The Mind Game

by Norman Spinrad

  It suddenly dawned on Weller that maybe both of them were chasing rainbows. Steinhardt, with his idea of playing the brain like an electronic organ and Bernstein, with his genius drugs. They were both trying to create talent out of thin air. And all these damn brainwave patterns could possibly show was creative effort, not results. Disagree? It was easy enough to disagree with them both.

  “Well, I can see Dr. Bernstein’s point about electronically induced creative consciousness,” he said, giving Steinhardt what he wanted first. “Seems to me if you recorded Michelangelo working on the Sistine Chapel and Joe Blow grinding his heart out on his fifteenth unpublishable novel, the screen would show the same damn thing.”

  “Exactly,” Bernstein said, obviously pleasantly surprised. “All we can measure is a state of effort. Other states also seem to produce the same brainwave pattern—stress, for example, and even meditative deconditioning. We can produce the pattern at will electronically, but not the results.”

  Steinhardt winked at Weller. Weller decided to throw a curve and disagree with Bernstein too. “On the other hand,” he said, “all you can do with the eptifiers is produce heightened effort in the same situation, not better product, right?”

  “So far … ,” Bernstein muttered. “But if we could concentrate more effort—”

  “So what you’re saying is that we’re both equally full of shit,” Steinhardt said.

  “I didn’t—”

  “No, no!” Steinhardt said, holding up his palm. “That’s exactly the kind of feedback I want to get. That’s why I wanted you to look things over without preconceptions, Jack. Now what’s your recommendation?”

  “Recommendation … ?”

  “We’re at an impasse here,” Steinhardt said. “I’m willing to listen to reason. That’s why I asked you for a fresh opinion. Where do we put our number-one priority? With Arthur’s vast scientific background or my vast instinctual vision? Make your recommendation.”

  By now Weller couldn’t figure out what would be taking which side against whom, nor whose side Steinhardt really wanted him to take. Bernstein looked at him very nervously. Sure, as far as he thinks, I’m about to deliver some land of official Monitor opinion. But what the hell is going on in Steinhardt’s head? Well… .

  “Well, if it were up to me, I guess I’d say go both ways.” Weller said. He looked at Bernstein slyly, then exchanged his end of a confidential glance with Steinhardt. “Trouble is,” he said, “the good doctor here is motivated to make the eptifier experiment succeed at the expense of the electronic stuff.” He smiled sweetly at Steinhardt. “And you’re biased in the opposite direction.”

  “I’m biased only toward getting results,” Bernstein said angrily.

  “Oh come on, Arthur, he’s right,” Steinhardt said. “If I can admit it, so can you. Question is, what do we do about it, Jack?”

  Weller shrugged, having reached the end of his line of bullshit.

  Steinhardt clapped his hands together. “I’ve got it,” he said brightly, but with a certain falseness, even sarcasm, to his tone that gave Weller the idea he had been working around to this for a long time. “We’ll make it a contest.”

  “A contest?” Bernstein muttered uneasily.

  “I’ll free you to work full-time on the eptifier experiments, Arthur,” Steinhardt said. “That’s what you want, isn’t it?”

  Bernstein looked at him suspiciously. “Yes,” he admitted grudgingly.

  “Great. Then it’s settled. Hayakawa will take over supervision of the brainwave-induction experiments. You’ll both go full bore. At the end of three months we’ll see who’s produced more results, and the losing project will be canceled.”

  “Science isn’t a contest!” Bernstein said angrily. “This isn’t fair. It’s blackmail.”

  “Oh, come on, Arthur,” Steinhardt said soothingly. “I’m putting my own pet project in the same jeopardy as yours, and I’m the boss of everything. Fair is fair. Wouldn’t you say so, Jack?”

  I guess I’m still supposed to disagree with him, Weller thought. “Well, to tell you the truth, it does sound a little unscientific, John,” he said.

  “You’re not here to tell me what’s scientific or not, bucko,” Steinhardt said angrily. “What the hell do you know about it? There’s too much Monitor interference in scientific affairs around here anyway. Wouldn’t you say so, Arthur?”

