Nova 2 Read online

“First,” said the President, “I want to express my appreciation of your cooperativeness. I hope the considerable concessions made by the United States, especially with regard to the Southeast Asia question, seemed more than a bribe to win your presence here. I hope they indicated that my government genuinely desires a permanent settlement of the conflicts that rack the world—a settlement such that armed strife can never occur again.”

  While his interpreter put it into Russian, he watched the two overlords. His heart thumped when Grigorovitch beamed and nodded. Tupilov’s dourness faded to puzzlement; he shook his big bald head as if to clear away an interior haze.

  His political years had taught the President how to assume sternness at will, however more common geniality was. “I shall be blunt,” he continued. “I shall tell you certain home truths in unvarnished language. We can have no peace until every nation is secure. This requires general nuclear disarmament, enforced by adequate inspection. It requires that the great powers join to guarantee every country safety, not against overt invasion alone, but also against subversion and insurrection. Undeniably, every nation that we Americans label ‘free’ is not. Many of their governments are tyrannical and corrupt. But liberation is not to be accomplished through violent revolution on the part of fanatics who, if successful, would upset the world balance of power and so bring us to the verge of the final war.

  “Instead, peace requires that the leading nations cooperate to make available to the people of every country the means for orderly replacement of their governments through genuinely free elections. This presupposes that they be granted freedom of speech, assembly, petition, travel, and worship, in fact as well as in name.

  “Gentlemen, we have talked too long and done too little about democracy. We must begin by putting our own houses in order. You will not resent my stating that your house is in the most urgent need of this.”

  For the only time on record, Igor Tupilov wept.

  “I find it hard to believe,” Mottice whispered. “That fundamental a change . . . from a few radio quanta?”

  “We found it hard to believe, too,” Sigerist admitted, grimly rather than excitedly. “However, your work on synergistics had suggested that the right combination of impulses might trigger autocatalytic transformations in the synapeses. It doesn’t take a lot, you see. These events happen on the molecular level. What’s needed is not quantity but quality: the exact frequencies, amplitudes, phases, and sequences.”

  “Our initial evidence came from rats,” Duarte said. “When we could alter their training at will, we proceeded to monkeys, finally man. The human pattern turned out to be a good deal more complex, as you’d expect. Finding it was largely a matter of cut-and-try . . . and, again, sheer luck.”

  Yuang scowled. “You still don’t know precisely what the chemistry and neurology are?”

  “How could we, two of us in this short a time? Our inducer ought to make quite a research tool!”

  “I am wondering about possible harm to the subject.”

  “We haven’t found any,” Sigerist stated, “and we didn’t just use volunteers for experimentation, we took part ourselves. Nothing happens except that the subject believes absolutely what he’s told or what he reads while he’s in the inducer field. There doesn’t seem to be decay of the new patterns afterward. Why should there be? What we have is nothing but an instant re-educator.”

  “Instant brainwasher,” Ginsberg muttered.

  “Well, it’s subject to abuse, like all tools,” Fenner said. They could see enthusiasm rising in him. “Imagine, though, the potentialities for good. A scalpel can kill a man or save his life. Maybe the inducer can save his soul.”

  The agent of the Human Relations Board smiled across his desk. “I think our meeting has a symbolic value beyond even what we hope to accomplish,” he said.

  Hatred smoldered back at him from dark eyes under a bush of hair. One brown fist thumped a chair arm. The bearded lips spat: “Get with it, mother! I promised you an hour o’ my time for your donation to the Black Squadron, and sixty minutes by that clock is what you’re gonna get, mother.”

  The local head of Citizens for Law and Order turned mushroom pallid. His dull-blue eyes popped behind their rimless glasses. “What?” he exclaimed. “You . . . gave government funds . . . to that gang of . . . of nihilists—?”

  “You will recall, sir,” the Human Relations agent replied, mildly, “that you agreed to come after I promised that the investigation of the assault on Reverend Washington would be dropped.”

  He pressed a button on his desk. “Ringing for coffee,” he said, repeating his smile. “I suspect we’ll be here longer than an hour.”

