The 13th Golden Age of Science Fiction Megapack

by Lester Del Rey

  “I was so pathetically grateful and proud, when they revived me. I was always gratefully proud of my achievements, you know, and what they could do for humanity. But the time had been too long—my brain only seemed normal. It had deteriorated, and I couldn’t remember all I should; when I tried too hard, there were strange nightmare periods of half insanity. And their psychological torture to rip the secret from me didn’t help. Two months of that, boy! They told me my name was almost like a god’s in this world, and then they stopped at nothing to get what they wanted from that god! And at last I must have gone mad for a time; I don’t remember, but somehow I must have escaped—I think I remember something about an air shaft. And then I was here, lost in the maze, unable to get out. But I couldn’t be here, could I, if the only entrance was through interpenetrable stone panels that I couldn’t remember how to energize?”

  “Easy, sir.” Jimmy slipped an arm under the trembling body of Aaron Bard and lifted him gently. “You could, all right. There’s one out of order, in constant interpenetrable condition in an old air shaft. That’s how I first found all this, years ago… There’s some soup I can heat in my rooms, and you won’t have to go back to them.”

  He might as well do one decent and human thing, while his mind was still his own, untouched by the damnable education machine. And seeing this bitter, suffering old man, he could no longer hate Aaron Bard for inventing it. The man had possessed a mind of inconceivable scope and had brought forth inventions in all fields as a cat brings forth kittens, but their misuse was no fault of his.

  And suddenly it occurred to him that here in his arms was the reason for the desperation his father felt. They couldn’t know of the interpenetrable panel, and the search that had undoubtedly been made and failed could have only one answer to them; he must have received outside help from some of the parties constantly plotting treason. With the threat of simple atomic power in such hands, no wonder his Dictator father was pulling all his last desperate tricks to maintain the order of things! Jimmy shook his head; it seemed that everything connected with Aaron Bard led to the position he was in and the inevitable education he must face. For a brief moment he hesitated, swayed by purely personal desires; then his hand moved out to the panel, and he was walking through into his own room, the aged figure still in his arms.

  Later, when the old scientist had satisfied some of the needs of his body and was sitting on the bed, smoking, his eyes wandered slowly over the rows of books on the shelves about the room, and his eyebrows lifted slightly. “The Age of Reason, even! The first books I’ve seen in this world, Jimmy!”

  “Nobody reads much, anymore, so they don’t miss them at the old library. People prefer ’vision for amusement and the compellor tapes if they need additional information. I started trying to learn things from them, and reading grew to be a habit.”

  “Umm. So you’re another one-eyed man?”

  “Eh?”

  Bard shrugged, and the bitterness returned to his mouth. “ ‘In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is—killed!’ Wells wrote a story about it. Where—when—I came from, men had emotional eyes to their souls, and my guess is that you’ve been through enough hell to develop your own. But this world is blind to such things. They don’t want people to see. It’s the old rule of the pack: Thou shalt conform! Jimmy, how did all this come to be?”

  Jimmy frowned, trying to put it into words. The start had probably been when Aaron Bard tried his newly invented psychicompellor on his son. The boy had liked that way of learning, and stolen other experimental tapes, building with his cold, calculating little brain toward the future already. Unerringly, he’d turned to the army, apparently sensing the coming war, and making the most of it when it came. Fifteen years of exhausting, technological warfare had let him introduce the educator to furnish the technical men needed, and had seen him bring forth stolen secret of his father after stolen secret, once the accidental death of Bard had left him alone in possession of Bard’s files. With the war’s end, the old education system was gone, and boys of twelve were serving as technicians at home until they could be replaced for active duty when old enough.

  Those same boys, grown to men and desiring the same things he did, had made possible his move from General to President, and finally to Dictator. He’d even adopted the psychicompellor as his heraldic device. And the ever-increasing demands of technology made going back to old methods impossible and assured him a constant supply of young “realists.” Bard interrupted. “Why? It would have been hard—getting an education was always difficult and becoming worse, which is why I tried to make the compellor—but it would have been worth it when they saw where it led. After all, without such help I managed to find a few things—even if they turned out to be Frankenstein monsters!”

