“Georgina Curtis,” the colonel said slowly. “Name your family line! What code number does your father carry? Where’s your family center meeting? Quick, girl, answer me!”
She was, after all, only a Slag girl. Her airs and graces had been copies of the real thing, amazingly accurate copies, but without foundation. La Boucherie had never expected the farce to go this far. He had not briefed her on the ritual questions any girl of good family could answer without even thinking. Her disguise had been meant to deceive Avish, who wanted to be deceived. It would not stand up to any closer scrutiny.
“I—I can’t.”
It was amazing how the likeness to the debutante dropped from her. The demure arrogance, the delicate graces vanished, and she was a Slag girl dressed up in borrowed finery, staring with scared muteness around the room.
“I thought so.” The colonel laughed harshly. “Leader, this woman’s an impostor. One of our men recognized her photograph at Headquarters. She was questioned once in the Slag about a holdup. I’ll just take her along.”
He reached for her arm—and the sough of Haver’s smash-gun flame roared between them. An inch to the right and the colonel’s hand would have vanished from his wrist.
Mart Havers laughed in sudden reckless excitement. He swung his two guns authoritatively.
“All right—back up!” he said, his voice strange in his own ears because of that joyful recklessness that seemed to close his throat.
He didn’t have time to wonder about it. He had never known quite this stimulation in his other conflicts, this intoxicating happiness that was like feeling an intolerable burden rolled from his shoulders. He was almost disappointed at the ease with which he carried the venture off. For every other man in the room was backing carefully in obedience to the swinging guns. They all knew what a smash-ray can do. They respected those blunt, flattened muzzles.
“Georgina, get behind me,” Havers said. “You by the door—inside here. Quick!”
Stepping carefully, he edged his way around the wall, backing toward the door, hearing Georgina’s rustling skirts and the patter of her feet as she moved behind the shelter of his broad cloaked shoulders. He heard the door creak as she opened it.
He didn’t dare look around, but for one instant of inexplicable disappointment he thought, “I’m going to make it! They aren’t even going to fight!”
Then something crashed against the back of his head that was like lightning made tangible, and time slowed up to a series of infinite seconds, a chain of them, one dropping leisurely from the next.
He had time to be aware of everything that happened. He saw the open mouths of the guards, their stares, the look of satisfaction on the colonel’s face. Havers felt his own-muscles go limp, the heavy guns dropping from his hands and taking an immeasurable time to strike the floor. He felt his knees buckle and saw the floor tilt up in his face, but slowly, slowly.
Inside his head, thoughts moved in lightning contrast to the slowed and dimming world. “Georgina’s getting away,” he thought, because he could hear her scurrying feet and no scream to announce her capture. Then he thought, “She’ll never make it—La Boucherie’s going to hate this.” And just before the lights went out entirely, he knew a great deal more about himself, in one flash, than he had known when the blow struck his skull.
This was what he had wanted, unconsciously, all along. The explicit death-wish that had haunted him for years now and had come so near the surface on his way here. “La Boucherie will hate this!” That was the most important thing in the world, revenge on the man who had made his life what it was. An intolerable life, pointless, a failure from start to finish, hatred grinding him from task to fruitless task and hating him the more for his inevitable failures, because under hatred he was incapable of success. The death-wish had a double source—revenge and escape. Personal escape into oblivion, if need be.
That was the reason for his exultant joy in this one fight of all the fights in his life, and the reason for his disappointment when he thought he had succeeded. It was the reason, he knew suddenly, why he had come to Georgina’s defense even though he had no more emotional ties there. Until this last vanishing moment he had not even thought that if she were exposed, then he as her brother would be exposed too. It had been sheer reaction against La Boucherie that had brought the guns to his hands.
He could not have known that twenty-five years ago his father had performed the same pattern of behavior, pulling smash-guns from beneath the web-shielded cloak and going down before the onslaught of the Leaders and their men.
IN THAT first combat, Mart Havers had entered into his exile in La Boucherie’s skilled but blundering hands.
In this second combat, following the pattern to its end, Mart Havers stepped out of exile and into his heritage again, though he could not have guessed it as the twenty-five-year cycle closed and the lights went out and the floor came up to receive his collapsing body . . .
This was oblivion. It was what he must have longed for over a period of many increasing years, this vast, relaxing grayness. This pleasant, endless, empty dream.
But then the lights began—no, sounds, words, questions that echoed and reechoed until his resting brain stirred into reluctant answer. But only a part of it. The censor slept on in his mind, but the paths where knowledge had imprinted itself in his brain lay open and answering to the skillful questions that came out of the dark.
“Who is Georgina Curtis?”
He told them. Why not? Nothing was important now. He was not even thinking.
“When did you first meet her?”
He told them that, too. Questions and answer went on and on, while the clouds of his slumber began to stir and seethe with a slow turmoil.
“Who? La Boucherie? Kennard La Boucherie?”
“Yes. Yes.”
“When did you first meet Kennard La Boucherie?”
