Then I dreamed that Mesner came in and looked down at me sleeping. A
light bulb came down from the ceiling. It turned bright, then dull,
then bright, then dull.
Mesner smiled as he lit a cigarette. "That really bothered you didn't
it, Fred. Bipping the Dirkson boy."
"It made me sick."
I wanted to wake up. I tried my best to wake up because I felt that if
I didn't wake up now, I never would. I would die in my sleep.
"Let's talk about it, Fred. I'm uneasy about it myself sometimes. I've
bipped so many of them, maybe my conscience bothers me. You think it
might bother a man's conscience, Fred?"
"What do you mean, conscience?"
"Maybe you think there's something immoral about bipping a man."
"If the State does it, it's right," I said. "If it helps bring about
the Era of Normalcy and absolute and permanent stability, then any
method is right."
Was that the correct answer? I was beginning to feel confused.
Thoughts, words all jumbling up. There was an orthodox thought and
an orthodox answer for everything. I'd learned them all. But had I
answered this one correctly?
"That's right, Fred. But the old crackpot Egghead moralists used to say
that the end doesn't necessarily justify the means. They would claim
that bipping a man was wrong, and that no good results could ever come
from it. They would say that a destructive means would always create a
destructive end. Violence, they said, could only create more violence.
What do you think of that, Fred?"
"That's wrong," I said. "That's confusing, double-dome stuff."
"I know. But we've got to identify with Egghead thinking if we can. No
matter how repulsive it is, we've got to understand how they think if
we're going to track them down and put them away. Now think hard, Fred.
Have you ever heard a man say, 'Better that the whole world should die
than that one man's brain should be invaded against his will.'"
"No, no, that's subversive," I screamed.
There was more dream, more questions, more and more confused answers. I
woke up in a cold sweat. I found several electronic spy-eyes concealed
about the room. Just outside my door I saw one of Mesner's cigarette
butts. It was yellowed with spittle, twisted and pinched in the way his
always were.
I didn't know if all of that night, or only part of it had been a
dream. I didn't know if Mesner had actually been questioning me in my
sleep or not. The spy-eyes could do that. But I knew Mesner had been
outside my door. Probably he had been questioning my dreams.
* * * * *
That day was worse than the night. Mesner had said to wait until I
heard from him, but there was no word from him that day. I tried more
tranquitabs. The hell with tomorrow's supply. They didn't help me. A
blinding headache hit me at regular intervals.
What was Mesner using me for? What did he want from me? What was I
supposed to know?
The Educational Tevee came on also at regular intervals.
"... so if you might think, Citizens, that a machine could do your
simple work better, just remember what a terrible thing the machines
did to us during the cataclysmic age of reason. As you know, the
machines were invented to replace human labor by Eggheads who have
always tried to destroy normal, comfortable and simple ways of life.
The disease of free-thought was only possible after the machines
replaced human beings, gave us the time to develop excessive and
self-destructive thinking...."
I watched the light outside my window turn a duller gray then black,
and after that an edge of white moon slid partly across the pane.
Why should I care what Mesner was trying to get out of me? If it was
subversive then I should be glad to get rid of it. If I was clear and
clean, then I had nothing to worry about. Why wasn't I simply bipped
like Donnicker and Dirkson had been? Why should a true patriot care?
I shivered and stared into the darkness. Something horrible had
happened to me. For the first time I realized I was entertaining
unpatriotic thoughts. I didn't want to be bipped. And I knew that when
Mesner finished with me, I would be bipped. When he found out whatever
I was supposed to know, I'd join Dirkson and the rest of them. It had
been all right, going along with the routines, as long as I actually
hadn't seen what happened to a man if he didn't.
I didn't want to be erased. Whatever I was, I suddenly wanted to stay
me, guilty or not. Maybe this attitude was all that Mesner wanted to
be sure of. But I doubted it. Because a simple bipping would have
determined that.
I didn't think I could stomach any more of Mesner's field-trips. On the
other hand I had to go along. It all seemed to boil down to whether I
wanted to get bipped now or later.
"Bipping isn't bad at all," Mesner had said yesterday. "After you're
bipped, you can do routine work like everyone else, never worry again
about worrying. That guy who replaced you, for example. He was bipped.
He's never made a mistake for 20 years. He never will."
