Collected Fiction, page 616
“It was a hideout of La Boucherie’s. That doesn’t mean anything either? Well, there’ve been two guards trailing me ever since I—escaped. They’ve probably got orders to see what happens between us. But don’t ask me why!”
Havers scowled. “I’m certainly not going to trust you at this point,” he said. “You may be one of Llewelyn’s spies yourself.”
“You wouldn’t think so of you had your real memory back.”
“I’ll get it back.”
“Not without my help you can’t,” Pusher said, and glanced at his artificial hand again. “I’ve got an idea. You’ve an appointment at the Center with Llewelyn?”
Mart nodded.
“Okay. My guess is that those guards are just supposed to watch us and report. And to stop us if we try to leave Reno. But suppose we went to Mnemonic Center and saw Llewelyn? Suppose we put the heat on him, and made him restore your memories?”
“You said it takes months.”
“I’ve heard talk of a new machine that does it faster. Instantly. It won’t work for Purging, but it does something—short-circuits the mind—if the guy’s already been purged. Llewelyn’s in charge of Mnemonics. He’d know how to work it. And it’s the only chance you’ll ever have of getting your memories back. Did you really think you could talk Llewelyn into it.”
MART thought of Daniele. A slow, deep anger was burning within him. And there was a hollowness, too, a feeling that he was merely a shadow, that his real substance had been taken from him.
“You help me, I’ll help you,” Dingle said. “But you’ve got to promise to get me out of Reno.”
“How can I?”
“Your uniform’s a passport.”
“What about those guards you say are watching us?”
Pusher looked at his gloved hand again. “Leave that to me,” he said.
The first warning Llewelyn had of trouble was when Havers and Dingle opened the door of his office and stepped inside, each man carrying a smash-gun. Llewelyn didn’t move. His tired face tightened a bit, that was all.
“Don’t move,” Dingle said. He circled the desk, looking for concealed signal buttons. “All right. Stand up. Against the wall. Hold out your arms.”
Deftly he frisked the Leader, while Llewelyn’s eyes held steady on Mart Havers.
“Put down your hands,” Dingle said. “But stay where you are. If anybody comes in, you’ll be killed. Remember that.”
“You’ve been followed,” Llewelyn, said. “Not any more, though,” Pusher said, smiling. “Remember what I said, If there’s trouble, you’ll be the first to get it.”
The Leader was still looking at Havers.
“There’ll be no. interruptions,” he said. “I gave orders that I wasn’t to be disturbed. I wanted to see you alone, Mart.”
“Did you know why I was coming?” Havers asked quickly.
“I guessed. You’ve found out you were Purged. Is that it?”
Mart nodded.
“The human factor always fails us,” Llewelyn said. “With you—and with this other plan. I tried to stop that, but apparently didn’t succeed.”
“What plan?”
“Letting Pusher Dingle escape and get to you.”
“We’re wasting time,” Pusher said, and Havers nodded.
“You know what I want, Llewelyn,” Havers said. “Either I get it now, or I’ll kill you.”
“Your old memories?” the Leader asked. “It’s a long treatment. It takes months.”
“That new machine you’ve got,” Dingle put in. “That, doesn’t take months, does it?” Llewelyn didn’t answer. Mart pushed his gun muzzle forward.
“There’s such a machine?”
“There is. But it’s still experimental. It much too dangerous to use on a human subject yet.”
Havers ignored that.
“Where is it?” Anger rose in him. “I’m not playing. I’m quite ready to kill you. Then we can look for another technician who can work the machine. You can’t stop me now. Understand that?”
Llewelyn nodded toward a door. “It’s in my private lab. Let’s go inside. We’ll be safer from interruptions.”
CHAPTER XIV
The Mind’s High Voltage
PUSHER’S eyes narrowed suspiciously. But the Leader, ignoring the guns aimed at him, turned his back and went slowly across the room. Dingle was at his heels. The door opened.
“Okay,” Pusher said. “I hope.”