  He leaned forward. As he spoke, passion transfigured his homely features. “Sirs,” he declared, “you are both men whose influence goes well beyond this community. Your power for good is potentially still greater than your power for evil. A moderate solution to the problems which called forth your respective organizations must be found . . . before the country we share is torn apart. It can be found! If not perfect satisfaction, then equal and endurable dissatisfaction. If not utopia, then human decency. The white man must lay aside his superiority complex, his greed, his indifference to the suffering around him. The black man must lay aside his hatred, his impatience, his unrealistic separatism. We must work and sacrifice together. We must individually strive to give more than we get, in order that our children may inherit what is rightfully theirs: freedom, equality, and well-being under the law. For we are in fact all equals, all Americans, all brothers in our common humanity.”

  He spoke on, and his visitors looked from him to each other with a widening gaze, and at last, slowly, their hands reached forth to clasp.

  “And if a mistake is made,” Duarte answered Fenner in a sarcastic tone, “why, you give the patient a jolt of inducer and straighten him out again.” He grinned. “Sig and I actually got to playing with that. He made me a Baptist. I retaliated by making him a vegetarian.”

  “How’d it feel?” Yuang inquired, sharp-voiced.

  “M-m-m . . . hard to describe.” Sigerist rubbed his chin and leaned back in his chair till he looked at the ceiling. “We knew what was going on, you see, which our test subjects didn’t. Nevertheless, vegetarianism seemed utterly right. No, let me rephrase that: it was right. I’d think of what I’ve read about slaughterhouses and—We foresaw this, naturally. We stuck by our promises to return next day and be, uh, disillusioned, told we’d been forced into a channel, that our prior beliefs and preferences were normal for us. I thought I could make the comparison later, having then experienced both attitudes, and decide objectively which was better. But right away, when Manuel spoke to me, after the slight initial fogginess of mind had cleared, right away I decided what the hell, I do like steak.”

  Duarte sobered. “For my part,” he said, “frankly, I miss God. I’ve considered going back to religion. Might have done so by now, except I realize certain faiths are . . . well, easier to hold, and I’d be sensible to investigate first.”

  Penny twisted a strand of blonde hair nervously between her fingers. Her bare foot kicked an old copy of the Tribe against a catbox ammoniacally overdue for changing, with a dry rustle and a small puff of Aug. Sunlight straggled through the window grime to glisten off bacon grease on the dishes which filled the sink in one comer of her pad. “Like, talk,” she invited. “Do your thing.”

  “I hope you don’t consider me a busybody,” said the social worker in the enormous hat. She sighed. “You probably do. But with your unemployment compensation expiring—”

  Penny sat down on the mattress which served for a bed, lit a cigarette, and wished it were a joint. “I’ll get along.”

  The social worker raised a plump arm to point at Billy, playing contentedly with himself in his playpen. At eighteen months, his face had acquired enough individuality that Penny had felt sure Big Dick was the father. She often wondered where Big Dick had gone.

  “I’m concerned about him,”
the social worker proceeded. “Don’t you realize you’re creating a misfit?”

  “This is a world he ought to fit into?” Penny drawled. “Come off it.” The smoke was pleasantly acrid in her nostrils.

  “Do listen, darling.” The social worker gripped her big purse, almost convulsively, squeezing together the brass knobs on its clasp. “You’re throwing away his life as well as your own.”

  For a moment the peace emblem drawn on the wall wobbled. Damn tobacco, Penny thought. Cancer. She stubbed out the cigarette on the floor. It occurred to her that she really must unplug the bathtub drain, or anyway wash her feet in the sink . . . Oddly hard to concentrate. The woman in the enormous hat droned on:

  “—you’ll move in with yet another man, or he’ll move in with you. Don’t you realize that a kiss can transmit syphilis? You could infect your little boy.”

  Oh, no! Horror struck. I never thought about that!

  “—You say you are protesting the evil and corruption of society. What evil? What corruption? Look around you. Look at the Thailand Peace, the Vienna Detente, the Treaty of Peking. What about the steady decline of interracial violence, the steady growth of interracial cooperation? What about the new penological program, hundreds of prisoners let out of jail every day, going straight and staying straight?”

