by John Brunner
“That’s not fair!” Ruth burst out. “They weren’t all–”
“For every Niemöller,” Bradshaw snapped, “there were a thousand who collaborated. And even Niemöller was an ex-U-boat captain, a willing professional murderer!”
“I–uh–I’d forgotten,” Ruth muttered, and added almost inaudibly, “But I can’t forget anything any more …”
“Did Gifford say”–from Malcolm–“the people at your lab are personally loyal to Charkall-Phelps?”
“Yes, he did,” Kneller sighed. “It’s of a piece with his career in politics, I suppose: business background, safe seat, Home Office within ten years where he can control the police … I was saying to Arthur as we arrived, the kind of thing you imagine can’t happen here. Plus an enormous populist movement handed to him on a plate, the Moral Pollution Campaign whose members are desperately seeking a scapegoat for what’s actually due to government incompetence, like high prices and bad housing and unemployment. I suspect he’s after a monopoly of VC. It would be the very thing he needs to secure personal supreme power in the chaos caused by the coming war.”
“Which, we are agreed, will be triggered off in Italy,” Randolph said, and added dryly, “Capital–Rome!”
Bewildered, Ruth said, “How is it you’re always in agreement? Is the result of VC going to be that everyone on earth will think alike? We might as well be ants!”
“Let’s ask Hector’s opinion,” Malcolm said. “If Billy were home I’d call him in too, but he’s not. Hector, right here we have all but two of the people known to be infected with VC. There were two others, but both are dead. I say the consequences of taking VC have been good in my case. I can organise data more efficiently, and on levels I never before had the chance to react on. And you know I’m physically healthy.”
Hector nodded. “Granted. Uh–Wilfred, what about you?”
“I’m doing work at the labs, or could be but for those damned meddlers, which I’d never have expected. It’s a cliché that a scientist does no original work after thirty. Maurice disproved that, and now Arthur and I are doing the same.”
“As for me,” Bradshaw said, “I have no reservations about VC. I’ve suffered … but it’s the right kind of suffering. I feel purified.”
“David?” Malcolm looked at Sawyer. “Oh, excuse me. It’s the blood-brother bit, as it were.”
“I don’t mind. It’s the same with me. Obviously I have an aptitude for detection, or I wouldn’t have made chief inspector. But these past few days I’ve been solving, in my head, cases five, six, seven years old.” He hesitated. “Moreover I’ve watched Harry Bott grow a conscience. Small-time thief, practising Catholic, treated his wife abominably. Now he says he’s going to go straight. I believe him.”
“But what about Corporal Stevens?” Ruth cried. “Caught trying to send a parcel-bomb to his officer’s wife? What about this man Crawford who runs a black power group? What about his opposite number in South Africa who’s spent his life sopping up so-called proofs that black people are subhuman? You can’t calculate with data you don’t possess!”
“I think,” Malcolm said slowly, “our minds have been made up for us. Sorry, Hector.” He pointed at the TV, whose screen showed the single word newsflash, and turned up the volume.
A voice said, “–regular programmes to bring you this important announcement. The northern frontiers of Italy have been closed since an hour ago, and both radio and television have ceased transmission. It can be confidently assumed that as a result of his successful strike call last Monday Marshal Dalessandro–”
“Did you know,” Malcolm said at random, “that they’re advertising the army again on Radio Free Enterprise? Owing to the record unemployment, recruiting figures have been high for months. Do I hear anybody say ‘waste of public money’?”
The TV voice said: “–mobilisation in Switzerland …”
“That does it,” Randolph said. “Nobody could fail to be aware what another war would mean. Not since 1945. But it’s clear that it’s possible to disregard that knowledge.”
“I’ve met people who can,” Bradshaw said.
“Yes. Well, what VC does is make it more difficult to ignore data you possess, right? So it’s our duty to turn this outbreak of VC into an epidemic. There simply isn’t any other way to save the world.”
He glanced at Kneller. “Wilfred?”
The professor felt in his pocket, produced the packet which made it bulge, and began carefully to unwrap it.
“We have the means,” he said. “This, for your information, is what VC looks like in the unpurified state.” He held up a sealed glass cylinder full of a yellowish mass with red veins running through it. “There’s enough here to affect five or six hundred people. With luck, in a month we could multiply that by a thousand. But we may not have a month. We shall just have to do the best we can.”
“First reactions from Brussels …” said the TV.
“But you have no right!” Ruth cried. “People ought to have the chance to choose!”
“So they should,” Malcolm countered sternly. “But how many of us will be given the choice whether or not to die in World War Three?”
BOOK THREE
Dissent
“An atheist could not be as great a military leader as one who is not an atheist. … I don’t think you will find an atheist who has reached the peak in the Armed Forces.”
–Admiral Thomas H. Moorer,
when chairman-designate of
the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
quoted in the Milwaukee Journal
XVII
There was silence. Malcolm made it more complete by switching off the TV.
