The Syndic

by C. M. Kornbluth

  XVI

  It was a dank fog-shrouded morning. Sometime during the night the quillof the dead reckoner had traced its fine red line over the 30thmeridian. Roughly half-way, Charles Orsino thought, rubbing the sleepfrom his eyes. But the line was straight as a string for the last fourhours of their run. The damn girl must have fallen asleep on watch. Heglared at her in the bow and broke open a ration. Blandly oblivious tothe glare, she said: "Good morning."

  Charles swallowed a mouthful of chocolate, half-chewed, and choked onit. He reached hastily for water and found the tall plastic column ofthe ion-exchange apparatus empty. "Damn it," he snarled, "why didn't yourefill this thing when you emptied it? And why didn't you zig-zagovernight? You're utterly irresponsible." He hurled the bucket overside,hauled it up and slopped seawater into the apparatus. Now there'd be agood twenty minutes before a man-sized drink accumulated.

  "Just a minute," she told him steadily. "Let's straighten this out. Ihaven't had any water on the night watch so I didn't have any occasionto refill the tube. You must have taken the last of the water with yourdinner. And as for the zig-zag, you said we should run a straightawaynow and then to mix it up. I decided that last night was as good a timeas any."

  He took a minute drink from the reservoir, stalling. There wassomething--yes; he had _meant_ to refill the apparatus after his dinnerration. And he _had_ told her to give it a few hours of straightawaysome night....

  He said formally: "You're quite right on both counts. I apologize." Hebit into a ration.

  "That's not good enough," she said. "I'm not going to have you tell meyou're sorry and then go scowling and sulking about the boat. In fact Idon't like your behavior at all."

  He said, enormously angry: "_Oh, you don't do you?_" and hated her, theworld and himself for the stupid inadequacy of the comeback.

  "No. I don't. I'm seriously worried. I'm afraid the conditioning you gotdidn't fall away completely when they swore you in. You've been actingirrationally and inconsistently."

  "What about you?" he snapped. "You got conditioned too."

  "That's right," she said. "That's another reason why you're worrying me.I find impulses in myself that have no business there. I simply seem todo a better job of controlling them than you're doing. For instance:we've been quarreling and at cross-purposes ever since you and Marthapicked me up. That couldn't be unless I were contributing to thefriction."

  The wheel was fixed; she took a step or two aft and said professorially:"I've never had trouble getting along with people. I've had differences,of course, and at times I've allowed myself displays of temper when itwas necessary to assert myself. But I find that you upset me; that forsome reason or other your opinion on a matter is important to me, thatif it differs with mine there should be a reconciliation."

  He put down the ration and said wonderingly: "Do you know, that's theway I feel about you? And you think it's the conditioning or--orsomething?" He took a couple of steps forward, hesitantly.

  "Yes," she said in a rather tremulous voice. "The conditioning orsomething. For instance, you're inhibited. You haven't made an indecentproposition to me, not even as a matter of courtesy. Not that I care, ofcourse, but--" In stepping aft, she tripped over the water bucket andwent down to the deck with a faint scream.

  He said: "Here, let me help you." He picked her up and didn't let go.

  "Thanks," she said faintly. "The conditioning technique can't be calledfaulty, but it has inherent limitations...." She trailed off and hekissed her. She kissed back and said more faintly still: "Or it might bethe drugs we used.... Oh, Charles, what _took_ you so long?"

  He said, brooding: "You're way out of my class, you know. I'm just abagman for the New York police. I wouldn't even be that if it weren'tfor Uncle Frank, and you're a Falcaro. It's just barely thinkable that Icould make a pass at you. I guess that held me off and I didn't want toadmit it so I got mad at you instead. Hell, I could have swum back tothe base and made a damned fool of myself trying to find Grinnel, butdown inside I knew better. The kid's _gone_."

  "We'll make a psychologist of you yet," she said.

  "Psychologist? Why? You're joking."

  "No. It's not a joke. You'll _like_ psychology, darling. You can't go onplaying polo forever, you know."

  Darling! What was he getting into? Old man Gilby was four-goal at sixty,wasn't he? Good God, was he hooked into marriage at twenty-three? Wasshe married already? Did she know or care whether he was? Had she beenpromiscuous? Would she continue to be? He'd never know; that was the onething you never asked; your only comfort, if you needed comfort, wasthat she could never dream of asking you. What went on here? Let me out!

  It went through his mind in a single panicky flash and then he said:"The hell with it," and kissed her again.

  She wanted to know: "The hell with what, darling?"

  "Everything. Tell me about psychology. I can't go on playing poloforever."

  It was an hour before she got around to telling him about psychology:"The neglect has been criminal--and inexplicable. For about a centuryit's been _assumed_ that psychology is a dead fallacy. Why?"

  "All right," he said amiably, playing with a lock of her hair. "Why?"

  "Lieberman," she said. "Lieberman of Johns-Hopkins. He was one of theold-line topological psychology men--don't let the lingo throw you,Charles; it's just the name of a system. He wrote an attack onthe _mengenlehre_ psychology school--point-sets of emotions,class-inclusions of reactions and so on. He blasted them to bits byproving that their constructs didn't correspond to the emotions andreactions of random-sampled populations. And then came the pay-off: hetried the same acid test on his _own_ school's constructs and found outthat they didn't correspond either. It didn't frighten him; he was ascientist. He published, and then the jig was up. Everybody, from fullprofessors to undergraduate students went down the roster of the schoolsof psychology and wrecked them so comprehensively that the field was asdead as palmistry in twenty years. The miracle is that it hadn'thappened before. The flaws were so glaring! Textbooks of the older kindsolemnly described syndromes, psychoses, neuroses that simply couldn'tbe found in the real world! And that's the way it was all the way downthe line."