  “But you depended on some odd linkage of simple facts for results, and most men can’t; they need a multitude of facts. And even then, we still follow you by rote in some things!”

  “Too easy knowledge. They aren’t using it—when they get facts, they don’t have the habits of hard thinking needed to utilize them. I noticed the meager developments of new fields… But when they began making these—uh—zombies…”

  Jimmy punched a button and nodded toward the creature that entered in answer. It began quietly clearing the room, removing the evidence of Bard’s meal, while the scientist studied it. “There’s one. He knows as much as any adult, but he has no soul, no emotions, you might say. Tell him to do something, and he will—but he won’t even eat without orders.”

  “Permanent mechanical hypnosis,” Bard muttered, and there was hell in his eyes. Then his mouth hardened, while the eyes grew even grimmer. “I never foresaw that, but—you’re wrong, and it makes it even worse! You—uh—4719, answer my questions. Do you have emotions such as hatred, fear, or a sense of despair?”

  Jimmy started to shake his head, but the zombie answered dully before him. “Yes, master, all those!”

  “But you can’t connect them with your actions—is that right? You’re two people, one in hell and unable to reach the other?”

  The affirmative answer was in the same dull tone again, and the zombie turned obediently and left at Bard’s gesture. Jimmy wiped sudden sweat from his forehead. He’d been hoping before that he might fail the compellor education as a release, but this would be sheer, unadulterated hell! And the psychologists must know this, even though they never mentioned it.

  “And ten percent of us are zombies! But only a very few at first, until the need for ever more knowledge made the shock of education greater. By then—the world had accepted such things; and some considered them a most useful by-product, since they made the best possible workers.” His own voice grew more bitter as he forced it on with the history lesson, trying to forget the new and unwelcome knowledge.

  Bard’s son had built the monstrous castle with its secret means for spying, and had fled into the passages with his private papers to die when his son wrested control from him. It was those moldy papers that had shown Jimmy the secret of escape when he’d stumbled into the labyrinth first. After that, the passage of Dictatorship from father to son had been peaceful enough, and taken for granted. On the whole, there had been little of the deliberate cruelty of the ancient Nazi regime, and the dictatorial powers, while great, were not absolute. The people were used to it—after all, they were products of the compellor, and a ruthless people, best suited by dictatorial government.

  Always the compellor! Jimmy hesitated for a moment, and then plunged into the tale of his own troubles. “So I’m to be made into a beast, whether I like it or not,” he finished. “Oh, I could turn you in and save myself. If I were an adult, I would! That’s why I hate it, even though I might like it then. It wouldn’t be me—it’d be just another adult, carrying my name, doing all the things I’ve learned to hate. I can save myself from becoming one of them—by becoming one!”

  “Requiescat in pace! Rest th
e dead in peace. If you wake them, they may learn they’ve made a ghastly mess of the world, and may even find themselves ruining the only person in all the world whom they like!” Aaron Bard shook his head, wrinkles of concentration cutting over the lines of pain. “The weapon you took from me isn’t exactly harmless. Sometime, during my temporary insanity, I must have remembered the old secret, since I made it then, and it’s atom-powered. Maybe, without a dictator—”

  “No! He’s weak, but he’s no worse than the others; I couldn’t let you kill my father!”

  “No, I suppose you couldn’t; anyhow, killing people isn’t usually much of a solution. Jimmy, are you sure there’s any danger of your being made like the others?”

  “I’ve seen the results!”