I closed my eyes. I thought of all the happy bottleheads walking
the streets, out on the farms, doing their routine work, happy and
care-free as long as they didn't worry. Human vegetables, the erased
ones, and the terrified ones who didn't know they were even scared.
Cities full of dull-eyed ciphers, and now that I was outside it a
little, I could see them with an awful clarity.
And I thought--how many are as dumb as they appear to be? How many
were just too frightened and numbed to think? How many would stay
frightened and numb so long that they would never be able to think even
if they sometime decided to try?
It was easy enough to assume that too much intelligence was an evil,
a virus to be burned out. Was it better to have too little and become
like the hillbilly?
Oh, Mesner had set my so-called quiescent IQ going all right. But how
far would it go before it had gone far enough for his purpose?
* * * * *
That night I had another bad dream. Only it didn't really seem so bad
as it should have been. A blind man was talking to me. Then I dreamed
that a blind girl with a seeing-eye dog was looking at me. She was
about fifteen, maybe younger, dressed in a plain flowered dress tied
in back with a ribbon. She had a soft round face and her eyes were
wide and opaque. The girl and dog seemed to come out of a mist and
they whispered to me. It was frightening, but important, and I didn't
remember what it was.
I woke up shivering. I seemed to smell wet hair, and the window was
open. I couldn't remember whether I had shut the window before I went
to sleep or not.
Mesner called me early the next morning.
He looked the same in his wrinkled suit with the food stains on the
lapels, and peeling an apple.
"Fred, have you ever heard a phrase sounding like '... and the blind
shall lead them?'"
I appeared to be trying to think about it, then said I had never heard
anything like that.
"You're positive about that?"
"I don't remember it."
"You mean you might have, but you just can't remember it."
"I didn't say that. I doubt if I ever heard such a phrase."
"What about this one, '... and the blind shall see again.'"
"No, I said.
"You're sure?"
I looked directly at him and he stopped peeling the apple. "If I'm
supposed to have such a damn high quiescent IQ, why not let me in on a
few things?"
"What few things?"
"These references to the blind. The Dirksons. Some blind girl named
Elsa. What are you trying to find out?"
"I thought maybe you remembered something, that's all. I'm pretty much
in the dark myself. All I have are a few clues and theories."
"Clues, theories, about what?"
"Eggheads. Sabotage. What the crackpots could build, they can best
destroy. They're blowing up factories, manufacturing and power plants,
machines, production."
"That's sabotage? I thought the whole idea in bringing about the Era of
Normalcy was to do away with all mechanization. Do everything with the
hands, like in the good old days."
"That's an ultimate goal, Fred. Drudges don't think. They're happier.
But the transition has to be more gradual. The Eggheads want to take
away all mechanization at once, create chaos and anarchy. They figure
that will cause the bottleheads to revolt against the Government. We
can't catch the saboteurs. The saboteurs inside a blown-up factory, for
example, we never know who they are. We bip every worker, not a sign of
a saboteur. So whoever does the dirty work is a mindless tool of the
Egghead underground, having no memory of having committed sabotage. Who
are the couriers, the ones who make vital contact between the Egghead
underground and the saboteurs? The dumb saboteur has to get his highly
complex directives from the Eggheads. Who are the couriers?"
"Why ask me?"
"I know this much, Fred. Blind people are used as couriers."
My knees felt weak. I couldn't say anything. All I could think about
was my dreams.
"I want to show you something, Fred." Mesner led me through the other
door. A bleak concrete cubicle, no windows, a damp walled gray cell.
Two naked men lay on slabs. Stroboscopes on their heads. Behind them,
styluses recorded brain-wave patterns on moving white strips. One of
the men, the one on the left, was blind. His eyes staring up into the
flicker were opaque.
"Look at those brain-wave recordings, Fred. They're getting the same
stimulus. We can give a thousand bottleheads this stimulus with the
flicker, and get identical responses. But not the blind boys. We can't
successfully bip a blind boy. The brain-waves are radically different
and we've never figured out a way of codifying them. A blind bastard's
never _seen_ anything. The seeing eyes are trackers, like radar. But a
blind boy takes in reality and records it and keeps it in a different
way. We can't get at the code easily. But I'm getting it. I've bipped
plenty of blind boys and I'm getting it, Fred. The blind are used for
couriers. I know that much. For the simple reason that we can't bip
meaningful info out of their scrambled think-tanks."