  Suddenly he was directing his confidential looks at Bernstein. What the hell did I do wrong? Weller wondered.

  “For once I agree with you, John,” Bernstein said with some emotion.

  “Then that’s that,” Steinhardt said. “I’ve listened to enough advice, and now I’ve decided. Turn over the induction experiments to Hayakawa. So it is written, so it shall be.”

  “But John—”

  Steinhardt held up his hand. “I hear no more,” he said. “Come on, Weller, I want a word with you.”

  He led Weller out to the golf cart without a word, but with an attitude that glowered at him like a thundercloud about to burst. But once outside Steinhardt leaned up against the golf cart and broke into laughter. “Perfect, kiddo,” he said. “Now do you see what I’m getting at?”

  “Huh?”

  “Come on,” Steinhardt said, climbing into the golf cart. “It’s really quite simple. I’d hoped you’d get it for yourself.” Weller got into the cart beside Steinhardt, and they began driving back in the general direction of the Colony.

  “Observe what we’ve done to old Bernstein’s head,” Steinhardt said. “Now he’ll bust his balls to prove his own theories while Hayakawa gives his all to prove mine. And he’s not sure whether I just saved his baby from cancellation at the recommendation of the Monitors. You took his side against me and my side against him, so he doesn’t know what to think about you. Whose influence am I under? And how much?”

  “But what’s the purpose of that, except to create paranoia?” Weller said.

  Steinhardt laughed. “That’s exactly the purpose,” he said. “Paranoia is the great motivator of subordinates. Creative chaos, m’boy. The operant characteristic of great leadership such as mine. That’s exactly the effect I want my taped testament to have. The land of ongoing chaos that maintains a true Transformational Consciousness. I mean you’ve certainly got to admit that we put Bernstein through changes.”

  He looked at Weller speculatively. “And in regard to you, I wanted to see if we could work together in the production of such Transformational mischief,” he said. “And I think we could. But the trouble is, the more you convince me that you’re the man I need, the less you convince me that I can trust you. Once more I find myself caught in our central paradox. ”

  “Which is?” Weller said, lost in Steinhardt’s maze of machinations.

  “Which is that talented people don’t seem to trust Transformationalism, and Transformationalism doesn’t seem to be able to trust creative talent,” Steinhardt said. He took his hands off the wheel to wave his arms momentarily, as if to embrace the Institute. “You think I don’t know that all this is my pigheaded Faustian determination to manufacture creative talent out of the general run of mediocrities we attract? To synthesize what I can’t extract. My God, I was a creative type myself, and I would’ve avoided anything like Transformationalism like the plague if I couldn’t get to be guru. You think I don’t understand where people like you are coming from?”

  “Then why not forget the power trips and mind games?” Weller said. “Why not surround yourself with independent equals like Bernstein?”

  ”Bernstein? Equals?” Steinhardt roared. “I don’t have any equals! Creative talent is one thing; being what I am is quite another. I need creative people to serve me, not to tell me what to do.”

  “You’re really serious?” Weller said. “You really think you can surround yourself with talented slaves?”

  “Slaves?” Steinhardt said. “Why are you people all so dense? I’ve got slaves coming out of my asshole! I need wide-awake servants.”

&n
bsp; “There’s a difference?”

  “Of course, there’s a difference,” Steinhardt said, calming down a little. “I know more about making people do what I want them to than any man in history. I can manipulate their minds like a maestro. But what I need is people who are self-motivated to serve the cause, with their talent intact and their minds unprogrammed. ”

  “Sincere, dedicated, self-motivated, creative talent that does what it’s told?” Weller said. “You don’t ask for very much, do you?”

  “No, I don’t,” Steinhardt said seriously. “I don’t want you worshiping me because I’m such a charismatic son of a bitch. I have enough of that to make me puke. I want you to be dedicated to what I’m doing because you believe in it, because you know it works, because you see that I’m right—of your own free will. Think about it. ”

  They had reached the gate to the Colony compound, and Steinhardt was silent as they passed through it and drove back to the cabin where Weller was staying with Annie, no doubt trying to give Weller the time to see the clear, pure light.