And some miles away across town La Boucherie was packing in angry haste, shooting questions at the frightened Georgina as he worked. It was his own fault, this catastrophe. He was fair enough to know it. He had let anger override his judgment and sent Havers off on a job as dangerous to La Boucherie and the Freemen organization as it was to Havers himself, because in his brain Havers carried, willy nilly, the safety of them all.
Twenty-five years before as John Haversham had died on the hospital steps he had ignited a time-fuse with the blast of his smash-guns which set off this explosion a quarter of a century later. La Boucherie knew it. Too late, he recognized in his own mind the slow growth of the hatred which had culminated in his sending Havers to his own doom and the doom of them all.
“He did it for me!” Georgina was sobbing. “I didn’t realize—I never knew he cared, so much. It was all my fault. I know it was!” “Shut up,” La Boucherie said. “Hand me that box. Quick, girl!”
“What do you think they’re doing to him now?”
Georgina blindly offered him the wrong’, item, and La Boucherie slapped it out of her hand with a growl. His nerves were cushioned under protective layers of fat, but this emergency had penetrated deep and made them vibrate to every petty annoyance.
“He’ll be right in the middle of the Purge, spilling everything he knows,” La Boucherie told her savagely. “Names and dates and places. Yours, mine. Everything. Guards may be on their way here now. If you can’t help, get out of my way.”
He lumbered across the room to ring for a porter.
“I think I’ve got about half an hour,” he said. “Stop that crying and pull yourself together. Even a porter might be suspicious today, if he saw you. Hurry, now. We’ve got to get out of here fast.”
They made it with fifteen minutes to spare.
CHAPTER VIII
The Purge
THE Purge was always efficient, but the psychologists who administered it to Mart Havers took time to marvel to one another at its super-efficiency in this one case. Fascinating things always emerged under narcosynthesis, from every criminal mind that was
treated, but usually the things followed an accepted pattern. With Mart Havers there were startling developments.
It was hard to believe. Kennard La Boucherie had never been suspected of subversiveness, and the Freemen were thought a dead issue long ago. But the trail led straight from the comparatively-innocent matter of Georgina, questioned as a witness to a Slag robbery, to La Boucherie and the Freemen and the vast underground organization that was moving so carefully toward success after the crippling pogrom of twenty-five years past.
They had to believe Havers. No one lies under narcosynthesis. There would be checks, of course, careful investigations. Meanwhile the information poured out, under the skilled questioning of the phychologists. They learned of La Boucherie’s longterm plans, and the paths they were so deviously followingly toward a point still years away when the Freemen could strike in safe hope of victory. They learned of the Aleutian hideout and of many others.
But they learned only what Mart Havers knew. La Boucherie had not by any means told him everything.
When everything that questions could elicit had emerged at last, it was time to examine the source from which they had come—Mart Havers himself, the individual organism. And what they found surprised them almost as much as the earlier material about the Freemen.
For clearly this was a potential Leader. Mart Havers had known, vaguely the story of his kidnaping and his background. But the investigators needed no such reminder to tell them what potential dynamite they had here in this remarkable brain. Leader material was not so plentiful they could afford to waste it.
With interest and enthusiasm they went to work on Mart Havers . . .
The next four months were a blank in Mart Havers’ memory.
The Cromwellian technicians were skillful. Even though certain lines of research were forbidden, other fields were left wide open, and parapsychology was a science immensely valuable to this civilization. The Leaders ruled only as long as they could rule. And psychology is far more powerful even than an atomic bomb, because it can stop the bomb from going off or being made in the first place.
They didn’t change his name. There was no need to erase his mind completely and imprint new memories upon it. Selectivity was necessary. What they did was to dissect Mart Havers’ ego, laying his mind open with drugs and hypnosis, and spreading out the material like a complicated aerial map.
He didn’t know it. He couldn’t have resisted neo-pentothal and Gestalt probing and all the other weapons they used. He was a guinea pig, and they took his mind apart, kept what they wanted, and removed the rest.
They removed it by burying it. It went from the conscious mind into the unconscious, that deep, turgid well that opens in the mind of every man. Complete erasure was impossible, unless they worked with the electronic patterns of pure thought, and they could not do that—yet. But on the writing in Havers’ brain they used ink eradicator, in effect, so that it was no longer visible, even to Mart Havers. Many of his memories faded into invisibility.
Then they wrote new sentences in his mind.
From an electrician’s viewpoint, they rewired Mart Havers so that from now on he would operate on AC instead of DC. The psychic drive was different His basic motivations had been altered. He was the same man, but now he would run on another type of current.
It took time. The process had to be geared to Havers’ strength. Years ago, when the process had first been used, too hasty treatment had often resulted in insanity or death. When a man faces an insoluble problem he may go mad, and two types of minds—radically opposed—in the same skull means ethical anode and cathode. So the siphoning was done most carefully these days. As one reservoir was gradually emptied, the other was as gradually filled.
And, in the end, Mart Havers was a Cromwellian . . .
HE DIDN’T have amnesia at all. True, he had forgotten some things, key events that had shaped his character. And other, non-existent events had been substituted, to fit his new character logically. But he was Mart Havers.
A Cromwellian.
