Collected Fiction
Page 568
“Diversion, perhaps—?”
“I don’t think it’s possible. Norman’s problem is an abstraction. And if we answered it—he would go insane.”
“I don’t know what my problem is,” Norman said desperately. “I don’t have any. I’m young, healthy, doing work I like, I’m engaged—” The psychologist scratched his jaw. “If we knew what your problem is, we could do something about it,” he said. “The most suggestive point here—” He rustled through the papers before him. “Let’s see. Do I seem real to you now?”
“Very,” Norman said.
“But there are times—The syndrome’s familiar. Sometimes you doubt reality. Most people have that feeling occasionally.” He leaned back and made thoughtful noises. Through the transparent wall the Fifth Monument was visible, pulsating with soft beats of light. It was very quiet here.
“You mean you don’t know what’s wrong with me,” Norman said.
“I don’t know yet. But I will. First we must find out what your problem is.”
“Flow long will that take? Ten years?”
“I had a problem myself once,” the psychologist said. “At the time I didn’t know what it was. I’ve found out since. I was heading for megalomania ; I wanted to change people. So I took up this work. I turned my energy into a useful channel. That solved my problem for me. It’s the right way for you, once we get at what’s bothering you.”
“All I want is to get rid of these hallucinations,” Norman said.
“Auditory, visual, and olfactory—mostly. And without external basis in fact. They’re not illusions, they’re hallucinations. I wish you could give me more details about them.”
“I can’t.” Norman seemed to shrink. “It’s like being dropped into boiling metal. It’s simply indescribable. An impression of noise, lights—it comes and goes in a flash. But it’s a flash of hell.”
“Tomorrow we’ll try narcosynihe sis again. I want to correlate my ideas in the meantime. It’s just possible—”
Norman stepped into a levitating current and was borne upward. At the level of the Fifth Monument’s upper balcony he stepped off. There were a few people here, not many, and they were busy with their own affairs—love-making and sight-seeing. Norman rested his arms on the rail and stared down. He had come up here because of a vague, unlikely hope that it would be quieter on the high balcony far above the city.
It was quiet, but no more so than the city had been. The rolling ways curved and slid smoothly beneath him. They were silent. Above him the Barrier was a gray, silent dome. He thought that gigantic claps of thunder were pounding at the Barrier from outside, that the impregnable hemisphere was beginning to crack, to buckle—to admit chaos in a roaring flood.
He gripped the cool plastic rad hard. Its solidity wasn’t reassuring In a moment the Barrier would split wide open—
There was no relief on the Monument. He glanced behind him at the base of the softly shining globe, with its rippling patterns of light, but that looked ready to shatter too. He stumbled as he jumped back into the drop-current. In fact, he missed it entirely. There was a heart-stopping instant when he was in free fall; then a safety-paragravity locked tight on his body and slid him easily into the current. He fell slowly.
But he had a new thought now. Suicide.
There were two questions involved. Did he want to commit suicide? And would suicide be possible? He studied the second point.
Without noticing, automatically he stepped on a moving way and dropped into one of the cushioned seats. No one died of violence in the city. No one ever had, as far as he knew. But had people tried to kill themselves?
It was a new, strange concept. There were so many safeties. No danger had been overlooked. There were no accidents.
The road curved. Forty feet away, across a lawn and a low wall, was the Barrier. Norman stood up and walked toward it. He was conscious of both attraction and repulsion.
Beyond the Barrier—
He stopped. There it was, directly before him, a smooth, gray substance without any mark or pattern. It wasn’t matter. It was something the builders had made, in the old days.
What was it like outside? Six hundred years had passed since the Barrier was created. In that time, the rest of the world could have changed considerably. An odd idea struck him: suppose the planet had been destroyed? Suppose a chain reaction had finally volatilized it? Would the city have been affected? Or was the city, within that fantastic barrier, not merely shielded but actually shifted into another plane of existence?
He struck his fist hard against the grayness; it was like striking rubber. Without warning the terror engulfed him. He could not hear himself screaming . . .
Afterward, he wondered how an eternity could be compressed into one instant. His thoughts swung back to suicide.
“Suicide?” Fleming said.
Nehral’s mind was troubled. “Ecology fails,” he remarked. “I suppose the trouble is that the city’s a closed unit. We’re doing artificially what was a natural law six hundred years ago. But nature didn’t play favorites, as we’re doing. And nature used variables. Mutations, I mean. There weren’t any rules about introducing new pieces into the game—in fact, there weren’t any rules about not introducing new rules. But here in the city we’ve got to stick by the original rules and the original pieces. If Bill Norman kills himself, I don’t know what may happen.”
“To us?”
“To us, and, through us, to the citizens. Norman’s psychologist can’t help him; lie’s a citizen, too. He doesn’t know—”
“What was his problem, by the way? The psychologist’s, I mean. He told Norman he’d solved it by taking up psychology.”
