He chucked the baby under the chin, and it cooed satisfactorily. All was right with the world…
Until a half hour later, when the doctor told him the truth about his child. The invisible but inescapable truth.
It took him a while to fully understand. And when he finally did, his first thought was: How will I tell her?
To his great relief and mystification, his wife took it better than he did. At least she seemed to. Or was it merely that built-in anesthetic that women seem to have that lets them blot out any tragedy that is far enough in the past or far enough into the indefinite future?
Whatever it was, he was grateful for it. Bad enough for a man to have to look ahead decades into the future and face the inevitable, to have to live with the thought of it long before the reality itself…
For a woman, let her just have her son.
He was a boy, just like any other boy, wasn’t he? Like every other normal boy. He would learn to walk, to talk, to play with other children. He’d probably have the mumps, and maybe chickenpox, too. There’d be good report cards and bad ones, he’d come home with black eyes and skinned knees…
Not a monster. A boy like any other boy. A woman could forget. A woman could lose herself in just being a mother.
But for how long could he make himself feel like a father?
The mutation was called immortality, perhaps inaccurately, since it would take forever to know whether it was really possible to live forever.
Nevertheless, men and women began to be bora who did not grow old and die.
Not that they were invulnerable; they simply did not age. A balance was struck in their systems at about the age of twenty, and from that age on, the body renewed itself; nervous system, circulatory system, endocrine system, digestive system—all retained their youthful vigor indefinitely.
They were not supermen. They could succumb to the usual diseases. They were just as prone to accidents as other men. They were neither better nor wiser. The mutation, like most other successful mutations, was a narrow one—it produced otherwise ordinary human beings who would not age.
The why of the mutation was, of course, one of those basically unanswerable riddles of evolution. Why do men have no tails? Why do birds have wings? Why intelligence itself?
Immortality was just one more in nature’s endless series of experiments. Like all the others, it was, in itself, neither a gift nor a curse. It was whatever men would make of it.
And what it would make of men.
He tried earnestly to be a good father. He was not gruff with his son—if anything, he was too gentle, for he could not look at that boyish face without a pang of regret, without a feeling of sadness.
He did try his best. He tried to be a companion to his son: fishing trips, camping, games—they did the usual father-son things together. And later on, he tried to be his son’s confidant, to share his dreams and yearnings and trials. He tried as few fathers try.
But it all fell flat.
Because it was all mechanical, it was all hypocritical. For there was one thing he could not bring himself to try, there was one thing he could not bear.
He could not let himself love his son.
And though he would scarcely admit it, even to himself, he was relieved when his son graduated from college and took a job 3000 miles away across the continent. It was as if half of a great weight were lifted from his shoulders; as if a dagger that had been hanging directly over his head had been moved across the room.
His wife took it like all mothers take it—it hurt to have a continent between her son and herself, but the hurt would grow numb with time…
The immortality mutation bred true. It would be passed along from generation to generation like any other dominant gene. Two immortals could produce immortal children, just as two darkhaired people produce dark-haired children.
The immortals would breed as fast as ordinary men, and since youth and potency would be theirs forever, they would be able to produce an unlimited number of offspring in their millennial life spans.
Since the immortals, in the long run, could easily outbreed mortals, the entire human race would someday be heir to the gift of immortality. In the long run.
In the short run…
Their son wrote home, and when he did, the answering letters were invariably written by his mother and countersigned, unread, by his father.
There were trips home every year or so, visits that his mother waited eagerly for and that his father dreaded. There was no hostility between father and son, but there was no warmth either—neither genuine pleasure at meeting nor sorrow at parting…
He knew that he had closed his son out of his heart. It was a cold, calculating thing to do. He knew that, too.
But he knew that he had to do it, for the sake of his own sanity, to be a rock that his wife could lean on…
It was a sacrifice, and it was not without its cost. Something within him seemed to shrivel and die. Pity, compassion, love, became academic, ersatz emotions to him. They could not move him—it was as if they were being described to him by somebody else.
And occasionally he found himself lying awake next to his sleeping wife, in the loneliest hours of the night, and wishing that he could cry at least one real tear.
Just one…
The laws of genetics are statistical—the coldest form of mathematics. A dominant gene, like the immortality gene, breeds more or less true. Immortality was dominant, death was becoming recessive.
But recessive does not necessarily mean extinct.
Every so often—and the frequency may be calculated by the laws of genetics—two dark-haired people produce a blond, two healthy people a diabetic, two ordinary people a genius or an immortal, two immortals…
The old man’s breath was stilled now. His heart gave one last futile flutter and gave up the fight.
Now there were only two lives in the room, two lives that would go on and on and on and on…
The man searched his heart futilely for some hint of genuine pain, some real and human emotion beyond the bitterness that weighed him down. But it was an old bitterness, the bitterness between father and son that was the fault of neither…
The woman left his side and tenderly, with the tears streaming down her creamy cheeks, she stroked the white mane of the dead old man.
