by James Gunn
“I was heading home for lunch when I saw the girls standing in front of the school,” Marouk said as they reached the boulevard that led to his villa. “Fortunately for you I investigated. I might not have been able to bail you out a second time.”
“Surely the Paymaster can do anything,” Kirk said.
“Don’t be bitter,” Marouk said, nodding. “I apologize for not telling you last night, but I didn’t want your perceptions of the situation to be colored by my relationship to it. As you may discover, however, the authority of the Paymaster is limited to the adjudication of disputes over pay and payday. In other areas, such as your encounters with the authorities, the Paymaster can depend only upon the prestige of the office.”
“It is a marvelous system,” Kirk said.
“You mean that ironically,” Marouk said, “but suspicion of outsiders is the only flaw in this otherwise perfect society. And that suspicion is not unfounded. Anyone who has not entered paradise is a threat to destroy it.”
“Perfect insanity is more like it,” Kirk said. “To me it looks indistinguishable from slavery.”
“We’re all slaves to that one thing in life that will bring us happiness,” Marouk said. “We keep looking for it, thinking we’ve found it, discarding one disappointment after another, pressing on toward the next possibility. The bluebird of happiness we call it, because it comes and departs before we can grasp it.”
“That’s life,” Kirk said. He looked around at the arching trees that shaded their walk and the glints of a blue sky and a white-yellow sun through breaks in the leaves. He breathed the aroma of an alien spring day scented with reminders of Earth, and listened to the songs of alien birds. It was a good life, and Kirk detested those who would sacrifice it on the altar of some dubious perfection.
[82] “No,” Marouk said. “That’s what I want you to understand. That used to be life. Everywhere else people are looking for something fleeting, protean, illusory. On Timshel we have found it. Clearly, indisputably, measurably—utter, complete happiness.”
“Maybe that’s how you see it,” Kirk said. “From here it looks like a drug experience without the aftermath. No hangover, perhaps, but even more addictive.”
“Payday is not. a drug,” Marouk said. “Drugs provide an illusion of pleasure by imitating the body’s own reward process. Payday is the real thing. The proof is that people never develop immunity, never need higher and higher doses.”
“How do you know?” Kirk asked. By now they had arrived back at Marouk’s villa. He looked down at Marouk’s wrist. “The Paymaster never has a payday.”
A shadow crossed Marouk’s face. “That’s true,” he said. “Don’t think I haven’t envied Dannie and Wolff and De Kreef, and everybody else.” He shrugged his shoulders as if he were trying to shift the weight of the world. “But some of us must make sacrifices.”
He looked down at Kirk’s wrist. “We’re going to have to get rid of that. It will only keep getting you into trouble.”
Kirk thought for a moment. “I think I’ll keep it,” he said. “Trouble or not.”
“Why don’t you exchange it for a real one?” Marouk said, offering a bracelet that he took from a shirt pocket.
Kirk shivered involuntarily. “No thanks,” he said.
Marouk shrugged and motioned Kirk to precede him through the garden and into the house. As Kirk reached the halfway point, however, he noticed that Marouk had lagged behind. He was turning to wait when he saw Marouk aiming a device, like a phaser, at his head.
[83] Then darkness closed over him like a deep and dreamless sleep.
When Kirk came back to consciousness, he was seated in Marouk’s living room, in the deep chair beside the fireplace. A solicitous Mareen was applying a cold cloth to his forehead, and a concerned Marouk was hovering nearby. Marouk sighed when Kirk opened his eyes. “Are you all right?” he asked. He waved Mareen aside, and motioned for her to leave them alone.
Kirk stretched. “As a matter of fact,” he said, “I feel pretty darned good for someone who just got knocked out. What hit me?”
“This,” Marouk said, holding out a rectangular device with a button on top. “It’s an adaptation of the payday sleep inducer. It operates on the sleep centers of the brain. Fortunately, you fell gently. Sleep seems to do that, relaxing the entire body simultaneously.”
