The COMPLEAT Collected SFF Works, page 410
As they were returning to their caskets, Patricia said sadly, "Poor Purdy. If only he hadn't managed to die in his sleep."
Chapter Sixteen
HE HAD two hours before cooldown. It was more than enough time, Devlin thought, to recall the details of a conversation which could only have lasted for half of that period.
Brother Howard had been tired, irritable at times and argumentative. When viewed with hindsight he might also find that the Brother had been less than careful about concealing his true intentions, whatever they were. But at that time Devlin had not known enough to ask the right questions ...
"I DON'T quite understand your acceptance standards, Brother," Devlin said. "You keep insisting that the colonists are nothing special. In fact, you seem to suggest that their mediocrity is almost a virtue. Surely you must be looking for some special qualifications?"
For a few seconds Devlin thought that the Brother was not going to answer. He lay on the examination couch, fully dressed except for his shoes and high, tight collar. But then he stretched, sighed and said, "These days, mediocrity is a special qualification."
"If it were as simple as that," said Devlin, irritably, "all you would need from us would be our name, age and sex before putting us into cold storage until it was time to go. I need a serious answer to a serious question."
"And I gave you a serious answer," the Brother replied. "But what you really need, perhaps, is to know if you are just a little bit above normal, or someone who is a shade more average than the others. Well, the trip requires two people aboard to observe, make a few simple decisions and, occasionally if at all, perform simple actions.
"For this reason," he added sardonically, "we have chosen carefully from our very average travelers two who will act as the ship's crew."
"But why the average people?" Devlin burst out. "What is it that you're afraid of? Surely, for the success of the project, you need an above-average crew, at least? Even in these degenerate days there must be a few stable, highly intelligent and dedicated supermen—"
"Like me?"
"If this is something I shouldn't know about, say so," said Devlin angrily. "Don't make jokes."
The couch sighed as Brother Howard raised himself on to his elbows. In a very serious voice he said, "I am too tired, and there is too little time left to me, to waste it making jokes. You would like to know why we seem so abnormally interested in normal people. Well, I must admit there are a few pieces of information that must be concealed from you, for the present, that is—but this is not one of them. Before I try to answer, I want you to think about the present society we are living and all too frequently dying in; now, where would you go to find a superman in these conditions? This is assuming that there ever was such a thing in the first place, and not just an over-trained, hyper-conditioned and force-grown human being. Then ask yourself where do we, the human race, go from here?"
This, thought Devlin impatiently, is the sort of question I have debated many, many times. Mostly he had argued on the side of the optimists, insisting that the combination of the arts and sciences—sensitivity with high technology—were bringing Earth's culture to the brink of a newer and even greater Renaissance. The suffering of a comparative few individuals and the excesses of others were only to be expected, just as the first Renaissance had been marred by its plagues and famines and unbalanced distribution of wealth.
He developed the argument for the Brother, insisting that in spite of the fact that so many individual and group activities were destructive, there had never in all recorded history been so much freedom of expression, so much medical care, so much food and associated comforts available to the population as a whole. Construction of mass-accommodation buildings, road systems and recreational areas—especially in cities with strong and psychologically well-trained security forces—were slowly but surely pulling ahead of the protest groups that were bent only on wrecking civilization for reasons which they themselves could not adequately explain. But then there had always been danger to the individual in a growing vital culture—carnivorous beasts prowling around the village at night, robbers and assassins infesting the highways and cities, and now protesters and Maxers and security forces ...
"You're an oppy, then," Brother Howard broke in. "You like it here?"
Devlin shook his head. "You know I don't. But I want to be optimistic, mostly because I don't want to agree with the doomsters. Then I think about the drugging and killing and senseless destruction of everything that has been or is being built, chaos and ultimate doom is all that I can honestly foresee. Yet the people who realize that we are headed for trouble, and who try to rise to the top where they can do something about it, are usually too old to survive the affairs needed to get there. And the ones who do get to the top without fighting are the ones who do what the people at the bottom want them to—which is nothing, because the people at the bottom don't know what they want.
"Even so, there must be a few who reach the top without losing their ideals, their sensitivity, their feeling of responsibility for the long-term welfare of the people below them," Devlin went on. "These are the kind of people you should send to the stars. I know that I seem to be arguing myself out of a berth on the ship, and I don't want to do that, but I don't think that I'm really fitted for this job. I don't know who is fitted or even—"
"Nobody is really fitted for this job," said the Brother dryly, '"because it is a brand new one. But you could be right. There are probably a few altruists and farseeing types around, but they are much rarer than you realize. The majority of the people from the middle levels to the top, even within the starship project, are motivated by intelligent—sometimes highly intelligent—self-interest. They do very valuable and necessary work, all of them, and very often display compassion and other noble qualities. But when you probe deeply enough, you find that they want power over people, even if it is the power to do only good. That, naturally, is an absolute bar as far as I am concerned."
"But why?" asked Devlin. "Surely we need leaders where we're going? And what about you, Brother? Why aren't you a suitable candidate?"
