One

by David Karp

  “Ummm,” Burden said, thoughtfully, “er, would you mind telling me what I can expect during the coming week?”

  “Oh, a rather intensified number of conversations of the sort we’ve been having, various tests, questions. You see, the problem is a double one—to acquaint you with your own heresies, and to disabuse you of them.”

  “You mean, I have heresies of which I’m not even aware?”

  Lark nodded.

  “But if I’m not aware of them—how can you know?”

  “Partially because some things are evident to us as heresies which are not evident to you, and partially by extension. We’ve made educated guesses at the extent of your heresies and if our guesses are correct—and by the way, we’re rarely very far wrong in our estimates—then your patterns of thinking, your system of values, your entire conceptual processes are heretical and must be changed.”

  “That’s a tall order,” Burden said. “Do you really think it can be done in a week?”

  “You’re a reasonable, logical, educated man, Professor Burden. I think that we can demonstrate the validity of our thinking to you so conclusively that you will give up your heresies.”

  “Let’s hope so, Mr. Lark,” Burden said with a smile.

  “I hope you’re not going to be hostile, Professor,” Lark said coldly.

  “No, of course not,” Burden replied, suddenly unsettled by the tone of Lark’s voice, “I want to help.”

  “Good,” Lark said, turning to open the door, “I’ll see you in the morning, then. Good day, Professor.”

  “Fine, Mr. Lark. In the morning,” Burden said, as the door closed behind the inquisitor. Burden sat back against the couch, vaguely troubled. The cold tone of Lark’s voice was quite out of keeping with the young man’s manner. It disturbed him somewhat, impressed him with the fact that Mr. Lark did have a temper after all. He shouldn’t have been quite so flippant. It wasn’t fair to Lark. He did want to be rid of these heresies if they were as important as Lark felt they were. He did want to justify Lark’s faith in him, see some good come from all the work the young man was putting into his case. After all, he respected Lark and could even come to like him if Lark would unbend. You had to respect a man with so much basic integrity. No, he thought, he would co-operate actively, he wouldn’t make the job any more difficult for Lark than it was already. Perhaps he was wrong—perhaps subconsciously he was a danger to the State. After all, he was a teacher, he had a duty both to the State and to his students. Had he ever flavored his teachings with heresy? Was he breeding heresy in the work he did? The State deserved loyalty. Especially such a state as the one that presided over their society. It was a small nation, but it had grown from the enormous cultural heritage of the English-speaking world.

  He knew something of early history. He knew about the psychotic tensions of the twentieth-century world, the terrors, the brutalities, the incredible bestiality recorded in the history books. It had been a sick, tortured, frenetic world in which life became nearly intolerable. It had to be made over in a new image. The benevolent State was the new way.

  Lark was right. Terror had failed and reason was being tried, reason and science. People, the eternal problem, were also the answer. Hence the State that concerned itself totally and exclusively with its citizens, their thoughts, their attitudes, their habits, the conscious remolding of their characters to more social, more humane, more peaceful patterns. He had agreed with those principles long ago. His father, too, had agreed. All thinking men had decided that man must be master of his fate, captain of his soul. The mercantile philosophy, the concept of their cultural progenitors, had failed; the myth of self-gratification had failed; the great religions had failed; terror had failed; war had failed; technology had failed. Character was the only thing left—the deliberate, systematic, tortuous method of breeding humans of character, believing in one another and in their systems of government. It had been under way just thirty years. Its first generation of seedlings were now coming into maturity and the country was showing its effects. For one thing, crime had fallen away to virtually zero figures. The only criminals actively operating were adults in their forties and fifties. Juvenile delinquency was nonexistent. Burden knew that insane asylums were dwindling in number, that alcoholic wards handled no adults under thirty.

  There was a great deal more family participation in self-entertainment. Reading of books and magazines had zoomed. Automobile registration had fallen enormously. Restlessness and wanderlust had decreased. People preferred to stay near home. The various churches had been delighted at the renewal of family life, the decrease in crime, the easing of emotional tensions, but they were disturbed by the empty places in the houses of worship. The Church of State was taking stronger and stronger hold. It was a strange religion. It could not be called wicked or immoral. It contained so many of the precepts of the Judaeo-Christian ethic that religious leaders were at a loss to criticize it and yet they wondered and puzzled and sought to understand why they were losing their worshipers. They lost them by the hundreds, by the thousands, by the tens of thousands. The Church of State was a church without ritual, without ceremony, without a mystique. It was moral, upright, simple, and stressed the fellowship of mankind. It had no ordained members. Any member of the congregation might get up and lead the others. Members lost their identity once they joined. Their contributions to the church were made directly from a small, uniform deduction from their salary. No one could give more even if he so desired and the application for the deduction was voluntary. It could be withdrawn at any time without comment or censure. The church had no synod, no over-all ecclesiastical direction. A State Church could be built by the government upon application of fifty adult citizens partially from funds contributed by the fifty and from the general fund of the church which was administered by two paid church employees, an accountant and his secretary. A government employee supervised the keeping of records and regularly examined the books but he was the sole official connection with the church. There was no other.

