_As every thinking man knows, every slave always yearns for the freedom
his master denies him..._
"_But, gentlemen," said the Physician, "I really don't think we can
consider any religion which has human sacrifice as an integral part as a
humane religion._"
"_At least," added the Painter with a chuckle, "not as far as the victim
is concerned._"
_The Philosopher looked irritated. "Bosh! What if the victim likes it
that way?_"
_--THE IDLE WORSHIPERS_
_by R. Phillip Dachboden_
I
The great merchantship _Naipor_ settled her tens of thousands of tons of
mass into her landing cradle on Viornis as gently as an egg being
settled into an egg crate, and almost as silently. Then, as the
antigravs were cut off, there was a vast, metallic sighing as the
gigantic structure of the cradle itself took over the load of holding
the ship in her hydraulic bath.
At that point, the ship was officially groundside, and the _Naipor_ was
in the hands of the ground officers. Space Captain Humbolt Reed sighed,
leaned back in his desk chair, reached out a hand, and casually touched
a trio of sensitized spots on the surface of his desk.
"Have High Lieutenant Blyke bring The Guesser to my office immediately,"
he said, in a voice that was obviously accustomed to giving orders that
would be obeyed.
Then he took his fingers off the spots without waiting for an answer.
In another part of the ship, in his quarters near the Fire Control
Section, sat the man known as The Guesser. He had a name, of course, a
regular name, like everyone else; it was down on the ship's books and in
the Main Registry. But he almost never used it; he hardly ever even
thought of it. For twenty of his thirty-five years of life, he had been
a trained Guesser, and for fifteen of them he'd been The Guesser of
_Naipor_.
He was fairly imposing-looking for a Guesser; he had the tall,
wide-shouldered build and the blocky face of an Executive, and his
father had been worried that he wouldn't show the capabilities of a
Guesser, while his mother had secretly hoped that he might actually
become an Executive. Fortunately for The Guesser, they had both been
wrong.
He was not only a Guesser, but a first-class predictor, and he showed
impatience with those of his underlings who failed to use their ability
in any particular. At the moment of the ship's landing, he was engaged
in verbally burning the ears off Kraybo, the young man who would
presumably take over The Guesser's job one day--if he ever learned how
to handle it.
"You're either a liar or an idiot," said The Guesser harshly, "and I
wish to eternity I knew which!"
Kraybo, standing at attention, merely swallowed and said nothing. He had
felt the back of The Guesser's hand too often before to expose himself
intentionally to its swing again.
The Guesser narrowed his eyes and tried to see what was going on in
Kraybo's mind.
"Look here, Kraybo," he said after a moment, "that one single Misfit
ship got close enough to do us some damage. It has endangered the life
of the _Naipor_ and the lives of her crewmen. You were on the board in
that quadrant of the ship, and you let it get in too close. The records
show that you mis-aimed one of your blasts. Now, what I want to know is
this: were you really guessing or were you following the computer too
closely?"
"I was following the computer," said Kraybo, in a slightly wavering
voice. "I'm sorry for the error, sir; it won't happen again."
The Guesser's voice almost became a snarl. "It hadn't better! You know
that a computer is only to feed you data and estimate probabilities on
the courses of attacking ships; you're not supposed to think they can
predict!"
"I know, sir; I just--"
"You just near came getting us all killed!" snapped The Guesser. "You
claim that you actually guessed where that ship was going to be, but you
followed the computer's extrapolation instead?"
"Yes, sir," said the tense-faced Kraybo. "I admit my error, and I'm
willing to take my punishment."
The Guesser grinned wolfishly. "Well, isn't that big-hearted of you? I'm
very glad you're willing, because I just don't know what I'd do if you
refused."
Kraybo's face burned crimson, but he said nothing.
The Guesser's voice was sarcastically soft. "But I guess about the only
thing I could do in that case would be to"--The Guesser's voice suddenly
became a bellow--"_kick your thick head in_!"
