"Now it's set off, Fred. You're fired up now. That's what I've been
waiting for. You were planted to sabotage Security itself, Fred, and
I always knew that. Now we're going to find out all the rest of it.
Now it's squeezing out of your unconscious, and we can drain it, empty
it all out. They put a lid on your mind, Fred, and I've taken it off.
Put on the ethical pressure, put it heavy on your idealistic Egghead
morality, steam it up hot, blow the lid off. It's working, Fred."
"Is it?" I said. "I don't remember anything that would do you any
good. I just know that it's wrong, the final horrible fraud. It isn't
intelligence you guys want to wipe out, Mesner. Not your own, not the
big wheels in power. It's only certain kinds of thinking, undesirable
thoughts, attitudes you don't like. Those are what you have to purge."
"Right, Fred. Only the wrong kind of Eggheads. Me, hell I'm an Egghead
too. Remember the prize pupil in your psych class at Drake University,
Fred?" Mesner laughed. "That was me."
"You can kill people," I said. "You can't burn a sense of what's right
or wrong out of people. That old dead blind man there has preserved
something you can't touch."
"Too bad you won't be around to see how wrong you are, Fred. We can
make people whatever we damn well want them to be. Your old ethical
pals worked out the methods. We're using it for a different end."
The front door squeaked. I felt a moist draft on my face, and a whisper
in my brain. A few words. I don't remember what they were. But they
were a key that opened floodgates of self-understanding and awareness.
I remembered a lot then, a lot of things and feelings that warmed me. I
had a wonderful sense of wholeness and I was no longer afraid of being
bipped, or afraid to die.
There was an expression of complete triumph on Mesner's face, and
he knew what had happened to me and he wanted it, all of it, sucked
away into his briefcase. Just the same, the whisper from the doorway
distracted his attention and I went for him.
In that second of time, I saw the little blind girl who had whispered
that triggering phrase for my release, and behind her, the seeing-eye
dog. She was utterly unafraid and smiling at me. Courage she was
saying. And I could share it with her.
She had sealed her own death in order to make me whole again.
I smashed the flashlight off the table into the wall and my weight
drove Mesner onto the floor. I managed to grab his arm and we lay there
in the dark straining for the nerve-gun. I began to hear the whir
of heliocars. I twisted Mesner's arm up and around and released the
nerve-gun's full charge directly into his face. A stammering scream
came out of him. It was the scream of something not human. A full
charge of that into the brain, it must have curled up the intricate
connections and short circuited his brain into an irreparable hash.
I took the blind girl's hand and we ran toward the river. The sky was
crossed with search beams. And in the deep darkness by the river I
was suddenly as blind as the girl who held my hand. We kept running
and stumbling through the reeds. I felt her hand slip from mine. Then
something hit me.
It wasn't a localized impact, but something seemed to have hit me all
over and moved through me as though my blood suddenly turned to lead.
I tried to find the girl. I tried to crawl to the river, into the
river. And near me I heard the girl say softly, "Goodbye now, Mr.
Fredricks. Don't worry, because you'll be brave."
"Thanks," I said. "Little girl, what's your name?"
She didn't answer. I tried to call out to her again in the darkness,
but I couldn't move my lips. Paralysis gripped me, and after that
blackness, with the lights sometime later beginning to flicker against
my tearing eyes, and then the horror.
* * * * *
The inquisition ended sooner than I thought it would. After the awful
intrusion, there isn't any farther awareness of time. After you are
thoroughly invaded, after your private soul, every naked cell of your
brain is peeled open, exposed to the raw glaring light, after that you
no longer care. What is you has been obliterated the way a shadow is
eaten by the burn of cold light.
Your identity is gone. They take it. You are theirs, all of you belongs
to them. You feel them pouring out your mind down to the pitiful dregs
as though they are pouring cups of coffee.
The pain is a shredding, ripping, raveling horror. After that there is
no feeling at all, and this is worse.
I told them everything I knew. What I couldn't tell, they tapped,
tearing chunks out the way you would rip pages and chapters out of a
book.
The responsible humanists, scientists, intellectuals had known what
was coming. They prepared for it, and set up the plan before the last
days of the Egghead purge. They set up the future saboteurs by a long
intricate process of psychodynamic conditioning. They did it in the
Universities before the schools were purged. Promising students were
selected, worked on.