  “Well,” Penny stammered, “well, uh, yeah, I guess that’s true, like I seen it in the papers, I guess, only can you trust the kept press?”

  “Of course you can! Not that the press is kept. This is a free country. You have your own newspapers of dissent, don’t you?”

  “Well, we got a lot to dissent about,” Penny said. The way the visitor talked and acted, she had to be a person who’d understand. “I don’t work on one myself, though. Like, that’s not my bag. I’m not the kind that wants to kill pigs or throw rocks, either. I mean, a pig’s human too, you know? Only when my friends keep getting busted or clubbed, like that, I can’t blame they get mad. See what I mean? If we could all love each other, the problems would go away. Only most people are so uptight they can’t love, they don’t know how, and the problems get worse and worse.” Penny shook her head, trying to clear out the haze. But things are getting better like she said! “Maybe they’ve finally begun to learn how in the establishment?”

  “They have always known, my dear,” the social worker answered. “What they have found at last is practical ways to cure troubles. We have a wonderful future before us. And violence, dropping out, unfair criticism is not what’s bringing it. What we need is cooperation within the system.

  “You’re not with it, Penny. I’ll tell you where it’s at. Law is where it’s at; the police aren’t your enemies, they’re your friends, your protectors. Cleanliness is where it’s at, health, leaving dope alone, regular habits, regular work; that’s how you contribute your share to the commune. And marriage. You simply don’t know what love is till you’re making it with one cat, the two of you sharing your whole lives, raising fine clean bright children in a country you are proud of—” I . . . I never saw . . . never understood . . .

  Finally Penny cried on the large bosom, in the comforting circle of the plump arms. The social worker soothed her, murmured to her, breathed in her ear, “You don’t have to give up your friends, you know. On the contrary. Help them. Help me call them together for a rally where we can tell them—”

  “What happens to the person who operates the inducer, hands out the propaganda?” Fenner wondered.

  “Oh, the impulses can be screened off,” Sigerist replied. “You can easily imagine how. We used a grounded metal-mesh booth. Manuel’s since designed a screen in the form of a net over the head, which could be disguised by a wig or a hat. For weak short-range projections, anyhow. Powerful ones, meant to cover a large area, would doubtless continue to require a special room for the speaker.” He hesitated. “We haven’t established whether psychoinduction occurs with more than one type of radio input. If it does, perhaps a shield against a given type can be bypassed by another.”

  “I tried to lie, experimentally, while under the field myself,” Duarte said. “And I couldn’t. I’d try to convince a volunteer that, oh, that two and two equals five. Right off, I’d get appalled and think, ‘You can’t do that to him! It isn’t a fact!’ Of course, fiction or poetry or something like that was okay to read aloud, except I got some odd looks from our subjects when I kept explaining at length that what they were hearing was untrue.”

  “So we’d either speak our lies from the booth,” Sigerist put in, “or we’d tell them things we knew . . . believed . . . were real. That’s another funny experience. Reinforcement in the brain, I suppose. At any rate, you grow quite vehement, about everything from Maxwell’s equations on up. We confined ourselves to that sort of thing with the volunteers, understand. First, we’d no right to tamper with their minds. Second, we didn’t want to give the game away. They were always told this was a study of how the tracings on a new kind of three-dimensional EEG correlate with verbal stimuli. Our falsehoods were neutral items. ‘Have you heard Doc Malanowicz is trying to use the Hilsch tube in respiratory function measurements?’ Next day we’d disabuse them, always in such a fashion that they didn’t suspect. We hope. The spectacular lies we saved for each other.” His chuckle was not too happy a sound. “I’m a Republican and Manuel’s a Democrat. When we were experimenting, both of us under the inducer field—the temptation to make a convert grew almighty strong.”

  “Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States.”

  “My fellow Americans. Tonight I wish to discuss with you the state of the nation and of the world. Our problems are many and grave. You know them both by name and by experience—international turmoil; cruel ideologies; subversion; outright treason; lawlessness; domestic discord, worsened by the unfair criticism of certain so-called intellectuals—a small minority, I hasten to add, since by and large the intellectual community is firmly loyal to the American ideal.