With a trembling sob, she pressed her soft smooth skin against the wrinkled leather of his cheek.
And, finally, after long cold decades, a dam within her husband burst, and the torrent of sternly suppressed love and sorrow flooded the lowlands of his soul.
Two lone and perfect tears escaped his still-impassive eyes as he watched his wife touch her warm young lips to that age-wrecked face.
And kiss their son goodbye.
The Ersatz Ego
My name is Dr. Harvey Sanders. Perhaps you’ve heard of me. Probably not.
I have never sought publicity. Indeed, I shun it. My work is what counts.
It is not spectacular work. It makes no headlines. Yet, in its way, it is making a profound revolution in this country. Not merely a social revolution, but a revolution in the American psyche itself.
I am a psychiatrist. I adjust men’s minds. I adjust them so that they in turn will be able to adjust to social change.
To any social change. I make people happy. Happy under virtually any social conditions.
I have all the accepted degrees from all the accepted universities. But I learned how to make men happy in a very special school—let’s call it the University of North Korea.
My professor of psychology at this unique institution was a Major Sung ping Lee. Sung ping Lee, as far as I know, did not have any of the accepted degrees from any of the accepted universities. But don’t let anyone tell you that Major Sung was not one hell of a psychologist.
I enrolled in the university two days after the Chinese “volunteers” swept south across the Yalu River. I was, at the time, a Captain in the United States Army. I was to become Guinea Pig 537
.
Major Sung was in full control of the situation from the beginning.
“Captain Sanders,” he said, as I sat before him in the bare preliminary interrogation room, “I see that you are a trained psychiatrist. Tell me, Captain, do you propose to give us nothing but your name, rank and serial number?”
“You know the rules of the Geneva Convention as well as 1 do, Major.”
But instead of making threats, Major Sung beamed. “Excellent,” he said. “What a shame if you had chosen to be cooperative at the start! Our experiment would’ve become rather pointless. And what a pity that would’ve been. As it is, I can see that we will have a most interesting time together.”
Sung rose to his feet and placed his shiny, smiling face inches from mine.
“Tell me, Captain,” he said softly, “do you believe in God?”
“What?” I mumbled.
“Oh come now, Captain. Surely you will not be giving away any military secrets by answering that question.”
“Uh… I suppose not. Very well, Major. Let us say for the sake of argument that I do not believe in God.” I smiled. I felt sure I had given him the opposite of what he had expected.
Once again, I was surprised.
“Perfect!” said Sung. “I can see that you will be an ideal subject. Captain, let me assure you that by the end of this month, you most certainly will believe in God.”
“What?”
“Look at my face, Captain. Today it appears to you as the face of a man, an enemy. In a month, you will recognize it as the face of God. That will be all for today, Captain Sanders.”
Early the next morning, I was taken to a different room. Once again, it was bare and Spartan—one chair, and a padded couch, complete with restraints, and sitting next to it, something which looked vaguely like an electroshock therapy apparatus.
Sung was waiting for me.
“Ah, Captain Sanders!” he said. “Today we begin our experiment. Tell me, Captain, what do you think that device is?”
“Some new kind of electroshock apparatus?”
“Very good, Captain. A close guess. So you have some acquaintance with electroshock therapy?”
“Enough to know that if you’re planning to torture me with that thing, you’re wasting your time. Electroshock therapy works by inducing a current directly in the brain. The brain has no pain receptors. You can give me just enough current to knock me out, or enough to kill me, but you can’t make me feel pain. It’s physiologically impossible.”
Sung laughed. “Such lack of subtlety!” he said. “Captain, there are tortures and tortures. Not all of them involve brute pain. Have you ever read a serious study of torture?”
“Torture? What is there to say about torture? You induce pain in the subject until he submits to your will.”
“Ah, but Captain, surely you realize that there is psychic pain as well as physiological pain. Even subconscious pain. Tell me, Captain, you have been using electroshock therapy in the West for a good many years; how does it work?”
“Why, you induce a current—”
“No! No!” said Sung. “I mean how does it really work? Just how does a current induced in the brain bring about psychological change?”
I shrugged. No one really knew the answer to that one.
“Consider Pavlov,” said Sung.
“What about Pavlov?”
Sung grinned. “Pavlov proved that it is the presence of a stimulus, positive or negative, that counts. Pain is a negative stimulus, but that doesn’t mean that every negative stimulus must involve pain. Now this device,” he said, pointing at the strange-looking electrical apparatus, “is something like an electroshock apparatus. It induces a small current in the brain, but never more than just enough to cause a momentary blackout. A pure negative stimulus, so to speak. No pain at all involved.”
“That’s all it does?”
“That’s all. But as you will discover, it is quite sufficient.”
He said something in Chinese, or maybe Korean, and the guards grabbed me and threw me down on the couch. They strapped me in, and Sung attached a set of electrodes to my head.
