The Santaroga Barrier

  Dasein shook his head. There was almost meaning in Piaget’s words, but the sense eluded him. He wet his lips with his tongue. “What?”

  Piaget scowled. “Jenny knows rapport. She said you’d probably show up here.” His voice sounded suddenly full of effort.

  An arriving, Dasein thought.

  It was a label for an event, a statement withholding judgment. He studied Piaget’s wide, bland face.

  “I saw children,” Dasein said.

  “What did you expect?”

  Dasein shrugged. “Are you going to run me off?”

  “AI Marden says the ones that run get the fever,” Piaget said. “The ones that watch get the benefit.”

  “Count me among the watchers,” Dasein said.

  Piaget grinned, opened the truck door. “Come.”

  Dasein remembered the river, hesitated. He thought of the torn carpet in the Inn’s hallway, the open gas jet, the lake, the arrow … the paint bleach. He thought of Jenny running away from him—“Stay away from me! I love you.”

  “Come along,” Piaget said.

  Still hesitating, Dasein said: “Why’re the children kept here?”

  “We must push back at the surface of childhood,” Piaget said. “It’s a brutal, animate thing. But there’s food growing.” He gestured at the expanse of greenhouses. “There’s educating. There’s useful energy. Waste not; want not.”

  Again, Dasein shook his head. Almost-meaning.

  Push back at the surface of childhood?

  It was like schizophrenic talk and he recalled the incident in the Blue Ewe, the haunting conversation of the young couple.

  How could one hear a sunset?

  “You … you’re not speaking English,” Dasein complained.

  “I’m speaking,” Piaget said.

  “But …”

  “Jenny says you’ll be an understander.” Piaget scratched his cheek, a pensive look on his face. “You have the training, Dasein.” Again, his voice took on that leaden effort. “Where’s your Weltanschauung? You do have a world view? The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.. What is it?”

  Piaget’s arm swept out to include the greenhouse complex and the entire valley, the world and the universe beyond.

  Dasein’s mouth felt dry. The man was insane.

  “You contain the Jaspers experience,” Piaget said. “Digest it. Jenny says you can do it. Reality shoots through her words.”

  The tight sensation was a pain in Dasein’s chest. Thoughts tumbled through his mind without order or sense.

  In a heavy voice, Piaget said: “For approximately one in five hundred, the Jaspers cannot …” He spread his arms, palms up. “You are not one of those few. I stake a reputation on it. You will be an opening person.”

  Dasein looked at the stone building, the hurrying people. All that action and purpose. He sensed it all might be like the dance of bees—motions designed to show him a direction. The direction escaped him.

  “I will try to put it in the words of outside,” Piaget said. “Perhaps then …” He shrugged, leaned against the side of the door to bring his broad face close to Dasein. “We sift reality through screens composed of ideas. These idea systems are limited by language. That is to say: language cuts the grooves in which our thoughts must move. If we seek new validity forms, we must step outside the language.”

  “What’s that have to do with the children?” Dasein nodded toward the greenhouses.

  “Dasein! We have a common instinctive experience, you and I. What happens in the unformed psyche? As individuals, as cultures and societies, we humans reenact every aspect of the instinctive life that has accompanied our species for uncounted generations. With the Jaspers, we take off the binding element. Couple that with the brutality of childhood? No! We would have violence, chaos. We would have no society. It’s simple, isn’t it? We must superimpose a limiting order on the innate patterns of our nervous systems. We must have common interests.”

  Dasein found himself grappling with these ideas, trying to see through them to some sense in Piaget’s earlier words. Push back at the surface of childhood? World view?

  “We must meet the survival needs of individuals,” Piaget said. “We know the civilization-culture-society outside is dying. They do die, you know. When this is about to happen, pieces break off from the parent body. Pieces cut themselves free, Dasein. Our scalpel—that was Jaspers. Think, man! You’ve lived out there. It’s a Virgilian autumn … the dusk of a civilization.”

  Piaget stepped back, studied Dasein.

