by David Karp
“Be more explicit. How?”
No state has the right to ask a man to believe in heresy.
“The State does not ask you to do that.”
But it does. The State says that heresy exists.
“But you admit that it does exist.”
Nonsense. Heresy means that an opinion is held against established doctrine. There is no established doctrine permissible under the contract citizens sign with the State. Hence there can be no heresy.
“Are you saying that the State has no right to establish doctrine?”
Yes, that is precisely what I am saying.
“Are you a heretic?”
No. I told you there is no heresy and hence no heretics.
“Within the present meaning of the term—are you a heretic?”
The present meaning of the term is in error.
“Within the present erroneous meaning of the term—are you a heretic?”
Yes, of course.
There was a long silence, and Burden slept without dreams, without sounds, without words.
10
Burden awoke with a faint headache. He felt sick to his stomach. He was back in his small room on the high bed. The curtains were parted and he could see the bleak day outside, the windows streaked with rain. It looked as though it were still raining. He tried to move and found his bones and muscles ached. He must have slept for quite a long time after the doctor gave him the needle but he didn’t feel at all rested. It took a great deal of effort for him to straighten up in bed but he knew he had to get down and see someone—a nurse or a doctor, someone. Surely his papers were ready to be processed now. He brought his legs out from under the covers and sat up in bed; his head swam and he had to put out his hand to steady himself.
The door opened and a nurse came in. “Oh, you’re not trying to get out of bed, I hope?” she asked brightly.
“I—I’m leaving this morning,” Burden said, feeling terribly weak. It must have been powerful sedation to have this sort of aftereffect, he thought. But if it were only a sedative, should it have left him as limp as this?
“Now you get right back under those covers and I’ll bring you some broth and crackers,” the nurse said, smiling professionally and gently forcing him back against the pillow.
“No, no, I’m all right. It’s a sedative the doctor gave me early this morning. I haven’t quite shaken it off. I’ll be all right in a few moments.”
“You’ll be all right tomorrow morning,” the nurse said, gently but steadily pressing against his chest.
“Tomorrow morning?” Burden asked, alarmed.
“You get a day’s rest in bed and a good night’s sleep, and tomorrow morning we’ll let you off the bed. You’ve been a sick boy.”
“Sick? I haven’t been sick at all.”
“Oh, no? Would you like to see your temperature chart?”
“Temperature?”
“I took it myself this morning while you were asleep. One hundred and two. It’s down now. But not nearly enough for you to get out of that bed. Now, come on, be a good boy and I’ll bring you some delicious broth and crackers.”
“But I’m not sick,” Burden protested feebly, feeling her strength and her youth pushing him back, watching her close the covers about him again.
“You are sick. Now, lie there and be a good boy and I’ll be back in a few moments.”
After she left Burden rested against the pillow, shocked and confused. She believed what she had said. But he wasn’t sick. It was the effect of the sedation. It must have caused him to be feverish during the night. But that didn’t mean he was sick. He hadn’t been sick. Didn’t these doctors understand the effects of their own drugs? Surely the doctor who had administered the needle had told the nurse what to expect. The doctor had warned him against catching a chill. Had he caught a chill, then? Was that what they meant when they said he was sick? But this was criminal. If he caught a chill it was because they were negligent. After all, he was under the influence of a sedative, he couldn’t be responsible for keeping his covers about him. Burden’s hands flapped helplessly with frustration. They kept making mistakes. Sick or not, he would have to insist upon being released this afternoon. He didn’t know how he would manage the trip back home. Perhaps he could call Emma and have her borrow someone’s car and drive down to pick him up. It would be the simplest thing to do but Burden didn’t want to upset Emma. And now he felt so exhausted and shaky that perhaps it would be best for him to remain overnight. Errors, errors, and errors again. They seemed to have such a wicked, fiendish ability to reproduce themselves in larger, uglier images. The chain would have to break somewhere and he would be free of the Department. This time he would give up his job with it, have nothing to do with them. He was sick of it, the sly young men, the officious ones, the deadly pyramid of paper, the ten thousand reins of reason that were crossed and tangled without purpose.
ii
The conference had been in progress since eight o’clock in the morning. Now it was nearly two in the afternoon. None of the earnest young men of the Psychosemantics Division appeared at all fatigued, although a few of the medical staffmen were flushed and irritable. The political analyst was a weak-eyed man with thick glasses and a drooping mustache that gave him the appearance of a diffident walrus. He had said practically nothing in the conference that had virtually resolved itself into a quarrel between the two medical members of the conference and the three spirited psychosemanticists. The recording of Burden’s words as they were spoken under the influence of the drug had been played eight times and referred to more than twenty times. The arguments had raged back and forth during the morning.
