The Vininese drove Dirrul to the city in a heavily armed surface car.
Two of the infantrymen sat behind them, their rocket guns ready on
their knees. It was testimony to the efficiency and organization of
Vinin that such a finished reception could be prepared on such short
notice. Dirrul's first intimation of the scope of the ceremony came
when they stopped at a school to be cheered by the pupils.
Rank upon rank of boys and girls lined up smartly behind the high wire
fence. They ranged in ages from tots, barely able to stand, to young
people in late adolescence. Except for the round metal disks, which
all of them wore, they were completely naked.
"Clothing breeds such false modesty and so many foolish frustrations,"
Dirrul's host explained. "On Vinin every child is reared in completely
objective equality. As soon as we take them from their parents--about
the time when they're first learning to walk--we give them
identification disks. Before that, when they're in the instinct
period, the disks aren't necessary.
"After their basic education we classify them. The leader-class is
issued permanent disks and the others give theirs up. The adjustment
is something very severe but on the whole the casualties are light."
Suddenly the Vininese seized Dirrul's hand and looked into his eyes.
"I trust you follow me, my friend?"
"Yes," Dirrul answered. Reason led him to a conclusion as he looked at
the massed children, a conclusion he could not bring himself to face.
He felt a new kind of fear, as cold as the depths of space and as
devoid of emotion. Instead of trusting to his own logic Dirrul
struggled to find a flaw in it--for a man cannot easily watch his
dream turn to dust in his hands.
They drove on into the city. Rows of men and women in working clothes
lined the streets, cheering wildly in unison. Crossed Vininese flags
were draped between the buildings and brave-colored streamers danced
in the wind.
"A reception is good for them," the Vininese said. "We need heroes
occasionally. It's fortunate you came when you did. The vagabonds have
had a disturbing effect on morale and it's impossible to suppress the
news entirely."
The vehicle stopped before the towering government building. Dirrul
was led up a flight of stone steps to a wide porch overlooking the
mass of cheering upturned faces in the public square. He stood
motionless while speeches were made and gay ribbon was draped around
his neck. The air shook with bright explosions--a huge flag was
unfurled over the porch--band music began to blare and a tidal wave of
precision-trained Vininese infantry wheeled into the square.
An official touched Dirrul's arm. "You must take the salute of our
work-leaders now."
Dirrul was pushed back against the stone railing as an orderly mob
filed past, blank-faced and chattering with meaningless pleasure. Many
of them pressed forward to touch his hand before the guards tactfully
hurried them on. When the organized confusion was at its height a tiny
square of paper was slipped into his hand.
Dirrul had no idea which of the mob had given it to him and he dared
not glance at it. But he managed to hide the paper in the band of his
tunic.
Hour by hour the throng filed past, endless and meaningless. It was an
agony for Dirrul. For the first time he looked into the face of his
dream and saw the reality of Vinin--order, discipline, efficiency--and
utter blankness. Unhappily he recalled one of Dr. Kramer's lectures.
"... Defiance of convention, confusion, frustration, stubbornness--yes
and a touch of the neurotic too--these goad the individual into
solving problems. And problem solving is progress. An orderly society
that asks no questions of itself, a society that has no doubts, is a
dying society...."
Dirrul understood the professor at last. He looked squarely at the
fact of what he was, a traitor to his own people, on the verge of
betraying them. He had been wonderfully deluded by his own
self-deception.
But the job wasn't quite finished. The Vininese would not have gone to
take Glenna from the hospital if they had understood his teleray. Let
them splurge on their reception! He was unimpressed. When the time
came for questions to be answered he would conveniently forget why he
had been sent to Vinin. Nothing they could do would drag it out of
him.
The crowd thinned and Dirrul was taken inside the building, where his
Vininese host awaited him. Sighing deeply the Vininese stood up.
"These public displays do take so much of our time," he said, "but
it's over now." This last seemed to amuse him and he repeated it
softly before adding, "The Chief's ready to see you."
Remembering the note and the flimsy possibility that it might suggest
a way out, Dirrul answered quickly, "But, sir, I really ought to clean
up first."
"You Agronians have such weird notions of propriety!"
"I would feel more presentable to your Chief if--if I could have a
bath. Perhaps I might even borrow a change of clothing."
The Vininese fingered his chin thoughtfully. "It might be more
amusing. Yes, the Chief can wait a few minutes longer for you to
satisfy your vanity."
