The Last Master

by Gordon R. Dickson

  Ett turned and walked off down the slope of the lawn, and as he did so his thoughts wandered off in another direction. He found himself a distraction in the chess-like problem of examining all the possible dangers in his projected scheme to give a forged order to the custodian of the 0-0 files. He gave himself up to it, for now.

  But in spite of himself, during the next two weeks while Rico and Maea were arranging for the production of the actual false order, through a variety of personal connections between MOGOWs and EC employees, Ett found himself going back to watch the response-training therapists at work with Wally. To someone who knew nothing about the history and scope of this work, the results could hardly have seemed less than magical. Even to Ett, what was accomplished was startling.

  The principle of response-therapy, or training, was extremely simple. It was to break down a complex physical action into a series of very simple movements, and teach these simple acts, one at a time, to a subject. By this means a sequence of movements was gradually built up, that became the complex action. The key to its success was the practice of rewarding the subject in training for any movement, even a random one, in the proper direction, so that an association between the correct movements and pleasure was achieved. As Ett had said, the principle had first been used by animal trainers, usually in circuses, to produce such performances as a chicken pecking out a tune on a small piano, or a dog stealing a wallet from the pocket of a clown and then hiding it in a series of different places while the clown frustratedly searched for it.

  The great virtue of the training technique from a showbusiness viewpoint was that its use could produce acts by animals that appeared to have human thought and intelligence behind them. Its virtue as a medical therapy—when the principle was adapted to that use, later on—was that it could be used to teach people with crippling mental deficiencies to perform complicated actions necessary to their participation in the society of the normally intelligent. It had been used, for example, to teach the mentally deprived to feed and dress themselves, to operate simple machinery, and, within certain limitations, to acquire the rudiments of normal adult behavior.

  Seventy or eighty years of development, however, had brought it almost to the level of a fine art. In Wally’s case, starting with a body essentially capable of nothing more than reflex movement, the response therapists began by working to develop what was referred to as “initiating actions.” Since the one base on which they had to build in what had been Wally was the feeding reflex, they set to work to build a movement by which a small piece of candy, put in his hand, would be carried by that hand to his mouth. In this case, the reward of the bit of good-tasting food on Wally’s palate was reinforced by a momentary mild stimulation beamed directly from a control cap into the pleasure center of Wally’s brain.

  From getting Wally to carry a morsel of something eatable to his mouth with a single arm movement, the therapists progressed to teaching him first to grasp and then to reach out and pick up the morsel. By the end of the sixth day they had him sitting up in order to reach out and pick up the reward, and from then on progress was rapid.

  By the end of the second week, what the therapists called “muscle pleasure” had entered the situation. This was a turn-of-the-century discovery in response therapy, something particularly useful in the case of training humans and the higher anthropoids. It had been discovered that in most warm-blooded mammals there was a distinct, associative pleasure in physical exertion. This had been recognized since time immemorial in the instances of children at play and athletes, both amateur and professional, engaging in physical sports. But it extended beyond that, throughout the animal kingdom as well, exemplified by horses too long confined in a barn who could not be kept from running upon their release, and by trained sled dogs who would continue to try to run along beside a team from which they had been cut loose because they were no longer able to pull properly.

  With the awakening of muscle pleasure in the body that had been Wally’s, the therapists were able gradually to reduce and finally to abandon the dangerously addictive activity of reward by stimulation of the brain’s pleasure center. Meanwhile, Wally was now able to rise from his bed in the morning, to dress himself in a simple one-piece coverall, and even to walk the grounds with one of the therapists in attendance.

  For all this, there was still no consciousness behind the eyes of the perambulating figure. Meeting Wally one morning out in the grounds, Ett had made the mistake of looking directly into those eyes; after that he could not bring himself to face Wally directly again.

  Ett himself was keeping very busy these days. His new forty-foot yacht was out on the ocean, with Al at the helm and the security men, Dr. Hoskides, and a number of the estate staff aboard. Ett had gone off with all of them, giving them the impression that he would be on this cruise for some time. But after the second day Rico had picked him off the ship’s lifeboat with a helicopter, and all those potential watchers for the EC were stranded on the ship.

  Ett kept up a good pretense for them just the same, and returned to the vessel for a few days several times. But he and the MOGOWs now had a goodly amount of privacy on the island, although they had to use some discretion, to be sure.

  Meanwhile, he completed the plan for getting at the 0-0 files, and put Rico and Maea to work on it. By the end of the second week after the yacht had sailed, Ett and Rico put themselves in the hands of Cye Morecki, a MOGOW who had been brought to the island in great secrecy a few days earlier with the ultimate purpose of working on Wally. Awaking at 3 a.m. one morning, they sat under Cye’s hands for two hours while he, using removable skin parts and other stage tools, changed the two of them so that in the end they looked not only unlike themselves—but enough like each other that the resemblance would disturb the memory of anyone trying to identify them from recollection alone. Then they both went out, took the atmosphere flyer to Miami, and there boarded a commercial ship for New York City.

  Two hours later, they were passing the annunciator at the office door of the museum employee who had access to the 0-0 files.

