by James Gunn
Standing in the doorway, shoulder-to-shoulder, were Willie and a Kampuskop. Each caught an arm and swung Gavin around to face the desk. The Chancellor was rising from behind it. Not an article of clothing was disturbed, not a hair was out of place, but something was wrong with his jaw.
“Take him to the southeast gate,” he said in a strained mechanical voice. “Take him to the southeast gate. Take him to the southeast gate...”
Too many realizations were pouring in upon Gavin simultaneously for him to adjust. The Chancellor was not a person. Gavin had been talking all this while with a robot.
The Chancellor-thing pulled itself upright and pushed its jaw back into shape with a click audible across the room. “By now,” it said, “you will have recognized that I am a mechanical creation, not a creature of flesh and blood like yourself. But I wish to dispose of two misapprehensions.” Human or not, this Chancellor could not let something alone. He had to keep chewing at it like a disputatious dog. “I was a real person, but, unfortunately, I was assassinated in the second year of my tenure here. Fortunately, my brain already had been cloned and this body created. It had been intended as my alterego, my stand-in for difficult moments, but it became the Chancellor. Since then I have been shot five times, hanged twice, stabbed more times than I can remember, and beaten almost daily. Resurrection is my fate. Only a machine could have endured it.” It hesitated. “And even a machine finds it difficult.”
Against his will, Gavin felt sympathy rising in him for this machine with feelings.
“I have not been replaced because I serve my function of hostage as meaningfully in this form as in any other. You may think it ridiculous to have a mechanical Chancellor. But it is no more ridiculous than having mechanical students. And that is what you are, responding mechanically to stimuli like so many robots.” The Chancellor-thing slumped at its desk, its head cupped in hands like a statue of misery.
Willie and the Kampuskop wheeled once more and virtually carried Gavin between them out of the office and down the hall, through the bulletproof-glass doorway, and down the marble steps, his feet occasionally touching the floor. Gavin thought he could hear gears whirring in the Kampuskop, and he was not too sure about Willie. They threw him into the back of a two-man squad car and slid down the rear door. Gavin tugged at it, but the door was locked. A moment later an engine started, and the car rumbled along the avenue, its tires almost flattened by the weight of the armor. Gavin's cubicle had no windows; he could only guess at their direction.
The implications of Gavin's discoveries were beginning to piece themselves together. What was this Iron Chancellor? Were its words only clever mechanical responses to obvious verbal stimuli, or were they infinitely variable like the human mind? Was the mechanical man controlled by programs in a distant computer? It had spoken of a cloned brain. Was that living brain hooked up inside the robot? Or was it protected somewhere else, nourished in some larger and more convenient receptacle, linked to the Iron Chancellor by radio receptors and transmitters grafted to appropriate nerve endings?
But apparently the Chancellor had been correct about his expulsion. Willie surely had been present to make certain the orders of StudEx were carried out. Which meant, no doubt, that he had been wrong all along about StudEx, and if that was true, wrong about the Chancellor as well.
Gavin's mind was whirling in his head, trying to grab the ring of reality, but all his images had been shattered, all the familiar signposts in his world pointed in the wrong direction, and he did not know where the truth could be found.
While he was thus confused, the car turned right, stopped, reversed, and backed, turning toward the left. Outside, something clanged and rattled metallically. The back door of the squad car rolled up, and in the faint starlight Gavin saw the stone gateposts of the southeast gate on either side of him. Between the posts a heavy metal gate had been raised high. He faced the featureless night, but he knew what waited for him in the darkness—one hundred feet of cleared land and then the beginning of town, with all its unknown dangers for the student.
He tried to squeeze himself farther into the car, but the wall behind him moved inexorably toward the back, pushing him into the night and uncertainty, pushing him out of the protected place he had come to know and to love, expelling him from paradise into the cold indifference of the outer world.
And then, on the edge of the car, clinging to it, he gave up and leaped into the night, yelling his defiance and outrage. As he leaped, the gate rattled down behind him and lights came on above him, blinding him, exposing him to his enemies.
And he stood alone upon a cold and light-blasted plain.
5. No Place Like Home
Paleolithic man needed many children to replace the men and women lost to hunting accidents, hardship, and disease; neolithic man needed a large family so that a few children would survive to care for him in his old age; industrial man needed no children but couldn't control his paleolithic instincts; modern men and women can control their paleolithic fertility but not their neolithic cultural heritage. Parenthood survives as a cultural fossil and is no sooner committed than regretted. And so the university campus becomes a place where students are sent by their parents so that they will not have to be continually reminded of their folly. Within the campus, students learn how to extend delinquency into a career. The convent and the military school were its historic counterparts, with one significant difference: here the asylum is run by the inmates.
—THE PROFESSOR'S NOTEBOOK
His arms thrown wide against the gate that barred him from the campus, Gavin faced the night and the enemies who hid behind it, and shouted, “All right, come and get me! One at a time or all together! I'm ready for you!”
