The Santaroga Barrier

by Frank Herbert

  “What?”

  “You heard me.”

  “Why?”

  “You’re a native,” Dasein said, “thoroughly conditioned to this … consciousness fuel. I want to see what’s under there, what kind of fears you …”

  “Of all the crazy …”

  “I’m not some amateur meddler asking to do this,” Dasein said. “I’m a clinical psychologist well versed in hypnotherapy.”

  “But what could you possibly hope to …”

  “What a man fears,” Dasein said. “His fears are like a ‘homing beacon.’ Home in on a man’s fears and you find his underlying motivations. Under every fear, there’s a violence of no mean …”

  “Nonsense! I have no …”

  “You’re a medical man. You know better than that.”

  Piaget stared at him, silently measuring. Presently, he said: “Well, every man has a death fear, of course. And …”

  “More than that.”

  “You think you’re some kind of god, Gilbert? You just go around …”

  “Doth the eagle mount up at thy command, and make her nest on high?” Dasein asked. He shook his head. “What do you worship?”

  “Oh … religion.” Piaget took a deep breath of relief. “Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night; nor for the arrow that flieth by day; nor for the pestilence that walketh in darkness; nor for the destruction that wasteth at noonday. Is that it? What do …”

  “That is not it.”

  “Gilbert, I’m not ignorant of these matters, as you must realize. To stir up the areas you’re suggesting …”

  “What would I stir up?”

  “We both know that cannot be predicted with any accuracy.”

  “You’re doing things as a community … a group, a society that you don’t want me digging into,” Dasein said. “What does that society really worship? With one hand, you say: ‘Look anywhere you like.’ With the other hand, you slam doors. In every action of …”

  “You really believe some of us tried to … kill you … for the community?”

  “Don’t you?”

  “Couldn’t there be some other explanation?”

  “What?”

  Dasein held a steady gaze on Piaget. The doctor was disturbed, no doubt of that. He refused to meet Dasein’s eyes. He moved his hands about aimlessly. His breathing had quickened.

  “Societies don’t believe they can die,” Piaget said. “It must follow that a society, as such, does not worship at all. If it cannot die, it’ll never face a final judgment.”

  “And if it’ll never face judgment,” Dasein said, “it can do things as a society that’d be too much for an individual to stomach.”

  “Perhaps,” Piaget muttered. “Perhaps.” Then: “All right, then. Why examine me? I’ve never tried to harm you.”

  Dasein looked away, taken aback by the question. Out window he could see through a frame of trees a stretch of hills which enclosed Santaroga. He felt himself enclosed by that line of hills, entangled here in a web of meanings.

  “What about the people who have tried to kill me?” Dasein asked shortly. “Would they be fit subjects?”

  “The boy, perhaps,” Piaget said. “I’ll have to examine him anyway.”

  “Petey, the Jorick boy,” Dasein said. “A failure, eh?”

  “I think not.”

  “Another opening person … like me?”

  “You remember that?”

  “Then, you said societies die, that you’d cut yourselves off here … with Jaspers.”

  “We had a speaking then, too, as I recall it,” Piaget said. “Have you really opened now? Are you seeing? Have you become?”

  Dasein abruptly remembered Jenny’s voice on the telephone: “Be careful.” And the fear when she’d said: “They want you to leave.”

  In this instant, Piaget became for him once more the gray cat in the garden, silencing the birds, and Dasein knew himself to be alone yet, without a group. He remembered the lake, the perception of perception—knowing his own body, that communal knowledge of mood, that sharing.

  Every conversation he’d had with Piaget came back to Dasein then to be weighed and balanced. He felt his Santaroga experiences had been building—one moment upon another—to this instant.

  “I’ll get you some more Jaspers,” Piaget said. “Perhaps then …”

  “You suspect I’m fluttery behind the eyes?” Dasein asked.

  Piaget smiled. “Sarah clings to the phrases of the past,” he said, “before we systematized our dealings with Jaspers … and with the outside. But don’t laugh at her or her phrases. She has the innocent eye.”

