Brain Wave (12 page)

“Guided missiles!” The leader whirled on his heel. “So they
do
have detectors like ours now. Good thing we checked, eh, priest? Now let us get away from here before the rockets come!”

He left, enough metallic stuff behind to fool the instruments, and led his men along the ridge of hills. While the army was busy firing rockets on his camp, he would be readying an attack on their rear.

With or without the help of the priest’s incomprehensible God, he felt quite sure that the attack would succeed.

   Felix Mandelbaum had hardly settled into his chair when the annunciator spoke. “Gantry.” The secretary’s tone of voice said that it was important.

Gantry—he didn’t know anybody of that name. He sighed and looked out the windows. Morning shadow still lay cool across the streets, but it was going to be a hot day.

There was a tank squatting on its treads down there, guns out to guard City Hall. The worst of the violence seemed to have passed: the Third Ba’al cult was falling apart rapidly after the prophet’s ignominious capture last week, the criminal gangs were being dealt with as the militia grew in size and experience, a measure of calm was returning to the city. But there was no telling what still prowled the outer districts, and there were surely going to be other storms before everything was finally under control.

Mandelbaum sat back in his chair, forcing tensed muscles to relax. He always felt tired these days, under the thin hard-held surface of energy. Too much to do, too little time for sleep. He pushed the buzzer which signalled: Let him in.

Gantry was a tall rawboned man whose good clothes did not quite fit him. There was an upstate twang in the ill-tempered voice: “They tell me you’re the dictator of the city now.”

“Not exactly,” said Mandelbaum, smiling. “I’m just a sort of general trouble shooter for the mayor and the council.”

“Yeah. But when there’s nothing but trouble, the trouble
shooter gets to be boss.” There was a truculence in the swift reply. Mandelbaum didn’t try to deny the charge, it was true enough. The mayor had all he could do handling ordinary administrative. machinery; Mandelbaum was the flexible man, the co-ordinator of a thousand quarreling elements, the maker of basic policy, and the newly created city council rarely failed to vote as he suggested.

“Sit down,” he invited. “What’s your trouble?” His racing mind already knew the answer, but he gained time by making the other spell it out for him.

“I represent the truck farmers of eight counties. I was sent here to ask what your people mean by robbing us.”

“Robbing?” asked Mandelbaum innocently.

“You know as well as I do. When we wouldn’t take dollars for our stuff they tried to give us city scrip. And when we wouldn’t take that, they said they’d seize our crops.”

“I know,” said Mandelbaum. “Some of the boys are pretty tactless. I’m sorry.”

Gantry’s eyes narrowed. “Are you ready to say they won’t pull guns on us? I hope so, because we got guns of our own.”

“Have you got tanks and planes too?” asked Mandelbaum. He waited an instant for the meaning to sink in, then went on swiftly: “Look, Mr. Gantry, there are six or seven million people left in this city. If we can’t assure them a regular food supply, they’ll starve. Can your association stand by and let seven million innocent men, women, and children die of hunger while you sit on more food than you can eat? No. You’re decent human beings. You couldn’t.”

“I don’t know,” said Gantry grimly. “After what that mob did when it came stampeding out of the city last month—”

“Believe me, the city government did everything it could to stop them. We failed in part, the panic was too big, but we did keep the whole city from moving out on you.” Mandelbaum made a bridge of his fingers and said judicially: “Now if you really were monsters you’d let the rest of them stay here to die. Only they wouldn’t Sooner or later, they’d
all swarm out on you, and then everything would go under.”

“Sure. Sure.” Gantry twisted his large red hands together. Somehow, he found himself on the defensive. “It ain’t that we want to make trouble, out in the country. It’s just—well, we raise food for you, but you ain’t paying us. You’re just taking it. Your scrip don’t mean a thing. What can we buy with it?”

“Nothing, now,” said Mandelbaum candidly. “But believe me, it’s not our fault. The people here want to work. We just haven’t got things organized enough yet. Once we do, our scrip will mean things like clothes and machinery for you. If you let us starve, though—where’s your market then?”

“All that was said at the association meeting,” replied Gantry. “The thing is, what guarantee have we got that you’ll keep your end of the bargain?”

“Look, Mr. Gantry, we do want to co-operate. We want it so much that we’re prepared to offer a representative of your people a seat on the city council. Then how can we double-cross you?”

“Hmmm—” Gantry’s eyes narrowed shrewdly. “How many members on the council all told?”