Kraybo's face drained of color suddenly.
The Guesser became suddenly brusque. "Never mind. We'll let it go for
now. Report to the Discipline Master in Intensity Five for ten minutes
total application time. Dismissed."
Kraybo, whose face had become even whiter, paused for a moment, as
though he were going to plead with The Guesser. But he saw the look in
his superior's eyes and thought better of it.
"Yes, sir," he said in a weak voice. He saluted and left.
* * * * *
And The Guesser just sat there, waiting for what he knew would come.
It did. High Lieutenant Blyke showed up within two minutes after Kraybo
had left. He stood at the door of The Guesser's cubicle, accompanied by
a sergeant-at-arms.
"Master Guesser, you will come with us." His manner was bored and
somewhat flat.
The Guesser bowed his head as he saluted. "As you command, great sir."
And he followed the lieutenant into the corridor, the sergeant tagging
along behind.
The Guesser wasn't thinking of his own forthcoming session with the
captain; he was thinking of Kraybo.
Kraybo was twenty-one, and had been in training as a Guesser ever since
he was old enough to speak and understand. He showed occasional flashes
of tremendous ability, but most of the time he seemed--well, _lazy_. And
then, there was always the question of his actual ability.
A battle in the weirdly distorted space of ultralight velocities
requires more than machines and more than merely ordinary human
abilities. No computer, however built, can possibly estimate the flight
of a dodging spaceship with a canny human being at the controls. Even
the superfast beams from a megadyne force gun require a finite time to
reach their target, and it is necessary to fire at the place where the
attacking ship will be, not at the position it is occupying at the time
of firing. That was a bit of knowledge as old as human warfare: you must
lead a moving target.
For a target moving at a constant velocity, or a constant acceleration,
or in any other kind of orbit which is mathematically predictable, a
computer was not only necessary, but sufficient. In such a case, the
accuracy was perfect, the hits one hundred per cent.
But the evasive action taken by a human pilot, aided by a randomity
selector, is not logical and therefore cannot be handled by a computer.
Like the path of a microscopic particle in Brownian motion, its position
can only be predicted statistically; estimating its probable location is
the best that can be done. And, in space warfare, probability of that
order is simply not good enough.
To compute such an orbit required a special type of human mind, and
therefore a special type of human. It required a Guesser.
The way a Guesser's mind operated could only be explained _to_ a Guesser
_by_ another Guesser. But, as far as anyone else was concerned, only the
objective results were important. A Guesser could "guess" the route of a
moving ship, and that was all anyone cared about. And a Master Guesser
prided himself on his ability to guess accurately 99.999% of the time.
The ancient sport of baseball was merely a test of muscular
co-ordination for a Guesser; as soon as a Guesser child learned to
control a bat, his batting average shot up to 1.000 and stayed there
until he got too old to swing the bat. A Master Guesser could make the
same score blindfolded.
Hitting a ship in space at ultralight velocities was something else
again. Young Kraybo could play baseball blindfolded, but he wasn't yet
capable of making the master guesses that would protect a merchantship
like the _Naipor_.
But what was the matter with him? He had, of course, a fire-control
computer to help him swing and aim his guns, but he didn't seem to be
able to depend on his guesswork. He had more than once fired at a spot
where the computer said the ship would be instead of firing at the spot
where it actually arrived a fraction of a second later.
There were only two things that could be troubling him. Either he was
doing exactly as he said--ignoring his guesses and following the
computer--or else he was inherently incapable of controlling his
guesswork and was hoping that the computer would do the work for him.
If the first were true, then Kraybo was a fool; if the second, then he
was a liar, and was no more capable of handling the fire control of the
_Naipor_ than the captain was.
The Guesser hated to have Kraybo punished, really, but that was the only
way to make a youngster keep his mind on his business.