“Very well,” he said. “Now we begin. And let us begin at the beginning—name, rank and serial number.”
He stepped over to the control console and fiddled with it for a few moments.
“Ah! Now then, your name?”
He threw a switch and I blacked out. No pain, no nothing. Just unconsciousness.
When I came to, it could’ve been a minute, or an hour later. I had no way of knowing.
“Ah!” said Sung. “You are awake. Now then, let us understand each other. Your name is not Harvey Sanders. You do not have a name.”
“Name?” he said.
“Ha—”
Blackness.
Awareness returned. Sung stared in my face. “Name?”
Blackness.
“Name?”
Blackness.
“Name?”
Blackness.
How many times it happened, I can’t remember. Ten? Twenty? A hundred?
Finally, there came a time…
“Name?” said Sung. And there was no blackness. Only… only…
“Come now. I promise you there will be no more shocks. Tell me now, Captain, what is your name?”
“Captain… Captain…”
“Come now, Captain, surely you have a name? Everyone has a name.”
“Of course. Only…”
“Only what?”
“I can’t… I… I have no name.”
“Good, Excellent. But surely you have a rank?”
“Captain, United States Army.”
Blackness.
“Rank?”
Blackness.
“Rank?”
Blackness.
I don’t think it took very many blackouts for me to lose my rank. After all, a name is something you live with all your life.
“Very good,” said Sung finally. “But we must have something to call you, eh? Hmmm… Guinea Pig! That’s it. Guinea Pig 537. Now then, what is your serial number?”
I honestly couldn’t remember.
“Come now, Guinea Pig 537, no serial number?”
I lay there numbly. I was… no one… I was… a man! I was… what did he call me, Guinea Pig 537?
Sung studied my face intently.
“Excellent!” he said. “You are a fine subject, Guinea Pig 537. You have earned your evening meal. Take him back to his cell now.”
That night, I lay on the hard bed, trying to remember.
A name… A name was the thing one was called. It had two parts. One part told what family you came from. I knew what a family was. I had one. There was my mother, and my father, who was dead, and my brother Bill, and my sister Eileen…
And me. My name was…
Was…
Guinea Pig 537.
No! That wasn’t my real name. Sung had called me that, but it wasn’t my name. I knew, because my name was… it was…
Blankness.
“Ah, good morning, Guinea Pig 537!” said Sung. “I hope you slept well. We have a busy day ahead of us.”
I struggled with the straps, but it was no use.
“Now then,” said Sung, “where are you from? Where were you born?”
“New York, New York!” I shouted in defiance. It was a name, a label, a place to cling to.
Blackness.
“Where were you born?”
Blackness.
I lost my birthplace, my age, and my country that day. I was a man. I existed. I had come to this place—Korea—to fight a war. I had been captured somewhere below the Yalu River… I had that much…
For a while.
Day after day, Major Sung ping Lee chipped away at the collection of nomenclature and memories that was me. More and more surrendered and passed into oblivion. My infancy, my childhood, my adolescence…
And all without a twinge of pain. “The brain has no pain receptors,” I had told him.
“There is torture and torture,” Sung had said.
And finally, the ultimate day came.
“Guinea Pig 537!” barked Sung. “Who are you?”
Blankness.
“Where are you?”
Blankness.
“What are you?”
Something bubbled into consciousness in my blighted mind.
“I am!” I shouted. “I am! I am! I am! I am!”
Sung smiled slowly. “At last,” he said. “The final delusion. Very well. What are you?”
“I am!”
Blackness.
“What are you?”
“I am!”
Blackness.
“What are you?”
“I am…”
Blackness.
“What are you?”
Nothingness. Featureless billows of black in a field that was black. Blankness. Oblivion. Nothingness. Pure, undiluted primeval nothingness.
Finally, after aeons of nothingness, millennia of chaos, a voice:
“We have torn it down,” said the voice. “Now we begin to create.”
“Who am I?” said the voice. Blankness.
“I will tell you,” said the voice. “I am God.”
“God…” I mumbled. “God… there is… God…”
“I am the Lord. Do not be afraid. I shall create for you a cosmos. I shall create for you a personality,” said the voice. It chuckled. “Perhaps not quite in my own image.”
“God… God is with me…”
“Let there be light.”
And there was light. A soft yellow light. It was a face. The face of Sung ping Lee.
“Would you like a name?” said the face of God.
“Name…”
“I shall give you a name. Let us call you Harvey. Harvey Sanders. What is your name?”
“Harvey Sanders… Oh, thank you! Thank you, God. Harvey Sanders! Harvey Sanders! My name is Harvey Sanders!”
“You are a man,” said God.
“A man! A man!”
I was a man. My name was Harvey Sanders. I was a man named Harvey Sanders. God had made me a man and given me a name.
The Last Hurrah of the Golden Horde Page 15