He summoned a blank-faced liveried servant and asked for a clean
worker's suit for Dirrul. Then he took Dirrul to the wall tube and
they shot noiselessly to an upper floor. As he left Dirrul at the
door of a luxurious suite, the Vininese said, "When you change your
clothes, my friend, don't forget to take the disk out of your tunic.
The Chief will want it when you see him."
When he was sure he was alone Dirrul spread open the note. It was a
crude drawing of a hearing aid and beneath it a cryptic sentence
written in Agronian,
_I lost mine and so has Glenna now._
The signature was unmistakably Hurd's but the note made no sense.
Hurd's hearing was as sound as Dirrul's. He had never used a
mechanical device--how could he have lost it then? _So has
Glenna_--that must be the key. Hurd somehow knew about the vagabond
raiding party that had rescued Glenna from the mental hospital. He
must have escaped from the Vininese earlier himself. He was probably
hiding somewhere in the capital.
Working on this hypothesis Dirrul made a guess that the thing Hurd had
lost was his illusion about the Vininese system. The hearing aid
symbolized what Hurd had been told about it, as opposed to the reality
which he saw with his own eyes.
But such an interpretation didn't ring entirely true. It was too
involved for an idea which could have been better expressed in four
words--_I know the truth_. Tossing the note aside Dirrul turned on the
water in the shower room and thoughtfully disrobed.
As he threw his tunic aside a violent paralyzing terror seized his
mind, making his head sing with a screeching vibration. Blindly he
snatched up the tunic in order to stuff the cloth into his mouth so he
would not cry out. But as soon as he pressed it against his skin his
terror vanished, like a siren suddenly stilled.
The pattern of the real truth fell into place then. Now he understood
the power of Vinin. Experimentally he took Sorgel's disk out of his
tunic and laid it on a table. As soon as he did so the blinding
nameless horror flamed up. When he held the disk again the exhausting
emotion vanished.
Looking back Dirrul saw an abundance of evidence that might have given
him a clue, had he not spent so much mental effort bolstering his
illusion of Vinin. There was the circumstance of his own unrelenting
terror when he was without the disk in the ravine--the painful sight
of his captors puncturing the prisoners' eardrums--the soundless talk
of the vagabonds, like the lip-reading of the deaf--the bleak
orderliness of the cheering mobs--and, most obvious of all, the
strange transmitters atop the well-guarded stone block-buildings.
It was all there, even to the final cruelty to the children. What was
it the Vininese had said? "The adjustment is sometimes very severe but
on the whole the casualties are light." And the very young, before
they were taken from their parents, didn't need disks because they
were in what the Vininese had called "the instinct period."
Dirrul knew what Hurd's drawing meant. Somehow Hurd had lost his
hearing, perhaps as a result of the beating the police had given him
on Agron. In any case only the deaf could think rationally on Vinin.
Hurd was telling Dirrul to shatter his own sense of hearing if he
still had the will to think and act for himself. The nightmare Dirrul
had witnessed in the ravine was not torture but the bravery of
desperate men attempting to rescue rational minds.
The Rational Potential--the gift of the legendary Earthmen! Like the
processes of thought itself it could never be wiped out by argument or
reason once it was understood. The Earthmen had wasted centuries
trying to undo their own evolved rationality before they realized it
could not be done. Now, on a higher level in another plane, the
Vininese were struggling to submerge the Earthmen's second achievement
of the Rational Potential.
It was done by their transmitters. A wave of some sort--probably
subsonic or supersonic--continuously filled the Vininese atmosphere.
The Vininese who wore the disks were protected against it. The others
succumbed if they retained their hearing. As Dirrul himself had
discovered in the ravine, when he did not consciously think the terror
diminished.
All Vininese children were given a basic education. It built up their
automatic responses, established correct stimulus-response behavior
patterns. Then, for the masses, the protective disks were eliminated
and the screeching fear pounded at them until the processes of
creative thinking were destroyed, leaving a backlog of malleable and
obedient habit patterns. The problem solving was done for them by
their masters.
The Vininese Confederacy--half the galaxy--was peopled by billions
upon billions of robot races, ruled by a handful of men with absolute
power. To that Dirrul would have betrayed his planet! To slavery and
to the destruction of the Rational Potential, all for the slippery
dream of orderliness and efficiency which masqueraded as progress.
He could save Agron today--but for how long? Sorgel would bewitch
countless other discontented Agronian fools. The Movement would try
again and one day the Vininese space fleet would penetrate the
Agronian Nuclear Beams. Dirrul had to escape. He had to go home and
tell the truth about Vinin.
And it was impossible. He was completely trapped with no visible way
out for himself.