“You have to face reality.”
“My hand is real. It’s the war that’s a dream.”
“Doesn’t it matter to you that the whole human race is enslaved by creatures from another planet? Doesn’t it matter to you that we may all soon be dead?”
“I planned on dying sometime anyway. And when I’m dead, what’ll it matter to me whether others go on living or not?”
Paul Rivers felt a wave of sick frustration sweep over him. She’s so imperturbable, he thought feverishly, so safe behind her schizoid defenses. Behind that saintly façade what absolute selfishness—what smug egotism. Looking down at his hands he saw that his fists were clenched. My god, he thought; what am I doing? I don’t hit patients; I help them. She must be getting to me, reaching some deep wall of repressed Balkani-ism within me. Across from him he saw that she watched alertly, perceived the frustration, anger and—fear.
“You think this little war of yours is important,” she said. “But to me it’s only a small and unimportant skirmish in a far bigger struggle.”
“What far bigger struggle?”
Wordlessly, Joan pointed to the windowbox; among her flowers, a contingent of red ants and another of black ants were engaged in a fracas. For the moment Paul gazed into the turmoil of writhing bodies and crunching mandibles—then he looked away, unable to speak. Is it I, he asked himself, who’s living on dreams and comforting illusions? Am I, in the end, the real escapist?
Joan, he realized, was still watching the ants. But not with anguish; on her Buddha-like face he saw a faint, gentle smile.
Rudolph Balkani sat at his elaborate, solar-battery-powered, justifying typewriter and let the words pour from his fingers. More than two days without sleep, but what did it matter? The methamphetamine tablets in his silver pill-box would keep him going until he had finished.
Only a single light burned in the room: the unshaded bulb over the cluttered desk on which he worked. The rest of the room, including the sprawled figure of the ruined robot Joan Hiashi, lay in shadow. It seemed to him as if the single bulb held back, with steadily diminishing strength, a blackness so heavy and thick as to be almost touched.
He had locked the door; several times people had knocked on it but Balkani had told them to go away. They had. Both the intercom and the vidphone had been carefully smashed. The bust of Freud had done them in, too.
Now the bronze, frowning father-figure lay face-down on the floor, its anger spent. The time had arrived for the son to create a universe. Feverishly Rudolf Balkani labored on, giving birth in the form of a book to the new universe that would displace the universe of Freud, together with all the other universes before it. A generation of young people would take this book as their Bible in the revolution of youth against age.
As he worked he hummed a snatch of a tune, always the tune of one of the advertising jingles which he had collected and studied in his early years. How much he had learned from TV commercials! While others turned down the TV set when the commercials came on, Balkani turned them up. The programs had nothing to sell but middle-class morality, a dreary product at best, but the commercials offered a world where dreams were for sale, where youth and health came in a box, and all pain and suffering were smoothed over with long, beautiful, slow-motion hair. Avant-garde films? Balkani jeered at them. Nothing lay in the most surrealistic of them to compare with the charisma of TV commercials. The work of the dedicated shoestring movie-makers of the ’sixties and ’seventies was now mercifully forgotten, but video-tape copies of erotic soap and beer commercials from the same period now brought bids of up to two hundred UN dollars from collectors.
At this moment Balkani stood ready to finish his masterpiece, Oblivion Therapy. Why not? The Joan Hiashi case, the one remaining piece in the cosmic crossword puzzle, had fallen—in an unexpected way, to be sure—in place. All alone in his office, Balkani laughed aloud. How simple it had become, after all. A gigantic shaggy dog story, where the whole point of the joke consisted in the fact that no point existed.
What lay behind it all?
Oblivion.
Suddenly Balkani stopped. The last sentence which he had typed had a ring of finality to it. Yes, he had written the concluding sentence of this, his life’s magnum opus. Carefully he removed the sheet from the typewriter and placed it with the rest of the manuscript; he then wrapped the manuscript with care and precision and addressed it to his New York publisher. He placed the package in the out-going mail tray and the autonomic mechanism of the tray at once whisked it from the room. So that was that.
