He said, with every eye straining to follow his lips:
"Some of you know the work of Adam Stone?"
Martel saw lips move, saying: "The Red Asteroid. The Other who lives
at the edge of Space."
"Adam Stone has gone to the Instrumentality, claiming success for his
work. He says that he has found how to Screen Out the Pain of Space.
He says that the Up-and-Out can be made safe for ordinary men to work
in, to stay awake in. He says that there need be no more Scanners."
Beltlights flashed on all over the room as Scanners sought the right to
speak. Vomact nodded to one of the older men. "Scanner Smith will
speak."
Smith stepped slowly up into the light, watching his own feet. He
turned so that they could see his face. He spoke: "I say that this is
a lie. I say that Stone is a liar. I say that the Instrumentality
must not be deceived."
He paused. Then, in answer to some question from the audience which
most of the others did not see, he said:
"I invoke the secret duty of the Scanners."
Smith raised his right hand for Emergency Attention:
"I say that Stone must die."
3
Martel, still cranched, shuddered as he heard the boos, groans, shouts,
squeaks, grunts and moans which came from the Scanners who forgot noise
in their excitement and strove to make their dead bodies talk to one
another's deaf ears. Beltlights flashed wildly all over the room.
There was a rush for the rostrum and Scanners milled around at the top,
vying for attention until Parizianski--by sheer bulk--shoved the others
aside and down, and turned to mouth at the group.
"Brother Scanners, I want your eyes."
The people on the floor kept moving, with their numb bodies jostling
one another. Finally Vomact stepped up in front of Parizianski, faced
the others, and said:
"Scanners, be Scanners! Give him your eyes."
Parizianski was not good at public speaking. His lips moved too fast.
He waved his hands, which took the eyes of the others away from his
lips. Nevertheless, Martel was able to follow most of the message:
"...can't do this. Stone may have succeeded. If he has succeeded, it
means the end of the Scanners. It means the end of the habermans, too.
None of us will have to fight in the Up-and-Out. We won't have anybody
else going under-the-Wire for a few hours or days of being human.
Everybody will be Other. Nobody will have to Cranch, never again. Men
can be men. The habermans can be killed decently and properly, the way
men were killed in the Old Days, without anybody keeping them alive.
They won't have to work in the Up-and-Out! There will be no more Great
Pain--think of it! No ... more ... Great ... Pain! How do we know
that Stone is a liar--" Lights began flashing directly into his eyes.
(The rudest insult of Scanner to Scanner was this.)
Vomact again exercized authority. He stepped in front of Parizianski
and said something which the others could not see. Parizianski stepped
down from the rostrum. Vomact again spoke:
"I think that some of the Scanners disagree with our Brother
Parizianski. I say that the use of the rostrum be suspended till we
have had a chance for private discussion. In fifteen minutes I will
call the meeting back to order."
Martel looked around for Vomact when the Senior had rejoined the group
on the floor. Finding the Senior, Martel wrote swift script on his
Tablet, waiting for a chance to thrust the Tablet before the Senior's
eyes. He had written,
_Am crcnhd. Rspctfly requst prmissn lv now, stnd by fr orders._
Being cranched did strange things to Martel. Most meetings that he
attended seemed formal heartening ceremonial, lighting up the dark
inward eternities of habermanhood. When he was not cranched, he
noticed his body no more than a marble bust notices its marble
pedestal. He had stood with them before. He had stood with them
effortless hours, while the long-winded ritual broke through the
terrible loneliness behind his eyes, and made him feel that the
Scanners, though a confraternity of the damned, were none the less
forever honored by the professional requirements of their mutilation.
