Robert Lionel, page 8
. . . with its eloctric mind-probes and its two-way stellar vision relays; with its hidden microphones and its hidden T.V. cameras. A world in which the Secret Police are everywhere. A world in which the Secret Police know everything. A world in which security has become something of a god; an evil deity, an omniscient badness, that evaded and infiltrated. . . .
Living in the Rajak Eurasian Utopia was rather like living on a microscope slide. It was like existing all the time at the viewing end of a telescope. One was constantly under the glare of the footlights, constantly under observation. Every word and deed were subject to scrutiny and analysis. They were checked and rechecked, certified, verified. It was an accountant's paradise and a human being's nightmare. The whole sociological stratum was gradually becoming a kind of civiliZation machine, a machine in which there was no room whatever for irregularities. And as the society pressed on remorselessly to its ghastly ultimate, so it became narrower and tighter.
Thought, even secret thought, became channeled down. A man's looks, his very vocabulary, could cause him to be suspected of espionage against the state. Even the mildest form of suspected espionage was a capital offense in the
Eurasian Utopia of Rajak the Magnificent. . . .
This was "1984" a thousand times more terrible than George Orwell ever envisaged it. This was the day of the Dictator. This was an earth that had been turned into hell.
This was Milton's "Paradise Loot" with no trace, not even the faintest suspicion, of any redemption. There was no savior-at least none, as far as the people could see; none, as far as their fear-conditioned minds were able to imagine, who could ever deliver them from the ghastly-subsistence into which life had degenerated. . . .
The guards marched out with Captain Ertzmann at their head. Even in his own thoughts he had been Ertzmann for so long now that he had forgotten his Christian name. Christian names were frowned upon; one had a surname and a number. If one was a sufficiently high rainking officer, one could drop the surname and be known by one of the priority numbers only. So far he had got. as far as being "Ertzmann." Until the last few hours he had dreamed of dropping the Ertzmann and becoming one of those super-efficient numbers; a super-efficient cog in tho machine; one of the inner wheels, one of the major gear, that ground the huge complex, civilized structure along, to a conclusion which he could now see was nothing other than ultimate destruction. His face was completely imo t passive, but his mind was a mass of brilliant thoughts, that had lain dormant for so long that he himself had been unaware of their existence until that moment. He glanced over his shoulder at the line of guardsmen behind.
him-men who would follow blindly into the glass cham-
>her in that room to which they had now descended.
A36 and A38 stood waiting by the firing mechanisms.
A strong guard of other security men lined the doorway and the walls. The area sub-officer saluted in the official way.
"May success attend you, in the name of RaJak tne Magnificent," he intoned. The fanaticism had become almost a religion with the automatons who carried out its every dictate. Ertzmann suddenly remembered his Christian name. It had been Paul. Paul Ertzmann. He liked the sound of Paul. It was somehow vaguely individualistic.
"Individualistic." A forbidden word, part of the old forbidden vocabulary. He knew that the liberationists used it.
They often used it when they were questioned, or at least when they had been questioned by the old physical torture methods. Nowadays the truth drugs seemoo to knock it all out of them. It even swept their vocabularies away. . . . It made them speak like members of the New Order. He thought carefully again about this trait of individualism.
Men were not cogs in a machine, turned out with the same precisjon that men turned. out ball bearings and gears and electronic relays. Men were considerably more than that.
They had personalities. Personalities. Another forbidden word! He knew now that these words meant something.
When he himself had been fully convinced, he had been as certain and fanatical about the doctrines of the New Order as all the other members of the security guard were, and as the high ranking officers above him were; in the recent past, he himself had been convinced that these things were so right and correct that they were the only way of life.
Then he had felt that the unfortunate liberation forces
were poor deluded fools who prattled meaningless words, simply because they were maladjusted to the society. And that explanation had actually satisfied him. He realized now that the long arm of coincidence did not stretch so far, that it was impossible for a whole group to have exactly the identical maladjustment. . . .
He found himself breaking off short in his train of thought, as A36 gestured toward the glass globe.
"Before you take your place, the machine will be shown briefly to you; then the electro encephalograph reversal treatment will implant the necessary survival data for the epoch in which you will find yourselves, as I explained in the briefing," said the officer. They looked carefully at the machine. Paul looked carefully at the guards with him-his select band! Deep down inside himself, his real personality was laughing grimly. He remembered the words of some historic religious song that he had come across somewhere in some ecclesiastical premises that had been raided-funny how things stick in your mind, he told Himself. . . . !
"O happy band of pilgrims." That was it. "O happy band of pilgrims." He looked round at his own hand-picked thugs, his sadists, his hired automatic killers. Men in name only. Simply obedient flesh and blood. Machines that need rood and water instead of oil and grease. Deep within him ais heart sank. In a few years this would be all that was left of humanity. For the first time in his life he felt a genuine pang of regret and remorse. He felt a tremendous sense of shame when he thought of the part he had played in the death of old Eric Rhinegow. Fool, he accused himself, blind, idiotic, fanatical fool, and then recalled something else that he had found in a pile of ancient literature that was being burnt. "The blood of the martyrs is the seed"
of the Church." He had not understood the words at the time. They had seemed no more than the strange ravings of these peculiar liberationists. "The blood of the martyrs,"
he repeated mentally, "is the seed of the Church." They clicked into place now; he knew the meaning' of the words -
fully. . . . A martyr-a man who died for something he believed in-as liberationist after liberationist had died by cruel torture for the things that he or she had believed in.