They went in. The door shut behind them. The lab was big, but not cluttered. Wiring, mechanisms, calibrated dials and revolving drums—all were vaguely familiar to Mart.
Llewelyn went to a metallic, partly insulated chair arid ran his hand across one of its arms.
“Is that it?” Mart asked.
The Leader nodded. “That’s it, Mart. But you can’t use it. It’s too dangerous.”
“You know how to work it, though,” Pusher said. “If anything goes wrong—” He gestured with his weapon.
Llewelyn turned to face them. “You’re not psychologists or neurologists. The brain’s a delicate mechanism. We’ve been trying to build an artificial synapse between the conscious and the unconscious mind. That’s where your former memories are, Mart—buried in your unconscious. Considered electrically, there’s a high potential built up there. But the insulation between conscious and unconscious is pretty good. That’s a safety measure. If you make an artificial synapse, it’s like running a dangerously high voltage through a copper wire that isn’t made to take it. And there’s only one safety fuse in the mind.” He paused.
“I’ll take the chance,” Mart said.
“Let me tell you what the fuse is. It’s insanity. It’s the final retreat for a mind that’s too overloaded with high voltage. So far we haven’t found a governor to control this device. It bridges the two minds, yes, but it does it too fast to be safe. We don’t know enough about the mind, Mart. Especially one like yours. No potential Leader has ever taken the Purge before.”
“Who was I?” Havers asked slowly. “What could a Leader do that would make a Purge necessary?”
Instead of answering, Llewelyn went off apparently in a new direction.
“It was experimental,” he said. “You were valuable material, and we wanted to save you, if we could. But all—almost all—of your previous memories had to be erased. We had to make sure_ of that. We had to make absolutely certain you’d turn into a bona fide Cromwellian. That’s why we kept checking on you, through Daniele Vaughan and others. After a while we were convinced you were safe, that your unconscious had turned the lock on those dangerous early memories of yours.”
“What were they? That’s what I want to know.”
Llewelyn didn’t answer that either.
“You refused a certain order. Superficially that was unimportant, except it was a bad breach of discipline. But our psychologists checked. So did I. I had a reason for being interested in your case. I suspected that it was your unconscious mind that had prompted your refusal to take on that particular Weather Patrol job. I knew that if the job went through, there’d be an abnormally hot spell in the Aleutians. Some glaciers would break up. One in particular. A certain hideout would be exposed and discovered.”
Dingle caught his breath.
“You didn’t know it had been already discovered. You talked about it when you were given the Purge. Our Guards went up there, but it was empty. So we forgot about it temporarily, until you refused that order. After that, we sent up guards on another routine check, and found out that some lawbreakers had moved in in the meantime.” He glanced at Pusher.
“I’ve known this man, Dingle, before?” Mart said. “Before I was Purged?”
Llewelyn nodded. “We’ve never worked on a Leader’s mind before. We weren’t quite sure how effective the Purge would be, whether the unconscious would keep its secrets. So we had to make sure. I had you brought here so I could study your psychological motivations. I didn’t believe you knew consciously that the Weather job would be dangerous to your—your former friends, but it was your unconscious mind that interested me. I had to make sure you wouldn’t begin regaining your old memories. That’s why I gave orders to let Dingle escape after he’d seen you. I wanted to find out your reaction.”
Havers eyed the chair. “Don’t bother with long explanations,” he said curtly. “They won’t be necessary, after—” He gestured toward the mechanism.
THE Leader didn’t answer. Mart handed his gun to Pusher and sat down in the chair.
“I’ll give you ten seconds,” he said. “After that, you’ll be killed and we’ll find another technician to do what we want.”
“Very well,” Llewelyn said. “My death wouldn’t stop you. This may be the best answer, after all. A Leader’s mind is so complicated that the Purge may stultify it fatally. Perhaps it was a mistake to remove your early memories. From what I know of your mind, Mart, I suspect you have remarkable potentialities. But you need all your brain to develop them. I’ll tell you this. Before your Purge, you were an enemy of Cromwellianism. And now you’re a Cromwellian. Well, I’ll bargain with you. I’ll agree to restore your former memories, if you let me do it my way. The safe way. It will take three months.”