"Because," said the Brother, "my self-interest, intelligent or otherwise, impels me to stay at home and exert pressure." He smiled wryly, held up one hand and pressed the index finger and thumb together until both nails were rimmed with white, then added, "You could say that I want to give someone, somewhere, the pip."
Devlin shut his mouth firmly so as not to express his anger verbally, but he could not clamp down on the expression on his face.
"Before you accuse me of joking again," the Brother went on, "or you run to a citizen neighbor to borrow his belt, let me tell you that I am giving you the sober truth even if it is, at times, couched in non-serious language. I am a completely unsuitable candidate. Before I became a Brother I was the kind of person that you think is needed for this project—highly trained, highly intelligent, emotionally stable and possessing all the qualities that you seem to think are desirable for the job. But then I had a revelation—a quasi-religious experience, you might say—which made me a fanatic. As such I had time and energy for only one form of activity ..."
Once again he held up his tightly pressed thumb and index finger.
Before Devlin could reply there was a triple shock which jerked his fold-away bed on its supports and made the room's walls creak. The emergency PA began calling for all block security personnel, regardless of status, to evacuate the roof in preparation for a landing by city security forces.
Obviously the protest was turning into a big one and, judging by the shocks to the block's structure, limited mass-destruction weapons were being brought into use. This was only the third time in a year that such a thing had happened in the city, but it could mean serious damage and perhaps destruction of the block's sheltering, albeit unwillingly, the protector force. A large number of bystander casualties might result. Devlin sighed and tried not to think about it while he was waiting for the Brother to start making sense.
"My view of the future is both oppy and doomster," the Brother went on, raising his voice above the sound of the PA. "Earth, our present high level of science and culture, the vast majority, if not all, of the people who live on it, will be gone within a century at most, and it could fall apart within the next decade. To me, and remember that you had the same idea, Earth is like a large, overripe but not quite rotten fruit.
"I arrived at this idea before my, well, revelation, when I was still a sane and well-integrated superman," he went on, without smiling. "The analogy is a reasonably good one. Initially the fruit is small and bitter and not at all pleasant. There is no subtlety of feeling in such a society, no freedom, little happiness for even the very few who grasp power because of the violence which brings them down. But later the fruit begins to grow and ripen. Order is imposed on the earlier chaos; laws and community cooperation replace continual war and give much more individual freedom, which in turn sends minds questing inward toward philosophy and outward into science. The fruit continues to ripen, becomes mature. No longer is anyone forced to labor mindlessly for two-thirds of his or her waking life. There is time to develop new and subtle tastes and forms of pleasant or painful activity. Everyone feels free to indulge in any pursuit he fancies and to go to Hell if that is what he wants to do. Many people, unfortunately, feel free to take the others to Hell with them. So the fruit becomes overripe and the next stage is dissolution and decay ..."
"So endeth the parable," said Devlin patiently.
"So beginneth the parable," the Brother replied firmly, "because here the analogy breaks down. Our growing, ripening fruit is not free to expand indefinitely, you see. It is growing within a thick, strong skin which produces compression effects. Population pressure, diminishing resources, pollution as well as various psychological and social ills are together squeezing a culture which is rotten to the point of fermentation. One, and the most important result of this pressure will be that the seedling or pip of our overripe fruit will be squeezed out."
He brought his index finger and thumb together again, then added very seriously, "The pip has to be directed toward fallow ground."
"Yes," said Devlin, "but ..."
"But the composition of the pip is important," the Brother went on. "There are philosophical aspects that I will not worry you with just yet. However, we at the project think that the whole process is a natural one and that our planetary fruit will emit its seed as naturally and inevitably as a caterpillar becomes a butterfly. But even so, we worry. Not only must we guide our pip toward an area where it will stand the best possible chance of taking root, we must also decide on the type of seed it must be so that it will survive into the indefinite future, because we may not have enough time or resources to squeeze out another pip.
"So we are faced with a hard decision," he continued. "Should we squeeze out a highly intelligent and technically trained pip, which might find its intelligence and training wasted if there should be a forced devolution into a primitive agricultural society? Or should we send hardy, thrusting, aggressive seeds which will survive and spread rapidly and perhaps choke themselves to death as we are doing now, or be destroyed by someone because they have become an obnoxious form of weed? Many times we have asked ourselves these questions, trying to find a seedling whose composition best represented our race.
"The more deeply we went into the questions, the more frightened we became of making a mistake," he went on, rubbing the back of his hand across a suddenly sweating forehead. "In the end we succumbed to moral cowardice and decided, if you could call it a decision, to select for mediocrity ... It can't be my imagination. What is happening to your cooling system?"
"Probably the security forces on the roof are drawing power from this area for their equipment," Devlin replied. "It won't become unlivable, but you'll feel more comfortable without your blouse—that is, if your belief allows you to ..."