  He stopped the golf cart in front of the cabin, leaned back, took a slug of whiskey, and regarded Weller as if he were a father pleading for the love of his errant son. “Look, the way I’ve handled you is a kind of experiment, Jack,” Steinhardt said. “By the time Maria brought you to my attention, every little thing about you was in your dossier. I knew exactly what you were doing and why from the beginning. Torrez wanted you dealt with in the usual way, but I said: no, Fred, this guy’s got style, let’s give him his run. Let him follow his own star to me, but let’s throw the book at him. If he makes it on his own hook, playing his own game, and we transform him from a regressive to a believer in the process, he’ll have gotten there creatively, and we’ll have solved one of our central problems.”

  He put his hand on Weller’s shoulder. “So here you are, kiddo,” he said, “and I still don’t know if my little experiment worked. Are you sincere, Weller? You’ve got everything to gain. Work with me, and you’ll be rich and powerful, and your talent will be optimized. All you’ve got to be able to say to yourself is, ‘I was wrong, and John Steinhardt is right,’ and a whole new world opens up. I kid you not. ”

  Weller stared silently at Steinhardt. For a moment he felt the force of a bond of sincerity between them, the impact of a powerful and perhaps even genuinely great man asking for his willing allegiance. He’s right, Weller thought. He’s offering me the world. Money, power, Annie, a chance to do really creative work. Why can’t I just give in and accept it? Why does it repel me?

  Why, said the other side of his head, can’t you learn to love Big Brother?

  So when he finally answered, his words were those of his carefully crafted persona, the character which had brought him this far, and which he could not abandon for the sake of John B. Steinhardt. “I’m ready to go to work for you right now, John,” he said.

  “Jesus, I know that, laddy-buck,” Steinhardt said. “But are you sincere about it, or are you still just a good con man?”

  Weller laughed. “I’d probably give you the same answer you’d give me to that one,” he said.

  Steinhardt laughed with him. “I’ll drink to that answer,” he said, toasting Weller with his flask and gulping down a slug of whiskey.

  His eyes narrowed, he shook his head speculatively, and seemed to suddenly withdraw into some private, murky head space. “But as I’ve said before,” Steinhardt said darkly, “I’ll drink to anything. ”

  Nineteen

  Weller sat watching Annie wash the dinner dishes in the little sink from an unsettling cinematic distance. Close-up of her hands moving the sponge across the plates, pull back for a low-angle full shot on her body bent over the sink, emphasizing her silent psychic distance from his camera-eye.

  He had to physically blink himself out of this distancing mode, this cinematic paranoia. Either I’m really going nuts, he thought, or this really is a totally paranoid situation.

  From the Great Man he heard nothing, but every casual conversation with Annie got immediately steered into the deep waters of Transformationalism, as if Steinhardt were pressuring her to accumulate data. The line of questioning was rather obvious.

  What had Steinhardt said to him? What was it like really working with John? What did he think Steinhardt thought of him? What did it feel like to have your consciousness enhanced with prolonged contact with the Font of All Wisdom?

  It could all have been covered by the reverent curiosity of a true believer, if it weren’t transparently designed to uncover his true feelings about the Great I Am. He sensed that Annie was constantly watching and recording his reactions—these past two days—monitoring him, to coin an odious phrase.

  It would have been classical paranoia if Steinhardt hadn’t openly told him that was exactly what she was going to be doing. I’m not paranoid, he thought. It’s really happening. My wife is willing to spy on me for Transformationalism, and there’s no doubt about it.

  And what are you loyal to, Weller? he thought. To a wife who doesn’t want your loyalty on your terms and won’t return it? To a dead-end career that maybe you can never go back to? What the hell is there in your life besides Transformationalism?