Havers shook his head.
“I don’t trust you,” he said. “Even if I did, I know you’re not at the top. You take orders too—from the Council.”
“This is dangerous. You run the risk of insanity.”
Suddenly Mart found that he didn’t care any more. He found himself vaguely hoping that the treatment would kill him, and the hope was strangely familiar in his mind, as if it stopped into a groove already worn to receive it. In another crisis of his life, somewhere, sometime, lost with the lost life, he had felt as he felt now. “Let it kill me! Let it be finished!”
Pusher Dingle gestured with his gun at Llewelyn.
“Ten seconds,” he said. “Get going.”
Llewelyn looked at Mart. He looked at the switch on the wall above the chair. For an instant he hesitated. Then he shook his head.
“I won’t do it,” he said.
Mart Havers gave him a grim, narroweyed glance. Then deliberately he twisted in the chair and laid his hand on the switch.
“Is this it?”
Llewelyn’s shoulders slumped. He said nothing, but he nodded. Mart’s hand closed on the lever. He pulled it down.
Mart Havers felt the firmness of the chair beneath him, the firmness of the lever in his hand. He felt a quiver of something, some intangible, force, move blindly through him. And then a bomb went off in the center of his brain.
Until that instant no. man could have imagined what the mind of a god might see. In Mart Havers’ mind every pathway worn by every random thought that had ever crossed it for one freakish second stood clear and open. He could look down every pathway to its source. And every path was double.
For his mind was double, too. And the halves were at war.
In that first godlike illumination he did not realize it. He was only stunned by the vast complexity of the memories that poured in upon him. But after the first second, the memories crashed and clashed.
For when Mnemonics altered Havers’ brain, they had implanted ideas diametrically opposed to the ideas already there. They had to. For every erased belief they set up a counter-belief, a contradiction, stemming from false but plausible sources.
So on the one hand, in a series of flashing pictures, Havers seemed simultaneously to see—for one instance—a handsome Guardsman gallant in plumes and scarlet cloak, bravely going down under the treacherous onslaught of squat, sneering men in Freemen emblems, and his emotion choked him with grief and loyalty; and in the same bewildering instant he saw the Freemen as sturdy, courageous martyrs fighting against hopeless odds, and their Guardsman victim a plumed fop who personified all that was evil and decadent.
That conflict multiplied endlessly in the vast spaces upon which any human mind can open. Wave upon wave of passionate conviction surged up and crashed upon an equal, opposing wave, until the tumult overreached the bounds of reason and Mart Havers felt the foundation of his sanity reel beneath that intolerable burden.
He remembered. He remembered not only what surface memories the artificial treatment had erased, but the sources lying far beneath them, from which they had sprung in his childhood. He remembered all that the doctors had said and done above him while he lay at Mnemonics Center unconscious beneath their ministrations. He remembered clearly the false things planted upon the roots of the true things.
But he could not sort out true from false. He believed with perfect conviction in every double truth before him. He knew the Cromwellians were infallible, nobel, good—and he knew they were false, evil, decadent, His mind spun with ideas by which they might be saved and overthrown.
IF IT had been a physical conflict Mart hi Havers might have tom his own body in half to comply with the double convictions that pulled him two ways so ruthlessly, so strong was each side of the combat. But since it was mental, there was no out at all.
No out except the thing Llewelyn had threatened, and Mart’s was a strong mind, potentially so powerful that even under this terrible schism its tough fabric resisted to the very last.
The bomb went off in the center of his brain. He remembered that He remembered, and then shut off his blinded thoughts, the instant when all memories lay frightfully open at one glance. He remembered a moment of such pure torment that the mind dazzled and refused to accept anything more . . .
