“Now don’t you forget, Skampi,” you say. You find it difficult to talk; you’ve got a wide grin plastered across your face and you can’t cast it adrift. “Just as soon as they’re through with you, you come looking for me, hear? I’ll buy you a soda.”
You lean back in your G-chair and hold the bulkhead button.
“I can drink beer,” he says manfully.
“We’ll compromise. We’ll make your soda with beer. Listen, kid. I can’t promise, but I know they’re fooling with the idea of a two-man crew for starships. How’d you like to go with me—one trip, anyhow? Of course, you’ll have to be conditioned six ways from the middle, double-time, and it’ll be real rough. But—what do you say?”
And you know? He doesn’t say anything!
He laughs, though.
* * * *
Now here comes Colonel Provost, the big big brass of Psychodynamics, and a young MP. That’s all the welcoming committee you’ll get. The compound’s walled and locked, and no windows look out on it. They must have unloaded some pretty sorry objects from these space cans from time to time.
They open the hatch from the outside and you immediately start coughing like hell. Your eyes say the dust has settled, but your lungs say no. By the time you have your eyes wiped, the M.P. is inside and squatting on the deck, cross-legged.
He says cheerfully, “Hi, kay-dee. This here’s a stun gun and if you so much as squint at me or the Colonel, you get flaked out like a heaving-line.”
“Don’t worry about me,” you say from behind that silly grin. “I got no quarrel with anybody and I like it here. Good morning, Colonel.”
“Look out for this one,” said the M.P. “Likes it here. He’s sick.”
“Shut up, wheelhead,” says the Colonel cheerfully. He has his gray crewcut and barrel torso shoved into the hatch and it’s real crowded in that little cabin. “Well, Cadet, how are we?”
“We’re fine,” you say. The M.P. cocks his head a little to one side and gets bright-eyed. He thinks you’re sassing the C.O., but you’re not. When you say “we,” you mean you and your shipmate.
“Anything special happen?”
The answer to that is a big fat yes, but it would take forever to tell. It’s all recorded, anyway; PD doesn’t miss a trick. But that’s from then till now, and done with. You’re concerned from now on. “Colonel, I want to talk to you right now. It’s about my shipmate.”
The Colonel leans a little further in and slaps the M.P.’s gun hand. He’s in front of the guy, so you can’t see his face. “Beat it, wheelhead.”
The M.P. clears out. You stagger up out of the G-seat and climb through the hatch. The Colonel catches your arms as you stagger. After a long time in free-fall, your knees won’t lock as you walk; you have to stiffen each one as your weight comes on it, and you have to concentrate. So you concentrate, but that doesn’t stop you from talking. You skim over the whole business, from your long solo to being reduced to meeting your shipmate, and the hassle you had with yourself over that, and then this thing that happened with the kid—weeks and weeks of it, and you’ve only just begun.
“You can pick ‘em, sir,” you pant as you lurch along. “Do you always use a little know-nothing kid? Where do you find ‘em? Does it always work out this well?”
“We get a commander out of every Long Haul,” he says.
“Say, that’s great, sir!”
“We don’t have very many ships,” he says, just as cheerfully.
“Oh,” you say.
* * * *
Suddenly you stop. “Wait, sir! What about Skampi? He’s still locked in on his side of the bulkhead.”
“You first,” says the Colonel. You go on into the PD lab. “Up you go.”
You look at the big chair with its straps and electrodes and big metal hood.
“You know, they used chairs like these in the French Revolution,” you say, showing off. You’re just busting with friendliness today. You never felt like this. You sit in the big chair. “Look, sir, I want to get started on a project right away This kid, now—I tell you, he’s got a lot on the ball. He’s spaceman right to the marrow bones. He comes from right around here, that little place up the pike, Masolo. He got shook out of his bassinet by the axitugs. He spent his childhood lying on his back on the roof looking for the starships in orbit. He’s—”
“You talk all the time,” the Colonel breaks in mildly. “Sum up, will you? You made out with your shipmate. You think you could do it again in a starship. That it?”
“Think we can try it? Hey, really? Look, can I be the one to tell him, Colonel?”
“Close your mouth and sit still.”
Those are orders. You sit still. The Colonel gets you strapped in and connected up. He puts his hand on the switch.
“Where did you say you came from?”
You didn’t say, and you don’t, because the hood swings down and you’re surrounded by a sudden dissonant chord of audio at tremendous amplitude. If you had been allowed to say, though, you wouldn’t have known.
The Colonel doesn’t even give you time to be surprised at this. You sink into blackness.
* * * *
It gets light again. You have no idea how much time has passed, but it must be plenty, because the sunlight from outside is a different color and slants in a different, way through the Venetian blinds. On a bench nearby is a stack of minicans with your case number painted on each one— that’d be the tape record of your Long Haul. There’s some stuff in there you’re not proud of, but you wouldn’t swap the whole story for anything.