_After all_, thought The Guesser, _that's the way I learned; Kraybo can
learn the same way. A little nerve-burning never hurt anyone._
But that last thought was more to bolster himself than it was to justify
his own actions toward Kraybo. The lieutenant was at the door of the
captain's office, with The Guesser right behind him.
* * * * *
The door dilated to receive the three--the lieutenant, The Guesser, and
the sergeant-at-arms--and they marched across the room to the captain's
desk.
The captain didn't even bother to look up until High Lieutenant Blyke
saluted and said: "The Guesser, sir."
And the captain gave the lieutenant a quick nod and then looked coldly
at The Guesser. "The ship has been badly damaged. Since there are no
repair docks here on Viornis, we will have to unload our cargo and then
go--_empty_--all the way to D'Graski's Planet for repairs. All during
that time, we will be more vulnerable than ever to Misfit raids."
His ice-chill voice stopped, and he simply looked at The Guesser with
glacier-blue, unblinking eyes for ten long seconds.
The Guesser said nothing. There was nothing he _could_ say. Nothing that
would do him any good.
The Guesser disliked Grand Captain Reed--and more, feared him. Reed had
been captain of the _Naipor_ for only three years, having replaced the
old captain on his retirement. He was a strict disciplinarian, and had a
tendency to punish heavily for very minor infractions of the rules. Not,
of course, that he didn't have every right to do so; he was, after all,
the captain.
But the old captain hadn't given The Guesser a nerve-burning in all the
years since he had accepted The Guesser as The Guesser. And Captain
Reed--
The captain's cold voice interrupted his thoughts.
"Well? What was it? If it was a mechano-electronic misfunction of the
computer, say so; we'll speak to the engineer."
The Guesser knew that the captain was giving him what looked like an
out--but The Guesser also knew it was a test, a trap.
The Guesser bowed his head very low and saluted. "No, great sir; the
fault was mine."
Grand Captain Reed nodded his head in satisfaction. "Very well.
Intensity Five, two minutes. Dismissed."
The Guesser bowed his head and saluted, then he turned and walked out
the door. The sergeant-at-arms didn't need to follow him; he had been
let off very lightly.
He marched off toward the Disciplinary Room with his head at the proper
angle--ready to lift it if he met a lesser crewman, ready to lower it if
he met an executive officer.
He could already feel the terrible pain of the nerve-burner coursing
through his body--a jolt every ten seconds for two minutes, like a whip
lashing all over his body at once. His only satisfaction was the
knowledge that he had sentenced Kraybo to ten minutes of the same thing.
* * * * *
The Guesser lay on his bed, face down, his grasping fingers clutching
spasmodically at the covering as his nerves twitched with remembered
pain. Thirteen jolts. Thirteen searing jolts of excruciating torture. It
was over now, but his synapses were still crackling with the memories of
those burning lashes of energy.
He was thirty-five. He had to keep that in mind. He was thirty-five now,
and his nerves should be under better control than they had been at
twenty. He wondered if there were tears streaming from his eyes, and
then decided it didn't matter. At least he wasn't crying aloud.
Of course, he had screamed in the nerve-burner; he had screamed thirteen
times. Any man who didn't scream when those blinding stabs of pain came
was either unconscious or dead--it was no disgrace to scream in the
burner. But he wasn't screaming now.
He lay there for ten minutes, his jaw clamped, while the twitching
subsided and his nervous system regained its usual co-ordination.
The burner did no actual physical damage; it wasn't good economics for
an Executive to allow his men to be hurt in any physical manner. It took
a very little actual amount of energy applied to the nerve endings to
make them undergo the complex electrochemical reaction that made them
send those screaming messages to the brain and spine. There was less
total damage done to the nerves than a good all-night binge would do to
a normal human being. But the effect on the mind was something else
again.
It was a very effective method of making a man learn almost any lesson
you wanted to teach him.
After a while, The Guesser shuddered once more, took a deep breath, held
it for fifteen seconds, and then released it. A little later, he lifted
himself up and swung his legs over the edge of his bed. He sat on the
edge of the bed for a few minutes, then got up and got dressed in his
best uniform.