Fredricks, a psychology student, was subjected to repeated hypnotic
experiments. A blind Professor named O'Hara did most of it. It was
all there finally in Fredrick's head, but then it was all suppressed
and finally Fredricks himself forgot that he knew. A delayed hypnotic
response pattern, an analogue, is set up. Later it will be triggered
off by a phrase, a word, a series of words repeated at conditioned
response intervals.
Ten years later he was working inside, inside Security itself. When
circumstances were right, a blind courier was to have triggered off
Fredrick's suppressed knowledge allowing him to sabotage the entire
Department of Records and Scientific Method. So many scientists and
intellectuals had already been purged that few remained among the
available personnel of Security who could have repaired a simple
gasoline motor without a step-by-step chart taken from the Department
of Records.
It would have been a master coup for the underground.
But Mesner had traced Fredrick's identity back to Drake University,
back to O'Hara. He had gotten suspicious, and removed Fredricks from
Security.
The blind girl had whispered the key phrase just the same, in order
that Fredricks might face the ordeal of the inquisition with as much
pride, strength, and courage as possible.
"Only a free man, a man who fully respects himself as an individual and
a human being," Fredricks told his inquisitors, "only a man who has
learned why he is living, can die like a man."
Then they killed me.
They tried to get more out of me, but what they wanted to know, I knew
nothing whatever about. I knew nothing about the underground, or the
headquarters of the Eggheads.
But by then I was dead, and what they did was of no importance. I was
no longer me. There was no awareness of being me. I had joined Dirkson
and the renegade bio-chemist and all the others.
I was hopping up and down in a cage before the Tevee cameras, and a
reporter was talking to millions of smiling, care-free citizens and
telling them how another vicious crackpot had been captured just in
time to avert some terrible disaster which would have disturbed the
status quo.
Then I was taken away.
"Are you awake now, Mr. Fredricks?"
I opened my eyes. I was in a clean white room lying near a barred
window. An attractive nurse smiled at me. She was holding a clipboard
and making notations on a report pad.
"How do you feel now, Fred?" Painfully, I turned and saw several ghosts
standing and sitting on the other side of the bed. I could see a door
behind them, partly opened onto a softly lit corridor.
There was Dr. Malden, a famous anthropologist whom I had last seen in
a newspaper headline during the purge. And Dr. Marquand, Nobel Prize
winner in electrobiology. And Dr. Martinson, one time head of the UN
Research Foundation. Dr. Rothberg, social psychologist. All dead, all
purged, bipped and confined years ago. All ghosts.
Only they were there. And they were alive, and they seemed glad to see
me. All I knew was that I was alive again. I was aware of being me. And
somehow I knew that these forgotten names were also alive again.
Rothberg handed me a cigarette and the nurse lit it for me. I
remembered that once I had liked cigarettes.
"So what's happened," I said. My voice was weak. My insides felt as
though they were filled with grinding pieces of broken razor blades.
"You're in Zany-Ward No. 104," Dr. Rothberg said.
"I don't believe I quite understand," I said carefully.
"You will," Dr. Rothberg said. "Let's just say for a starter that when
a man is bipped and brought here, we try to put him back together
again. It's a long painful process. Sometimes he's not quite the same,
but we've done pretty good work. We rebuild burned-out circuits. We
have to know exactly what you were before you were bipped, and we try
to duplicate the pattern. Regeneration is slow and rough. You'll be all
right."
They shook hands with me and smiled down at me and went out. The pretty
nurse gave me a pill and I lay back and thought about it. It was
logical enough, and I started to laugh. During the months after that
while the slow process of re-learning and regeneration continued, I
learned more about the Zany-Wards. Serious as it was, and as much as
there was yet to be done, it was always amusing.
As Eggheads were apprehended and confined, they were rehabilitated, put
back together again, in a way you could say fissioned. The Eggheads are
the inmates. They run the Zany-Wards which are used also as bases of
operation in a continuing attempt to disrupt the Era of Normalcy. Great
scientific labs are concealed underground.
When Security inspection committees appear on the scene, we all put on
our acts. We dance, make faces, act like monkeys and giggle.
Doctor Rothberg told me yesterday that if our sabotage work doesn't
soon cause people to rebel against the Era of Normalcy, it won't be
long before we'll be the only sane people left in the world.