They climbed up on one of the hogback rocks some ten yards from shore.
This one rose a good dozen feet above the surface. It was cleft in the
middle, forming a little hollow hidden from land and water alike. They
crawled into this and sat down, breathing hard. The sea was loud at
their backs and the air felt cold on their wet skins.
Dalgetty leaned back against the smooth stone, looking at the woman,
who was unemotionally counting how many clips she had in her pouch.
The thin drenched tunic and slacks showed a very nice figure. "What's
your name?" he asked.
"Casimir," she answered, without looking up.
"First name, I mean. Mine is Simon."
"Elena, if you must know. Four packs, a hundred rounds plus ten in the
chamber now. If we have to shoot them all, we'd better be good. These
aren't magnums, so you have to hit a man just right to put him out of
action."
"Well," shrugged Dalgetty, "we'll just have to lumber along as best we
can. I oak we don't make ashes of ourselves."
"Oh, _no_!" He couldn't tell whether it was appreciation or dismay.
"At a time like this too."
"It doesn't make me very popular," he agreed. "Everybody says to elm
with me. But, as they say in France, ve are alo-o-one now, mon cherry,
and tree's a crowd."
"Don't get ideas," she snapped.
"Oh, I'll get plenty of ideas, though I admit this isn't the place to
carry them out." Dalgetty folded his arms behind his head and blinked
up at the sky. "Man, could I use a nice tall mint julep right now."
Elena frowned. "If you're trying to convince me you're just a simple
American boy you might as well quit," she said thinly. "That sort
of--of emotional control, in a situation like this, only makes you
less human."
Dalgetty swore at himself. She was too damn quick, that was all. And
her intelligence might be enough for her to learn....
_Will I have to kill her?_
He drove the thought from him. He could overcome his own conditioning
about anything, including murder, if he wanted to, but he'd never want
to. No, that was out. "How did you get here?" he asked. "How much does
the FBI know?"
"Why should I tell you?"
"Well, it'd be nice to know if we can expect reinforcements."
"We can't." Her voice was bleak. "I might as well let you know. The
Institute could find out anyway through its government connections--the
damned octopus!" he looked into the sky. Dalgetty's gaze followed the
curve of her high cheekbones. Unusual face--you didn't often see such an
oddly pleasing arrangement. The slight departure from symmetry....
"We've wondered about Bertrand Meade for some time, as every thinking
person has," she began tonelessly. "It's too bad there are so few
thinking people in the country."
"Something the Institute is trying to correct," Dalgetty put in.
Elena ignored him. "It was finally decided to work agents into his
various organizations. I've been with Thomas Bancroft for about two
years now. My background was carefully faked and I'm a useful
assistant. But even so it was only a short while back that I got
sufficiently into his confidence to be given some inkling of what's
going on. As far as I know no other FBI operative has learned as
much."
"And what have you found out?"
"Essentially the same things you were describing in the cell, plus
more details on the actual work they're doing. Apparently the
Institute was onto Meade's plans long before we were. It doesn't speak
well for your purposes, whatever they are, that you haven't asked us
for help before this.
"The decision to kidnap Dr. Tighe was taken only a couple of weeks
ago. I haven't had a chance to communicate with my associates in the
force. There's always someone around, watching. The set-up's well
arranged, so that even those not under suspicion don't have much
chance to work unobserved, once they've gotten high enough to know
anything important. Everybody spies on everybody else and submits
periodic reports."
She gave him a harsh look. "So here I am. No official person knows my
whereabouts and if I should disappear it would be called a deplorable
accident. Nothing could be proved and I doubt if the FBI would ever
get another chance to do any effective spying."
"But you have proof enough for a raid," he ventured.
"No, we haven't. Up till the time I was told Dr. Tighe was going to be
snatched I didn't know for certain that anything illegal was going on.
There's nothing in the law against like-minded people knowing each
other and having a sort of club. Even if they hire tough characters
and arm them the law can't protest. The Act of Nineteen Ninety-nine
effectively forbids private armies but it would be hard to prove Meade
has one."
"He doesn't really," said Dalgetty. "Those goons aren't much more than
what they claim to be--bodyguards. This whole fight is primarily on
a--a mental level."
"So I gather. And can a free country forbid debate or propaganda? Not
to mention that Meade's people include some powerful men in the
government itself. If I could get away from here alive we'd be able to
hang a kidnapping charge on Thomas Bancroft, with assorted charges of
threat, mayhem and conspiracy, but it wouldn't touch the main group."
Her fists clenched. "It's like fighting shadows."
* * * * *
"You war against the sunset-glow. The judgment follows fast my lord!"
quoted Dalgetty. _Heriots' Ford_ was one of the few poems he liked.
"Getting Bancroft out of the way would be something," he added. "The
way to fight Meade is not to attack him physically but to change the
conditions under which he must work."
"Change them to what?" Her eyes challenged his. He noticed that there
were small gold flecks in the gray. "What does the Institute want?"
"A sane world," he replied.
"I've wondered," she said. "Maybe Bancroft is more nearly right than
you. Maybe I should be on his side after all."
"I take it you favor libertarian government," he said. "In the past
it's always broken down sooner or later and the main reason has been
that there aren't enough people with the intelligence, alertness and
toughness to resist the inevitable encroachments of power on liberty.
"The Institute is trying to do two things--create such a citizenry and
simultaneously to build up a society which itself produces men of that
kind and reinforces those traits in them. It can be done, given time.
Under ideal conditions we estimate it would take about three hundred
years for the whole world. Actually it'll take longer."
