trained dog. He was also here to work.

  The forces he must encounter seemed monstrous. He was one man, alone against he knew not what kind of organization. He had to rescue one other man before—well, before history was changed and spun off on the wrong course, the long downward path. He had his knowledge and abilities but they wouldn’t stop a bullet. Nor did they include education for this kind of warfare. War that was not war, politics that were not politics but a handful of scrawled equations and a bookful of slowly gathered data and a brainful of dreams.

  Bancroft had Tighe—somewhere. The Institute could not ask the government for help, even if to a large degree the Institute was the government. It could, perhaps, send Dalgetty a few men but it had no goon squads. And time was like a hound on his heels.

  * * * *

  The sensitive man turned, suddenly aware of someone else. This was a middle-aged fellow, gaunt and gray-haired, with an intellectual cast of feature. He leaned on the rail and said quietly, “Nice evening, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” said Dalgetty. “Very nice.”

  “It gives me a feeling of real accomplishment, this place,” said the stranger.

  “How so?” asked Dalgetty, not unwilling to make conversation.

  The man looked out over the sea and spoke softly as if to himself. “I’m fifty years old. I was born during World War Three and grew up with the famines and the mass insanities that followed. I saw fighting myself in Asia. I worried about a senselessly expanding population pressing on senselessly diminished resources. I saw an America that seemed equally divided between decadence and madness.

  “And yet I can stand now and watch a world where we’ve got a functioning United Nations, where population increase is leveling off and democratic government spreading to country after country, where we’re conquering the seas and even going out to other planets. Things have changed since I was a boy but on the whole it’s been for the better.”

  “Ah,” said Dalgetty, “a kindred spirit. Though I’m afraid it’s not quite that simple.”

  The man arched his brows. “So you vote conservative?”

  “The Labor Party is conservative,” said Dalgetty. “As proof of which it’s in coalition with the Republicans and the Neofederalists as well as some splinter groups. No, I don’t care if it stays in, or if the Conservatives prosper or the Liberals take over. The question is—who shall control the group in power?”

  “Its membership, I suppose,” said the man.

  “But just who is its membership? You know as well as I do that the great failing of the American people has always been their lack of interest in politics.”

  “What? Why, they vote, don’t they? What was the last percentage?”

  “Eight-eight-point-three-seven. Sure they vote—once the ticket has been presented to them. But how many of them have anything to do with nominating the candidates or writing the platforms? How many will actually take time out to work at it—or even to write their Congressmen? ‘Ward heeler’ is still a term of contempt.

  “All too often in our history the vote has been simply a matter of choosing between two well-oiled machines. A sufficiently clever and determined group can take over a party, keep the name and the slogans and in a few years do a complete behind-the-scenes volte-face.” Dalgetty’s words came fast, this was one facet of a task to which he had given his life.

  “Two machines,” said the stranger, “or four or five as we’ve got now, are at least better than one.”

  “Not if the same crowd controls all of them,” Dalgetty said grimly.

  “But—”

  “‘If you can’t lick ’em, join ’em.’ Better yet, join all sides. Then you can’t lose.”

  “I don’t think that’s happened yet,” said the man.

  “No it hasn’t,” said Dalgetty, “not in the United States, though in some other countries—never mind. It’s still in process of happening, that’s all. The lines today are drawn not by nations or parties, but by—philosophies, if you wish. Two views of man’s destiny, cutting across all national, political, racial and religious lines.”

  “And what are those two views?” asked the stranger quietly.

  “You might call them libertarian and totalitarian, though the latter don’t necessarily think of themselves as such. The peak of rampant individualism was reached in the nineteenth century, legally speaking. Though in point of fact social pressure and custom were more strait-jacketing than most people today realize.

  “In the twentieth century that social rigidity—in manners, morals, habits of thought—broke down. The emancipation of women, for instance, or the easy divorce or the laws about privacy. But at the same time legal control began tightening up again. Government took over more and more functions, taxes got steeper, the individual’s life got more and more bound by regulations saying ‘thou shalt’ and ‘thou shalt not.’

  “Well, it looks as if war is going out as an institution. That takes off a lot of pressure. Such hampering restrictions as conscription to fight or work, or rationing, have been removed. What we’re slowly attaining is a society where the individual has maximum freedom, both from law and custom. It’s perhaps farthest advanced in America, Canada, and Brazil, but it’s growing the world over.

  “But there are elements which don’t like the consequences of genuine libertarianism. And the new science of human behavior, mass and individual, is achieving rigorous formulation. It’s becoming the most powerful tool man has ever had—for whoever controls the human mind will also control all that man can do. That science can be used by anyone, mind you. If you’ll read between the lines you’ll see what a hidden struggle is shaping up for control of it as soon as it reaches maturity and empirical useability.”