"Thank you, no problem," said the Brother. While he was unfastening his black garment he went on, "So you will find no citizens or ex-citizens traveling in the ship. There is nothing at all special about the colonists, other than they are only moderately good, moderately intelligent, neither too idealistic nor too cynical, not too lazy or too energetic and, well, average.
"You see," he continued seriously, "when we really began to look into the situation we found that the ordinary non-aggressive, non-violent, moderate and average people have always been with us, and they have always been in the majority. They have always been here—a great, inert mass of humanity that refused to make anything but the smallest change in their thinking and life-styles when our flashy supermen and world conquerors tried to change, for good or bad, their world. Throughout history they have been like a great mass of sheep, slowly evolving—sometimes because of, sometimes in spite of, the scientific and cultural predators in their midst. They have grown slowly but they have survived as a type even to the present day ..."
He broke off as he pulled the blouse over his head, folded it carefully and placed it on the floor.
"And that is why," he added, "the meek will inherit the new Earth."
Devlin tried hard not to stare at the upper torso which the Brother had revealed. The other was in his middle or late fifties, but the muscle tone was still good. However, the onset of the degenerative processes had caused the scars, which had been left by the removal of a large number of surgically implanted bio-sensors, to show clearly. Devlin had seen pictures of such scarring in the textbooks but until now had never met, or ever expected to meet, such a case. Until now he had not believed that stellar astronauts really existed.
"If supermen are excluded," he said, clearing his throat and trying not to stare at the ghostly scars, "surely the ordinary people must be given training to prepare them for ... I mean, we could meet anything out there."
"What training could we possibly give to an average, normal individual," Brother Howard replied, "that would prepare him to meet the completely unimaginable? No, training as you understand the term is out. It might cause our carefully selected average people to warp or break, and we can't risk that happening. No, Doctor, the process does not involve training, but education ..."
Suddenly the picture and sound of the Brother began to dissolve as a change in the lighting beyond Devlin's closed eyelids brought him back to present time. He opened his eyes to look at the cubicle display.
GOODNIGHT DEVLIN.
The fear of what the next frigid sleep might bring came rushing back to him as he realized that the cold explosion was only seconds away. But there was still a large portion of his mind that remembered only the feeling of awe at speaking to a stellar astronaut who, it had been rumored, had been one of the first to test hibernation anaesthesia in space conditions, and the Brother's enigmatic closing remark before he, too, had wished Devlin goodnight.
"... Before you can understand the people you may meet, you must first fully understand yourself."
Chapter Seventeen
THE DREAM began very badly, with a long and rapid succession of deaths. Like an endless deck of playing cards dealt face upward, they were presented briefly and with all the details clear before being replaced by another face of death with a greater or smaller value of fear, violence or pain.
There was a card for the brontosaurus and the trilobite and the cave-dweller and the old king and many, many others whose deaths he had not experienced before. There was the instant barbecue of an old schoolteacher, the drunken agony of a salesman spitted on his car's steering column, the frantic coughing of a soldier drowning in the blood from his throat wound and an airline pilot who had his third cervical vertebra and a large section of his lower jaw blasted away by a hijacker's bullet.
Some of the deaths were much worse than the others and a few were almost pleasant. These were the slow, comfortable deaths from wasting diseases or exposure when the breakdown of circulation brought drowsiness and a feeling of warmth. But even those cards, although free of the symbols of violence and pain, were often stamped with the dark and dreadful markings of fear of death itself and of what might come after.
Only gradually did he become aware that he was able to make comparisons between these terrible or merely unpleasant deaths and, much later, that he was an individual called Devlin who suffered it all but was at the same time detached from everything that was happening to him.
Devlin did not know how long it was and how often he died before he discovered that he could exercise a small measure of control over the process.
He began by trying to hold on to the less unpleasant dyings for as long as possible—those which were comparatively painless, or those which had pain associated with them but where the fear of death was absent or of secondary importance because of anxiety for or pleasant memories of loved ones. Then he learned how to push away from the death instants, to go farther and farther backward in time into the period preceding the continual and fearfully detailed dyings.
The deaths were not banished or forgotten. They were still the most intense and painful episodes in the dream lives. But now he could be selective, he could tune for the less savage and painful experiences leading up to death in the hope of going even further back to times when there was only life and pleasure instead of death and pain.
A few of the cards Devlin had already seen, but very briefly ...
HE WAS a good salesman and always had been since he had joined the organization at the age of twenty-two. Section heads, supervisors and sales directors of increasing seniority had commended him for his youthful enthusiasm and complete faith in the product of the moment. He had always given every sales pitch everything he had, and he had had a lot to give.
Offers of promotion had come early, but less and less often. Customers were so much wax in his hands, but for some reason he was unable to inspire fellow salesmen to anything like the same degree of enthusiasm. They were a cynical bunch, in general, who refused to share in his act of faith in their product. So he was given selling assignments of increasing importance because, it was said, his talents should not be wasted on a purely supervisory job, and his commission and expenses were the envy of all except his mother.