After all, the captain hadn't said anything about restricting him to the
ship, and he had never been to Viornis before. Besides, a couple of
drinks might make him feel better.
There were better planets in the galaxy, he decided two hours later.
Thousands of them.
For one thing, it was a small, but dense world, with a surface gravity
of one point two standard gees--not enough to be disabling, but enough
to make a man feel sluggish. For another, its main export was farm
products: there were very few large towns on Viornis, and no center of
population that could really be called a city. Even here, at the
spaceport, the busiest and largest town on the planet, the population
was less than a million. It was a "new" world, with a history that
didn't stretch back more than two centuries. With the careful population
control exercised by the ruling Execs, it would probably remain small
and provincial for another half millennium.
The Guesser moseyed down one of the streets of Bellinberg probably named
after the first Prime Executive of the planet--looking for a decent
place for a spaceman to have a drink. It was evening, and the sinking of
the yellow primary below the western horizon had left behind it a clear,
star-filled sky that filled the air with a soft, white radiance. The
streets of the town itself were well-lit by bright glow-plates imbedded
in the walls of the buildings, but above the street level, the buildings
themselves loomed darkly. Occasionally, an Exec's aircar would drift
rapidly overhead with a soft rush of air, and, in the distance, he could
see the shimmering towers of the Executive section rising high above the
eight- or ten-storyed buildings that made up the majority of Bellinberg.
The streets were fairly crowded with strollers--most of them Class Four
or Five citizens who stepped deferentially aside as soon as they saw his
uniform, and kept their eyes averted from him. Now and then, the power
car of a Class Three rolled swiftly by, and The Guesser felt a slight
twinge of envy. Technically, his own rank was the equivalent of Class
Three, but he had never owned a groundcar. What need had a spaceman of a
groundcar? Still, it would be nice to drive one just once, he thought;
it would be a new experience, certainly.
Right now, though, he was looking for a Class Three bar; just a place to
have a small, quiet drink and a bite to eat. He had a perfect right to
go into a lower class bar, of course, but he had never felt quite
comfortable associating with his inferiors in such a manner, and
certainly they would feel nervous in his presence because of the sidearm
at his hip.
No one below Class Three was allowed to carry a beamgun, and only Ones
and Twos were allowed to wear the screening fields that protected them
from the nerve-searing effects of the weapon. And they, being Execs,
were in no danger from each other.
Finally, after much walking, he decided that he was in the wrong part of
town. There were no Class Three bars anywhere along these streets.
Perhaps, he thought, he should have gone to the Spacemen's Club at the
spaceport itself. On the other hand, he hadn't particularly wanted to
see any of the other minor officers of his own class after the
near-fiasco which had damaged the _Naipor_. Being a Guesser set him
apart, even from other Threes.
He thought for a moment of asking a policeman, but he dismissed it.
Cops, as always, were a breed apart. Besides, they weren't on the
streets to give directions, but to preserve order.
At last, he went into a nearby Class Four bar and snapped his fingers
for the bartender, ignoring the sudden silence that had followed his
entrance.
The barman set down a glass quickly and hurried over, bobbing his head
obsequiously. "Yes, sir; yes, sir. What can I do for you, sir? It's an
honor to have you here, sir. How may I serve you?"
The man himself was wearing the distinctive clothing of a Five, so his
customers outranked him, but the brassard on his arm showed that his
master was a Two, which afforded him enough authority to keep reasonable
order in the place.
"Where's the nearest Class Three bar?" The Guesser snapped.
The barman looked faintly disappointed, but he didn't lose his
obsequiousness. "Oh, that's quite a way from here, sir--about the
closest would be Mallard's, over on Fourteenth Street and Upper Drive. A
mile, at least."
The Guesser scowled. He was in the wrong section of town, all right.