  “Which I haven’t.”

  “You still have some of the assumptions and prejudices of the not-men,” Piaget said.

  “And I’ve heard too much, learned too much about you, ever to be allowed to leave,” Dasein said.

  “Won’t you even try to become?” Piaget asked.

  “Become what?” Piaget’s crazy, almost-schizophrenic talk enraged him. A speaking! A seeing!

  “Only you know that,” Piiaget said.

  “Know what?”

  Piaget merely stared at him.

  “I’ll tell you what I know,” Dasein said. “I know you’re terrified by my suggestion. You don’t want to find out how Vina’s roach powder got into the coffee. You don’t want to know how Clara Scheler poisoned her stew. You don’t want to know what prompted someone to push me off a float. You don’t want to know why a fifteen-year-old boy would try to put an arrow through me. You don’t want to know how Jenny poisoned the eggs. You don’t want to know how a car was set up to crush me, or how my truck was rigged as a fire bomb. You don’t want to …”

  “All right!”

  Piaget rubbed his chin, turned away.

  “I told you you might succeed,” Dasein said.

  “‘Iti vuccati’” Piaget murmured. “‘Thus it is said: Every system and every interpretation becomes false in the light of a more complete system.’ I wonder if that’s why you’re here—to remind us no positive statement may be made that’s free from contradictions.”

  He turned, stared at Dasein.

  “What’re you talking about?” Dasein asked. Piaget’s tone and manner carried a suddenly disturbing calmness.

  “The inner enlightenment of all beings dwells in the self,” Piaget said. “The self which cannot be isolated abides in the memory as a perception of symbols. We are conscious as a projection of self upon the receptive content of the senses. But it happens the self can be led astray—the self of a person or the self of a community. I wonder …”

  “Stop trying to distract me with gobbledygook,” Dasein said. “You’re trying to change the subject, avoid …”

  “A … void,” Piaget said. “Ah, yes. The void is very pertinent to this. Einstein cannot be confined to mathematics. All phenomenal existence is transitory, relative. No particular thing is real. It is passing into something else at every moment.”

  Dasein pushed himself upright in the bed. Had the old doctor gone crazy?

  “Performance alone doesn’t produce the result,” Piaget said. “You’re grasping at absolutes. To seek any fixed thing, however, is to deal in false imagination. You’re trying to strain soap from the water with your fingers. Duality is a delusion.”

  Dasein shook his head from side to side. The man was making no sense at all.

  “I see you are confused,” Piaget said. “You don’t really understand your own intellectual energy. You walk on narrow paths. I offer you new orbits of …”

  “You can stop that,” Dasein said. He remembered the lake then, the husky feminine voice saying: “There’s only one thing to do.” And Jenny: “We’re doing it.”

  “You must adapt to conditional thought,” Piaget said. “In that way, you’ll be able to understand relative self-existence and express the relative truth of whatever you perceive. You have the ability to do it. I can see that. Your insight into the violent actions which surround �
�”

  “Whatever you’re doing to me, you won’t stop it, will you?” Dasein asked. “You keep pushing and pushing and …”

  “Who pushes?” Piaget asked. “Are you not the one exerting the greatest …”

  “Damn you! Stop it!”

  Piaget looked at him silently.

  “Einstein,” Dasein muttered. “Relativity … absolutes … intellectual energy … phenomenal …” He broke off as his mind lurched momentarily into a speed of computation very like what he had experienced when deciding to hurdle the gap in the bridge.

  It’s sweep-rate, Dasein thought. It’s like hunting submarines—in the mind. It’s how many search units you can put to the job and how fast they can travel.

  As quickly as it had come, the sensation was gone. But Dasein had never felt as shaken in his life. No immediate danger had triggered this ability … not this time.

  Narrow paths, he thought. He looked up at Piaget in wonder. There was more here than fell upon the ears. Could that be the way Santarogans thought? Dasein shook his head. It didn’t seem possible … or likely.