Shuffling wearily, he made his way over to the ample medical supply cabinet, feeling at last the effects of so much lack of sleep. An overdose of quinidine, he said to himself as he lifted out the hypodermic; that should provide the necessary cardiac arrest.
With a grunt, he sat down at the foot of his analyst’s couch, rolled up his sleeve and gave himself the injection. His arm, from so many previous injections, had become insensitive; he felt nothing.
The needle broke as it fell to the floor from his suddenly stiffening fingers, and, with a sigh, he slid back onto the couch.
His subordinates were so much afraid of him that they did not break in and find his body until a day and a half later.
XIII
“WHAT DO YOU mean, you don’t know where he is?” Dr. Choate demanded.
“Just what I said,” answered Ed Newkom, shrugging his shoulders. The two men faced each other for a moment in silence in the little Knoxville hotel room and then Dr. Choate turned away.
“He must have left some indication of how he could be reached,” Choate said.
“Nope,” Ed Newkom said flatly.
“And he took the girl, Joan Hiashi, with him?”
“That’s right, Dr. Choate.”
It had become hot in the hotel room. Choate brought out an Iris linen handkerchief and mopped the perspiration from his forehead; he squinted at the bright sunlight streaming in from the window and felt angry and irritable. “I have to locate him; I have to know whether he plans to undertake the Percy X mission or not. It’s been five days; he may be gone for good.” Defected, he thought, or just plain copped out.
“You don’t know Paul very well, do you?” Ed Newkom said.
“That’s the trouble; I do know him. I know how involved he gets emotionally with his patients. It’s part of his style of therapy to treat the patient almost as an equal. A bad policy—it puts too much strain on the therapist. He’s probably cracking up.” He felt all at once—not irritation—but genuine concern.
Paul Rivers, at that moment, knew an inner calm and peace with himself such as he had never before experienced. He had begun to learn how to do nothing. The Sexual Freedom Society had not understood how to achieve it, but Joan Hiashi did; now she was teaching him, in a run-down one-room cabin in the woods of Tennessee, a good distance from the nearest paved road. She had taught him how to lie in the sun like a vegetable—and grow roots.
Side by side the two of them lay, on the ramshackle porch, only their fingertips touching. Once Paul had half-heartedly tried to kiss her, but she had pushed him gently away and he had taken “no” for an answer. Now, after more than an hour of torpid, mindless silence, she had begun to speak, very slowly.
“I can’t make love anymore; it makes me feel false, now. I’m not a woman, or a man; I’m both and neither. I’m the entire universe and just a single tiny eye, watching. To be a man or a woman is to put on an act—and I’m through with acting. It is good to touch me, though, isn’t it? As it’s good to touch a dog or a cat?”
“Yes,” Paul said, almost inaudibly. This is the first time, he thought, that a woman has known how to let me be. How to be with me without requiring that I pay attention to her, constantly prove to her that she exists. It’s true in a way, he realized, that being a manor a woman is, in a large measure, just an act, a certain culturally determined rôle that may have very little to do with how we really are inside. How many times, he asked himsel
f, have I made love not because I wanted to but because I wanted to prove to myself and some poor woman that I was a “real man”?
He glanced over at Joan’s expressionless profile and thought, But she seems so far away. I wonder where she’s gone, deep in her hidden depths.
“Where are you, Joan?” he asked.
“Nowhere.”
“You’re the little Nowhere Girl, aren’t you?”
“You could call me that.”
A bird, probably a hummingbird, caught Paul’s eye; it sat on a tree-branch beyond the weed-infested yard, singing. It had one short song which it sang over and over again, always exactly the same. As Paul watched it, he could have sworn that the bird paused and looked back at him, silent for a moment, and thoughtful. Man and bird contemplated each other across the expanse of undulating heat and then, abruptly, the bird resumed its singing. Suddenly, and without warning, Paul felt painful emotions rising into activity within him. Fantasies danced on his brain and unexplainable tears dimmed his vision. Perhaps he had been a bird, once; perhaps this small bird had recognized him as a brother.
The bird came closer, still singing.
