He had grown up among intellects aimed at the future. He and Tighe had traveled a lot. They had often been in the huge pylon of the main Institute building. They had gone over to Tighe’s native England once a year at least. But always the old house had been dear to them.
It stood on a ridge, long and low and weathered gray like a part of the earth. By day it had rested in a green sun-dazzle of trees or a glistering purity of snow. By night you heard the boards creaking and the lonesome sound of wind talking down the chimney. Yes, it had been good.
And there had been the wonder of it. He loved his training. The horizonless world within himself was a glorious thing to explore. And that had oriented him outward to the real world—he had felt wind and rain and sunlight, the pride of high buildings and the surge of a galloping horse, thresh of waves and laughter of women and smooth mysterious purr of great machines, with a fullness that made him pity those deaf and dumb and blind around him.
Oh yes, he loved those things. He was in love with the whole turning planet and the big skies overhead. It was a world of light and strength and swift winds and it would be bitter to leave it. But Tighe was locked in darkness.
He said slowly, “All we ever were was a research and educational center, a sort of informal university specializing in the scientific study of man. We’re not any kind of political organization. You’d be surprised how much we differ in our individual opinions.”
“What of it?” shrugged Tyler. “This is something larger than politics. Your work, if fully developed, would change our whole society, perhaps the whole nature of man. We know you’ve learned more things than you’ve made public. Therefore you’re reserving that information for uses of your own.”
“And you want it for your purposes?”
“Yes,” said Tyler. After a moment, “I despise melodrama but if you don’t cooperate you’re going to get the works. And we’ve got Tighe too, never forget that. One of you ought to break down if he watches the other being questioned.”
We’re going to the same place! We’re going to Tighe!
The effort to hold face and voice steady was monstrous. “Just where are we bound?”
“An island. We should be there soon. I’ll be going back again myself but Mr. Bancroft is coming shortly. That should convince you just how important this is to us.”
Dalgetty nodded. “Can I think it over for awhile? It isn’t an easy decision for me.”
“Sure. I hope you decide right.”
Tyler got up and left with his guards. The big man who had handed him the drink earlier sat where he had been all the time. Slowly the psychologist began to tighten himself. The faint drone of turbines and whistle of jets and sundered air began to enlarge.
“Where are we going?” he asked.
“CAN’T TELL YOU THAT. SHUDDUP, WILL YOU?”
“But surely.…”
The guard didn’t answer. But he was thinking. Ree-villa-ghee-gay-doe—never would p’rnounce that damn Spig name…cripes, what a God-forsaken hole!…Mebbe I can work a trip over to Mexico.… That little gal in Guada.…
Dalgetty concentrated. Revilla—he had it now. Islas de Revillagigedo a small group some 350 or 400 miles off the Mexican coast, little visited with very few inhabitants. His eidetic memory went to work, conjuring an image of a large-scale map he had once studied. Closing his eyes he laid off the exact distance, latitude and longitude, individual islands.
Wait, there was one a little further west, a speck on the map, not properly belonging to the group. And—he riffled through all the facts he had ever learned pertaining to Bancroft. Wait now, Bertrand Meade, who seemed to be the kingpin of the whole movement—yes, Meade owned that tiny island.
So that’s where we’re going! He sank back, letting weariness overrun him. It would be awhile yet before they arrived.
Dalgetty sighed and looked out at the stars. Why had men arranged such clumsy constellations when the total pattern of the sky was a big and lovely harmony? He knew his personal danger would be enormous once he was on the ground. Torture, mutilation, even death.
Dalgetty closed his eyes again. Almost at once he was asleep.
CHAPTER IV
They landed on a small field while it was still dark. Hustled out into a glare of lights Dalgetty did not have much chance to study his surroundings. There were men standing on guard with magnum rifles, tough-looking professional goons in loose gray uniforms. Dalgetty followed obediently across the concrete, along a walk and through a garden to the looming curved bulk of a house.