Lark had presided over the conference since its beginning, his chin sunk into a cupped hand, one bony, sharp knee drawn up so his shinbone pressed against the edge of the table, his large, pale eyes watching alertly at times, drooping deceptively with sleep at other times. He had not slept at all during the previous night except for a cat nap in a hard chair while waiting for Burden to be brought down. His clothing was rumpled, his fingernails grimy, and he smelled the stale sweat of his body. By two in the afternoon he had heard enough and dismissed the two medical staff members.
“Thank you, gentlemen, you’ve been most helpful,” Lark said pleasantly as the two doctors rose and looked angrily at the members of the Psychosemantics Division.
“Of course, sir, I trust that you will carefully weigh the opinions of a traditional, tested science against the bastard offspring of two minor systems of inquiry,” one of the older doctors said severely.
“I will, Doctor,” Lark said without a smile. The doctors nodded formally and respectfully to Lark and left.
After they had gone one of the more disrespectful of the psychosemanticists sniffed and asked calmly, “Did he call us bastards?”
The political analyst stifled a smile under the large, shaggy mustache and watched Lark out of the corners of his weak eyes.
“I think the doctor was most justified,” Lark said with a touch of severity in his voice. “Medicine is a respected and established science. You hooted at it, sneered, and deprecated it all morning with as much grace as a gang of hooligans. You fully deserve their contempt.”
“The fact of the matter is, sir,” the eldest psychosemanticist said carefully, “Burden is not medically insane. I found nothing inconsistent in his statements or in his reactions. Nor do I suggest that the consistency of his thought derives from an obsessive delusion. In the terms of Burden’s understanding of the words he uses, he is both consistent and sane. Burden will not be cured by narcotic suggestion or therapy. Essentially Burden is a problem in re-education. He must be retaught the meanings of words like a bright child who has, without instruction or guidance, constructed a world of words that sound the way he likes them to sound, mean what he likes to think they mean, and uses them the way he prefers to use them. After all, a man without words is a blank. We have to erase Burden’s understanding and begin again. Change his apprecia
tion, understanding, and use of words and you will change the patterns of his thoughts and the motives that move him. You will only then permanently erase the basic heresies that he maintains.” Apparently the other two members of the department agreed, for they both nodded sharply.
“And what shall we do with Burden’s nonverbal personality?” Lark asked gently.
“With all respect, sir,” the eldest continued firmly, “there is no such thing as a nonverbal personality. Even the most illiterate and brutish of men can find interior verbalizations of his motives. He may not be able to communicate those motives to you, but to himself they can be made quite clear if he is forced to think about them. He can verbalize far enough to feel that he doesn’t like this or does like that. Like is a word, sir. If he can express it to himself he is a verbal personality. The only nonverbal personalities are vegetative, which turn toward light or water by instinct that has nothing to do with choice. Where an element of choice is involved and one is selected over another, verbalization is indicated; for the very acceptance of one implies yes and the denial of the other implies no.”
“Then all we have to do is to unscramble Professor Burden’s vocabulary and he’ll cease to be a heretic?” Lark asked gently.
“Basically, that’s the problem,” the spokesman said, and his associates agreed.
“Thank you, gentlemen,” Lark said, bringing his knee down. The psychosemanticists rose, collected their books and papers, and left without speaking again or nodding. After the door had closed Lark surveyed the litter of paper, the cups of water, the ash trays filled with tobacco and bits of scrap. His eye drifted on to the figure of the political analyst. “Well, it seems that we’re alone, Doctor Wright.”