Old Eric Rhinegow had been one of those. . . . His blood that had spilt onto the security guard room floor where the bayonets had his aged flesh. That blood had been the seed of the new idea, the new dawning, the drawing aside of the curtains.
These liberationists, Ertzmann knew, believed in some kind of life after death; they believed in a soul, an indestructible eternal essence that went on when life was extinct. When the physical body was destroyed they believed that the real person, the real man, the real mind, went on and was not extinguished. If that was so, then the real Eric R4inegow might even be watching him at that moment. And if the eternal spirit of the old man was able to look deep within him and read his innermost thoughts, as even the security guards were unable to do, then he would have in some way atoned for his part in the death.
For he knew that the old man would find satisfaction in what he saw.
He realized, as they fitted the electro encephalograph
reversal indoctrinator to his head and to the heads of the party who were accompanying him, even as his subconscious was imbibing the archaic French and the other information that they would need in the epoch to which they were about to be transported-that there was far, far more to life than he had ever envisaged in his wildest and most improbable dreams. There were, he could see, certain moral standards, things which he had always regarded as the ravings of the wildest lunatics. and yet standards which now held inexorably true. As though the dirt of centuries had been swept away from his mind, revealling something clean and worthwhile, he was able to realize in the depths of his own understanding that all the meaningless words and phrases which had tumbled from the lips of captured liberationists had been true; had been part of a huge gestalt, or pattern, which now made overwhelm-ingly straightforward Common sense.
It opened up to him whole new vistas of thought. Life changed from shades of drab grey to a magnificent panorama, a phantasmagoria of superb tints and hues.
He was vaguely aware the reversal device was being removed from his head He looked round at his men. He and they knew that when they required it, deep within their minds, as ~ for them to recall as this morning's breakfast, or the headlines of today's paper, was a complete new vocabulary, even the ability to think in archaic French if they required it. They knew without being told the manners and the customs, for the carefully garnered data from the Imperial Research Museum had been recorded on to a tape. The tape, containing the vocabulary and all necessary information, had then been fed as a series of code electronic patterns into the reversal device.
It had been picked up by their own subconscious minds and was now as much a part of their memories as if it had been acquired by a process of long, slow mental effort. It was the perfect method of learning. It saved time, and time was as vital as obediooce in the Eurasian Utopia of Rajak the Magnificent. TlD1e, nature, and eventually the whole cosmos itself, if the party and the dictator had their way, would eventually become one huge, smoothly ron-ning machine that obeyed without question the dictates of that great dictator.
Again a two-,handed salute from the area sub-officer, who was eight grades superior in the order. Looking at him, Paul Ertzmann wondered what kind of mind the man reaIly had. It gave him no small sense of satisfaction to realize that however superior the officer might be in the order of the dictator, and by the standards of the Eurasian regime, as far as personality, and plain, straightforward humanity were concerned, the man was practically nonex-istent. . . . He was a nonentity; he had not found tnat one vital spark which had been kindled into a sudden flarina light in the heart of security Captain Paul Ertzmann.
The glass cylinder lifted, there was room in a pinch four men inside, and believing as they did in efficiency, the scientists had decided that four moo should go.
Ertzmann and three of his hand-picked guards made their way on to the crystalline quartz, and the glass cylinder settled around them. Oddly enough, Ertzmann was not afraid. Many men would have been overawed at the
possibility of traveling through time, but there was still sufficient of the Eurasian military disciplin about him to cast out all fear in obedience to orders. It was that kind of discipline which enabled the Eurasian armies to charge through hails of crackling energy bolts to death in battles for the expansion of their borders. It was this obedience to discipline which enabled the Eurasian anti-grav pilots to bring their gigantic warships crashing down with suicidal velocities upon enemy shipping. It was, in fact, the reaction of the completely conditioned mind to any environment. And yet in Ertzmann's case there were other feelings present. Although his military training and conditioning had removed all fear from his mind, the curiosity which was part of the natural mati, now reasserting itself, after years of contrary training, was looking round with great interest at the interior of the time vortex chamber.
The grey mist was beginning to infiltrate, as if it were poison gas pumping into the devitalizing chamber. .. . The mist ~w thicker, and Ertzmann decided that it might be a good idea to take a deep breath, in case there was anything actively unpleasant in the grey mist. He was glad that he had done so, for he noticed a few seconds later that as the mist grew in intensity and became tinged with purple and finally black, his colleagues were having difficulty in remaining upright. One by one the security guards slumped to the floor. Ertzmann reached his hand out to touch the side of the cylinder and managed with swimming head to remain upright. The glass itself disappeared; the date became evident in fiery red letters, then melted like wax before the heat of a torch. Then Ertzmann felt that he, too, must succumb. His knees buckled, his broad shoulders bowed, his great deep chest heaved. Then he, too, sagged down on top of the unconscious security guards. He did not fully lose consciousness, but experienced a kind of paralysis which gripped him.