  Burden had never thought deeply about the society in which he lived. It seemed to work well, but he didn’t have the basis of comparison that older people seemed to have. Most of the older people, when you spoke to them privately, agreed that this society was better, but that it was puzzling, one they did not fully understand, and so did not quite trust. There were so many good things in it that one couldn’t complain, and yet the vague feeling persisted that the society had a catch in it, a joker that had not yet been shown. Burden had pursued this point a few times in the hopes of describing it in his reports. But the older people seemed unwilling or incapable of pinning down their thoughts. One professor had complained that the society had “no zest, no verve, no drive, no sense of excitement.” Burden thought it a rather childish comment of an old man. Only one colleague, a professor in the Physics Department, had ever made a valid point about the old days. “Nowadays,” he had said, “you get the feeling that no one really gives a damn about physical sciences. Nuclear physics used to be the most important thing in the world. But now, what if I do come up with a process for extracting maximum energy from a lump of coal? All you can use it for is to drive a ship to the stars. But who the hell wants to go? People don’t even want to stir out of their houses at night—how in God’s name can you expect them to want to reach the stars?”

  At least that much was true. There seemed to be a lack of interest in things that had once absorbed mankind. The pre­occupation with the outer world had fallen off. There was more looking inward. Psychologists, social scientists, and others who studied man were delighted. Their work was considered important and was subsidized by an interested government.

  The integrity that the government sought to instill in its citizens was seeping into business. A buyer’s market—a very moral, very sober buyer’s market—existed, in which appeals to vanity or to hedonism were considered immoral, wicked, and heretical. But there appeared no undue amount of unemployment. Food consumption was high, h
ome construction booming. The population growth, surprising in its steadily rising curve, provided a half dozen industries with continuous work. Labor-saving devices for the home were always in demand and there was a steady pressure for the development of automatic machinery to cut down the length of the working day. People wanted to be home more often for longer periods of time and marriage figures topped their previous highs with every counting. Divorce, on the other hand, steadily decreased.

  Burden had heard all of these things. They constituted, he knew, a picture of the society in which he lived. But he had grown up in that society, and he was not old enough to make comparisons, to know whether it was a good society or not. Strange, he thought, how we need rulers by which to measure our own happiness. Stranger yet not to know whether a society was good or not unless one had lived in an earlier, different society. The young people, of course, completely accepted their society. To them it was approaching the state of perfection. That much he got from talking with all of them. They were quite free in their ideas; free and identical. Differences of opinion did not seem to exist for them, except at home. Burden recollected that quite a few had trouble at home—particularly where there was a disproportionate difference in age between themselves and their parents—late parenthood or cases of children born of second marriages. The beginning of the new society had caught Burden in midstride, he decided. He was just twelve years old, not a child, not an adult. His father had been in favor of the new society—his brother Ralph dubious. To Burden it had always seemed a good society, a vital one. Then where had his heresies come from? Not from his parents, not from his observations. From his colleagues? From Emma? From Emma’s parents? Burden rested against the couch pondering the question that he knew Lark would ask him. Lark would want to know. Lark, in fact, was entitled to know. He himself did not know the answer. It would require thought—as much as he could do on his own without Lark’s astute guesses, although he knew that Lark would help him. The discovery of one’s own soul was a fascinating experience, Burden decided. He found himself looking forward to the week ahead with something that resembled excitement.

  13

  Because he was in need of fresh air, Lark left the building for the walk to the conference room. The air was cold and the brilliant sparkle of the Sunday afternoon was disappearing very quickly. It gave him an unhappy sense of confinement to walk between the buildings, their sheer walls rising on all sides of him, broken only by the cross bridges of the intrabuilding shuttles. He wished that the designers had not chosen such a pattern but something a little more open, perhaps a group of low buildings scattered over all the acreage available to the Department. The construction of the buildings suggested that they existed for the mechanical efficiency of the Department and not for the personal efficiency of the staff. Perhaps he ought to do an investigative monograph on the implicit heresy of the architects who designed the buildings. The question, of course, was whether the buildings existed for the sake of the workers who were to occupy them or for the convenience of the functions they were to perform. Lark smiled and stowed the thoughts away in his mind for later inspection. Now his chief problem was Burden.

  It was moving along well. Burden had effected a transference. The psychiatric division had predicted the transference, had suggested means by which it could be established quickly. They had been right. Burden liked him, respected him, perhaps even needed him. Lark thought that perhaps they might go into Burden’s sexual fantasies at the next session in which Burden would be drugged.

  When Lark arrived at the conference room he found Conger sitting at the long table, fussing, as usual, with his short-stemmed pipe; Julian Richard was drawing pointless doodles on a pad of paper; Doctor Emmerich was chatting with his assistant, a youngish man with a sturdy, earnest face whom Lark did not know. Doctor Wright, plucking absent-mindedly at his mustache, was seated in a discreet, distant corner of the table apart from the others. He had been called to the conference because Lark felt the political analyst was a stimulant to the discussion.