Long afterward, Pusher Dingle told him what had happened. But Havers had no recollection of leaving the Center, or of their flight. Pusher said he had seemed quite normal. But then Pusher did not know Mart Havers very well. Certainly he must have walked and run, fired his gun when he had to, hidden and lain flat and got up again _to crawl in the shadows—all this as efficiently as a man with his wits about him.
But for all his thinking purposes, Mart Havers was mad for a long while. Mentally he was in a catatonic state of pure death, out of which nothing could shake him. It was his only hope for eventual cure, and he must have known it, in the murky depths of his mind walled off by scar-tissue while healing slowly, slowly took place.
Many days went by before Mart knew where he was, or who he was. And many more before the first painful stirrings of thought began again.
CHAPTER XV
Freemen’s Hideout
LA BOUCHERIE drew the ragged fabric of his once-gala red cloak across his huge shoulders. The corners of his mouth were drawn down. He sat back in his chair, thrusting it against the crude aluminum brace that helped support the cave wall, and eyed Mart Havers.
“Got something?” he asked abruptly.
Mart found another chair.
“Maybe,” he said. “My mind’s still messed up. But I think there may be a way. I’ve been kicking it around with Georgina and Pusher, and it could work. But I wanted to talk to you first, and alone.”
Havers had been here a month, in this top secret hideout near the Pole. It had taken that long for his half-wrecked brain to mend. With a new purposefulness he had forced himself to refrain from thinking ahead, waiting until he felt that he was ready. He was not quite ready yet, but the inaction had grown unendurable. He wanted a showdown.
One reason, perhaps, was the change in La Boucherie. It wasn’t only the man’s altered attitude toward him, though that was significant. There was a new, grudging respect in it, and, a little more of animosity than Mart had ever realized. But he told himself that La Boucherie was under a tremendous strain. Alone, the man had saved the wreck of the Freemen, during the Cromwellian crackdown after Mart’s capture, managing to bring nearly two hundred of them to this new, safer hideout.
La Boucherie had discovered the cavern long ago, Mart learned, but had kept the knowledge to himself. Back in 1948, it had been an experimental station for polar technological experiments, and, insulated beneath the tundra, it had stood safe even after its desertion. It had been completely forgotten, an unfinished construction. But La Boucherie had remembered, and secretly he managed to keep it stocked with food. It had been the haven he needed when the peril came at last.
“Well?” La Boucherie was waiting.
Havers ticked off points, on his fingers. “One, the Freemen are smashed, except for this single cell and maybe some scattered members who can’t help us. We can’t hope to overthrow the Cromwellians. We haven’t enough manpower. We can’t count on the workers to join us, even though they’re in the majority. They’re used to Cromwellian rule. Right so far?”
La Boucherie nodded.
“Two, then. Everything depends on us—what we can do, alone. What are we aiming for?”
“You know that. Overthrow of the Cromwell rule.”
“And then? Setting up another, arbitrary rule won’t be easy. That’s how tyrannies get started. Man should choose his own government. The government he deserves is what he always gets, anyhow. Remember, I’ve been a Cromwellian. I can see both sides of the coin. The trouble with Cromwellianism is that there’s no strong opposition party.”
“You think that you would cure the evil?”
“I think so. But it’s too late to create such a party while the Cromwellians hold power. The time for that passed long ago. They’ve been ruling for so long now that they’re perfectly sure they’re right and that everybody else is wrong. They never question their own rules.”
“So?”
“There are two steps. Make the Cromwellians vulnerable. Then smash them.”
La Boucherie sneered heavily.
“Easy to say,” he remarked, “but they’ve got the weapons and the technology.”
Havers shrugged. “Government depends on a comparatively few key men,” he said. “There are perhaps a hundred Cromwell Leaders in the world today who aren’t expendable. There’s the Council—”
“Thirty-six men in that.”
“You know who-they are?”
“I brought my secret papers with me,” La Boucherie said. “I know who the key men are. You’re right on that point. If we could get rid of perhaps a hundred Leaders, there’d be chaos—until we were smashed and new Leaders stepped into the top posts.”