“And this?” Kirk said. He held up his left wrist. It wore a bracelet, but the remains of his former bracelet lay on the table beside him. The imitation ruby in its center had been smashed, exposing the broken circuits at its base.
“You’ll learn to love it,” Marouk said. “And I couldn’t let you keep reporting to the Enterprise, which obviously is in orbit somewhere close, even though we have not been able to locate it.”
“I would have put treachery beyond you, Kemal,” Kirk said sorrowfully. “I thought we were friends.”
Marouk nodded. “We are. But some things are more important than friendship. I had no choice. Matters are coming to a head.”
“For me, too,” Kirk said. “What time is it?”
“Midafternoon.”
“The Joy Machine has given me an ultimatum. Become a joy-besotted citizen or get out of town.”
“I know,” Marouk said.
“You know?”
[84] “The Joy Machine tells me—things,” Marouk said. He fished a virtually invisible device from his ear and held it toward Kirk before he returned it.
“What kind of things?”
“Whatever it wants me to know.”
“You mean that you’re just a figurehead, providing a human face for the machine that controls everything?” Kirk stood up and spread his arms in irritation.
“Not quite,” Marouk said, flinching in spite of his self-discipline. He was a bigger man than Kirk, but older; and Kirk had the edge of righteous anger. “The Machine values independent judgment, and I am allowed to provide exceptions that humanize the Machine’s inflexibility.”
“But not under its control,” Kirk said skeptically, letting his arms drop to his sides. The living room still had all the graciousness of the previous evening, but now the good life had a dark edge.
“I have,” Marouk said slowly, “a certain invulnerability to the Joy Machine’s mandate, because of my position but also because of my services.”
“What kind of services?”
“I helped De Kreef build the Joy Machine.”
“You helped him build it!”
Marouk shrugged apologetically. “I didn’t know then what it was. De Kreef was no physical scientist. He was a philosopher, and it was all he could do to imagine the possibility of stimulating from a distance the pleasure centers of the brain. I developed the room-temperature superconductors that allowed a much-improved computer to be built, and helped put it together. It was De Kreef who assigned that computer the task of inventing the device that made payday possible.”
“Payday came from the Machine itself?”
Marouk nodded. “But I was able to build into it certain prohibitions.”
“I hope it was against harming humans,” Kirk said wryly.
[85] “Nothing as fundamental as that,” Marouk said. “Although, as far as I know, it never has harmed anyone. That would be contrary to its basic function. No, I made my person and my family and my residence exempt from the Machine’s control.”
“And yet you’re going to allow your daughters to come under the Joy Machine’s influence?”
“It’s really a wonderful system, Jim,” Marouk said earnestly. “Tandy can hardly wait to be part of it. You’ll see. My reservations have more to do with the need for checks and balances.”
“I’d rather see Tandy dead,” Kirk said.
“Than be happy?” Marouk asked. “There’s a peculiarly human paradox.”
Kirk looked at Marouk. “If you worked on the Joy Machine, you must know its weaknesses.”
“I’m going to surprise you, Jim, by telling you everything I know. That’s because I d
on’t know of any. It seems defenseless, sitting there in its attic, but since I helped put it together it has added to itself, spread throughout the city and, for all anyone knows, throughout the world, until the original computer may be the least part of it. Destroy it, and nothing at all would be changed.”
“Then what am I going to do?” Kirk asked.
“There’s nothing you can do,” Marouk said. “Just embrace joy. Allow yourself to be happy.”
“That’s where you’re wrong,” Kirk said firmly. “As soon as my friends arrive, we’ll take this Utopian hell apart.”
“That should be about now,” Marouk said. He turned to look out the patio doors toward the garden.
Kirk followed his gaze and saw three silvery shapes shimmer into existence before they solidified into Spock and McCoy and Uhura. And saw them slump, like wilted blossoms in the flower beds, into unconsciousness.
[86] Spock opened his eyes first. He looked around Marouk’s living room. “Interesting,” he said, as if surprised at his vulnerability to a Timshel device.