“Sadism. We took care of that easily enough. We aroused his interest in the study of psychology. His mental index was so high we couldn’t give him surgery; he needed a subtler intellectual release. But he’s thoroughly social and well-balanced now. The practice of psychology is the sublimation he needed, and he’s very competent. However, he’ll never get at the root of Norman’s trouble. Ecology fails,” he repeated. “The relationship between an organism and its environment—irreconcilable, in this case. Hallucinations! Norman doesn’t have hallucinations. Or even illusions. He simply has rational periods—luckily brief.”
“It’s an abnormal ecology anyway.”
“It had to be. The city is uninhabitable.”
The city screamed!
It was a microcosm, and it had to battle unimaginable stresses to maintain its efficiency. It was an outboard motor on a lifeboat. The storm rage. The motor strained, shrilled, sparked—screamed. The environment was so completely artificial that no normal technology could have kept the balance.
Six hundred years ago the builders had studied and discarded plan after plan. The maximum diameter of a Barrier was five miles. The vulnerability increased according to the square of the diameter. And invulnerability was the main factor.
The city had to be built and maintained as a self-sufficient unit within an impossibly small radius.
Consider the problems. Self-sufficient. There were no pipe lines to outside. A civilization had to exist for an indefinite period in its own waste products. Steamships, spaceships, are not parallels. They have to make port and take in fresh supplies.
This lifeboat would be at sea for much longer than six hundred years. And the citizens—the survivors—must be kept not only alive, but healthy physically and mentally.
The smaller the area, the higher the concentration. The builders could make the necessary machines. They knew how to do that. But such machines had never been constructed before on the planet. Not in such concentration!
Civilization is an artificial environment. With the machines that were necessary, the city became so artificial that nobody could live in it. The builders got their efficiency; they made the city so that it could exist indefinitely, supplying all the air, water, food and power required. The machines took care of that.
But such machines!
Anyone living in the city would have developed a neurosis in two minutes, a psychosis in ten, and would have lived a little while longer than that. Thus the builders had an efficient city, but nobody could use it.
There was one answer.
Hypnosis.
Everyone in the city was under hypnosis. It was selective telepathic hypnosis, with the so-called Monuments—powerful hypnopedic machines—as the control devices. The survivors in the lifeboat didn’t know there was a storm. They saw only placid water on which the boat drifted smoothly.
The city screamed to deaf ears. No one had heard it for six hundred years. No one had felt the radiation or seen the blinding, shocking light that flashed through the city. The citizens could not, and the Controllers could not either, because they were blind and deaf and dumb, and lacking in certain other senses. They had their telepathy, their ESP, which enabled them to accomplish their task of steering the lifeboat. As for the citizens, their job was to survive.
No one had heard the city screaming for six hundred years—except Bill Norman.
“He has an inquiring mind,” Nehral said dryly. “Too inquiring. His problem’s an abstraction, as I’ve mentioned, and if he gets the right answer it’ll kill him. If he doesn’t, he’ll go insane. In either case, we’ll suffer, because we’re not conditioned to failure. The main hypnotic maxim implanted in our minds is that every citizen must survive. All right. You’ve got the facts now, Fleming. Does anything suggest itself?”
“I don’t have all the facts. What’s Norman’s problem?”
“He comes of dangerous stock,” Nehral answered indirectly. “Theologians and mathematicians. His mind is . . . a little too rational. As for his problem—well, Pilate asked the same question three thousand years ago, and I don’t recall his ever getting an answer. It’s a question that’s lain behind every bit of research since research first started.
But the answer has never been fatal till now. Norman’s question is simply this—“What is truth?”
There was a pause. Nehra! went on.
“He hasn’t expressed it even to himself, he doesn’t know he’s asking that question. But we know; we have entree to his mind. That’s the question that he’s finding insoluble, and the problem that’s bringing him gradually out of control, out of his hypnosis. So far there’ve been only flashes of realization. Split-second rational periods. Those are bad enough, for him. He’s heard and seen the city as it is—”
Another pause. Fleming’s thoughts stilled. Nehral said:
“It’s the only problem we can’t solve by hypnotic suggestion. We’ve tried. But it’s useless. Norman’s that remarkably rare person someone who is looking for the truth.” Fleming said slowly, “He’s looking for the truth. But—does he have—to find it?”
His thoughts raced into Nehral’s brain, flint against steel, and struck fire there.
Three weeks later the psychologist pronounced Norman cured and he instantly married Mia. They went up to the Fifth Monument and held hands.
“As long as you understand—” Norman said.
“I’ll go with you,” she told him. “Anywhere.”
“Well, it won’t be tomorrow. I was going at it the wrong way. Imagine trying to tunnel out through the Barrier! No. I’ll have to fight fire with tire. The Barrier’s the result of natural physical laws. There’s no secret about how it was created. But how to destroy it—that’s another thing entirely.”
“They say it can’t be destroyed Some day it’ll disappear, Bill.”
“When? I’m not going to wait for that. It may take me years, because I’ll have to learn how to use my weapons: Years of study and practice and research. But I’ve got a purpose.”
“You can’t become an expert nuclear physicist overnight.”
He laughed and put his arm around her shoulders. “I don’t expect to. First things come first. First I’ll have to learn to be a good physicist. Ehrlich and Pasteur and Curie—they had a drive, a motivation. So have I, now. I know what I want. I want out.”