  “May I elaborate?” Piaget asked.

  Dasein nodded.

  “You will have remarked the blunt way we state our relative truths for sales purposes,” Piaget said. “Conditional thought rejects any other approach. Mutual respect is implicit, then, in conditional thought. Contrast the market approach of those who sent you to spy upon us. They have …”

  “How fast can you think?” Dasein asked.

  “Fast?” Piaget shrugged. “As fast as necessary.”

  As fast as necessary, Dasein thought.

  “May I continue?” Piaget asked.

  Again, Dasein nodded.

  “It has been noted,” Piaget said, “that sewer-peak-load times tend to match station breaks on TV—an elementary fact you can recognize with only the briefest reflection. But it’s only a short step from this elementary fact to the placement of flow meters in the sewers as a quite accurate check on the available listening units at any given moment. I’ve no doubt this already is being done; it’s so obvious. Now, reflect a moment on the basic attitudes toward their fellowmen of people who would do this sort of thing, as opposed to those who could not find it in themselves to do it.”

  Dasein cleared his throat. Here was the core of Santaroga’s indictment against the outside. How did you use people? With dignity? Or did you tap their most basic functions for your own purposes? The outside began to appear more and more as a place of irritating emptiness and contrived blandishments.

  I’m really beginning to see things as a Santarogan, Dasein thought. There was a sense of victory in the thought. It was what he had set out to do as part of his job.

  “It isn’t surprising,” Piaget said, “to find the ‘N-square’ law from warfare being applied to advertising and politics—other kinds of warfare, you see—with no real conversion problem from one field to the other. Each has its concepts of concentration and exposure. The mathematics of differentials and predictions apply equally well, no matter the field of battle.”

  Armies, Dasein thought. He focused on Piaget’s moving lips, wondering suddenly how the subject had been changed to such a different field. Had Piaget done it deliberately? They’d been talking about Santaroga’s blind side, its fears …

  “You’ve given me food for speculation,” Piaget said. “I’m going to leave you alone for a while and see if I can come up with something constructive. There’s a call bell at the head of your bed. The nurses are not on this floor, but one can be here quite rapidly in an emergency. They’ll look in on you from time to time. Would you like something to read? May I send you anything?”

  Something constructive? Dasein wondered. What does he mean?

  “How about some copies of our valley newspaper?” Piaget asked.

  “Some writing paper and a pen,” Dasein said. He hesitated, then: “And the papers—yes.”

  “Very well. Try to rest. You appear to be regaining some of your strength, but don’t overdo it.”

  Piaget turned, strode out of the room.

  Presently, a red-haired nurse bustled in with a stack of newspapers, a ruled tablet and a dark-green ballpoint pen. She deposited them on his nightstand, said: “Do you want your bed straightened?”

  “No, thanks.”

  Dasein found his attention caught by her striking resemblance to Al Marden.

  “You’re a Marden,” he said.

  “So what else is new?” she asked and left him.

  Well, get her! Dasein thought.

  He glanced at the stack of newspapers, remembering his search through Santaroga for the paper’s office. They had come to him so easily they’d lost some of their allure. He slipped out of bed, found his knees had lost some of their weakness.

  The canned food caught his eye.

  Dasein rummaged in the box, found an applesauce, ate it swiftly while the food still was redolent with Jaspers. Even as he ate, he hoped this would return him to that level of clarity and speed of thought he’d experienced at the bridge and, briefly, with Piaget.

  The applesauce eased his hunger, left him vaguely restless—nothing else.

  Was it losing its kick? he wondered. Did it require more and more of the stuff each time? Or was he merely becoming acclimated?

  Hooked?

  He thought of Jenny pleading with him, cajoling. A consciousness fuel. What in the name of God had Santaroga discovered?

  Dasein stared out the window at the path of boundary hills visible through the trees. A fire somewhere beneath his field of view sent smoke spiraling above the ridge. Dasein stared at the smoke, feeling an oddly compulsive mysticism, a deeply primitive sensation about that unseen fire. There was a spirit signature written in the smoke, something out of his own genetic past. No fear accompanied the sensation. It was, instead, as though he had been reunited with some part of himself cut off since childhood.