  He opened the door himself. He was a man past middle age but vigorous looking in spite of a face folded in deep wrinkles.

  “What do you want?” he said. “This isn’t part of the public section of the museum—”

  “We come from Vienna,” said Rico. He pronounced the words very slowly and plainly.

  “Ah,” said the other, stepping back from the door to let them in and then closing it behind them. “Anyone from Vienna is especially welcome. Who are you?”

  “I don’t think we need to identify ourselves, Mr. Tolick,” Rico said. He was speaking through a throat filter that altered his voice. “We’ve given the password; you’ve given the countersign. We’ve got something to give you here.”

  He produced a heavy sealed envelope.

  “These are to be copied below and the originals returned to us,” said Rico.

  “Oh?” said Tolick. He spoke into the phone on his wrist. “Code nine thousand—”

  His voice broke off. As he had been speaking, he had been ripping open the envelope. As it came unsealed a little puff of almost invisible vapor shot up at his face. He stopped moving and stood with the torn envelope still in his hands, like someone lost in thought.

  Hastily, Ett reached out, caught up the old man’s wrist, and shut off the phone connection. Taking a small button attached to a short length of what looked like fine wire, he touched the end of the wire to the skin over the bone behind Tolick’s ear, and spoke. His voice came out through his throat filter, altered and deepened to sound like the voice Tolick was expecting to hear from the phone.

  “Tolick. This is Sauvonne. Here are your instructions. Take the entire envelope contents down for copying as you’ve been told. This is an order.”

  Ett quickly put the button with its wire back out of sight inside his jacket, even as Rico finished hooking a small vid-transceiver, also button-size, to the shoulder of Tolick’s jacket. Rico looked down
at his own wrist chronometer and saw, on its tiny screen, a view of them which had been transmitted from the tiny transceiver; Ett could see it over his shoulder.

  At forty seconds after the puff of vapor had escaped from the envelope, Tolick stirred, blinked, and turned without a word to the wall behind him. At a touch of his hand, the wall slid aside to reveal an old-fashioned concrete vault entrance large enough to walk into. Tolick put his right thumb into the lock hole and said, “Tolick, entering.”

  The vault opened. The old man went in, and the door closed behind him. Ett and Rico followed his movements on the screen of Rico’s chronometer. For a second or two the vault seemed to tremble around Tolick; then it settled. In another minute its door opened before him of its own accord, and he stepped out—now seventy meters below his office.

  The room Tolick entered was small and starkly lighted. Along one wall were a row of filing cabinets with innumerable little drawers ranked in them. Tolick paused and drew from the envelope a thick sheaf of imperishable plastic paper bound with metal clamps into a solid unit and topped with an order form several pages in length. Tolick scanned the form and drew in a hissing breath. On the last page, the signature on the order held his attention for a second.

  He turned to a grav-float table surface in the middle of the room, that had what seemed to be a ground-glass screen set in it. He spread out the last sheet of the order holding the signature face down on the ground-glass and waited for a second.

  At the end of that time a word suddenly glowed to life on the ground-glass above the sheet: Forgery.

  Tolick chuckled. He put the order and the clamped bundle of sheets back into the envelope and took the vault elevator back up to his office. There he handed them back to Rico. Brushing against him, Ett retrieved the tiny vid-transceiver.

  “You made the copies?” Rico asked.

  “Oh, yes,” said Tolick, almost chuckling again. “I made them. Good day, gentlemen.”

  They turned toward the door. As they were going out, Tolick spoke unexpectedly behind them.

  “What are you? Auditor Corps men?”

  Rico and Ett jerked about.

  “Certainly not,” said Rico. “What makes you think that?”

  “Oh, nothing… nothing,” said Tolick cheerfully, with a wave of his hand. “Just every so often, one of the other Sections decides they’d like to run a little test on me, that’s all.”

  They went on out. As they closed the door behind them they could hear Tolick laughing.

  “We’d better move fast,” Ett said, in his altered voice. They went swiftly to the nearest slideramp, up to the street, and took an automated cab to the Harbor Terminal, where they changed cabs. An hour later they were occupying third-class seats on a commercial atmosphere ship back to Miami, using the identification papers of the two MOGOW men; and soon after that they were back at a table in a laboratory room on the island, stripping the envelope from its contents.

  Ett let the order flutter to the floor. But with great care he pried off the metal clamps. With these no longer holding the apparent sheaf of papers together, the top half inch of them came off like a box lid. Inside was a space packed with what seemed to be tiny crystals hardly bigger than grains of sand.

  “Careful,” said Rico. “Don’t breathe on them.”

  He slid the now-exposed mass of crystals into an aperture in a large metal device on the table to their right and sealed the opening behind it.

  “Now,” he said, with something that was almost a sigh of relief. “The rest of the process is automatic.”

  Ett nodded. They went off to get Cye to remove their make-up. An hour later they were back in the room, with Maea along; and Rico tended the large machine and took a few readings.

  “You didn’t explain to me,” Maea said, “how this works.”

  “You’re right,” said Ett. “But Rico is the one who knew about this, so let him tell you.”