“Bill, if you should fail—”
“I expect to, at first. But in the end I won’t fail. I know what I want. Out!”
She moved closer to him, and they were silent, looking down at the quiet, familiar friendliness of the city. I can stand it for a while, Norman thought. Especially with Mia. Now that, the psychologist’s got rid of my trouble, I can settle dozen to work.
Above them the rippling, soft light beat out from the great globe atop the Monument.
“Mia—”
“Yes?”
“I know what I want now.”
“But he doesn’t know,” Fleming said.
“That’s all right,” Nehral said cheerfully. “He never really knew what his problem was. You found the answer. Not the one he wanted, but the best one. Displacement, diversion, sublimation—the name doesn’t matter. It was the same treatment, basically, as turning sadistic tendencies into channels of beneficial surgery. We’ve given Norman his compromise. He still doesn’t know what he’s looking for, but he’s been hypnotized into believing that he can find it outside the city. Put food on top of a wall, out of reach of a starving man, and you’ll get a neurosis. But if you give the man materials for building a ladder, his energy will be deflected into a productive channel. Norman will spend all his life in research, and probably make some valuable discoveries. He’s sane again. He’s under the preventive hypnosis. And he’ll die thinking there’s a way out.”
“Through the Barrier? There isn’t.”
“Of course there isn’t. But Norman could accept the hypnotic suggestion that there was a way, if only he could find it. We’ve given him the materials to build his ladder. He’ll fail and fail, but he’ll never really get discouraged. He’s looking for truth. We’ve told him he can find truth outside the Barrier, and that he can find a way out. He’s happy now. He’s stopped rocking the lifeboat.”
“Truth . . .” Fleming said, and then, “Nehral—I’ve been wondering.”
“What?”
“Is there a Barrier?”
Nehral said, “But the city’s survived! Nothing from outside has ever come through the Barrier—”
“Suppose there isn’t a Barrier,” Fleming said. “How would the city look from outside? Like a . . . a furnace, perhaps. It’s uninhabitable. We can’t conceive of the real city, any more than the hypnotized citizens can. Would you walk into a furnace? Nehral, perhaps the city’s its own Barrier.”
“But we sense the Barrier. The citizens see the Barrier—”
“Do they? Do—we? Or is that part of the hypnosis too, a part we don’t know about? Nehral—I don’t know. There may be a Barrier, and it may disappear when its half-time is run. But suppose we just think there’s a Barrier?”
“But—” Nehral said, and stopped. “That would mean—Norman might find a way out!”
“I wonder if that was what the builders planned?” Fleming said.
THE END.
LANDS OF THE EARTHQUAKE
William Boyce, in whose veins flows the blood of crusaders, goes on the quest of a lost memory and a mysterious woman in an odd clime where cities move and time stands motionless!
CHAPTER I
The Crystalline Window
WILLIAM BOYCE lost a year out of his life when he was thirty. One August morning he was walking south of the library on Fifth Avenue, past the stone lions that guard the broad steps, and then suddenly he was in a hospital bed in Bellevue, one year later. A patrolman had found him lying unconscious on one of Central Park’s broad lawns. Boyce came out of Bellevue into Hell.
Amnesia was nothing new. Psychiatrists told Boyce that under treatment his memory would probably return. In the meantime, it would be best to slip back into his familiar grooves of life and pick up where he had so abruptly left off a
year ago.
It sounded easy. Boyce tried it. But he had lost all interest in his classes at the university. He was haunted. He developed an obsession. He knew that he had to find out what had happened to the lost year or he could not go on.
Occasionally fleeting flashes of memory would come to him—a man’s swarthy, moustached face, a quiet voice he seemed to know intimately, speaking sometimes in a language that was familiar and yet strange.
Once, in Classics, Boyce heard that tongue spoken—it was a reading from a medieval manuscript in old French, the French of six hundred years ago. But he understood it like his native tongue. That was very strange, he thought . . .
Then there was a memory of dark figures, robed, moving with an eery litheness that made Boyce shake suddenly all over with sheer terror. That memory always snapped shut almost instantly, as if his mind would allow him only a glimpse. At such times he wondered whether the truth about his lost year might not drive him insane with sheer panic.
But something still drew him resistlessly to that lost time. He thought that it was linked somehow with the crystal he had found in his pocket upon his release from Bellevue. It was not a large crystal, but it was cut in a way he had never seen before. Some of its facets were concave, others were convex. It was perfectly transparent. And he felt—uncomfortable—when he did not have it in his pocket. He could not have said why.
Time passed—a year, full of restlessness and uncertainty. More and more of his days he spent wandering through the city, searching and searching, with no knowledge of what he sought. He was beginning to drink—too much, and more than too much.
The district near the East River, far south of mid-town, seemed to have the deepest attraction for him. Sometimes, hazy with whiskey, he would roam the silent streets, his hand in his pocket clenched on the crystal that seemed cold against his palm with a chill of its own, never taking warmth from his touch. Louder and louder, more and more insistently, that silent voice from his lost year was calling him.