  For his part, Dasein found himself suddenly fascinated by the doctor. There was a timeless essence in the man, powerful, intrusive on everything about him. Framed in the white smock’s collar was an Egyptian head, strong cheeks and jaws, a nose out of Moses’ time, white even teeth behind thin lips.

  Piaget smiled, a deaf smile of ultimate stubborness, let a honeyed look flow across the landscape around them, the greenhouses, the people.

  Dasein knew then why he’d been sent here. No mere market report had prompted this. Marden had nailed it. He was here to break this up, smash it.

  The Santarogans were working their children here, training them. Child labor. Piaget seemed not to care how much he revealed.

  “Come along,” Piaget said. “I’ll show you our school.”

  Dasein shook his head. What would it be in there? An accidental push against broken glass? A child with a knife?

  “I’ m … I have to think,” Dasein said.

  “Are you sure?” Piaget’s words dropped on the air like a challenge.

  Dasein thought of a fortress abbey in the Dark Ages, warrior monks. All this was contained in Piaget and his valley, in the confidence with which Santarogans defied the outside. Were they really confident? he wondered. Or were they actors hypnotized by their own performance?

  “You’ve been a swimmer on the surface,” Piaget said. “You haven’t even seen the struggle. You haven’t yet developed the innocent eye that sees the universe uncluttered by past assumptions. You were programmed and sent here to break us up.”

  Dasein paled.

  “To be programmed is to be prejudiced,” Piaget said. “Because prejudice is selecting and rejecting and that is programming.” He sighed. “Such pains we take with you because of our Jenny.”

  “I came here with an open mind,” Dasein said.

  “Not prejudiced?” Piaget raised his eyebrows.

  “So you’re contending with … groups outside over what’s the right way …”

  “Contending is too soft a word, Dasein. There’s a power struggle going on over control of the human consciousness. We are a cell of health surrounded by plague. It’s not men’s minds that are at stake, but their consciousness, their awareness. This isn’t a struggle over a market area. Make no mistake about it. This is a struggle over what’s to be judged valuable in our universe. Outside, they value whatever can be measured, counted or tabulated. Here, we go by different standards.”

  Dasein sensed threat in Piaget’s voice. There was no longer a veneer of pretense here. The doctor was setting up the sides in a war and Dasein felt caught in the middle. He was, he knew, on more dangerous ground than he’d ever been before. Piaget and his friends controlled the valley. An ex-post-facto accident would be child’s play for them.

  “The ones who hired me,” Dasein said, “they’re men who believe …”

  “Men!” Piaget sneered. “Out there …” He pointed beyond the hills which enclosed the valley. “ … they’re destroying their environment. In the process, they’re becoming not-men! We are men.” He touched his chest. “They are not. Nature is a unified field. A radical change in environment means the inhabitants must change to survive. The not-men out there are changing to survive.”

  Dasein gaped at Piaget. That was it, of course. The Santarogans were conservatives … unchanging. He’d seen this for himself. But there was a fanatic intensity to Piaget, a religious fervor, that repelled Dasein. So it was a strugg
le over men’s minds …

  “You are saying to yourself,” Piaget said, “that these fool Santarogans have a psycheletic substance which makes them inhuman.”

  It was so close to his thoughts that Dasein grew still with fear. Could they read minds? Was that a by-product of the Jaspers substance?

  “You’re equating us with the unwashed, sandaled users of LSD,” Piaget said. “Kooks, you would say. But you are like them—unaware. We are aware. We have truly released the mind. We have a power medicine—just as whiskey and gin and aspirin and tobacco … and, yes, LSD, just as these are power medicines. But you must see the difference. Whiskey and the other depressants, these keep their subjects docile. Our medicine releases the animal that has never been tamed … up to now.”

  Dasein looked at the greenhouses.

  “Yes,” Piaget said. “Look here. That is where we domesticate the human animal.”

  With a shock of awareness, Dasein realized he had heard too much ever to be allowed out of the valley. They had passed a point of no return with him. In his present state of mind, there was only one answer for the Santarogans: they had to kill him. The only question remaining was: Did they know it? Was any of this conscious? Or did it truly operate at the level of instinct?