He paused just a second as the door opened for them and stood looking out into darkness. The sea rolled and hissed there on a wide beach. He caught the clean salt smell of it and filled his lungs. It might be the last time he ever breathed such air.
“Get along with you.” An arm jerked him into motion again.
Down a bare coldly-lit hallway, down an escalator, into the guts of the island. Another door, a room beyond it, an ungentle shove. The door clashed to behind him.
Dalgetty looked around. The cell was small, bleakly furnished with bunk, toilet and washstand, had a ventilator grille in one wall. Nothing else. He tried listening with maximum sensitivity but there were only remote confused murmurs.
Dad! he thought. You’re here somewhere too.
He flopped on the bunk and spent a moment analyzing the aesthetics of the layout. It had a certain pleasing severity, the unconscious balance of complete functionalism. Soon Dalgetty went back to sleep.
A guard with a breakfast tray woke him. Dalgetty tried to read the man’s thoughts but there weren’t any to speak of. He ate ravenously under a gun muzzle, gave the tray back and returned to sleep. It was the same at lunch time.
His time-sense told him that it was 1435 hours when he was roused again. There were three men this time, husky specimens. “Come on,” said one of them. “Never saw such a guy for pounding his ear.”
Dalgetty stood up, running a hand through his hair. The red bristles were scratchy on his palm. It was a cover-up, a substitute symbol to bring his nervous system back under full control. The process felt as if he were being tumbled through a huge gulf.
“Just how many of your fellows are there here?” he asked.
“Enough. Now get going!”
He caught the whisper of thought—fifty of us guards, is it? Yeah, fifty, I guess.
Fifty! Dalgetty felt taut as he walked out between two of them. Fifty goons. And they were trained, he knew that. The Institute had learned that Bertrand Meade’s private army was well-drilled. Nothing obtrusive about it—officially they were only servants and bodyguards—but they knew how to shoot.
And he was alone in mid-ocean with them. He was alone and no one knew where he was and anything could be done to him. He felt cold, walking down the corridor.
There was a room beyond with benches and a desk. One of the guards gestured to a chair at one end. “Sit,” he grunted.
Dalgetty submitted. The straps went around his wrists and ankles, holding him to the arms and legs of the heavy chair. Another buckled about his waist. He looked down and saw that the chair was bolted to the floor. One of the guards crossed to the desk and started up a tape recorder.
A door opened in the far end of the room. Thomas Bancroft came in. He was a big man, fleshy but in well-scrubbed health, his clothes designed with quiet good taste. The head was white-maned, leonine, with handsome florid features and sharp blue eyes. He smiled ever so faintly and sat down behind the desk.
The woman was with him—Dalgetty looked harder at her. She was new to him. She was medium tall, a little on the compact side, her blond hair cut too short, no makeup on her broad Slavic features. Young, in hard condition, moving with a firm masculine stride. With those tilted gray eyes, that delicately curved nose and wide sullen mouth, she could have been a beauty had she wanted to be.
One of the modern type, thought Dalgetty. A flesh-and-blood machine, trying to outmale men, frustrated and unhappy without knowing it and all the
more bitter for that.
Briefly there was sorrow in him, an enormous pity for the millions of mankind. They did not know themselves, they fought themselves like wild beasts, tied up in knots, locked in nightmare. Man could be so much if he had the chance.
He glanced at Bancroft. “I know you,” he said, “but I’m afraid the lady has the advantage of me.”
“My secretary and general assistant, Miss Casimir.” The politician’s voice was sonorous, a beautifully controlled instrument. He leaned across the desk. The recorder by his elbow whirred in the flat soundproofed stillness.
“Mr. Dalgetty,” he said, “I want you to understand that we aren’t fiends. There are things too important for ordinary rules though. Wars have been fought over them in the past and may well be fought again. It will be easier for all concerned if you cooperate with us now. No one need ever know that you have done so.”
“Suppose I answer your questions,” said Dalgetty. “How do you know I’ll be telling the truth?”