  Rico nodded. “I will, of course. But you were the one who figured out that something like this ought to be available, and reminded me of it.” He turned to face them.

  “The crystals are from one of the many research laboratories funded by the EC. So far they haven’t been released for commercial use. They’re grown completely within a grav field, under no particular stress lines. However, once they’re removed from the protection of the grav field enclosing them—as they were when the order paper was detached in the secret file room—they immediately develop stress lines in response not only to gravitational pull but to mass objects within a radius of some twelve meters surrounding them.”

  Maea frowned. “But how does that help us?”

  “These stress lines can be interpreted by computer,” Rico went on. “It’s much like the process they use when they have a computer enhance—clean up and sharpen—a photograph of Mars or Pluto or any other stellar body. That interpretation of the crystals we have here should give us a complete picture, not only of the files in the basement, but of a good part of the information in them.”

  Maea nodded. “I see,” she said. “You took a three-dimensional picture of the room, and you’ll be able to read the files when the picture is developed.”

  “That’s about it,” said Ett. “More complicated, of course. And probably objects further from the grains will be too distorted for interpretation. So we have to wait to see just how much we’ll get.”

  Ett and Maea went off to have lunch, and returned some hours later to find Rico poring over a readout on a screen attached to the machine into which he had put the crystals. He looked up, apparently pleased, as they came in.

  “We got what we were after,” he said. “Everything for five meters in every direction, including the rock structure around the sub-basement and a full set of details on Tolick’s insides, came through sharply enough for the computer to give us a copy—beyond that we’ve got some general information, but small things, in particular, are too fuzzy to be of use. Of course, it’s going to be a few days before we can get a good sort on what all we’ve got, here—it’s a good thing there was a system to those files, or we’d have to do the equivalent of paging through a large library to find what we’re after.”

  “But we’ll get what we want?” Ett asked.

  “Yes,” Rico said. “What you’re looking for should be here. It’ll take a day to pull it out for you.”

  “Good,” said Ett. “Call me if I can be of any help. I think I’m going to have to lie down for a bit.”

  He went back to his own room. He had been geared up again during the actual visit to the museum and had forgotten all his small discomforts, but now these were back, compounded by the deep weariness that always followed excitement. He dropped off into a dreamless sleep, from which he was roused by the sound of his bedside phone.

  He rolled over on one elbow, groggily, in the darkened room, and felt blindly for the on stud. The screen surface of the phone lit with the image of Rico, looking once more very secretarial.

  “What is it?” asked Ett thickly.

  “Cele Partner,” said Rico. “Reverberations from our little visit to the museum, perhaps, although the auditors can’t have anything much to go on. Patrick St. Onge called just half an hour ago to see how you’d recovered from your cold—but pretty plainly he really wanted to find out if you’d left the island. I told him you were over being sick but were still weak and tired. Now Miss Partner wants to talk to you.”

  “We still don’t know for sure she’s connected with the EC,” Ett said.

  “I’ll make you a small wager that we find a dossier on her in the zero-zero files, and proof she’s connected with St. Onge and the auditors,“ answered Rico.

  “All right, put her on,” said Ett. He knew what he looked like when he was awakened suddenly from one of these deep-fatigue naps; it ought to convince Cele.

  Rico’s face dissolved on the screen, and in a moment Cele’s face formed.

  “Ett?” she said. “Ett, are you there? I can’t see you.”

 
“Just a minute,” he said, trying to make his voice thick even though he was coming thoroughly awake now.

  He turned on the bedside light. From the screen he could see her examining his appearance closely.

  “You’re still sick, then?” she asked.

  “Not really,” he said. “Just a little wobbly.”

  “What a shame! I was going to suggest we might get together in New Orleans this evening. I had some business over here, and I’m on your time schedule, more or less.”

  “Any time I can’t make it to New Orleans from here, I’m in bad shape,” said Ett.

  “How about eight o’clock, this time?”

  “Eight will be fine. Eight by your time. Where?”

  “I’ll be at the Corso. And I’m looking forward to seeing you again. Good evening.”

  “Evening.”

  They broke connection. Ett lay where he was for a moment, on one elbow propped up on his bed. Then he called Rico on the phone.

  “Did you listen in?” he asked the secretary.

  “No, Mr. Ho. Should I, from now on?”

  “Yes… no. No, on second thought. But you’ll be glad to hear, if you’re right about Cele, that they’re beginning to take the bait. I’m to have dinner with her in New Orleans at eight. I’ll try to bring her back here afterwards to see Wally. Better get Cye to put a mustache on him.”

  “He’ll be ready, Mr. Ho.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Flying from the island to New Orleans in his private atmosphere ship, Ett had time to wonder if he was doing the right thing. There was certainly a possibility that Cele, with St. Onge and the Auditor Corps—with the whole EC bureaucracy, for that matter—were laying a trap for him; either to kill him, or kidnap him for questioning under deep drugs. But he had assumed all along that such methods would be avoided by his opponents for as long as possible, until desperation drove them to such extremes—they loved their rules, after all. And Ett, thinking it over, still believed that he’d not given St. Onge reason to feel desperate. His whole strategy was based on that idea, that principle.