“Ruth,” he said in a tone suddenly full of tenderness, “it would clear all our consciences, not just yours, if we could persuade Hector what we plan to do is right. That’s what I had in mind when I appealed to him just now. I submit to you that one could not at random pick a more ideal judge. He is not affected by VC, but he knows about it, and he knows people who have it, and he has examined one of them–me–using tests of his own choice and all available medical facilities. Furthermore, he is a doctor in general practice at a large clinic. Not only is he acquainted with the use of virtually every drug in the pharmacopoeia; he is also acquainted with the social conditions that obtain in London today, because he sees patients from every class every day. It’s a dreadful burden to place on any man. But if he is willing to undertake the task, will you abide by what he says?”
Stiff-featured and pale, Ruth countered, “Will the rest of you? Or will you simply go ahead anyway?”
“If we can’t prove to you and Hector that it’s right, it won’t be worth doing. Particularly to you.”
“What? Why?” She stared at him.
“Because you were deprived of your own life, and that hasn’t made you hate the world. You care about it, and the people in it. It would be pointless reasoning with somebody like Charkall-Phelps, who doesn’t give a damn for mankind, only for himself.”
“And if we can’t persuade you,” Kneller said, “I’ll personally destroy this.” He held up the test-tube.
“Good. Hector?”
“You want me to–to sort of interrogate you about your motives, is that it? I’ll do my best, although …” Hector gathered himself. “Very well! To begin with, all my instincts as a doctor cry out against turning loose VC, a substance that once at large can never be eradicated short of killing everybody who carries it. Maurice asked me whether someone who had it in his power to alter human nature should do so. I couldn’t answer. I still can’t. Such a thing is unprecedented.”
“Not at all,” Malcolm said. “It’s directly owing to just such a chemical alteration in a large terrestrial population that we can sit here and reason with one another.” He glanced at Kneller. “Wilfred, you must know what I’m talking about.”
“I believe I do. The loss of the enzyme which converts urea to allantoin.”
“I don’t know about that,�
� Ruth said stubbornly. “Or”–seemingly suddenly giddy, she put her hands to her temples–“or do I? It’s so awful, this turnover period! Neither able to remember nor able to forget!”
“Urea stimulates activity in the nervous system,” Malcolm said. “Loss of the power to excrete it as allantoin has been compared to adding a permanent pep-pill to our diet.”
“I–uh … Yes, I read about it once. But in a story. Not an article or a book that I’d have taken seriously.” Ruth let her hands fall to her lap.
“But that occurred naturally,” Hector objected. “What you’re planning is–”
Malcolm interrupted. “Are we not natural creatures? Are we not evolved, too? Surely all the lessons we’ve learned in the past century come to a single point: we have to stop thinking of ourselves as somehow apart from nature, and recognise that we’re inseparable from it.”
“Which is something I’m keenly aware of,” Randolph said. “Since catching VC I feel that instead of being an isolated entity which I keep here in my frontal lobes”–tapping his forehead–“my consciousness is more integrated with the rest of me. The forebrain has been termed a tumourous outgrowth, and inasmuch as a tumour has the power to kill that’s an apt comparison. Thanks to it, we’ve become able to ruin the world we live in and even to exterminate our species. Rationally, that’s a decision we ought never to take. But if it is taken it won’t be on a rational basis.”
“Inside my head,” Malcolm quoted, “a man is trying to ride a dog which is trying to ride a lizard. We find it easy to decide which way we’d like to go. Because we’re being pulled three ways at once, small wonder we never get there!”
“And small wonder,” Bradshaw chimed in, “that so many of us give up–cast ourselves on the mercy of a hypothetical all-powerful supreme being who can really do what we can only envisage.”
“We all know what it’s like to have plans frustrated,” Ruth said, and gave a slight shudder. Clearly she was struggling to control herself. “That’s among the reasons why we sometimes lose our tempers and strike out at random and even kill one another. But it’s an inescapable part of being human.”
“What we’re saying,” Malcolm contradicted, “is that it isn’t inescapable any longer. Consider. Plans can be frustrated by inanimate forces, and it’s foolish to rail against them. If a thunderstorm blows tiles off your roof and your home gets flooded, you may be angry but you don’t blame the storm. On the other hand you have every reason to blame the builder who last mended the roof if he charged you a fat fee for making it stormproof. The weather is beyond reach of a complaint. Other human beings aren’t. What hurts is to have your plans frustrated by people whom you think of as being trustworthy because they’re members of your species.”
“Wait a moment,” Hector said. “I was describing to Wilfred the other day how some of my Irish patients expect me to cure with a single pill children who are mentally disturbed because they had to live through years of violence at home.” He leaned back in his chair. “I can’t help letting them down. What they expect of me is literally out of the question.”
“Don’t you tell them so?” Malcolm said.
“Of course, but they don’t listen.”
“VC makes it impossible not to listen,” Malcolm murmured. “If they had VC, those people would stop treating you like a magician and start treating you like a doctor.”
“Exactly,” Kneller agreed. “They’d be able to draw on their own and other people’s experience of what medicine is. They no doubt have the information, and they disregard it.”