  “What is that ideal? Let me tell you the eternal truths on which this country is founded, for which it stands. We believe in God. We believe in country; we stand ready to fight and die if need be, in the conviction that America’s cause is always just. We believe in the democratic process, and therefore in the leaders which that process has given us—”

  Ginsberg whistled. “If this gadget fell into the wrong hands—Help!”

  “Would it necessarily?” Fenner asked. His glance flickered around the table. “I know what you’re thinking,” he said in a hurried voice. “ ‘The H-bomb’s not in a class with this.’ Right? Well, let me remind you that thermonuclear fusion is on the point of giving us unlimited power . . . clean power, that doesn’t poison air or soil. Let me remind you of lives saved and knowledge gained through abundant radionuclides. And the big birds haven’t flown yet, have they?” He drew breath. “If this, uh, inducer is as advertised, and I see no reason to doubt that, why, can’t you see what it’ll mean? Research. Therapy. Yes, and securing the world. I don’t mind admitting I’d turn it on some of those characters who’re destroying the ecology that keeps us all alive. Why not? Why can’t the inducer be used judiciously?”

  “One problem is, when you have the specs, this is an easy thing to build, at least on a small scale,” Sigerist replied. “Now when in history was perfect security achieved? You can’t reach the entire human race, you know. You may broadcast ‘Love thy neighbor’ while flooding the planet with inducer waves. But what of the guy who doesn’t tune you in? Suppose he happens to be reading Mein Kampf instead? Or is down in a mine or driving through a tunnel? Or simply asleep?

  “Is everyone who’s to be given any knowledge of the inducer’s existence . . . will everybody be dragooned first into a mental Janissary corps? I don’t see how that can be practical. Their very presence and behavior would tip off shrewd men. And then there are ways . . . burglary, assassination, duplication of research . . . And once the fact is loose—”

  Pidge had to stand a minute and fight his ner
ves after he stepped out of the car. What if something went wrong?

  The suburban street (trees, hedges, lawns, flowers, big well-built houses, under afternoon sunlight that brought forth an odor of growth and a chorus of birdsong) pressed him with its alienness. He was from the inner city, tenements, dark little stores, bars and poolhalls that smelled of urine, smog and blowing trash and thundering trucks and gray crowds. This place was too goddamn quiet. Nobody around except a couple of kids playing in a yard, a starchy nurse pushing a stroller down the sidewalk, a dog or two.

  Pidge squared his narrow shoulders. Don’t crawfish now! After the casing you’ve done, the money you’ve laid out—He rallied resentment. You’re not doing a thing except claiming your share. The rich bitches have pushed you around too goddamn long.

  And he wasn’t drawing any attention here. He was sure he wasn’t. White, and small, not like those bastards who’d shoved him out of their way through his whole life, oh, he’d show them how brains counted . . . Shave, haircut, good suit, conservative tie, shined shoes, Homburg hat (the wires and transistors beneath his wig enclosed his scalp like claws), briefcase from the Goodwill and car borrowed but you couldn’t tell that by looking. And he’d spent many hours in this neighborhood, watched, eased into conversation with servants; everything was known, everything planned, he’d only to go through with his program.

  And They wouldn’t appreciate his backing out. He’d had a tough time as was, wheedling till They let him in on the operation—the set of operations—he’d gotten wind of. Buying in had cost him all he could scrape together and a third of the haul when he was finished. And it had demanded he do his own legwork and prove he had a good plan.

  Well, sure, they’d had plenty of trouble, expense, and risk beforehand, to make these jobs possible. Finding out what was being done in the jails that turned so many guys into squares, hell, into stoolies; finding guards who could be bought; arranging for an apparatus to be smuggled out and stuff to be left behind so the fuzz would think it’d simply been busted; getting those scientific guys to copy the apparatus. And of course it couldn’t be used more than for maybe a week, on the scale that they intended. Though people were awful stodgy, unalert, these days—those that watched the speeches on TV or read the papers; don’t ever do that, Pidge—the cops wouldn’t be too dumb to understand what had happened. Then the apparatus wouldn’t be good for anything but hit-and-run stuff.