I have wings, too, Paul thought. But you can’t see them. And I can feel the wind under them, feel the air bearing up the weight of my body.
When his vision cleared, the bird had gone.
“He knew you were listening,” Joan said. “He’s a terrible ham.”
“Does this sort of thing happen to you often?”
“Yes,” Joan said. “They’re all hams, the birds and animals, but they won’t show off to you unless they sense that you won’t hurt them. They don’t have as much knowledge as humans, but much more wisdom. Some of them, particularly cats, are great philosophers and holy men.”
“Are you a holy woman?” he asked, surprised at his own question.
“Perhaps. If I have any ambition it’s to be something like a saint or holy woman. What else is worthwhile?”
Paul said thoughtfully, “You’ve made it about halfway.” He chose his words with care. “Buddha and Christ began by going off into the wilderness, into the kind of aloneness you seem to be in now, but they didn’t stay there. They came back—to try to do something for the rest of us. Maybe they failed. But at least they tried.” With a grunt he rose unsteadily to his feet, stood swaying, then stretched and felt all right.
“Where are you going?” Joan asked.
“Back to the city,” Paul said grimly. “I’ve got work to do.”
Much to his own surprise, Gus Swenesgard found himself still alive after the Great Battle. And, being alive, he could indulge himself in the luxury of admiring his enemy.
“We got some pretty good Neegs in these hills,” he said to nobody in particular as he stumped through the lobby of his hotel and out into the morning sunshine. Pausing, he inhaled a good, hefty amount of dusty air laden with the healthy smell of decaying weeds; he then ran his hand over his somewhat unshaven jowls, coughed and spat. “I gotta quit smoking one of these days,” he muttered under his breath. But he knew, deep inside, that he didn’t have the strength to do it.
Instead, he pulled out a cigar and lit it.
Ah, he thought dreamily, that’s better. There was nothing that covered up the taste of old, stale smoke quite so well as new, fresh smoke. Gus exhaled, then swaggered down the front steps—carefully avoiding the broken one—and headed for the prisoners’ compound down the street; several vacant lots had been fenced in to provide a temporary dwelling-place for the Neeg-part deserters that streamed into Gus’ plantation in ever-increasing numbers. Since the battle of the phantoms the trickle of turncoats had become a torrent. If they just keep using that illusion machine, Gus said to himself, I’ll be sittin’ pretty.
When he reached the fence of the prisoners’ compound he paused a moment, pondering. It’s no good, he decided, keeping those good, black bucks standing around idle; I think we’d better get a little public works goin’ here. First off I’ll get a sign-painting factory going to make signs and posters that say “FULL EMPLOYMENT” and “LET’S ALL PULL TOGETHER” and that sort of thing, and then we’ll have to get a money factory going to pay them. I think we got some old steel engravings of confederate money in the museum that are still as good as in the old days when Jeff Davis lived.
Once we get the money printed up, he thought happily, we can start fixin’ up this place. Roads to be built, ionocrafts to be repaired. And a government to be set up. In his mind he began to list all his relatives and personal friends; they, of course, would have to have special political positions set up for them…and under them he would create an overlapping maze of job-holding bureaucratic functionaries whose tasks would be vague—but who would constitute all the good people personally familiar to him on a man-to-man hand-shaking basis throughout the bale. Have to get a few of the right kind of Neegs in there, too, he reflected. To keep them from getting restless.
He spotted the lean, stooped figure of Doc Burns emerging from the compound, past the guards. “How’s it going, Doc?” Gus said.
“You ought to get these people out of here; these conditions breed disease.”
“How about sending them into battle—they left the ‘parts; now let them fight the ’parts.”
Doc Burns said, “These Neegs didn’t leave the ‘parts; they left those weapons. And they’re not about to go into battle against those same weapons. It was bad enough for them, being on the giving end; they’re not about to—”
“But,” Gus said, “I gotta clean out those hills once and for all. I haven’t given up: I can’t give up.”
“Use robots.”
“You know, Doc, maybe you got something there.” A robot army, Gus thought, might not be affected by illusions. Anyhow it seemed worth a try. “An all-out offensive against the Neeg-parts,” he said aloud, “using nothing but autonomic and homeostatic weapons.”