The older man’s head nodded gently, sadly. Lark slumped further in his chair, his eyes turned to the ceiling. “What do you think of our Professor Burden?” Lark asked.
“He is an unhappy man,” Doctor Wright said softly.
Lark turned to look at the political analyst. This made more sense than all the gabble of the doctors and psychosemanticists and investigators. “What is he unhappy about?”
“To live one way and to believe another always leads to unhappiness, restlessness, to ultimate failure. It’s as true of people as it is of nations.”
“Tell me more about that, Doctor Wright.”
“There’s nothing to tell, really. It is an old dichotomy found again and again in history. Do you know your twentieth-century history well, sir?”
“Fairly well.”
“There was a minor dictator of Italy in the early part of the century named B. Mussolinus or Mussolino—I forget the name. But this dictator had romantic dreams of ancient Rome. He sought to restore Italy to its Roman emotional climate. Well, quite brutally and crudely he badgered the poor country into disciplining and organizing itself. And on this industrially primitive and backward nation he forced a helmet, in the fervent belief that the helmet made the warrior. Unfortunately it did not. When he thought he had an Italy that was again Roman he went on his first tiny adventure. It was the subjugation of a barbarian prince—the Negus of Ethiopia.
“He won his little war and was so delighted with himself and his new Roman armies that when the second of the world wars broke out he put his Roman armies in the field—to discover that, after all, they weren’t Roman, that the tradition was dead, that Italy did not have the industrial resources, the technical equipment, or the spirit required for modern warfare.
“In the end they succumbed to the only real Romans of the century—the Americans. The Americans were the new Romans of the middle of the twentieth century and they were invincible.” Wright paused and shrugged his shoulders. “Well, you know what it led to. You know how much our State owes to that American-Roman tradition. World federation, our own State’s almost total Americanization, the bastardization of a thousand social cultures.” Doctor Wright stopped and smiled apologetically. “I’m afraid I’ve wandered from the subject, sir.”
“No, no,” Lark said, entertained and interested. “Go on, please. I’m willing to wait for the point.”
“Well, briefly, the analogy of the soft, diffused spirit of a country being artificially heated, hammered, and drawn into a semblance of a war shield to Burden’s spirit artificially being drawn into a semblance of conformity to the society in which he lives stands up. Burden may wish to conform. He may see all the reasons in the world for conforming, as the twentieth-century Italians may have wished to be a warrior folk, may have seen all the glittering, ego-warming reasons for being warriors. And yet both failed. They failed because the capacity to become what you wish to become is a great deal smaller than the capacity to become anything at all. Burden wishes to conform, the Italians wished to become warriors; but neither could successfully see that wish through. Burden could conform to all outward appearances as the Italians could appear to be warriors, but in great crisis both illusions fail.”
“Very interesting,” Lark said thoughtfully, “that remark about illusions. Burden can’t abide illusion. You notice the stress he placed on the paper flowers?”
“An unsuccessful illusion.”
“More than that. It was not the lack of success of the illusion that disturbed him. That I understand. That we all understand. A thing that does not faithfully fulfill its function bothers us. If paper flowers are intended to deceive and they do not, then we have every right to be angry. But Burden objects to the attempt at illusion. And he objects still further when he is partially deceived.”
“Deception is something we all undergo, in some form or another, in all our lives. Some men object, some ignore it. Burden is one who despises it,” Wright said.
“Then if Burden despises deception, he must equally despise manipulation, which simply means that he must despise the State.”
“Or would, if he understood it completely.”
“There you are wrong,” Lark said, shooting out a bony forefinger. “He would admire the State and approve of it if he understood it completely. I feel that Burden is a soft humanitarian. Notice in his interview with Richard his concern for Conger. Now, why should he be concerned about Conger if Conger had treated him so badly?”
“I can only suggest that he didn’t feel Conger treated him badly.”
“Guilty conscience?”
“Perhaps,” Doctor Wright plucked at his mustache thoughtfully, “or perhaps deep down he felt that some of Conger’s reproaches had some justification—in part, anyway. He saw the justice of his punishment and accepted it.”
“And could not bear the thought of Conger’s suffering for being correct, and so defended him to Richard?”
“Probably.”