Kirk looked at him sympathetically from the armchair beside the fireplace. Spock looked first at Kirk, then at McCoy seated to his right on the sofa and at Uhura, slumped in a chair to his left. They were just beginning to awaken from their induced slumber.
“Well, Captain,” Spock said, “it seems that Marouk was not as good a friend as you thought.”
“He is caught in a web of responsibilities more binding than friendship,” Kirk said.
McCoy sat up and looked around. He was a bit slower than Spock to understand what had happened to them. Almost immediately, however, he checked his physical response as if he had his own internal medical scanner. “That was not a phaser set on stun. It must have been a version of the Joy Machine’s sleep inducer.”
“Quite right, Doctor,” Kirk said.
Uhura’s eyes opened. She sat up straight. “Is everyone all right?” she asked. Her gaze moved quickly from Spock to McCoy to Kirk, as if to assure herself that their quick nods did not conceal injury.
“Your transmission stopped,” Spock said. “It seemed likely that you needed help.”
Kirk held up the remains of the bracelet Uhura had fashioned for him. “I need help, all right. But I’m not sure what kind, if any, is going to really matter.” He held up his left wrist for their inspection.
“I noticed that, Captain,” Spock said, “and this,” He held up his own left wrist. It, too, had a bracelet.
McCoy and Uhura looked at their wrists. Bracelets had been fitted to them as well.
“What’s going on here?” McCoy asked. He put his right hand on the bracelet as if he were going to remove it.
“I’m not sure that would be wise, Doctor,” Spock said.
[87] “He’s right,” Marouk said from the archway leading from the hall. He had a tray in his hands. On it rested five cups. Steam rose gently from them, and the aroma of Timshel coffee filled the air. “The bracelet bonds to the nervous system, and an attempt to remove it might prove fatal.”
“I thought you said the Joy Machine had never injured anyone,” Kirk said.
“The injury, if it occurs,” Marouk said, “would come from an attempt to remove a bond established for your own good.”
“Like Adam and Eve tasting the forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge,” McCoy said ironically.
“That’s true,” Marouk agreed, setting down the tray and motioning for them to help themselves.
“ ‘For in the day that thou eatest thereof,’ ” Spock quoted, “ ‘thou shalt surely die.’ ”
“Depend on Spock to quote the precise scripture,” McCoy said.
“There is much wisdom to be gained from ancient texts,” Spock said.
“What is more to the point,” Kirk said to Marouk, “you are the one who placed these bonds upon us—for our own good.”
“I admit my guilt,” Marouk said, “but I ask you to believe that I had no choice. It was either me or another, and if I did it I retained some influence over what happens next.”
Uhura rose from her chair. “And what does happen next, Paymaster? Do we all get a sample payday and become slaves to the machine?”
“Not yet.”
McCoy laughed. “You really believe this stuff, don’t you? Well, I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m for marching down to the World Center and destroying that damned machine.”
“As I told Jim,” Marouk said, “I don’t think the Joy Machine can be destroyed. Not anymore. Maybe once, shortly after it was activated, but now it exists in bits [88] and pieces all over Timshel, and one part lopped off will simply be regenerated somewhere else.”
“But there’s another reason at least as important, isn’t there, Marouk?” McCoy asked.
Marouk nodded. “Violence is not permitted. Even the emotions that lead to violence are forbidden.”
“Permitted by whom?” Uhura asked. “Forbidden by whom?”
“The Joy Machine,” Marouk said. “It was created to give people pleasure. Anger, jealousy, hatred, envy—all the old sins—make people unable to enjoy happiness; as well, they cause unhappiness to others, and the Joy Machine has outlawed them.”
“How can it do that?” McCoy asked.
“As Marouk has said,” Spock pointed out, “the bracelets have attached themselves to our nervous systems.”
“The emotions that I have mentioned create nervous responses that the Joy Machine monitors,” Marouk said. “It counters them with impulses that dampen the mood, whatever it is. Aggression is stopped outright. After several such occurrences, the Joy Machine will begin a process of personal reformation that involves a stimulation of the nervous system, pain for punishment, pleasure for reward.”