  If he precipitated a crisis, Dasein knew he’d find out. Was there a way to avoid it? he wondered. As he hesitated, Piaget moved around the truck, climbed in beside him.

  “You won’t come with me,” he said. “I’ll go with you.”

  “You’ll go with me?”

  “To my house; to the clinic.” He turned, studied Dasein. “I love my niece, you understand? I’ll not have her hurt if I can prevent it.”

  “If I refuse?”

  “Ahh, Gilbert, you would make the angels weep. We don’t want weeping, do we? We don’t want Jenny’s tears. Aren’t you concerned about her?”

  “I’ve some anxiety about …”

  “When anxiety enters, inquiry stops. You have a hard head, Gilbert. A hard head makes a sore back. Let us go to the clinic.”

  “What kind of death trap have you set up there?”

  Piaget glared at him in outrage. “Death trap?”

  Holding as reasonable a tone as he could manage, Dasein said: “You’re trying to kill me. Don’t deny it. I’ve …”

  “I’m disgusted with you, Gilbert. When have we tried to kill you?”

  Dasein took a deep breath, held up his right hand, enumerated the accidents, dropping a finger for each one until his hand was clenched into a fist. He had left out only the incident with Petey Jorick … and that because of a promise.

  “Accidents!” Piaget said.

  “As we both know,” Dasein said, “there are very few real accidents in this world. Most of what we call accidents are unconscious violence. You say you’ve opened your mind. Use it.”

  “Pah! Your thoughts are like muddy water!”

  “Let the muddy water stand and it becomes clear,” Dasein said.

  “You can’t be serious.” He glared at Dasein. “But I see that you are.” He closed his eyes momentarily, opened them. “Well, would you believe Jenny?”

  Stay away from me! I love you! Dasein thought.

  “Let’s go to your clinic,” Dasein said. He started the truck, backed out of the parking lot and headed toward town.

  “Trying to kill you,” Piaget muttered. He stared out at the landscape rushing past them.

  Dasein drove in silence … thinking, thinking, thinking. The instant he headed toward Jenny, the old fantasies gripped him. Jenny and her valley! The place had enveloped him in its aura—crazy, crazy, crazy! But the pattern was emerging. It was going together with its own Santaroga kind of logic.

  “So not everyone can take your … power medicine?” Dasein asked. “What happens to the ones who fail?”

  “We take care of our own,” Piaget growled. “That’s why I keep hoping you’ll stay.”

  “Jenny’s a trained psychologist. Why don’t you use her?”

  “She does her tour of duty.”

  “I’m going to ask Jenny to leave with me,” Dasein said. “You know that, don’t you?”

  Piaget sniffed.

  “She can break away from your … Jaspers,” Dasein said. “Men go into the service from here. They must …”

  “They always come home when it’s over,” Piaget said. “That’s in your notes. Don’t you realize how unhappy they are out there?” He turned toward Dasein. “Is that the choice you’d offer Jenny?”

  “They can’t be all that unhappy about leaving,” Dasein said. “Otherwise you clever people would’ve found another solution.”

  “Hmmph!” Piaget snorted. “You didn’t even do your homework for the people who hired you.” He sighed. “I’ll tell you, Gilbert. The draft rejects most of our young men—severe allergy reaction to a diet which doesn’t include periodic administration of Jaspers. They can only get that here. The approximately six percent of our young people who go out do so as a duty to the valley. We don’t want to call down the federal wrath on us. We have a political accommodation with the state, but we’re not large enough to apply the same technique nationally.”

  They’ve already decided about me, Dasein thought. They don’t care what they tell me.

  The realization brought a tight sensation of fear in the pit of his stomach.

  He rounded a corner and came parallel with the river. Ahead stood the clump of willows and the long, down-sweeping curve to the bridge. Dasein recalled his projection of evil onto the river, stepped on the throttle to get this place behind him. The truck entered the curve. The road was banked nicely. The bridge came into view. There was a yellow truck parked off the road at the far side, men standing behind it drinking out of metal cups.