  “But have you? The children are given no education or discipline until they’re twelve, and then suddenly filled with knowledge, for which they haven’t been prepared, even if preadolescents can be prepared for all that—which I don’t believe. Even in my day, in spite of some discipline and training, twelve-year-old boys were little hoodlums, choosing to group together into gangs; wild, savage barbarians, filled with only their own egotism; pack-hunting animals, not yet civilized. Not cruel, exactly, but thoughtless, ruthless as we’ve seen this world is. Maybe with the sudden new flood of knowledge for which they never worked, they make good technicians; but that spurious, forced adulthood might very well discourage any real maturity; when the whole world considers them automatic adults, what incentive have they to mature?”

  Jimmy thought back over his early childhood, before the education fizzle, and it was true that he and the other boys had been the egocentric little animals Bard described; there had been no thought of anything beyond their immediate whims and wants, and no one to tell them that the jungle rule for survival of the fittest should be tempered with decency and consideration for others. But the books had taught him that there had been problem children and boy-gangs before the compellor—and they had mostly outgrown it. Here, after education, they never changed; and while the pressure of society now resisted any attempt on their part to change, that wasn’t the explanation needed; other ages had developed stupid standards, but there had always been those who refused them before.

  “Do you believe that, sir?”

  The old man shrugged slightly. “I don’t know. I can’t be sure. Maybe I’m only trying to justify myself. Maybe the educator does do something to the mind, carefully as I designed it to carry no personal feelings to the subject. And while I’ve seen some of the people, I haven’t seen enough of the private life to judge; you can’t judge, because you never knew normal people… When I invented it, I had serious doubts about it, for that matter. They still use it as I designed it—exactly?”

  “Except for the size of the tapes.”

  “Then there’s a wave form that will cancel out the subject’s sensitivity, blanket the impulse, if broadcast within a few miles. If I could remember it—if I had an electronics laboratory where I could try it—maybe your fake immunity to education could be made real.”

  Relief washed over the younger man, sending him to his feet and to the panel. “There is a laboratory. The first Dictator had everything installed for an emergency, deep underground in the passages. I don’t know how well stocked it is, but I’ve been there.”

  He saw purpose and determination come into the tired face, and Aaron Bard was beside him as the panel became passable. Jimmy turned through a side way that led near the Senatorial section of the castle. On impulse he turned aside and motioned the other forward. “If you want an idea of our private life, take a look at our Senators and judge for yourself.”

  The wall became transparent to light and sound in one direction and they were looking out into one of the cloakrooms of the Senate Hall. One of the middle-aged men was telling a small audience of some personal triumph of his: “Their first kid—burned—just a damned zombie! I told her when she turned me down for that pimple-faced goon that I’d fix her and I did. I spent five weeks taking the kid around on the sly, winning his confidence. Just before education, I slipped him the dope in candy! You know what it does when they’re full of that and the educator starts in.”

  Another grinned. “Better go easy telling about it; some of us might decide to turn you in for breaking the laws you helped write against using the stuff that way.”

  “Hell, you can’t prove it. I’m not dumb enough to give you birds anything you could pin on me. Just to prove I’m the smartest man in this bunch, I’ll let you in on something. I’ve been doing a little thinking on the Dictator’s son…”

  “Drop it, Pete, cold! I was with a bunch that hired some fellows to kill the monkey a couple years ago—and you can’t prove that, either! We had keys to his door and everything; but he’s still around, and the thugs never came back. I don’t know what makes, but no other attempt has worked. The Dictator’s got some tricks up his sleeve, there.”

  Jimmy shut the panel off and grinned. “I don’t sleep anywhere near doors, and there’s a section of the floor that can be made interpenetrable, with a ninety-foot shaft under it. That’s why I wangled that particular suite out of my father.”

  “These are the Senators?” Bard asked.

  “Some of the best ones.” Jimmy went on, turning on a panel now and again, and Bard frowned more strongly after each new one. Some were plotting treason, others merely talking. Once something like sympathy for the zombies was expressed, but not too strongly. Jimmy started to shut the last panel off, when a new voice started.

  “Blane’s weakling son is dead. Puny little yap couldn’t take the climate and working with all the zombies in the mines; committed suicide this morning.”