He felt better for his outburst though a bit sheepish about the heroic pose and the ancient formula in which he had expressed his defiance. The words had come to his lips unbidden, perhaps out of the long hours of childhood he had spent with books or in front of the flickering images on the wall screen.
The only answer was silence. It poured back upon him like the cold waves of the sea upon the shore.
“Come on!” he shouted. “Don't be afraid! I'm all alone! Surely there are enough of you to overcome one student.”
Again, silence. Gavin frowned, then shrugged and marched forward across the rubble that separated the campus wall from the town. It was performed bravely enough, but when he reached the edge of the darkness beyond the lights of the wall, he sidled into it, crouching, as if he was trying to slide between the heavy black-velvet panels of a curtain.
He stopped and waited for his eyes to adjust to the darkness, his body tensed for a blow that might hit at any moment. Nothing touched him except a moth blundering past him toward the distant lights. Gradually his fighting tension eased as the adrenaline was washed from his bloodstream. When at last he could see, he discovered that he was alone. In front of him was a row of dark houses; a few steps to his left was a paved street that led down the hill.
He felt like a fool. No one had been waiting for him. No one had cared. And yet—the thought came to him—perhaps they were lurking behind the houses, waiting to see if he were point man for an ambush, luring him farther into their territory before they pounced.
That was more like it. He would play their game because he had no choice. Here he was—defenseless, alone, still weak from his illness, an exile from his chosen country. He walked down the middle of the street as the Israelites might have walked between the parted waters of the Red Sea. His footsteps, light as they were upon the pavement, sounded loud in the night.
Streetlights began at the end of the first block. Bugs buzzed around them and knocked against the protective glass with a staccato beat as if they were transmitting some coded message to the world. Gavin avoided the lighted areas. This was not like the blasted part of town through which Gregory had led them. People lived here. Grass was cut neatly near the sidewalk, Gavin could see at the edge of the cones of light, and the sidewalks and the stree
ts were in good repair.
Gavin took a deep breath. The air smelled good. For years he had not thought he could breathe the air outside the campus walls, but now, strangely, he felt freer than he had felt for a long time. He did not know why, but he decided not to think about that now. He could, he realized, return to the campus through the secret passageway he had used last night. He was maybe a mile east of it, but he felt sure he could find it again if he were not attacked before he got there. But returning was pointless. Jenny was gone, and the Professor was gone, and the campus had nothing more for him, not even learning. And if he returned, he probably would be killed in some particularly nasty way by Willie or some other agent of StudEx, or perhaps even by the Kampuskops.
He could try to organize a countermovement to outvote or overthrow StudEx, and there was some merit in that; but he knew the notion was quixotic. Before he was more than started, StudEx or the Chancellor would act, and he could not operate completely underground in so small and organized a society. In any case, it was a corrupt society in which he no longer felt any interest.
“People get the government they deserve,” the Professor said once.
Something moved in the darkness. Light came from windows in some of the houses here, as if they scorned the concealment of raidshades, and in their small glow Gavin glimpsed a head turning and a hand reaching, and he grabbed a bony shoulder and a thin arm.
“Hey, fella,” a soprano voice said, “keep your hands to yourself!” And then, in a tone of delighted discovery, “Hey, Ma, here's a student! A real student!”
“Shut up!” Gavin said. “What are you trying to do?” As he spoke, he realized that the shoulder and arm he held in his hands belonged to a boy perhaps ten years old.
“Me?” said the boy. “Look around you, man!”
Gavin looked and saw no one. He shook the boy. “What do you mean?”
The boy opened his hand. In it was a small crawling insect. As Gavin watched, a part of its anatomy glowed and was dark, glowed and was dark.
“A lightning bug,” Gavin said, and understood that what he had not seen around him were the flickering spots of light that appeared in the night, disappeared, and reappeared a few feet away. For a moment he was returned to the long, brown summer evenings when he was a boy.
“Young man,” said a calm voice from the nearby darkness, “I got me a shotgun aimed at your head. I intend to shoot high with the first one so as not to hit Johnny, but I can't guarantee you won't get a few pellets. The second shot, Johnny'll just have to take his chances.”
“Hell, Ma, don't shoot,” the boy said with equal calmness. “This fella ain't much.” As if to demonstrate the truth of what he said, the boy twisted in Gavin's hands and was gone.
“All right, young man,” the first voice said from the darkness, “walk over here slow where I can see you.”
Gavin estimated his chances of leaping into the darkness and decided they weren't good enough. Slowly he walked toward the voice. Within a few feet he was walking on the resilience of grass and could smell its sharp green odor. A few more feet and he made out the dim outline of a porch and a dark figure seated on it.
“That's far enough,” the voice said. Gavin stopped.
The figure on the porch was small, and from the darkness came the creaking of wood against wood, as if a rocker were slowly moving back and forth.
“Why,” the voice said, “you sure ain't much, are you? All ragged and bedraggled. Why you out here this time of night?”
Gavin was silent.
“Speak up, boy! I got all the patience in the world, but this shotgun—it ain't got patience one.”
“I was expelled.”
“Expelled, is it? Well, that's different. That means you ain't rightly a student anymore, doesn't it?”