“Like training a dog,” Kirk observed.
“I thought pleasure was reserved for payday,” Uhura said.
“It is not that kind of pleasure,” Marouk said. “Payday is better described as ecstasy. The reformation process is like a brief release of endorphins.”
“And then?” McCoy asked.
“In the end everyone chooses pleasure,” Marouk said. “All our criminals, all our mentally unbalanced, all our neurotics—all finally chose happiness.
“But look,” he continued, gesturing, “with all the talk we have let the coffee get cold. And I know how much Jim likes our Timshel coffee.”
[89] Kirk laughed sardonically at the juxtaposition of these gilded cuffs and Timshel hospitality.
“Then what do you expect us to do?” Uhura asked.
Marouk shrugged. “I expect you all to become citizens of Timshel.”
McCoy and Uhura laughed. Kirk stared incredulously. Spock, however, looked at them somberly and said, “It is the only logical thing to do.”
Marouk seemed to agree, but Kirk, McCoy, and Uhura looked at Spock in astonishment. “You have said some pretty ridiculous things in our time together,” McCoy said, “but this tops them all.”
“I’m sure Spock has a good reason for his statement,” Kirk said.
Spock nodded. “I have been doing some research into the history of the pleasure-center technology. The experiments with rats that Dr. McCoy described—”
“What experiments?” Kirk asked.
Briefly McCoy repeated what he had remembered about the planting of electrodes in the pleasure centers of rats and their pushing a lever that gave them a jolt of pleasure while they ignored food, drink, sleep, and other rats, until they dropped from exhaustion and often died.
“That is what De Kreef avoided with his sleep response and by putting the process under the control of an incorruptible computer,” Marouk said. “When people awake, payday has faded into a wonderful dream. They long to recapture that feeling and work to experience it once again, but they cannot overdo it.”
“I have discovered,” Spock said, “that a fad sprang up in the twenty-first century. People were having plugs surgically implanted in their heads. They were connected to electrodes in their brain. They coul
d hook themselves up to a source of power and experience ecstasy after ecstasy limited only by their physical endurance.”
[90] “How horrible!” Uhura said.
“I remember now,” McCoy said. “They were called wireheads, and the operation was outlawed.”
“The ultimate junkies,” Kirk said.
Spock nodded. “They could never be weaned from their addiction. If their plugs were removed or the electrical stimulus denied them, they would pine away.”
“In the end,” McCoy said, “they could only be fed intravenously until other causes killed them off. They had lost the will, perhaps even the ability, to live independent of their addiction.”
“Unlike Adam and Eve, expelled from paradise,” Spock said, “they could not survive exile.”
“That may have been the origin of the process,” Marouk said, “but what we have here is far different. You haven’t seen any wireheads, have you?” he asked Kirk.
“What I see,” Kirk said slowly, “is a beautiful world whose attempt to perfect the natural quality of life has been diverted into a vicious cycle of meaningless pleasure.”
“What I hoped you would see,” Marouk said sorrowfully, “is a world that has found what everyone else is looking for, the secret of eternal happiness.”
“You really mean that, don’t you?” Kirk asked.
Spock looked on with his customary logical calm while McCoy and Uhura switched their gazes between Kirk and Marouk as if they were watching a tennis match.
Marouk’s face twisted. “I had hoped,” he said hoarsely, “that one of you would replace me as Paymaster. You, Kirk, or maybe you, Spock. Then I, too, could enter paradise.” For a moment he looked like Atlas hoping to persuade Hercules to take the weight of the world from his shoulders.
Kirk held up his left wrist. “You seem to have disqualified us.”
[91] “The Joy Machine can release whoever is chosen,” Marouk said.
“I don’t think you will find any volunteers for Paymaster here,” Spock said. “Unlike you, we do not believe in compromising with evil, even if it masquerades as the ultimate good.”
“Then I still don’t understand,” McCoy said to Spock, “why you thought becoming a citizen was the only logical thing to do.”