The naked men on the slabs moaned. One of them opened his mouth and a
bloody foam spread over his chin.
"What I'm looking for now is a known courier who is also blind. Then I
can bip him, and check the info with the code I've worked out."
He unbuttoned his coat and took a black hand-gun out of a holster
strapped beneath his arm. "Meanwhile, Fred, these bottleheads have had
it. They're burned out."
I heard the two sharp echoing reports as Mesner shot them in the head.
One of them beat his heels on the slab. Mesner pointed the smoking
revolver. "Even dead, the blind brain records differently. See there?"
I leaned against the wall. Through a crumbled hole down in the corner
of damp concrete, I saw two red eyes and heard the rat squealing.
"Let's go, Fred. We've got some important field-trips on today's
schedule. And you still have a lot to learn."
We went to Chicago. We set up some hidden electronic spy-eyes in a
big apartment building. They were to be checked later for evidence of
someone there who was hiding an IQ of over a hundred.
And that afternoon we ran down a renegade bio-chemist hiding in a
tenement. He had disguised himself for a number of years as a plumber.
Mesner bipped him, and an official Security heliocar came down from
Washington to take him away.
When Mesner finished with the old man he was hopping around like a
monkey, making grotesque faces, giggling and yelling. Tevee cameramen
were on hand. A reporter was commenting on the capture of another, "...
insane crackpot who has been living here under an assumed name while
plotting and planning and building some diabolical machine with which
to blow up the city. Our department of Internal Security excercising
its eternal vigilance, captured him in time...."
Mesner and I took the heliocar back up into a clear blue sky and headed
for Sauk City.
"Do you wonder, Fred, why we just don't kill them after they're bipped?"
"What could it matter?"
"It doesn't to them, but to us it matters. Public likes their
scapegoats alive. More satisfying to hate live people. Public likes
to see their dragons behind bars, humiliated, treated like crackpots.
Makes a bottlehead feel good to see an Egghead dancing like a monkey.
Also prevents martyrs. Living men are never martyrs."
"So why are we going to Sauk City?" I asked. I wanted to change the
subject.
Mesner had information that an ex-professor from some long-extinct
University had been concealing a high IQ after having supposedly purged
himself of it years before. He was supposed to have been caught by a
brain-probing spy-eye and was reported to have an IQ of over 160.
Mesner talked of such an IQ as though it was a living time-bomb that
might go off any minute and blow Sauk City and the entire State to
hell. He shot the heliocar along at 500 miles an hour. He held the
T-Bar in one hand and lit cigarettes with the other.
"What upset you so much, Fred? I mean that morning when I interrupted
you sorting cards?"
I felt a warning click in my head. I remembered it. _The eyes are the
windows of the soul._
Mesner, I thought, couldn't look into the windows of a blind man. Could
I?
It hadn't been my own thought that had disrupted my idyllic, care-free
life sorting cards. Mesner had said it to me.
"Just the unexpected break in the routine," I said. You've already
explained it. My quiescent IQ is just too high to be a successful
card-sorter."
"It wasn't _what_ I said?"
"What did you say? I've forgotten."
"The eyes are the windows of the soul. But I was only quoting, Fred.
Some crackpot said that long ago."
"Why probe me about blind people? I never knew any."
"Ninety percent of a human being's mental activity is underground,
like most of an iceberg is under water. How much of your past can you
remember, Fred?"
"Very little. The past is dead. Why should I remember it?"
"Because a good intelligence depends on the past. Memory is a part
of it. Without a past, you don't have a brain. And we've got to
release our brains, Fred, for awhile. Until we can catch saboteurs and
Eggheads."
"I guess I've just been a patriot too long," I said.
"Remember attending Drake University ten years ago, Fred?"
"Sure," I said, fast, as though it was unimportant. I was really
beginning to sweat. "I can remember if you keep prodding me. Sure, I
can. So what? I purged myself. I forgot it. Schools weren't illegal
then."
"But we've got to reawaken all those past memories, Fred. Make our
brains work better, even if a lot of double-dome stuff comes up. You
remember a psyche prof named O'Hara?"
I felt suddenly dizzy, sick. A wavering wheel started turning in my
head. I managed to stop it from turning so fast. "I don't remember that
at all," I said.