  “Ah, yes,” said the man. “The Psychotechnic Institute.”

  Dalgetty nodded, wondering why he had jumped into such a lecture. Well, the more people who had some idea of the truth the better—though it wouldn’t do for them to know the whole truth either. Not yet.

  “The Institute trains so many for governmental posts and does so much advisory work,” said the man, “that sometimes it looks almost as if it were quietly taking over the whole show.”

  Dalgetty shivered a little in the sunset breeze and wished he’d brought his cloak. He thought wearily, Here it is again. Here is the story they are spreading, not in blatant accusations, not all at once, but slowly and subtly, a whisper here, a hint there, a slanted news story, a supposedly dispassionate article.… Oh, yes, they know their applied semantics.

  “Too many people fear such an outcome,�
�� he declared. “It just isn’t true. The Institute is a private research organization with a Federal grant. Its records are open to anyone.”

  “All the records?” The man’s face was vague in the gathering twilight.

  Dalgetty thought he could make out a skeptically lifted brow. He didn’t reply directly but said, “There’s a foggy notion in the public mind that a group equipped with a complete science of man—which the Institute hasn’t got by a long shot—could ‘take over’ at once and, by manipulations of some unspecified but frightfully subtle sort, rule the world. The theory is that if you know just what buttons to push and so on, men will do precisely as you wish without knowing that they’re being guided. The theory happens to be pure jetwash.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” said the man. “In general terms it sounds pretty plausible.”

  Dalgetty shook his head. “Suppose I were an engineer,” he said, “and suppose I saw an avalanche coming down on me. I might know exactly what to do to stop it—where to plant my dynamite, where to build my concrete wall and so on. Only the knowledge wouldn’t help me. I’d have neither the time nor the strength to use it.

  “The situation is similar with regard to human dynamics, both mass and individual. It takes months or years to change a man’s convictions and when you have hundreds of millions of men.…” He shrugged. “Social currents are too large for all but the slightest, most gradual control. In fact perhaps the most valuable results obtained to date are not those which show what can be done but what cannot.”

  “You speak with the voice of authority,” said the man.

  “I’m a psychologist,” said Dalgetty truthfully enough. He didn’t add that he was also a subject, observer and guinea pig in one. “And I’m afraid I talk too much. Go from bad to voice.”

  “Ouch,” said the man. He leaned his back against the rail and his shadowy hand extended a pack. “Smoke?”

  “No, thanks, I don’t.”

  “You’re a rarity.” The brief lighter-flare etched the stranger’s face against the dusk.

  “I’ve found other ways of relaxing.”

  “Good for you. By the way I’m a professor myself. English Litt at Colorado.”

  “Afraid I’m rather a roughneck in that respect,” said Dalgetty. For a moment he had a sense of loss. His thought processes had become too far removed from the ordinary human for him to find much in fiction or poetry. But music, sculpture, painting—there was something else. He looked over the broad glimmering water, at the stations dark against the first stars, and savored the many symmetries and harmonies with a real pleasure. You needed senses like his before you could know what a lovely world this was.

  “I’m on vacation now,” said the man. Dalgetty did not reply in kind. After a moment—” You are too, I suppose?”

  Dalgetty felt a slight shock. A personal question from a stranger—well, you didn’t expect otherwise from someone like the girl Glenna but a professor should be better conditioned to privacy customs.

  “Yes,” he said shortly. “Just visiting.”

  “By the way, my name is Tyler, Harmon Tyler.”

  “Joe Thomson.” Dalgetty shook hands with him.

  “We might continue our conversation if you’re going to be around for awhile,” said Tyler. “You raised some interesting points.”

  Dalgetty considered. It would be worthwhile staying as long as Bancroft did, in the hope of learning some more. “I may be here a couple of days yet,” he said.

  “Good,” said Tyler. He looked up at the sky. It was beginning to fill with stars. The deck was still empty. It ran around the dim upthrusting bulk of a weather-observation tower which was turned over to its automatics for the night and there was no one else to be seen. A few fluoros cast wan puddles of luminance on the plastic flooring.

  Glancing at his watch, Tyler said casually, “It’s about nineteen-thirty hours now. If you don’t mind waiting till twenty hundred I can show you something interesting.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Ah, you’ll be surprised.” Tyler chuckled. “Not many people know about it. Now, getting back to that point you raised earlier.…”

  The half hour passed swiftly. Dalgetty did most of the talking.

  “—and mass action. Look, to a rather crude first approximation a state of semantic equilibrium on a world-wide scale, which of course has never existed, would be represented by an equation of the form—”

  “Excuse me.” Tyler consulted the shining dial again. “If you don’t mind stopping for a few minutes I’ll show you that odd sight I was talking about.”

  “Eh? Oh-oh, sure.”