“Neoscopolamine, of course. I don’t think you’ve been immunized. It confuses the mind too much for us to interrogate you about these complex matters under its influence but we will surely find out if you have been answering our present questions correctly.”
“And what then? Do you just let me go?”
Bancroft shrugged. “Why shouldn’t we? We may have to keep you here for awhile but soon you will have ceased to matter and can safely be released.”
Dalgetty considered. Not even he could do much against truth drugs. And there were still more radical procedures, prefrontal lobotomy for instance. He shivered. The leatherite straps felt damp against his thin clothing.
He looked at Bancroft. “What do you really want?” he asked. “Why are you working for Bertrand Meade?”
Bancroft’s heavy mouth lifted in a smile. “I thought you were supposed to answer the questions,” he said.
“Whether I do or not depends on whose questions they are,” said Dalgetty. Stall for time! Put it off, the moment of terror, put it off! “Frankly, what I know of Meade doesn’t make me friendly. But I could be wrong.”
“Mr. Meade is a distinguished executive.”
“Uh-huh. He’s also the power behind a hell of a lot of political figures, including you. He’s the real boss of the Actionist movement.”
“What do you know of that?” asked the woman sharply.
“It’s a complicated story,” said Dalgetty, “but essentially Actionism is a—a Weltanschauung. We’re still recovering from the World Wars and their aftermath. People everywhere are swinging away from great vague capitalized causes toward a cooler and clearer view of life.
“It’s analogous to the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, which also followed a period of turmoil between conflicting fanaticisms. A belief in reason is growing up even in the popular mind, a spirit of moderation and tolerance. There’s a wait-and-see attitude toward everything, including the sciences and particularly the new half-finished science of psychodynamics. The world wants to rest for awhile.
“Well, such a state of mind has its own drawbacks. It produces wonderful structures of thought but there’s something cold about them. There is so little real passion, so much caution—the arts, for instance, are becoming ever more stylized. Old symbols like religion and the sovereign state and a particular form of government, for which men once died, are openly jeered at. We can formulate the semantic condition at the Institute in a very neat equation.
“And you don’t like it. Your kind of man needs something big. And mere concrete bigness isn’t enough. You could give your lives to the sciences or to inter-planetary colonization or to social correction, as many people are cheerfully doing—but those aren’t for you. Down underneath you miss the universal father-image.
“You want an almighty Church or an almighty State or an almighty anything, a huge misty symbol which demands everything you’ve got and gives in return only a feeling of belonging.” Dalgetty’s voice was harsh. “In short, you can’t stand on your own psychic feet. You can’t face the truth that man is a lonely creature and that his purpose must come from within himself.”
Bancroft scowled. “I didn’t come here to be lectured,” he said.
“Have it your way,” answered Dalgetty. “I thought you wanted to know what I knew of Actionism. That’s it in unprecise verbal language. Essentially you want to be a Leader in a Cause. Your men, such as aren’t merely hired, want to be Followers. Only there isn’t a Cause around, these days, except the common-sense one of improving human life.”
The woman, Casimir, leaned over the desk. There was a curious intensity in her eyes. “You just pointed out the drawbacks yourself,” she said. “This is a decadent period.”
“No,” said Dalgetty. “Unless you insist on loaded connotations. It’s a necessary period of rest. Recoil time for a whole society—well, it all works out neatly in Tighe’s formulation. The present state of affairs should continue for about seventy-five years, we feel at the Institute. In that time, reason can—we hope—be so firmly implanted in the basic structure of society that when the next great wave of passion comes it won’t turn men against each other.
“The present is, well, analytic. While we catch our breath we can begin to understand ourselves. When the next synthetic—or creative or crusading period, if you wish—comes, it will be saner than all which have gone before. And man can’t afford to go insane again. Not in the same world with the lithium bomb.”
Bancroft nodded. “And you in the Institute are trying to control this process,” he said. “You’re trying to stretch out the period of—damn it, of decadence! Oh, I’ve studied the modern school system too, Dalgetty. I know how subtly the rising generation is being indoctrinated—through policies formulated by your men in the government.”