"But I'd be honored to serve you, sir," the barman hurried on. "Private
booth, best of everything, perfect privacy--"
The Guesser shook his head quickly. "No. Just tell me how to get to
Mallard's."
The barman looked at him for a moment, rubbing a fingertip across his
chin, then he said: "You're not driving, I suppose, sir? No? Well, then,
you can either take the tubeway or walk, sir...." He let the sentence
hang, waiting for The Guesser's decision.
The Guesser thought rapidly. Tubeways were for Fours and Fives. Threes
had groundcars; Ones and Twos had aircars; Sixes and below walked. And
spacemen walked.
Trouble is, spacemen aren't used to walking, especially on a planet
where they weigh twenty per cent more than they're used to. The Guesser
decided he'd take the tubeway; at the Class Three bar, he might be able
to talk someone into driving him to the spaceport later.
But five minutes later, he was walking in the direction the bartender
had told him to take for finding Mallard's on foot. To get to the
tubeway was a four-block walk, and then there would be another long walk
after he got off. Hoofing it straight there would be only a matter of
five blocks difference, and it would at least spare him the
embarrassment of taking the tube.
* * * * *
It was a foolish thing to do, perhaps, but once The Guesser had set his
mind on something, it took a lot more than a long walk to dissuade him
from his purpose. He saw he was not the only spaceman out on the town;
one of the Class Five taverns he passed was filled with boisterous
singing, and he could see a crowd of men standing around three crewmen
who were leading them in a distinctly off-color ballad. The Guesser
smiled a little to himself. Let them have their fun while they were
on-planet; their lives weren't exactly bright aboard ship.
Of course, they got as much as was good for them in the way of
entertainment, but a little binge gave them something to look forward
to, and a good nerve-burning would sober them up fast enough if they
made the mistake of coming back drunk.
Nerve-burning didn't really bother a Five much, after all; they were
big, tough, work-hardened clods, whose minds and brains simply didn't
have the sensitivity to be hurt by that sort of treatment. Oh, they
screamed as loud as anyone when they were in the burner, but it really
didn't have much effect on them. They were just too thick-skulled to
have it make much difference to them one way or the other.
On the other hand, an Exec would probably go all to pieces in a burner.
If it didn't kill him outright, he'd at least be sick for days. They
were too soft to take even a touch of it. No Class One, so far as The
Guesser knew, had ever been subjected to that sort of treatment, and a
Two only got it rarely. They just weren't used to it; they wouldn't have
the stamina to take it.
His thoughts were interrupted suddenly by the familiar warning that rang
in his mind like a bell. He realized suddenly, as he became blazingly
aware of his surroundings, that he had somehow wandered into a
definitely low-class neighborhood. Around him were the stark, plain
housing groups of Class Six families. The streets were more dimly lit,
and there was almost no one on the street, since it was after curfew
time for Sixes. The nearest pedestrian was a block off and moving away.
All that took him but a fraction of a second to notice, and he knew that
it was not his surroundings which had sparked the warning in his mind.
There was something behind him--moving.
What had told him? Almost nothing. The merest touch of a foot on the
soft pavement--the faintest rustle of clothing--the whisper of something
moving through the air.
Almost nothing--but enough. To a man who had played blindfold baseball,
it was plenty. He knew that someone not ten paces behind him had thrown
something heavy, and he knew its exact trajectory to within a thousandth
of a millimeter, and he knew exactly how to move his head to avoid the
missile.
He moved it, at the same time jerking his body to one side. It had only
been a guess--but what more did a Guesser need?
From the first hint of warning to the beginning of the dodging motion,
less than half a second had passed.
He started to spin around as the heavy object went by him, but another
warning yelped in his mind. He twisted a little, but it was too late.
Something burned horribly through his body, like a thousand million
acid-tipped, white-hot needles jabbing through skin and flesh and
sinking into the bone. He couldn't even scream.
He blacked out as if he'd been a computer suddenly deprived of power.