  “Look out!” Piaget shouted.

  In that instant, Dasein saw the reason for the truck—a gaping hole in the center of the bridge where the planks had been removed. That was a county work crew and they’d opened at least a ten foot hole in the bridge.

  The truck sped some forty feet during the moment it took Dasein to realize his peril.

  Now, he could see a two-by-four stretched across each end of the bridge, yellow warning flags tied at their centers.

  Dasein gripped the steering wheel. His mind shifted into a speed of computation he had never before experienced. The effect was to slow the external passage of time. The truck seemed to come almost to a stop while he reviewed the possibilities—

  Hit the brakes?

  No. Brakes and tires were old. At this speed, the truck would skid onto the bridge and into the hole.

  Swerve off the road?

  No. The river waited on both sides—a deep cut in the earth to swallow them.

  Aim for a bridge abutment to stop the truck?

  Not at this speed and without seat belts.

  Hit the throttle to increase speed?

  That was a possibility. There was the temporary barrier to break through, but that was only a two-by-four. The bridge rose in a slight arc up and over the river. The hole had been opened in the center. Given enough speed, the truck could leap the hole.

  Dasein jammed the throttle to the floorboards. The old truck leaped ahead. There came a sharp cracking sound as they smashed through the barrier. Planks clattered beneath the wheels. There came a breathless instant of flying, a spring-crushing lurch as they landed across the hole, the “crack” of the far barrier.

  He hit the brakes, came to a screeching stop opposite the workmen. Time resumed its normal pace as Dasein stared out at the crew—five men, faces pale, mouths agape.

  “For the love of heaven!” Piaget gasped. “Do you always take chances like that?”

  “Was there any other way to get us out of that mess?” Dasein asked. He lifted his right hand, stared at it. The hand was trembling.

  Piaget reflected a moment, then: “You took what was probably the only way out … but if you hadn’t been driving so damn’ fast on a blind …”

  “I wi
ll make you a bet,” Dasein said. “I’ll bet the work on that bridge wasn’t necessary, that it was either a mistake or some sort of make-work.”

  Dasein reached for his door handle, had to grope twice to get it in his hand, then found it took a conscious surge of effort to open the door. He stepped out, found his knees rubbery. He stood a moment, took several deep breaths, then moved around to the front of the truck.

  Both headlights were smashed and there was a deep dent stretching across both fenders and the grill.

  Dasein turned his attention to the workmen. One, a stocky, dark-haired man in a plaid shirt and dungarees stood a step ahead of the others. Dasein focused on the man, said: “Why wasn’t there a warning sign back there around the corner?”

  “Good God, man!” the fellow said. His face reddened. “Nobody comes down that road this time of day.”

  Dasein walked down the road toward a pile of planks, dirt and oil on them testifying that they’d been taken from the bridge. They looked to be three-by-twelve redwood. He lifted the end of one, turned it over—no cracks or checks. It gave off the sharp sound of an unbroken board when he dropped it back to the pile.

  He turned to see the workman he’d addressed approaching. Piaget was several paces behind the man.

  “When did you get the order to do this work?” Dasein asked.

  “Huh?” The man stopped, stared at Dasein with a puzzled frown.

  “When did you get orders to repair this bridge?” Dasein asked.

  “Well … we decided to come up here about an hour ago. What the hell difference does it make? You’ve smashed the …”

  “You decided?” Dasein asked. “Aren’t you assigned to jobs?”

  “I’m the road crew foreman in this valley, mister. I decide, not that it’s any of your business.”

  Piaget came to a stop beside the man, said: “Dr. Dasein, this is Josh Marden, Captain Marden’s nephew.”

  “Nepotism begins at home, I see,” Dasein said, his tone elaborately polite. “Well, Mr. Marden, or may I call you Josh?”

  “Now, you look here, Dr. Das …”

  “Josh, then,” Dasein said, still in that tone of calm politeness. “I’m very curious, Josh. These appear to be perfectly sound planks. Why’d you decide to replace them?”