While they were at it, they checked his capabilities. At birth he had had Leader potentialities, though no one could tell whether a new-born infant would be an electronics expert or a geopolitician. Environment shaped that. Havers’ environment had subtly shaped him, and the tests showed the job at which he would be most competent. So they put memories of technical training in his mind, too, and he came out of the Purge a fully qualified Weather Patrolman—qualified except for practical experience.
After that, he was assigned to Weather Patrol, and liked it.
The mind, like Nature, has a check and balance system. The psychologists had taken away Havers’ memories of Georgina and La Boucherie, and had given him nothing in place of the emotions he had felt toward those two. It wasn’t as simple as love or hatred; emotions are blended composites. But there was a lack now in Mart Havers’ psyche, and his super-ego did something about that.
It was inevitable that the gap had to be filled. It was accident that he met Daniele Vaughan and Andre Kelvin.
He met Daniele first. Another man would probably have overlooked the potentialities of her beauty, for she was one of the rare Female Leaders, and was bound by the traditional rule of “uglification.” The Cromwellians ruled by giving their slaves a lesser race to rule in turn—the female of the species, degraded to a pretty, helpless, useless group without any purpose in life except to preen themselves for the males. So the Leaders were mostly men.
Sometimes, however, female babies exhibited Leader potentialities. It was not safe to let them grow up as ordinary women. They would be rebellious, lacking a natural outlet for their capabilities. These were trained as Leaders, but with a difference. You couldn’t be a Leader—and a woman!
Daniele wore gray, skilfully tailored so that she looked awkward and mannish in it. Her hair was done up in an unbecoming huddle, and her lips and cheeks had never known rouge or lipstick. Daniele Vaughan was a Leader technician on the lab staff of Weather Control, and it was her job to teach Havers the practical application of certain knowledge already implanted in his brain. She taught him capably, but not as a woman.
Hypnosis had given him a great stock pile of references. He knew what was meant by the lapse rate—the vertical temperature gradient—and the difference between dry adiabatic and saturated adiabatic. He knew how to use the cup anemometer and theodolite-equipped balloons. He knew that Beaufort Number 5 was little more than a moderate wind, and above Beaufort Number 10 the real danger began! He understood isobars and anticyclones and, in theory, he was a Weather Patrolman.
But he needed the practical experience, and he got part of it in the laboratory, working with Daniele Vaughan.
For the first time he enjoyed working at a profession. The harsh, relentless pressure of La Boucherie’s watchfulness was gone, and instead there was a real new psychic drive, which left no room for rebellion.
Why should the new Mart Havers rebel?? He had a chance for advancement; he was serving the period of apprenticeship that every unfledged Leader must serve before he became a Leader—and that was enough.
True, there had been considerable discussion before the authorities decided to admit Havers to the closely guarded Leader ranks, but there was no arguing with the results of the psychological tests. Mental-ability made a Leader, and Mart Havers had that.
False memories had been implanted. Havers didn’t know he had taken the Purge. He seldom bothered to wonder about his previous life. There was a reason—a mental bloc the psychologists had placed in his mind, so he wouldn’t wonder too much. That was insurance against conflict between his new conscious mind and the secrets, now forgotten, buried in his unconscious.
He worked with Daniele. He didn’t regard her as a woman. But she regarded him as a man, because she had never known another man like him. Havers’ harsh early life had left ineradicable traces.
They were charting a polar front. Daniele sat back in her chair and nodded at Havers.
“All righ
t,” she said. “Suppose you tell me. See how much you’ve learned in six weeks.”
Havers studied the map. It told him something, but not enough. A cold wave was advancing, there would be variations in pressure. Perhaps a storm near the border. That didn’t matter. But—
HE FOUND another, larger, map and plotted the weather with swift accuracy. Daniele watched him, her gray eyes unreadable.
Havers laughed.
“Don’t break it,” he said. “Not at this time of year. There may be a mild storm in Dakota, but that doesn’t matter.”
“Why?”
“The coastal fruit crop,” he told her. “Hot days, cold nights. Too cold for this time of year. The growers need a cloud blanket to save their crops.”
“How?”
This was rote. “Noctural clouds will reflect the outgoing radiation from the ground at night, after a hot day. The heat will just bounce back and forth between the ground and the clouds all night long, instead of being dissipated into space, which would let the crops freeze. That’s why we don’t want to break up the storm before it gets far enough south. Satisfied?”
She nodded briefly. “That’s enough for today,” she said, rising and yawning. “I’m tired. From now on it’s routine, anyway, and only a few more days of it. You’re going out on Patrol Wednesday, aren’t you?”
“That’s right. Patrol Fifty-one.”
“Oh?” she said, an odd note in her voice. “Well, you’ll have a good captain over you. Clean up the lab before you turn in. Good night.”
She went out, her shoulders sagging tiredly. Havers looked after her for a moment, and then whistling, went to work. He worked slowly. His mind was full of the new project—the field experience to be gained on actual Patrol duty.
It was an exciting job, a glamorous one, and a vital one. Ever since mankind had first made his epochal step toward controlling the weather in 1946, when Vincent Shaefer dropped six pounds of dry ice through a cloud, supercooling and precipitating it, Earth had begun to be a little more under control of its dominant race. Weather could be controlled!
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