“That's true,” Gavin said, though all it meant was that he no longer was a student within the campus wall that he had known. Being a student, he realized now, was unrelated to surroundings or circumstances; it was a state of mind, as the Professor had said. He would never stop being a student.
The voice of the little woman on the porch softened. ‘Well, I wouldn't want a student in my house—not even one who's been expelled—but I don't like to see no one, not even a student, in a shape like you. Johnny, go get a shirt and a pair of pants out of Billy's closet.”
“But, Ma,” the boy protested from behind the woman, “someday maybe I can wear ’em.”
“You ain't never gonna be as big as Billy,” the woman said. “You take more after my side of the family; Billy took after his pa's side. And Billy ain't never coming home. While you're about it, Johnny, you might get this young fella an apple off the kitchen able.”
The door opened and freed a shaft of light that briefly silhouetted the figure of the small woman sitting in a rocking chair, the long, straight barrel of a shotgun extending the right arm of the chair like a deadly iron tongue.
“You are in bad shape, son,” the woman said, and Gavin realized that the spray of light had splashed him as well, and that the woman was calling him by another name. Gavin shifted to avoid the light when he door reopened.
“Not too close,” the woman said. “I may be sentimental, but I ain't foolish. Where you heading?”
“Home,” Gavin said, and knew suddenly that it was true. That was where he was going, and he didn't know why, except that there was nowhere else to go.
“That's good, son.” The woman's voice had turned husky.
Gavin thought that her eyes probably were filled with tears, and he could spring now and get the gun, but he hesitated. And then the door opened again, and it was too late.
“Here, Ma,” the boy said.
Clothing came flying out of the air toward him like giant winged monsters. Gavin caught them.
“Put'em on, son,” the woman said.
Gavin stripped off his mudcaked workman's shirt and peasant trousers and slipped into a cotton pullover and a pair of old soft jeans. He couldn't tell what color anything was, but they felt good. They took him back to his childhood—they were the kind of clothes he had worn before he went off to college and learned the proper dress for sincere revolutionaries—and smelling the soap-clean clothes brought back memories, and he wished he were home now, taking a long hot bath in the old marble bathtub, smelling the suds, and then sliding fresh, clean clothes over a towel-dried body, tingling with cleanliness. They were sensations he had not known for nearly four years, and they all came flooding back.
As he stood there, smelling an old world back into reality, a round object came toward him out of the darkness. He stuck up his hand, and the object hit it, and his fingers tightened around it. It was an apple. He bit into it gratefully, and with the first taste of juice he realized how hungry he was.
“There, now,” the woman said with a note of finality. “Keep some citizen from taking a swing at you out of spite. Somebody stop you, why, just tell ’em you're on your way home. Like you told me.”
“I want to thank you,” Gavin said. The rusty words stuck in his throat, and he had difficulty getting them out, but when he did, he was glad they were said. “I don't know why you've done this, but—”
“Wasn't for you,” the woman said. “Maybe someday, somewhere, my Billy will need help, and maybe somebody'll give him what he needs. Go on. Get.”
Gavin turned and headed back down the street, biting off hunks of sweet apple as he went, and licking the juice from his lips, and thinking there was something to be said for the simple pleasures of life, uncomplicated by questions of revolutionary justice.
By midmorning he was nearing Kansas City on the rebuilt Kansas Turnpike, the wind of his passage blowing fresh and cool in his face out of a blue sky. He had slept well but not long in a shed north of town, been awakened by the sunrise, and risen, stretching, smelling the odor of dew evaporating from green growing things, hearing the sounds of large animals moving into nearby pastures. He was up earlier than he had been for years, and he felt remarkably good fo
r all his recent experiences.
He had been picked up by the third car that passed, an old steam-turbine car driven by a middle-aged man with thinning brown hair that he combed carefully over a bald spot without concealing it. He was a large-boned man with a ruddy complexion that spoke of years spent exposed to sun and winter wind. He was a rancher, he said, and he had just sold fifty steers for good money, and he was going to Kansas City to buy him a new electric car.
“Operates from power broadcast from the nuclear-fission plant in the sky,” the rancher had said. “Imagine that!”
“What do you know,” Gavin said.
“Cost of the car includes the cost of the power,” the rancher had said. He was looking forward to the silky quiet of a new electric.
“How about you?” the rancher had asked. “Why you going to the city?”
“Going home,” Gavin said happily. “Going home.”
And the middle-aged man beside him had glowed in Gavin's warmth. “By golly,” he said. “That's good.” And after a pause in which his mood seemed to change from reflexive to reflective, he said, “I had a daughter once.”
“Oh,” Gavin said politely.
“When she was fifteen, she run away to college,” the rancher said. “Ain't heard from her since. She was mature for her age, you know. Guess she could have passed for eighteen all right. Cutest little girl. Loved her daddy. Yes, indeed. Loved her daddy. Pigtails. Ice-cream cones. Guess kids gotta grow up, lead their own lives.”
“Yeah,” Gavin said.