  Pushing back at the surface of childhood, he thought.

  He realized then that a Santarogan did not cut off his primitive past; he contained it within a membranous understanding.

  How far do I go in becoming a Santarogan before I turn back? he wondered. I have a duty to Selador and the ones who hired me. When do I make my break?

  The thought filled him with a deep revulsion against returning to the outside. But he had to do it. There was a thick feeling of nausea in his throat, a pounding ache at his temples. He thought of the irritant emptiness of the outside—piecemeal debris of lives, egos with sham patches, a world almost devoid of anything to make the soul rise and soar.

  There was no substructure to life outside, he thought, no underlying sequence to tie it all together. There was only a shallow, glittering roadway signposted with flashy, hypnotic diversions. And behind the glitter—only the bare board structure of props … and desolation.

  I can’t go back, he thought. He turned to his bed, threw himself across it. My duty—I must go back. What’s happening to me? Have I waited too long?

  Had Piaget lied about the Jaspers effect?

  Dasein turned onto his back, threw an arm across his eyes. What was the chemical essence of Jaspers? Selador could be no help there; the stuff didn’t travel.

  I knew that, Dasein thought. I knew it all along.

  He took his arm away from his eyes. No doubt of what he’d been doing: avoiding his own responsibility. Dasein looked at the doors in the wall facing him—kitchen, lab …

  A sigh lifted his chest.

  Cheese would be the best carrier, he knew. It held the Jaspers essence longest. The lab … and some cheese.

  Dasein rang the bell at the head of his bed.

  A voice startled him, coming from directly behind his head: “Do you wish a nurse immediately?”

  Dasein turned, saw a speaker grill in the wall. “I’d … like some Jaspers cheese,” he said.

  “Oh … Right away, sir.” There was delight in that feminine voice no electronic reproduction could conceal.

&n
bsp; Presently, the red-haired nurse with the stamp of the Marden genes on her face shouldered her way into the room carrying a tray. She placed the tray atop the papers on Dasein’s nightstand.

  “There you are, doctor,” she said. “I brought you some crackers, too.”

  “Thanks,” Dasein said.

  She turned at the doorway before leaving: “Jenny will be delighted to hear this.”

  “Jenny’s awake?”

  “Oh, yes. Most of her problem was an allergenic reaction to the aconite. We’ve purged the poison from her system and she’s making a very rapid recovery. She wants to get up. That’s always a good sign.”

  “How’d the poison get in the food?” Dasein asked.

  “One of the student nurses mistook it for a container of MSG. She …”

  “But how’d it get in the kitchen?”

  “We haven’t determined yet. No doubt it was some silly accident.”

  “No doubt,” Dasein muttered.

  “Well, you eat your cheese and get some rest,” she said. “Ring if you need anything.”

  The door closed briskly behind her.

  Dasein looked at the golden block of cheese. Its Jaspers odor clamored at his nostrils. He broke off a small corner of the cheese in his fingers, touched it to his tongue. Dasein’s senses jumped to attention. Without conscious volition, he took the cheese into his mouth, swallowed it: smooth, soothing flavor. A clear-headed alertness surged through him.

  Whatever else happens, Dasein thought, the world has to find out about this stuff.

  He swung his feet out of bed, stood up. A pulsing ache throbbed through his forehead. He closed his eyes, felt the world spin, steadied himself against the bed.

  The vertigo passed.

  Dasein found a cheese knife on the tray, cut a slice off the golden brick, stopped his hand from conveying the food to his mouth.

  The body does it, he thought. He felt the strength of the physical demand, promised himself more of the cheese … later. First—the lab.

  It was pretty much as he’d expected: sparse, but sufficient. There was a good centrifuge, a microtome, a binocular microscope with controlled illumination, gas burner, ranks of clean test tubes—all the instruments and esoteria of the trade.