“But merely making use of more information isn’t a panacea,” Hector snapped, reverting to his devil’s advocate rôle. “While I’m not a hundred per cent convinced you’ve made your point about this being analogous to what’s already happened in the course of evolution, I do have to concede that the chance of another war breaking out does seem very real, and what with nuclear weapons that’s like writing a factor of infinity into an equation. Admitting something has to be done, the question stands: is this the right thing to do? Could the ability to calculate with all the data accumulated in a lifetime help a savage in–oh–New Guinea if fallout came sifting down and everyone in the village was ill with radiation sickness?”
“Yes,” Malcolm said promptly. “Given that people had been weak and ill before and some had recovered when they did this or that or the other, ate this or that, drank this or that … You picked a poor example; radiation sickness has to be cured by helping the body to mend itself.”
“Besides, we’re not talking about New Guinea savages,” Sawyer said. “We’re talking about technological Western man. Here’s a question for you, Doctor. Do you approve of murder, the pushing of hard drugs, and driving people out of their homes with dogs and petrol-bombs?”
“What? No, of course I don’t.”
“As to driving people out of their homes, it’s because Harry Bott caught VC that the memory of his spell as a frightener has turned him against crime for good. As to drug-peddling, VC persuaded him to shop his brother-in-law Joe Feathers, whom we’d been after for years without success. As to murder, but for catching VC myself I couldn’t have deduced just by looking at Dr Post’s body that I very probably already had his killer under arrest. Nor could I have assembled that dossier on Washgrave Properties. How did George Washgrave get away with it? He exploited our selective inattention.” Glancing at Kneller and Randolph. “I didn’t know that term until I heard it from you at Post’s home. But that’s what he took advantage of. He was a filthy villain, but he was rich and respectable and gave to charity and went to church every Sunday, and that’s what people took notice of.”
“Which brings us to the nub of the matter,” Malcolm said. “How do you fool people? How do you get them to put up with things that are harmful to them and bring you a handsome profit? How do you get them to eat food that doesn’t nourish them properly? How do you get them to believe it’s worth emptying serviceable houses at a time of shortage in order to build a motorway that the homeless citizens can’t afford to use?” He pointed in the direction of the one which droned day and night within earshot of Chater Street. “How do you get them to re-elect you to power when you’ve made ghastly mistakes and propose to keep right on repeating them? As it were, ‘We did it before and it didn’t work but it damned well should have done so let us do it again!’ We’re seeing that around us all the time: the cost of living doubled in the past four years, the number of unemployed doubled too, and services halved! Lord, street-lamps switched off, tube-trains packed to overload capacity, the Health Service being cut back, people suffering from scurvy and rickets in one of the world’s richest countries! How do you get away with it? Above all, how do you persuade people to risk their lives in order to kill total strangers whom they know almost literally nothing about? Why, the answer’s simple. You lie to them!”
He leaned forward earnestly. “And all too often the lie is easier to believe than the truth.”
“I’ve used that technique,” Bradshaw said. “You said a moment ago, Malcolm, that Dr Campbell’s patients look on him as more of a magician. Magic is what movements like the Moral Pollution Campaign are based on. The argument runs like this: we’ve misbehaved and so we’re being punished. We must seek out the wicked atheists and perverts and deal with them, and when we’ve demonstrated that we hate their guts everything will be all right again.”
“You can find magic in the law, too,” Sawyer said. “It’s used to cover up every conceivable type of inconsistency. If you kill a dozen people by sniping at them from a roof-top, you’re a criminal. Unless you had a uniform on. Then you get a medal. That’s more or less what Corporal Stevens said when he created that terrific scandal on TV in Scotland–and he was quite right. I arrested him when he was running with that gang I told you about, for doing what he was ordered to do in Glasgow!”
“Our whole society is schizophrenic from top to bottom,” Malcolm said.
“Absolutely!” Kneller snapped.
“But it’s not surprising when you’re being asked to lick the boots of the people who are simultaneously either beating or starving you into submission!”
“I still don’t see,” Hector declared doggedly, “how VC can cure us. What we need is an injection of raw empathy. That might do some good. Not extra knowledge. Extra–ah–love!”
“That will come of its own accord,” Malcolm said. “Will you grant that human beings are readily frightened by what they don’t understand? And that when they’re afraid they can more easily be manipulated?”
“Ah … Yes, of course.”
“Will you further grant that they are most commonly manipulated by propaganda, which is a kind of lying?”
“Yes.” Hector looked uncomfortable, as though he felt he was being pushed towards a conclusion he didn’t relish.
“Will you concede that a population in full possession of data from past experience will, when invited to go and commit publicly sanctioned mass murder at the risk of their own lives, remember the faults and shortcomings of the leaders who are issuing the orders? Remember, for example, that they are the people who couldn’t arrange a decent diet for them, or decent homes, or regular work, or proper medical care?”
“Just a–”
“I hadn’t quite finished. Likewise will realise that they don’t know anything about the so-called enemy except what those known-to-be-untrustworthy leaders have told them?”
Into the dead pause that followed, the ring of the phone in the hallway stabbed like a dagger.
“I’ll go,” Ruth said, rising quickly. “I–uh … You just keep on at Hector. I’m leaving it to him, as I said.”
And she hastened from the room, closing the door behind her.