“Hello, Colonel,” you say with your tongue thick.
“You with us again? Good.” He looks at an enlarged filmstrip and back at you. He shows you. It’s a picture of the bulkhead with the triangular score in it. “Magnetostriction vibrator, with a diamond bearing for a drill bit, hm? Not bad. You guys scare me. I’d have sworn that bulkhead couldn’t be cut and that there was nothing in the ship that could cut it. You must’ve been real eager.”
“I wanted to kill him. You know that now,” you say happily.
“You damn near did.”
“Aw, now, Colonel! I wouldn’t have gone through with it.”
“Come on,” he says, opening the buckles.
“Where, sir?”
“To your space can. Wouldn’t you like to have a look at it from the outside?”
“Cadets aren’t permitted—”
“You qualify,” says the old man shortly.
So out you go to the compound. The can still stands where it was landed.
“Where’s Skampi?” you ask worriedly.
The Colonel just passes you an odd look and walks on. You follow him up to the can. “Here, around the front.”
You walk around to the bow and look up at it. It’s just the shape it ought to be from the way it looked from inside, except that it looks a little like a picture of a whale caught winking at you.
Winking?
One-eyed!
“Do you mean to tell me you had that kid in a blind compartment, without so much as a viewport?” you rage.
The Colonel pushes you. “Sit down. Over there. On the hatch. You returning heroes and your manic moods . . . sit down!”
You sit on the edge of the open hatch.
“Sometimes they fall over when I explain,” he says gruffly. “Now what was bothering you?”
“Locking that kid up in a dark—”
“There isn’t a kid. There isn’t a dark cabin. There’s no viewport on that side of the can. It’s a hydrazine tank.”
“But I—but we—but the—”
“Where do you come from?”
“Masolo, but what’s that to—”
“What did your mother and all the kids call you when you were a space-struck teener?”
“Scampy. They all—Scampy?”
“That’s right,” he says bluntly.
* * * *
Rocked, you cover your face. “By God! I can remember now, thinking
back in detail over my whole life—it started in the bus that day I passed the entrance exams. What is it? Please, what is it?”
“Well, if you want me to get technical, they call it Dell’s hypothesis. It was formulated way back in the middle of the 20th century by Dudley Dell, which was one of the pseudonyms of a magazine editor. As I remember it, he later became a lay analyst and—”
“Please, Colonel!” You’re in trouble.
“Okay, okay,” he says soothingly. “Well, up to that time, psychologists—particularly analyists—had been banging their heads against a stone wall in certain cases, and sometimes banging up the patient in the process. Those early therapists knew that childish feelings and motivations were interfering with adult efficiency and happiness. When a man would slam out of his house and do a lousy day’s work after a fight with his wife, the doctor would tell him, ‘You’re acting as if you were a child rejected by its mother,’ and this was—”
“Colonel, sir, are you going to please tell me what the hell’s with me?”
“I am,” he answers calmly. “This, as I was beginning to explain, was all wrong because the ‘as if’ concept made the patient disbelieve in this active eight-year-old within him —a very viable, hard-fighting, eight-year-old it was, too. So when behaviour got more infantile, the doc would pull his beard, or chin, and say, ‘Mm-hmm, schizophrenia,’ thereby scaring the liverwurst out of the patient. Dell stopped all that.”
“Dell stopped all that,” you repeat, suffering.
“It was a little thing, that hypothesis of his—little like E = MC2 or Newton’s apple—but, oh, my, what happened!”
“Oh, my,” you agree. “What happened?”
“Dell began directing therapy to the infantile segment, treating it as a living, thinking, feeling organism. It responded so excellently that it changed the face of psychoanalysis. Now in your case—you’re not going to interrupt?”
* * * *
You shake your head blankly but obediently.
“Good. In your case, an extension of Dell’s hypothesis was used. The sum total of your life up until you took your entrance examinations to this Base was arrested at the age of 15. A hypnotic barrier was erected so that you could have no access to any of this. You—all of you cadets— literally start a new life here, with no ties whatever to an earlier one. Your technical education very deliberately has no reference factors to anything but itself. You learn quickly because your minds are uncluttered. You never miss your past because we’re careful never to reactivate it.
“When this approach was first tried, the subjects were graduated with memories only of their training. Well, it didn’t work. Childhood conditioning is too important to the entire human being to be wiped out without diminishing the subject in just about every emotional way. So we developed this new system. That’s what we used on you.