  He knew that he really only had two alternatives. He could try to blackmail his way out of the Institute with the Master Contact Sheet and hope that he would make it. And hope against everything he knew that she would choose to come with him when push came to shove.

  Or he could accept John B. Steinhardt as his personal savior. And keep Annie. And become rich and powerful. And become a different person.

  Obviously there was only one logical, Transformational conclusion. Steinhardt had set it up so that a rational man had only one self-interested choice. Gain everything or lose everything was reasonably clear-cut. But he rebelled against that logic. There was no way he could find it in his heart to love Big Brother. At this point he was beginning to wonder whether that made him a hero or a masochist. Perhaps they amounted to much the same thing.

  Annie finished the dishes, dried her hands, and walked slowly over to him, thighs rubbing lightly together, blouse undone to the third button, and a come-hither look in her eyes. “I’ve got plenty of time before I have to go to tonight’s staff meeting,” she said, sitting down beside him with a little toss of her hair and a wiggle of her ass.

  But Weller was finding it hard to relate to her sexually since she had started interrogating him on the sly. Making love to her was becoming more and more difficult and less and less satisfying. Whenever he made love to her, he felt that a world of eyes was looking on over their shoulders, and two of them were hers.

  So once again he pretended to ignore the obvious, and for once did a little sly interrogating of his own. He leaned forward and said, “What happens if I do end up directing John’s little project? What happens then?”

  Annie angled her body away from him and looked at him in confusion. “What happens then? What do you mean?”

  “I mean us,” Weller said. “Once it’s over, where do we go from there?”

  “Over?” Annie said shrilly. “Once what’s over?” Her voice suddenly hardened into the commissar’s tone he had been hearing for days, and he had neither the heart nor the stomach to confront it.

  “I’ve got to admit this has been good for us,” he began cautiously. “But this place is like a hothouse. Sooner or later we’ve got to return to the real world and pick up the threads of our lives.”

  Her eyes became distant and impenetrable. “Our old fives are dead,” she said. “Old instantaneous personas. We’re not those people any more. We can’t go back, we can only go on. Can’t you see that, Jack?”

  “Sure,” Weller said sadly, and he really could. “But what we are now are instantaneous personas too. Riding the changes got us here, but some day we’re going to have to ride the changes out, or we’ll end up becoming dead shells again. There aren’t any final destinations. John would say so himself. ”

  “I don’
t like what I’m hearing, Jack,” Annie said in an almost threatening tone. “You’re telling me you want us to leave the movement. Isn’t that really it?”

  Even now, especially now, when a single “yes” would finally bring them to the inevitable confrontation, Weller’s courage failed him, and he found himself drawing back from the brink. “No,” he said. “Not leave the movement, just have some lives of our own, too. Not turn our backs on Transformationalism, but not let it swallow us whole, either. Some kind of compromise between serving the movement and serving ourselves.”

  “As far as I’m concerned, serving the movement is serving myself,” Annie said coldly. “I don’t want to go back to Hollywood ego tripping. I won’t. I can’t.”

  “Cant?” Weller snapped. “Don’t you think you’d better take a hard second look if leaving here is something you think you cant do? Whatever happened to freedom? Don’t you ever miss it?”

  “You’re just running a cheap word game,” Annie said angrily. “I can’t leave because I don’t want to leave. Freedom is what I’ve finally found in Transformationalism. Freedom is working for something that transcends your own petty ego, something that takes you outside the limits of your self, that makes you a part of a greater destiny. ”

  Her voice had become that strident commissar speech he had come to know all too well. But suddenly it became soft, personal, and immediate as she touched a palm to his cheek.

  “Poor baby,” she said, “I don’t think you’ve ever found anything like that for yourself, have you? Not even here, not yet. Oh Jack, wasn’t I the same way? We blamed it on the Hollywood system, but even our dreams and ambitions were confined by our own egos. If only we were free to do our things, we’d find what we were looking for, we’d really be creative people, we’d be all right. A movie star and a hotshot feature-film director, right? All we ever thought of was moving up in the Hollywood machine that was grinding us down.”