"But just what kind of person is needed?" Elena asked coldly. "Who
decides it? _You_ do. You're just the same as all other reformers,
including Meade--hell bent to change the whole human race over to your
particular ideal, whether they like it or not."
"Oh, they'll like it," he smiled. "That's part of the process."
"It's a worse tyranny than whips and barbed wire," she snapped.
"You've never experienced those then."
"You _have_ got that knowledge," she accused. "You have the data and
the equations to be--sociological engineers."
"In theory," he said. "In practice it isn't that easy. The social
forces are so great that--well, we could be overwhelmed before
accomplishing anything. And there are plenty of things we still don't
know. It will take decades, perhaps centuries, to work out a complete
dynamics of man. We're one step beyond the politician's rule of thumb
but not up to the point where we can use slide rules. We have to feel
our way."
"Nevertheless," she said, "you've got the beginnings of a knowledge
which reveals the true structure of society and the processes that
make it. Given that knowledge man could in time build his own
world-order the way he desired it, a stable culture that wouldn't know
the horrors of oppression or collapse. But you've hidden away the very
fact that such information exists. You're using it in secret."
"Because we have to," Dalgetty said. "If it were generally known that
we're putting pressure on here and there and giving advice slanted
just the way _we_ desire, the whole thing would blow up in our faces.
People don't like being shoved around."
"And still you're doing it!" One hand dropped to her gun. "You, a
clique of maybe a hundred men...."
"More than that. You'd be surprised how many are with us."
"You've decided _you_ are the almighty arbiters. Your superior wisdom
is going to lead poor blind mankind up the road to heaven. I say it's
down the road to hell! The last century saw the dictatorship of the
elite and the dictatorship of the proletariat. This one seems to be
birthing the dictatorship of the intellectuals. I don't like any of
them!"
"Look, Elena." Dalgetty leaned on one elbow and faced her. "It isn't
that simple. All right, we've got some special knowledge. When we
first realized we were getting somewhere in our research we had to
decide whether to make our results public or merely give out selected
less important findings. Don't you see, no matter what we did it would
have been us, the few men, who decided? Even destroying all our
information would have been a decision."
His voice grew more urgent. "So we made what I think was the right
choice. History shows as conclusively as our own equations that
freedom is not a 'natural' condition of man. It's a metastable state
at best, all too likely to collapse into tyranny. The tyranny can be
imposed from outside by the better-organized armies of a conqueror, or
it can come from within--through the will of the people themselves,
surrendering their rights to the father-image, the almighty leader,
the absolute state.
"What use does Bertrand Meade want to make of our findings if he can
get them? To bring about the end of freedom by working on the people
till they themselves desire it. And the damnable part of it is that
Meade's goal is much more easily attained than ours.
"So suppose we made our knowledge public. Suppose we educated anyone
who desired it in our techniques. Can't you see what would happen?
Can't you see the struggle that would be waged for control of the
human mind? It could start as innocuously as a businessman planning a
more effective advertising campaign. It would end in a welter of
propaganda, counter-propaganda, social and economic manipulations,
corruption, competition for the key offices--and so, ultimately, there
would be violence.
"All the psychodynamic tensors ever written down won't stop a
machine-gun. Violence riding over a society thrown into chaos,
enforced peace--and the peace-makers, perhaps with the best will in
the world, using the Institute techniques to restore order. Then one
step leads to another, power gets more and more centralized and it
isn't long before you have the total state back again. Only this total
state could _never_ be overthrown!"
Elena Casimir bit her lip. A stray breeze slid down the rock wall and
rumpled her bright hair. After a long while she said, "Maybe you're
right. But America today has, on the whole, a good government. You
could let them know."
"Too risky. Sooner or later someone, probably with very idealistic
motives, would force the whole thing into the open. So we're keeping
hidden the very fact that our most important equations exist--which is
why we didn't ask for help when Meade's detectives finally learned
that they know."
"How do you know your precious Institute won't become just such an
oligarchy as you describe?"
"I don't," Simon said, "but it's improbable. You see, the recruits who
are eventually taught everything we know are pretty thoroughly
indoctrinated with our own present-day beliefs. And we've learned
enough individual psych to do some real indoctrinating! They'll pass
it on to the next generation and so on.
"Meanwhile we hope the social structure and the mental climate is
being modified in such a way that eventually it would be very
difficult, if not impossible, for anyone to impose absolute control by
any means. For as I said before, even an ultimately developed
psychodynamics can't do everything. Ordinary propaganda, for instance,
is quite ineffective on people trained in critical thinking.
"When enough people the world over are sane we can make the knowledge
general. Meanwhile we've got to keep it under wraps and quietly
prevent anyone else from learning the same things independently. Most
such prevention, by the way, consists merely of recruiting promising
researchers into our own ranks."
"The world's too big," she said very softly. "You can't foresee all
that'll happen. Too many things could go wrong."
"Maybe. It's a chance we've got to take." His own gaze was somber.
They sat for awhile in stillness. Then she said, "It all sounds very
pretty. But--what are you, Dalgetty?"
"Simon," he corrected.
"What are you?" she repeated. "You've done things I wouldn't have
believed were possible. _Are you human?_"
"I'm told so." He smiled.
"Yes? I wonder! How is it possible that you--"
He wagged a finger. "Ah-ah! Right of privacy." And with swift
seriousness, "You know too much already. I have to assume you can keep
it secret all your life."
"That remains to be seen," Elena said, not looking at him.