“But we discovered a peculiar thing. Even in untrained adults—as opposed to the sharp division of pre- and post-entrance you have here—even untrained adults suffer to greater or lesser degree from internal strife between childhood and adult interpretations and convictions. An exaggerated example would be a child’s implicit belief in Santa Claus and the Easter bunny, existing at one and the same time with the adult’s realization that these are only legends. The inner child—the child within the adult—still exists, according to Dell and to all tests since, and will fight like the very devil for survival, beliefs and all especially one whose beliefs and natural feelings and reactions had been made grounds for punishment or ridicule.
“The schism between you and Scampy was extreme; you were, in effect, born on different planets. To be a complete human being, you had to be rejoined; but to be integrated successfully, you and Scampy had to learn how to get along together. For Scampy, this was not difficult—you, even in injustice and cruelty, were a real live hero-image. But the adult you had a stonier path. Somewhere within yourself, though, you somehow found an element of tolerance and empathy, and used it to bridge the gap.
“I may say,” the Colonel adds severely, “that it takes a particularly fine kind of person to negotiate this difficult merger. You are not usual, Cadet; not usual at all.”
“Scampy,” you murmur. Impulsively, you pull your shirt away from your chest and look down as if there were something hiding there. “But he talked to me! Don’t tell me you’ve secretly invented a telepathic converter with bandpass filters!”
“Of course not. When the barrier was erected between you and Scampy, Scampy was conditioned to speak sub-vocally—that is, back in the throat and virtually without lip movement. You have a subminiature transmitter placed surgically in your pharynx. The button on your bulkhead activated it. There had to be a button, you see; we couldn’t have the two of you speaking at the same time, which is what persons in the same room invariably do. You can’t subvocalize and talk simultaneously. It would have tipped you off. Hence the button.”
“I can’t get used to it,” you complain. “I can’t! I practically saw the boy! Listen, Colonel—can I keep my built-in transmitter and have the same rig on my starship?”
He smiles, although you think it hurts his face. “You really want it left as is?”
“He’s a good kid.”
“Very well—Commander. Dismissed.” He marches away.
* * * *
You look after him, shaking your head. Then you duck into the space can. You stare at the bulkhead and at the button and at the scoring on the plate where you came that close to filling your cabin with your hydrazine supply. You shudder.
“Hey,” you call softly. “Scamp!”
You push the button. You hear the carrier. Then, “I’m thirsty,” says Scampy.
You cut out of there and go down to the rec area and into the short-order bar.
“A beer,” you say. “And put a lump of vanilla ice cream in it. And two straws.”
“You crazy?” asks the man.
“No,” you say. “Oh, no!”
<
* * * *
SENSE FROM THOUGHT DIVIDE
by
Mark Clifton
A million- (billion?-) dollar voyage to nowhere is high-priced psychotherapy. Mark Clifton, who spent twenty or so years in industrial engineering and personnel work before he turned to s-f writing, takes us back to the comparative miserliness of an ordinary cost-plus Gov’t, contract, and the pragmatic psychology of a hard-working personnel director.
No problems, this time, about selling a new idea to a reluctant public; no theories or abstractions about souls, psyches, ids or egos. Just the practical business-world problem of getting people to do their jobs as efficiently as possible—in this case, persuading a cloak-and-turban-ed Swami to help get levitation onto the production line.
* * * *
“Remembrance and reflection, how allied; What thin partitions sense from thought divide.”
Pope
When I opened the door to my secretary’s office, I could see her looking up from her desk at the Swami’s face with an expression of fascinated skepticism. The Swami’s back was toward me, and on it hung flowing folds of a black cloak. His turban was white, except where it had rubbed against the back of his neck.
“A tall, dark, and handsome man will soon come into your life,” he was intoning in that sepulchral voice men habitually use in their dealings with the absolute.
Sara’s green eyes focused beyond him, on me, and began to twinkle.
“And there he is right now,” she commented dryly. “Mr. Kennedy, Personnel Director for Computer Research.”
The Swami whirled around, his heavy robe following the movement in a practiced swirl. His liquid black eyes looked me over shrewdly, and he bowed toward me as he vaguely touched his chest, lips and forehead. I expected him to murmur, “Effendi,” or “Bwana Sahib,” or something, but he must have felt silence was more impressive.
I acknowledged his greeting by pulling down one corner of my mouth. Then I looked at his companion.
The young lieutenant was standing very straight, very stiff, and a flush of pink was starting up from his collar and spreading around his clenched jaws to leave a semicircle of white in front of his red ears.
“Who are you?” I asked the lieutenant.
“Lieutenant Murphy,” he answered shortly, and managed to open his teeth a bare quarter of an inch for the words to come out. “Pentagon!” His light gray eyes pierced me to see if I were impressed.
The Year's Greatest Science Fiction & Fantasy 1 - [Anthology] Page 13