  Tyler threw away his cigarette. It was a tiny meteor in the gloom. He took Dalgetty’s arm. They walked slowly around the weather tower.

  The men came from the opposite side and met them halfway. Dalgetty had hardly seen them before he felt the sting in his chest.

  A needle gun!

  The world roared about him. He took a step forward, trying to scream, but his throat locked. The deck lifted up and hit him and his mind whirled toward darkness.

  From somewhere will rose within him, trained reflexes worked, he summoned all that was left of his draining strength and fought the anesthetic. His wrestling with it was a groping in fog. Again and again he spiraled into unconsciousness and rose strangling. Dimly, through nightmare, he was aware of being carried. Once someone stopped the group in a corridor and asked what was wrong. The answer seemed to come from immensely far away. “I dunno. He passed out—just like that. We’re taking him to a doctor.”

  There was a century spent going down some elevator. The boat-house walls trembled liquidly around him. He was carried aboard a large vessel, it was not visible through the gray mist. Some dulled portion of himself thought that this was obviously a private boat-house, since no one was trying to stop—trying to stop—trying to stop.…

  Then the night came.

  CHAPTER III

  He woke slowly, with a dry retch, and blinked his eyes open. Noise of air, he was flying, it must have been a triphibian they took him onto. He tried to force recovery but his mind was still too paralyzed.

  “Here. Drink this.”

  Dalgetty took the glass and gulped thirstily. It was coolness and steadiness spreading through him. The vibratto within him faded, and the headache dulled enough to be endurable. Slowly he looked around, and felt the first crawl of panic.

  No! He suppressed the emotion with an almost physical thrust. Now was the time for calm and quick wit and—

  A big man near him nodded and stuck his head out the door. “He’s okay now, I guess,” he called. “Want to talk to him?”

  Dalgetty’s eyes roved the compartment. It was a rear cabin in a large airboat, luxuriously furnished with reclining seats and an inlaid table. A broad window looked out on the stairs.

  Caught! It was pure bitterness, an impotent rage at himself. Walked right into their arms!

  Tyler came into the room, followed by a pair of burly stone-faced men. He smiled. “Sorry,” he murmured, “but you’re playing out of your league, you know.”

  “Yeah.” Dalgetty shook his head. Wryness twisted his mouth. “I don’t league it much either.”

  Tyler grinned. It was a sympathetic expression. “You punsters are incurable,” he said. “I’m glad you’re taking it so well. We don’t intend any harm to you.”

  Skepticism was dark in Dalgetty but he managed to relax. “How’d you get onto me?” he asked.

  “Oh, various ways. You were pretty clumsy, I’m afraid.” Tyler sat down across the table. The guards remained standing. “We were sure the Institute would attempt a counterblow and we’ve studied it and its personnel thoroughly. You were recognized, Dalgetty—and you’re known to be very close to Tighe. So you walked after us without even a face-mask.…

  “At any rate, you were noticed hanging around the colony. We checked back on your movements. One of the rec girls had some interesting things to tell of you. We decided you’d bet
ter be questioned. I sounded you out as much as a casual acquaintance could and then took you to the rendezvous.” Tyler spread his hands. “That’s all.”

  Dalgetty sighed and his shoulders slumped under a sudden enormous burden of discouragement. Yes, they were right. He was out of his orbit. “Well,” he said, “what now?”

  “Now we have you and Tighe,” said the other. He took out a cigarette. “I hope you’re somewhat more willing to talk than he is.”

  “Suppose I’m not?”

  “Understand this.” Tyler frowned. “There are reasons for going slow with Tighe. He has hostage value, for one thing. But you’re nobody. And while we aren’t monsters I for one have little sympathy to spare for your kind of fanatic.”

  “Now there,” said Dalgetty with a lift of sardonicism, “is an interesting example of semantic evolution. This being, on the whole, an easy-going tolerant period, the word ‘fanatic’ has come to be simply an epithet—a fellow on the other side.”

  “That will do,” snapped Tyler. “You won’t be allowed to stall. There are questions we want answered.” He ticked the points off on his fingers. “What are the Institute’s ultimate aims? How is it going about attaining them? How far has it gotten? Precisely what has it learned, in a scientific way, that it hasn’t published? How much does it know about us?” He smiled thinly. “You’ve always been close to Tighe. He raised you, didn’t he? You should know just as much as he.”

  Yes, thought Dalgetty, Tighe raised me. He was all the father I ever had, really. I was an orphan and he took me in and he was good.

  Sharp in his mind rose the image of the old house. It had lain on broad wooded grounds in the fair hills of Maine, with a little river running down to a bay winged with sailboats. There had been neighbors—quiet-spoken folk with something more real about them than most of today’s rootless world knew. And there had been many visitors—men and women with minds like flickering sword-blades.