“Which suggests that justice is more important to him than pity. An interesting thought. It means that Burden is not a humanitarian at all. I thought we were dealing with one of those soft, fuzzy-headed sentimentalists. But Burden is not a sentimentalist. An interesting and arresting thought, Doctor Wright.” Lark paused, placed his long slender fingers together in a churchly figure in front of his long nose. “What if—” Lark began, paused, and began again, “What if Burden were made to see that conformity was no more or less than the inevitable outcome of logic—would he conform then?”
“If he could be made to see that,” Wright said.
“Logically it is, you know,” Lark said, looking at Wright with innocent eyes.
Doctor Wright shrugged his shoulders.
“Don’t you believe that?” Lark asked gently.
“Don’t ask me about that. I’m a heretic,” Wright said with a smile.
“So am I,” Lark replied, smiling back. Doctor Wright looked at Lark sharply. “Yes,” Lark went on, “what is happening to Burden happened to me. When I was fourteen years old I was taken out of school and brought here. They worked on me three years, as an experiment. They won, but the expenditure of time and effort were enormous. Haven’t you ever read the Larsen-Kohn reports? Incidentally, that’s where I got my name—Lark—a simpl
e contraction of the two names of the men who were closer than fathers to me for three years. I was never out of the company of one or the other for all that time. Haven’t you ever read the accounts?”
“No,” Wright said, looking at Lark with eyes both shocked and curious. The reports were classified and not available to all who were interested. In essence, of course, everyone knew what the reports contained.
“Almost fourteen volumes this thick,” Lark gestured with his thumb and forefinger. “I’ve read them all so many times that if they were destroyed tomorrow I could sit down and write them out, word for word, footnote for footnote—all fourteen volumes. Intensely interesting, one’s own soul. Kohn died of a massive cerebral hemorrhage shortly after the conclusion of the experiment and before the last volume was completed. Larsen is an invalid. The doctors say I killed Kohn and crippled Larsen. But, of course, that was nonsense. I didn’t harm them at all. They did it to themselves trying to rid me of heresy, to understand the mechanism of heresy. I’ve tried to visit Larsen—he doesn’t live too far from here. But the doctors won’t let me. Larsen gets uncontrollable when my intentions are even hinted at. Somewhat like the poor dogs Pavlov worked on. Even the sight of the laboratory building made their salivary glands operate, caused them to howl and twitch and otherwise seem possessed. In my case, the curious thing was that the experimenter and not the experimental animal was affected. Poor Larsen. He and Kohn were the only family I knew. I loved them both. But I proved to be too much for them,” Lark concluded with a strange, half-lit smile that was at once turned toward Wright and toward some inner vision.
“Well,” Wright licked at his lower lip nervously, “if they were successful with you—I don’t see why you can’t hope to be successful with Burden.”
Lark looked at Doctor Wright for a long moment. He knew that Wright was a heretic. There were a few working for the Department in sections where a conformist would produce false results. While it is pleasant to have everyone believe as he should, it is fatal to depend upon them for all necessary opinions and decisions. A political analyst who was not a heretic was useless. He could produce analyses only to the taste and liking of the State. A government could not afford such flattery in critical matters; political analysis had to be clear, cold, absolute, without any taint of state loyalty or social conformity. There were other heretics in government of great importance and their opinions were highly valued. However, their heresy had been carefully charted. Wherever they worked, whatever they did, their superiors knew the full extent of their hostility. Wright, for instance, could not be relied upon for political analyses concerning the manipulation of intellectual thinking. He was bitterly opposed to it and denied that it could be done successfully. However, no one asked his opinion in this field or, if his opinion were asked, his conclusions were viewed in the light of his emotions. Lark knew Wright well enough to know that the man had a compulsion toward honesty in his work and could no more lie about his conclusions than he could voluntarily cease breathing. The one thing Lark knew about Wright and all other heretics employed in government was that they were required to show superficial social conformity outside of their work. It was required to keep heretics from enlisting others in their ranks, and to keep confusion from the minds of those who did conform and saw no reason for not conforming. It was a wise state that knew when to excuse heresy, and Lark felt that his was a wise one.