The great grey-black mist continued to press in and enclose them.. The darkness grew more and more pronounced, became darker and thicker and mote tarij!;ible with every passing second. Ertzmann was vaguely aware that the guardsmen beneath him were groaning as though they were under great stress or in pain. Their eyes were closed, but he could see the retinas were moving under-neath, as the nerves twitched the muscles of the eyes themselves. His eyes grew heavier and heavier until at last he was forced to close them.
He knew, even though they were closed, that the I darkness was still there. It grew thicker still. He felt almost overcome by it. He felt that his heart, his lungs, his muscles, his bones, his sin~ws, must yield to this crushing black amorphousness, and yet it did not do so. He lived as though he were dead. He felt as though his body had been lowered into wet black concrete, concrete which was setting and contracting with every passing second. . . . He felt that the end of the world had come and gone a thousand times. It was like being in the grip of some dreadful implo-sion; as though he were shrinking, and then ~xpanding; as though he were a diver without a suit, being dragged to th~
bottom of the ocean by remorseless lead weights upon his ankles, and, as the pressure increased; as though his body
were being ground down into th~ size of a walnut. Yet he knew that there was no real physical change taking place.
There was no alteration in his physiological chara~
teristics. He was still Paul Ertzmann; he still weighed around a hundred and seventy pounds. His hair was still black and his eyes were still grey. He could not move his arms and legs, the body was still responsiv~ to the mind, but both lay helplessly paralyzed above th~ other bodies slumped on the crystalline quartz of the floor. Just as it seemed that flesh and blood could stand no more, when it seemed that nerve and sinew must surely snap with the tremendous in-pressing strain, when it seemed that the tremendous pressure must overcome the most courageous effort of physical endurance, the miracle happened. The darkness began to lift. . . slowly. . . slowly, so slowly that it didn't seem real; like a man who has placed hi.~ hand ac-cidentally on a hot pipe and finds that he cannot get it off, and then in spite of the blistering agony, finds that the pipe is gradually starting to cool. And so it was with Ertzmann and the other guards. Inch by inch; ounce by ounce; the great w~ight and pressure of the dreadful Stygian blackness seemed gradually to lift. The blackness gave way to grey, the grey to purple, the purple to grey, and the grey to opalescent light. And the dreadful voyage backwards through time was over. There was a short red flash on one of the cylindrical walls, and then even the cylinder disappeared. There was nothing but a puff of grey mist.
They found themselves in the courtyard of an inn.
There was no one in sight. Their conditioning sprang un-bidden to their memories. Ertzmann gave swift orders which he knew his men would comprehend before he even bothered to utter them. For he knew that they, too, had received similar conditioning. The thoughts of freedom and the new ideas about liberationism, which had previously gone through his head, he pushed gently into the background until he judged that the opportunity would be ripe to bring them into operation. There were four more guardsmen due to arrive when the cylinder discharged its second load; and when the original party had recovered from their journey and gotten their bearings, the second, party had arrived. It had not occurred to Ertzmann until that moment to consider how thoroughly efficient the conditioning must have been. For at some time or other, while he and his followers had been under the influence of electro encephalograph reversal process, their uniforms had been changed to perfect replicas of the douaniers' uniform of the period. They knew- their lines, and like actors in costume, they were ready to play their part. Each had also been supplied with a mental image of the features of Mike Grafton. There would be very little difficulty for them in tracking him down. When the entire party of eight was assembled, they made their way to the inn door.
"We are looking for a stranger."
Ertzmann gave as close a description as he could of the missing man. The inn-keeper noted the number in the party, the grim, determined expressions on the cold, stem faces, and his heart sank within him.
"He-er-he has been here," he admitted.
"Is he here now?" demanded Ertzmann in the archaic
french that sprang so naturally to his lips, now that there was an occasion to use it. Silently the inn-ke-eper nodded again. Another look at those cold grim faces told him that, it would be advisable to tell the whole story. Briefly he poured out the episode of the watch and the man with the strange grey clothes.
"Yes, an English spy, as we suspected. He was last seen wrearing such clothes," snapped out Ertzmann quickly. In-wardly he knew it was Grafton without a shadow of doubt. The inn-keeper showed the watch, and a final seal was put upon the knowledge that the security men had already held almost for certain.
"He's in the room upstairs," whined the inn-keeper. "I trust I have. done nothing to offend the Emperor.
"You have done nothing worthy of punishment," said Ertzmann coldly. "It is well, though, that you have told us the truth and not attempted to shield this spy. Come."
with a swift movement of his arm he beckoned the security guards upstairs. As they mounted the stairs, he wondered whether there would be any possibility of saving Grafton. He wanted very much to have a talk with the liberation man. It might be his great chance to make a break. He looked round at his own forces, eight of them.