“Indoctrinated? Trained, I would say. Trained in self-restraint and critical thinking.” Dalgetty grinned with one side of his mouth. “Well, we aren’t here to argue generalities. Specifically Meade feels he has a mission. He is the natural leader of America—ultimately, through the U.N., in which we are still powerful, the world. He wants to restore what he calls ‘ancestral virtues’—you see, I’ve listened to his speeches and yours, Bancroft.
“These virtues consist of obedience, physical and mental, to ‘constituted authority’—of ‘dynamism,’ which operationally speaking means people ought to jump when he gives an order—of… Oh, why go on? It’s the old story. Power hunger, the recreation of the Absolute State, this time on a planetary scale.
“With psychological appeals to some and with promises of reward to others he’s built up quite a following. But he’s shrewd enough to know that he can’t just stage a revolution. He has to make people want him. He has to reverse the social current until it swings back to authoritarianism—with him riding the crest.
“And that of course is where the Institute comes in. Yes, we have developed theories which make at least a beginning at explaining the facts of history. It was a matter not so much of gathering data as of inventing a rigorous self-correcting symbology and our paramathematics seems to be just that. We haven’t published all of our findings because of the uses to which they could be put. If you know exactly how to go about it you can shape world society into almost any image you want—in fifty years or less! You want that knowledge of ours for your purposes!”
Dalgetty fell silent. There was a long quietness. His own breathing seemed unnaturally loud.
“All right.” Bancroft nodded again, slowly. “You haven’t told us anything we don’t know.”
“I’m well aware of that,” said Dalgetty.
“Your phrasing was rather unfriendly,” said Bancroft. “What you don’t appreciate is the revolting stagnation and cynicism of this age.”
“Now you’re using the loaded words,” said Dalgetty. “Facts just are. There’s no use passing moral judgments on reality, the only thing you can do is try to change it.”
“Yes,” said Bancroft. “All right then,
we’re trying. Do you want to help us?”
“You could beat the hell out of me,” said Dalgetty, “but it wouldn’t teach you a science that it takes years to learn.”
“No, but we’d know just what you have and where to find it. We have some good brains on our side. Given your data and equations they can figure it out.” The pale eyes grew wholly chill. “You don’t seem to appreciate your situation. You’re a prisoner, understand?”
Dalgetty braced his muscles. He didn’t reply.
Bancroft sighed. “Bring him in,” he said.
One of the guards went out. Dalgetty’s heart stumbled. Dad, he thought. It was anguish in him. Casimir walked over to stand in front of him. Her eyes searched his.
“Don’t be a fool,” she said. “It hurts worse than you know. Tell us.”
He looked up at her. I’m afraid, he thought. God knows I’m afraid. His own sweat was acrid in his nostrils. “No,” he said.
“I tell you they’ll do everything!” She had a nice voice, low and soft, but it roughened now. Her face was colorless with strain. “Go on man, don’t condemn yourself to—mindlessness!”
There was something strange here. Dalgetty’s senses began to reach out. She was leaning close and he knew the signs of horror even if she tried to hide them. She’s not so hard as she makes out—but then why is she with them?
He threw a bluff. “I know who you are,” he said. “Shall I tell your friends?”
“No, you don’t!” She stepped back, rigid, and his whetted senses caught the fear-smell. In a moment there was control and she said, “All right then, have it your way.”
And underneath, the thought, slowed by the gluiness of panic, Does he know I’m FBI?
FBI! He jerked against the straps. Ye gods!
Calmness returned to him as she walked to her chief but his mind whirred. Yes, why not? Institute men had little connection with the Federal detectives, who, since the abolition of a discredited Security, had resumed a broad function. They might easily have become dubious about Bertrand Meade on their own, have planted operatives with him. They had women among them too and a woman was always less conspicuous than a man.
The Second Science Fiction Megapack Page 42