"Then of course you wouldn't remember that he was blind?"
In the darkness behind closed lids I could see patterns of light begin
to flicker and threatening whispers dug at a fogging curtain.
"Don't push it, Fred. It'll come. I'm patient. If I weren't, then by
this time I would be bipped myself and safely put away."
He would get it all right, I knew. Sooner or later he would tap it.
First I would tap it, then Mesner would tap it. And after that I never
would worry again. I'd never worry about remembering or forgetting
anything. I wouldn't even be me. A body with a bipped brain would walk
around doing routine work, and looking like me. But I'd be dead. I
didn't want to die that way. Genuine physical death would be all right.
But not that, not that bipping treatment.
Mesner turned quickly and caught me staring at the outline of the
hand-gun under his coat. He smiled. "You want one of these, Fred?"
"Not yet," I said. "I don't remember enough yet. I'm not smart enough
yet."
"Tell me when you're ready."
* * * * *
By the time we closed in on the professor in an old deserted house
on the outskirts of Sauk City, he had managed to hang himself to a
waterpipe in the basement. He wore a pair of ragged pants. He was
terribly thin and his hair was white, and his toothless mouth gaped
open and his jaws sucked in. I had never seen anyone appear so pitiful
and so harmless as that old man hanging there.
We untied the rope and the body fell to the floor. Mesner took a small
disc from his case and put it over the dead man's heart, then stood up.
"He's too dead. We should have gotten here a few minutes earlier."
He seemed tired as he sat down on a soggy box. His hands were dirty
with coal dust and a smudge of it was on his face.
This is it, I thought. Now was as good a time for it as any, because
there wasn't any good time for it. He had all the advantage. And the
longer it went on, the greater advantage he would have. It was only a
question of time anyway, and I couldn't stand waiting.
I lunged at him. I heard the faint whining sound, saw the flash and
the glint of the disc coming out of his pocket. A sudden, painless
paralysis hit me and I was helpless on my knees looking at Mesner. He
just stared at me morosely, tired, irritated a little.
"You should know better, Fred. You're smart."
"Go to hell," I said.
He shook his head. "Not now, Fred. Nor you either. It isn't me you want
to get, Fred. You just don't want to get bipped. You ought to trust
me. I don't want to bip you, now or ever. I mean it. We need brains to
catch Eggheads and that's my job. You're valuable. Everybody getting
bipped, it isn't easy to get smart people these days."
"Bip me now then, you bastard. Get it over with."
"You'd better trust me. I'm being honest. Some of these other orthodox
jerks in Security, they wouldn't fool with you. They would bip you
sooner than look at you."
"Why don't you?"
"I've told you, for God's sake. You're a bright guy, and I'm eager to
learn. And I don't want to burn up any important info."
Then I got it. Then I knew why he was keeping the bipper off me.
I thought about it all the way back to Washington while Mesner fed
himself apples. I was supposed to have valuable unconscious info.
Mesner wanted it. But the old crackpots were right. The means not only
created the ends, but could destroy the ends if the means were bad
enough. You probe and pry into a man's brain deep and hard enough and
you come up with nothing. Your methods have destroyed the end. You've
burned out the truth you're trying to get.
Mesner was trying to get info from me without burning it up.
The bastard was trying to have his bloody cake and eat it. But the
insight didn't make my position any easier. He was going to get it some
way. His talking and hinting and probing was designed to awaken vital
memory in me, get it up into total consciousness where he could get at
it with his instruments without the danger of burning it up.
Soon as he got what he wanted he would bip me. I couldn't keep him
from getting it because I didn't know what it was. I couldn't keep on
suppressing something if I didn't know what it was, and I knew that no
one can consciously suppress knowledge in himself in any case.
* * * * *
For two more days I didn't hear from Mesner. I indulged in feverish
and ridiculous escape fantasies. There could be no escape for me. The
educational voices from the Tevee drifted in and out.
"... the greatest threat to man's happy survival is reason. Man was
never intended to go above a certain mental level and become thereby a
victim of his own imagination and complex fears. This disease of reason
has been carried to its final suicidal limit by Eggheads...."
No mention of sabotage. The care-free public must not hear of such
disquieting things. All the public heard 24 hours a day was a voice
telling them about the evils of reason. The destructiveness of
overly-developed brains, and the vicious criminality of Eggheads.