  "So where does that leave us?" Charles demanded. "Is it or isn't it ascience?"

  "It is," she said simply. "Lieberman and his followers went too far. Itbecame a kind of hysteria. The experimenters must have been too eager.They misread results, they misinterpreted statistics, they misunderstoodthe claims of a school and knocked down not its true claims butstraw-man claims they had set up themselves."

  "But--_psychology_!" Charles protested, obscurely embarrassed at thethought that man's mind was subject to scientific study--not because heknew the first thing about it, but because _everybody_ knew psychologywas phony.

  She shrugged. "I can't help it. We were doing physiology of the sensoryorgans, trying to settle the oldie about focusing the eye, and I got togrubbing around the pre-Lieberman texts looking for light in thedarkness. Some of it sounded so--not sensible, but _positive_ that I ranoff one of Lieberman's population checks. And the old boy had been deadwrong. _Mengenlehre_ constructs correspond quite nicely to the actualway people's minds work. I kept checking and the schools that weredestroyed as hopelessly fallacious a century ago checked out, someclosely and some not so closely, as good descriptions of the way themind works. Some have predictive value. I used _mengenlehre_ psychologyalgorithms to compute the conditioning on you and me, including thetrigger release. It worked. You see, Charles? We're on the rim ofsomething tremendous!"

  "When did this Lieberman flourish?"

  "I don't have the exact dates in my head. The breakup of the schoolscorresponded roughly with the lifetime of John G. Falcaro."

  That pin-pointed it rather well. John G. succeeded Rafael, who succeededAmadeo Falcaro, first leader of the Syndic in revolt. Under John G., thehard-won freedom was enjoyed, the bulging store-houses were joyouslyemptied, craft union rules went joyously out the window and builders_worke
d_, the dollar went to an all-time high and there was an all-timenumber of dollars in circulation. It had been an exhuberant time stillfondly remembered; just the time for over-enthusiastic rebels against afusty scholasticism to joyously smash old ways of thought without toomuch exercise of the conscience. It all checked out.

  She started and he got to his feet. A hardly-noticed discomfort wasbecoming acute; the speedboat was pitching and rolling quite seriously,for the first time since their escape. "Dirty weather coming up," hesaid. "We've been too damned lucky so far." He thought, but didn'tremark, that there was much to worry about in the fact that there seemedto have been no pursuit. The meager resources of the North American Navywouldn't be spent on chasing a single minor craft--not if the weathercould be counted on to finish her off.

  "I thought we were unsinkable?"

  "In a way. Seal the boat and she's unsinkable the way a corked bottleis. But the boat's made up of a lot of bits and pieces that go togetherjust so. Pound her for a few hours with waves and the bits and piecesgive way. She doesn't sink, but she doesn't steam or steer either. Iwish the Syndic had a fleet on the Atlantic."

  "Sorry," she said. "The nearest fleet I know of is Mob ore boats on thegreat lakes and they aren't likely to pick us up."

  The sea-search radar pinged and they flew to the screen. "_Something_ at273 degrees, about eight miles," he said. "It can't be pursuit. Theycouldn't have any reason at all to circle around us and come at us fromahead." He strained his eyes into the west and thought he could see ablack speck on the gray.

  Lee Falcaro tried a pair of binoculars and complained: "These thingswon't work."

  "Not on a rolling, pitching platform they won't--not with an opticallever eight miles long. I don't suppose this boat would have agyro-stabilized signal glass." He spun the wheel to 180; they staggeredand clung as the bow whipped about, searched and steadied on the newcourse. The mounting waves slammed them broadside-to and the rollingincreased. They hardly noticed; their eyes were on the radarscope.Fogged as it was with sea return, they nevertheless could be sure afterseveral minutes that the object had changed course to 135. Charles madea flying guess at her speed, read their own speed off and scribbled fora moment.

  He said nothing, but spun the wheel to 225 and went back to theradarscope. The object changed course to 145. Charles scribbled againand said at last, flatly: "They're running collision courses on us.Automatically computed, I suppose, from a radar. We're through."

  He spun the wheel to 180 again, and studied the crawling green spark onthe radarscope. "This way we give 'em the longest run for their moneyand can pray for a miracle. The only way we can use our speed to outrunthem is to turn around and head back into Government Territory--whichisn't what we want. Relax, Lee. Maybe if the weather thickens they'lllose us--no; not with radar."

  They sat together on a bunk, wordlessly, for hours while the spraydashed higher and the boat shivered to hammering waves. Briefly they sawthe pursuer, three miles off, low, black and ugly, before fog closed inagain.

  At nightfall there was the close, triumphant roar of a big reactionturbine and a light stabbed through the fog, flooding the boat withblue-white radiance. A cliff-like black hull loomed alongside as abull-horn roared at them: "Cut your engines and come about into thewind."

  Lee Falcaro read white-painted letters on the black hull: "_Hon. JamesJ. Regan, Chicago_." She turned to Charles and said wonderingly: "It'san ore boat. From the Mob great lakes fleet."