This time, it was different. Coming cranched, and in full possession
of smell-sound-taste-feeling, he reacted more or less as a normal man
would. He saw his friends and colleagues as a lot of cruelly driven
ghosts, posturing out the meaningless ritual of their indefeasible
damnation. What difference did anything make, once you were a
haberman? Why all this talk about habermans and Scanners? Habermans
were criminals or heretics, and Scanners were gentlemen-volunteers, but
they were all in the same fix--except that Scanners were deemed worthy
of the short-time return of the Cranching Wire, while habermans were
simply disconnected while the ships lay in port and were left suspended
until they should be awakened, in some hour of emergency or trouble, to
work out another spell of their damnation. It was a rare haberman that
you saw on the street--someone of special merit or bravery, allowed to
look at mankind from the terrible prison of his own mechanified body.
And yet, what Scanner ever pitied a haberman? What Scanner ever
honored a haberman except perfunctorily in the line of duty? What had
the Scanners as a guild and a class, ever done for the habermans,
except to murder them with a twist of the wrist whenever a haberman,
too long beside a Scanner, picked up the tricks of the Scanning trade
and learned how to live at his own will, not the will the Scanners
imposed? What could the Others, the ordinary men, know of what went on
inside the ships? The Others slept in their cylinders, mercifully
unconscious until they woke up on whatever other Earth they had
consigned themselves to. What could the Others know of the men who had
to stay alive within the ship?
What could any Other know of the Up-and-Out? What Other could look at
the biting acid beauty of the stars in open space? What could they
tell of the Great Pain, which started quietly in the marrow, like an
ache, and proceeded by the fatigue and nausea of each separate nerve
cell, brain cell, touchpoint in the body, until life itself became a
terrible aching hunger for silence and for death?
He was a Scanner. All right, he was a Scanner. He had been a Scanner
from the moment when, wholly normal, he had stood in the sunlight
before a Subchief of Instrumentality, and had sworn:
"I pledge my honor and my life to Mankind. I sacrifice myself
willingly for the welfare of Mankind. In accepting the perilous
austere Honor, I yield all my rights without exception to the Honorable
Chiefs of the Instrumentality and to the Honored Confraternity of
Scanners."
He had pledged.
He had gone into the Haberman Device.
He remembered his Hell. He had not had such a bad one, even though it
had seemed to last a hundred million years, all of them without sleep.
He had learned to feel with his eyes. He had learned to see despite
the heavy eyeplates set back of his eyeballs, to insulate his eyes from
the rest of him. He had learned to watch his skin. He still
remembered the time he had noticed dampness on his shirt, and had
pulled out his Scanning Mirror only to discover that he had worn a hole
in his side by leaning against a vibrating machine. (A thing like that
could not happen to him now; he was too adept at reading his own
instruments.) He remembered the way that he had gone Up-and-Out, and
the way that the Great Pain beat into him, despite the fact that his
touch, smell, feeling, and hearing were gone for all ordinary purposes.
He remembered killing habermans, and keeping others alive, and standing
for months beside the Honorable Scanner-Pilot while neither of them
slept. He remembered going ashore on Earth Four, and remembered that
he had not enjoyed it, and had realized on that day that there was no
reward.
Martel stood among the other Scanners. He hated their awkwardness when
they moved, their immobility when they stood still. He hated the queer
assortment of smells which their bodies yielded unnoticed. He hated
the grunts and groans and squawks which they emitted from their
deafness. He hated them, and himself.
How could Luci stand him? He had kept his chestbox reading Danger for
weeks while he courted her, carrying the Cranch Wire about with him
most illegally, and going direct from one cranch to the other without
worrying about the fact his indicators all crept up to the edge of
_Overload_. He had wooed her without thinking of what would happen if
she did say, "Yes." She had.
"And they lived happily ever after." In Old Books they did, but how
could they, in life? He had had eighteen days under-the-wire in the
whole of the past year! Yet she had loved him. She still loved him.
He knew it. She fretted about him through the long months that he was
in the Up-and-Out. She tried to make home mean something to him even
when he was haberman, make food pretty when it could not be tasted,
make herself lovable when she could not be kissed--or might as well
not, since a haberman body meant no more than furniture. Luci was
patient.