  “His old man couldn’t save him from that, eh? Good. Put it into the papers, will you? I want to be sure the Dictator’s monkey gets full details. They were thick for a while, you know.”

  Jimmy’s lips twisted as he cut off suddenly. “The only partly human person I ever knew—the one who taught me to read. He was a sickly boy, but his father managed to save him from euthanasia, somehow. Probably he went around with me for physical protection, since the others wouldn’t let him alone. Then they shipped him to some mines down in South America, to handle zombie labor.”

  “Euthanasia? Nice word for killing off the weak. Biologically, perhaps such times as these may serve a useful purpose, but I’d rather have the physically weak around than those who treat them that way. Jimmy, I think if my trick doesn’t work and the educator does things to you it shouldn’t, I’ll kill you before I kill myself!”

  Jimmy nodded tightly. Bard wasn’t the killing type, but he hoped he’d do it, if such a thing occurred. Now he hurried, wasting no more time in convincing the other of the necessity to prevent such a change in him. He located the place he wanted and stepped in, pressed a switch on the floor, and set the lift to dropping smoothly downward.

  “Power is stolen, but cleverly, and no one has suspected. There are auxiliary fuel-batteries, too. The laboratory power will be the same. And here we are.”

  He pointed to the room, filled with a maze of equipment of all kinds, neatly in order, but covered with dust and dirt from long disuse. Aaron Bard looked at it slowly, with a wry grin.

  “Familiar, Jimmy. My son apparently copied it from my old laboratory, where he used to fiddle around sometimes, adapting my stuff to military use. With a little decency, he’d have been a good scientist; he was clever enough.”

  Jimmy watched, some measure of hope coming to him, as the old man began working. He cleared the tables of dust with casual flicks of a cloth and began, his hands now steady. Wires, small tubes, coils, and various other electronic equipment came from the little boxes and drawers, though some required careful search. Then his fingers began the job of assembling and soldering them into a plastic case about the size of a muskmelon, filled almost solidly as he went along.

  “That boy who taught
you how to read—was he educated at the age of twelve?”

  “Of course—it’s compulsory. Everyone has to be. Or—” Jimmy frowned, trying to remember more clearly; but he could only recall vague hints and phrases from bits of conversation among Blane’s enemies. “There was something about falsified records during the euthanasia judgment proceedings, I think, but I don’t know what records. Does it matter?”

  Bard shrugged, scribbling bits of diagrams on a scrap of dirty paper before picking up the soldering iron again. “I wish I knew…Umm? In that fifteen-year war, when they first began intensive use of the compellor, they must have tried it on all types and ages. Did any scientist check on variations due to such factors? No, they wouldn’t! No wonder they don’t develop new fields. How about a book of memoirs by some soldier who deals with personalities?”

  “Maybe, but I don’t know. The diary of the first Dictator might, if it could be read, but when I tried after finding it, I only got hints of words here and there. It’s in some horrible code—narrow strips of short, irregularly spaced letter groups, pasted in. I can’t even figure what kind of a code it is, and there’s no key.”

  “Key’s in the library, Jimmy, if you’ll look up Brak-O-Type—machine shorthand. He considered ordinary typing inefficient; one time when I thoroughly agreed with him. Damn!” Bard sucked on the thumb where a drop of solder had fallen and stared down at the tight-packed parts. He picked up a tiny electrolytic condenser, studied the apparatus, and put it down again doubtfully. Then he sat motionlessly, gazing down into the half-finished object.

  The work, which had progressed rapidly at first, was now beginning to go more slowly, with long pauses while the older man thought. And the pauses lengthened. Jimmy slipped out and up the lift again, to walk rapidly down a corridor that would lead him to the rear of one of the restaurants of the castle. The rats had been blamed for a great deal at that place, and they were in for more blame as Jimmy slid his hands back into the corridors with coffee and food in them.