After listening to that long enough, and having all subversive level
IQs purged, who could believe otherwise? How many believed otherwise
now? Did I? What in hell did Mesner want to dig out of me? Who, what,
why was I?
I was still a bottle. But now there were countless cracks appearing in
it.
Then Mesner called, said we were going on another field-trip that next
afternoon. All right, I said. Someway or other, I knew, I would make
this my last trip with Mesner.
He had located a blind man, he said, who he knew had been a courier,
a blind man definitely linked up with a recent sabotaging of a motor
parts plant somewhere in Illinois.
* * * * *
Mesner looked down on the shanty town from a high bluff above the
river. The river rats' shanties were built half in, half out of the
water, some of them on stilts, some of them actually consisting of
dilapidated houseboats.
Mesner said river rats were worse rebs even than hillbillies. They
drifted up and down the rivers. You staged a raid and they dissolved
away into the river like rodents. Many of them skipped quarterly
brain-checks, but no one knew how many. Birth and death records weren't
kept by river rats.
I walked ahead of Mesner down a winding gravel path into rotting reeds
by the river, then we followed another muddy path toward the shanties.
Frogs and insects hummed. A path of moonlight moved across the water.
A ribby hound dog slunk away from me. A ragged kid looking wilder than
the hound, ran across the path and slipped soundlessly into the muddy
water.
Mesner pointed out the blind man's shack. Then he looked at me and
smiled with that absurd little cupid bow mouth. "This isn't the time
either, Fred. If you think we're not covered, you're wrong. You
couldn't run fifty feet before they burned you down."
We walked nearer the loosely boarded and sagging shack.
"You take the back, Fred. Just remember, better later than now. And be
careful. When these river rats get stirred up, they can cause a hell of
a row. The entire goon squad would have to move in and there would be a
mass bipping spree."
Mesner crept nearer, then whispered. "No light. You can't even tell if
one of them's at home after dark. Why do they need a light? Go on,
watch the back door, Fred. And don't let this one slip by."
I heard the front door crash inward. A man wearing only tattered pants
ran out. He was thin and ribby like the dog, and I could see the
moonlight shining on the opaque whiteness of his eyes.
He ran directly at me. And I knew I wasn't going to try to stop him.
But I didn't know why. Then Mesner came out and fired a small gun,
smaller than the one under his coat. It wasn't the same. This was a
nerve-gun and it curled the synaptic connections between neurons.
The blind man collapsed and lay like a corpse at my feet. I knelt down
and felt of him. Mesner whispered for me to drag the old man inside. I
hooked my hands under his shoulders and pulled him into the shack. It
didn't matter to me now, nor to the blind man, I thought.
He hardly weighed anything. His eyes were fixed in a white silence as
Mesner shone a small flashlight into them. Then Mesner shut both doors
and pulled a ragged cloth across the single window.
He opened his case. He put the stroboscope on the blind man's head. The
bluish light began to flicker over the staring opaque eyes. I saw the
nerve-gun lying on the floor beside Mesner's hand.
"You're too late," I said. "He's dead. I wouldn't have dragged him in
here if I hadn't known he was dead."
Mesner was breathing thickly. His fat round face was pale and shiny
with sweat. "I know he's dead. He must have gulped a fast-action poison
soon as I came in the door. Maybe even the blind boys are deciding
things are getting too hot."
Mesner worked the stroboscope.
"But he's dead," I said.
"Brain cells are the last to die," Mesner said. "Maybe I can pick up a
little info yet."
It burst out of me then as from an abscess. The bottle cracked into a
thousand fragments. I lunged at Mesner. He seemed to roll away from me,
and then he squatted there in the flickering light. He leveled the gun
at me.
"So you're beginning to wake up, Fred!"
Probing a dead man. Questioning the dead. Even a corpse was sacred no
longer. The vile and horrible bastards, all of them.
"I don't care what happens to me," I said.
"That's noble of you."
"I'm going to kill you."
"Why?"
"You wouldn't understand."
"Maybe I wouldn't agree, but I'll understand, Fred. I know what you're
thinking. What I'm doing now is just too much. Right? The final
indignity one human being could inflict on another, right? A human mind
should be sacred, even if it's dumb. Even if it's dead. Especially if
it's dead. Right, Fred?"