  The psychiatric division had hinted broadly that it would like to place a representative on the conference board but Lark had avoided decision by suggesting a separate psychiatric consultation. There was no point in overloading the conference board on Burden. Lark preferred small groups. They worked better. He had witnessed the painful effects of mass conferences in earlier years. Where departmental and divisional convictions ran high, a synthesis in open conference often exhausted more time than it was worth. Perhaps one day he would be reproached or perhaps even examined for the arrogation of authority. For the moment, he was careful to acknowledge the assistance of each of the divisions of the Department and to take no steps without consulting the necessary divisions. But the over-all plan was still in his own hands, where he intended it should remain.

  “Well, gentlemen, I think we can begin,” Lark said, taking his seat at the head of the table.

  “Sir,” Doctor Emmerich, the elderly doctor who had first examined Burden, spoke up, “do you contemplate questioning under narcotics again?”

  “Yes, Doctor,” Lark said, pulling Burden’s folder toward him, “every night for the next two weeks or until I’m satisfied there is no point in it.”

  “I should like to point out that the drug is rather dangerous, in that continuous administration over a period of two weeks may permanently damage the heart and other organs,” Doctor Emmerich said.

  “I’m not interested in Professor Burden’s health, Doctor,” Lark said crisply. “If I fail, he’s lost. If I succeed I don’t imagine he would reproach us for a weakened heart. I think the psychiatric division’s recommendation that this method is the quickest is a sound one. I intend to continue with it. Yes, Frank?”

  “I was thinking,” Conger said mildly, “couldn’t we possibly have these injections made at some other time than three or four o’clock in the morning?”

  Lark smiled mechanically. “Sorry to break up your sleep, Frank, but it’s part of the pattern. Burden’s going to catch on to those injections. Perhaps this morning, perhaps the next morning. That’s what we want. I don’t have three years in which to amiably coax Professor Burden out of his heresies. I have exactly twelve days left now, and every one of them has to count.”

  “But aren’t you afraid that if Burden understands that he’s being systematically drugged and questioned he will freeze up?” Richard asked, leaning forward on the table.

  “What is needed here is a thread of terror—a bright, red thread of terror. Just enough to let Professor Burden know that we are not merely holding conversational hands with him.”

  “Then you want to frighten him?” Conger asked, sucking at a flame held over his pipe bowl.

  “Fear is necessary, I’m afraid. We want to speed up Professor Burden’s reclamation. We can conceal the reason for the injection. Make up anything that seems plausible to you, Doctor.” Emmerich nodded. “But he is bound to wonder about the injection,” Lark went on smoothly, “and we’ll hold off telling him.”

  “That’s the shocker,” Conger said, finally satisfied with the light in his pipe.

  “Yes, that’s the shocker. It might drive Professor Burden forward. It might retard him. If it deeply frightens him I’ll discontinue for a night and see if we can’t persuade him it’s for his own good—which, of course, it is,” Lark said blandly. “The emotional pattern is fear, recovery from fear, increased faith in me, suspicion, doubt, confusion, and fear again.”

  “And once he’s terrified?” Conger asked, puffing placidly.

  “He turns to me. Then we begin to break down his inner resistance. He wants to believe because intellectually we’ve shown him how wrong he’s been.”

  “But what if he reacts to fear with courage?” Doctor Wright asked. The others turned to look at him.

  “I always trust you to come up with the difficult question,” Lark said, favoring Wright with a smile. “Well, let’s presume he becomes brave and resists. Whom will he resist? Me? Certainly
not. I’m the one who is working so hard for his own good. I am his friend. I am the one person whom he knows well. I am a quantity he understands. The Department, on the other hand, is a vague, threatening entity which he does not understand. He has had some painful, minor experiences with it. If he resists he must have some basis on which to rest his resistance. What is it he objects to? To being held? But he is being held for heresy. He has admitted heresy—or will, when we have come up to that point. We are effecting a cure. He wants it now—the cure, I mean. He wants it in a slightly intellectual, vaguely social way. It is not imperative to him that he conform. He’d like to, if only to please me, but if it becomes inconvenient for him to conform he won’t. Not at this stage. The strength of terror is that it is implied, never stated. A man can face anything if he knows how terrible it will be, or imagines that he does. You can threaten him with beatings, with torture, with death. Well, he says, they can beat me senseless, they can torture me until I faint, and I can die only once. I’ll trust the thresholds of pain and death to save me from things I can’t bear. But what if he has no knowledge of what terror we are saving for him? What if the terror is never named? What if the terror is never limited? He has so many things to be frightened of—all the things that are buried deep within him. He supplies himself with his own whips, racks, chains, acids, fires, and hells. He’ll do a more awful job on himself than we could ever hope to do. And too, of course, you know the ordinances against physical punishment.”

  “You don’t call this punishment,” Doctor Wright said dryly, watching Lark through the thick lenses of his glasses.

  “Punishment as a social concept no longer exists,” Lark said patiently. “I would not dream of harming Professor Burden. I seek only to rid him of his heresies. If I enlist his help in doing so, am I punishing him? You see what I mean, don’t you, Doctor?”