Doc Burns said skeptically, “Where will you get such weapons?”
“From the worms,” Gus said. “I’ll get Mekkis to give me the best they’ve got; stuff maybe which we’ve never seen.” He strode off.
“Read no more,” the Oracle pleaded mournfully. “The hour of the Nowhere Girl is upon us!”
Mekkis wove, sent out his tongue to depress a button on his office intercom. “Send in the Huckster,” he ordered his wik secretary.
A moment later the door slid aside; a smiling, well-dressed Terran with bow tie and purple velvet coveralls entered. “I am the Huckster,” he informed Mekkis.
“I know,” Mekkis said, and he thought, You must be a telepath, too; otherwise you never would have learned to scramble. And also, he said to himself, you must be a graduate of Balkani’s school.
“You are, I understand,” the Huckster said, “looking for certain documents, certain obscure papers written by Dr. Rudolph Balkani and circulated privately to students at his seminars. Papers crucial to a comprehension of Balkani’s theories, yet withheld from the general public.”
“Do you have such papers?”
“For a price.”
“Of course,” Mekkis said. “I’m told that it is you who sold my predecessor, Marshal Koli, this vast collection of plastic model planes and other various historical odds and ends now enshrined in these offices. If you can supply me with these documents I will trade you the entire World War One sequence of fighter aircraft for them.”
“You’ve got to be kidding,” the Huckster said, grinning.
“I realize that you may find my generosity a little overwhelming,” Mekkis said, “but we Ganymedians are a—”
“You don’t understand.” The Huckster had begun to laugh openly. “I wouldn’t take those model planes if you paid me to haul them away. They’re utterly worthless.”
“What! But Marshal Koli said—”
“Marshal Koli was a collector, Mr. Administrator. I’m a businessman. The documents I have to sell should be worth in the neighborhood of one hundred Ganymedian cluds. It is that or nothing.”
&
nbsp; “Let me see it,” Mekkis said.
“One page, that’s all.”
Mekkis said, “I could have you arrested and the document taken from you by force.”
“True,” the Huckster said. “But you would never see the other documents I could bring you; this is only one of many such lovely items.”
“Very well. My secretary will make out a check for you to the amount of one hundred cluds. Now let’s see the thing.”
After the Huckster had gone Mekkis studied the document carefully. It appeared authentic; he recognized the writing-style of the erratic Balkani. The key, Mekkis thought; analysis of the experiments in chemotherapy which made possible his Oblivion Therapy. Great god almighty!
I’ll have to see what else that young Terran has for sale, mused the Ganymedian Administrator.
He did not grant an audience to Gus Swenesgard. When notified of Gus’ presence he did not even bother to scan him. “As I’ve already ordered,” he informed his secretary, “give him what he wants and leave me alone.” Gus, therefore, left with a requisition for first-line autonomic and homeostatic Ganymedian attack weapons.
Mekkis did not know this, but, had he known, he would not have cared. Because a report had come in—news completely unexpected.
“Percy X and Joan Hiashi,” his wik secretary informed him, “have escaped from Balkani’s establishment in Norway.” A pause and then the secretary said, “Dr. Balkani is dead.”
For a moment Mekkis ceased to think. He sat, mouth open, his tongue frozen. “How did it happen?” he asked at last.
“Suicide, it would appear.”
“No,” Mekkis whispered. “It can’t be suicide.”
“I’m only passing on what information I got from Cultural Control,” the secretary said.
“Is there anything more?”
The secretary said, “It seems almost certain that Percy X has returned to this bale; that has Cultural Control in a panic because it indicates that resistance to Gany rule may be much more widespread and subtle than had been previously believed. Someone managed to slip two simulacra into Balkani’s establishment, one of Percy X and one of Joan Hiashi; Balkani evidently didn’t recognize the switch, even though the simulacra had been built from one of his designs. There is speculation that Balkani was a double agent and that all of the wiks trained by him may be imprinted with lethal post-hypnotic suggestions. Some have already killed themselves—for no apparent reason.”