They bargained for a while, and Gantry left with a city offer of four seats which would hold special veto powers on certain matters concerning rural policy. Mandelbaum was sure the farmers would accept it: it looked like a distinct victory for their side.

He grinned to himself. How do you define victory? The veto power wouldn’t mean a thing, because rural policy was perfectly straightforward anyway. The city, the whole state and nation, would gain by the reunification of so large an area. Perhaps the piled-up debt to the farmers would never be paid—society was changing so rapidly that there might be no more cities in a few years—but that, however lamentable, was a small matter. What counted now was survival.

“North and Morgan,” said the annunciator.

Mandelbaum braced himself. This was going to be tougher. The waterfront boss and the crazy political theorist had their own ambitions, and considerable followings
—too large to be put down by force. He stood up politely to greet them.

North was a burly man, his face hard under it layers of fat; Morgan was slighter physically, but his eyes smoldered under the high bald forehead. They glared at each other as they came in, and looked accusingly at Mandelbaum. North growled their mutual question: “What’s the idea bringing us in at the same time? I wanted to see you in private.”

“Sorry,” said Mandelbaum insincerely. “There must have been a mix-up. Would you mind both just sitting down for a few minutes, though? Maybe we can work it out together somehow.”

“There is no ‘somehow’ about it,” snapped Morgan. “I and my followers are getting sick of seeing the obvious principles of Dynapsychism ignored in this government. I warn you, unless you reorganize soon along sensible lines—”

North brushed him aside and turned to Mandelbaum. “Look here, there’re close to a hundred ships layin’ idle in the port of New York while th’ East Coast and Europe’re yellin’ for trade. My boys’re gettin’ fed up with havin’ their voice go unheard.”

“We haven’t had much word from Europe lately,” said Mandelbaum in apologetic tone. “And things are too mixed up yet for us even to try coastwise trading. What’d we trade with? Where’d we find fuel for those ships? I’m sorry, but—” His mind went on:
The real trouble is, your
racket hasn’t got any waterfront to live off now
.

“It all comes from blind stubbornness,” declared Morgan. “As I have conclusively shown, a social integration along the psychological principles I have discovered would eliminate—”

And your trouble is, you want power, and too many people are still hunting a panacea, a final answer
, thought Mandelbaum coldly.
You sound intellectual, so they think you are; a certain class still wants a man on a white horse, but prefers him with a textbook under one arm. You and Lenin!

“Excuse me,” he said aloud. “What do you propose to do, Mr. North?”

“New York started as a port an’ it’ll be a port again before long. This time we wanna see that the workers that make the port go, get their fair share in governin’ it!”

In other words, you also want to be dictator
. Aloud, thoughtfully: “There may be something in what you both say. But we can’t do everything at once, you know. It seems to me, though, like you two gentlemen are thinking along pretty parallel lines. Why don’t you get together and present a united front? Then I’d find it a lot easier to put your proposals before the council.”

Morgan’s pale cheeks flushed. “A band of sweaty human machines—”

North’s big fists doubled. “Watch y’r langwidge, sonny boy.”

“No, really,” said Mandelbaum. “You both want a better integrated government, don’t you? It seems to me—”

Hmmm
. The same thought lit the two pairs of eyes. It had been shockingly easy to plant it.
Together, perhaps, we could … and then afterward I can get rid of him—

There was more discussion, but it ended with North and Morgan going out together. Mandelbaum could almost read their contempt for him; hadn’t he ever heard of divide and rule?

Briefly, there was sadness in him. So far, people hadn’t really changed much. The wild-eyed dreamer simply built higher castles in the clouds; the hard-boiled racketeer had no vocabulary of ideas or concepts to rise above his own language of greed.

It wouldn’t last. Within months, there would be no more Norths and no more Morgans. The change in themselves, and in all mankind, would destroy their littleness. But meanwhile, they were dangerous animals and had to be dealt with.

He reached for the phone and called over the web operated for him alone. “Hullo, Bowers? How’re you doing?—Look, I’ve got the Dynapsychist and the rackets boss together. They’ll probably plan a sort of fake Popular Front, with the idea of getting seats on the council and then taking over the whole show by force—palace revolution,
coup d’état
, whatever you call it.—Yeh. Alert our agents in both parties. I’ll want complete reports. Then we
want to use those agents to egg them on against each other. —Yeah, the alliance is as unstable as any I ever heard of. A little careful pushing, and they’ll bury the hatchet all right—in each other. Then when the militia has mopped up what’s left of the tong war, we can start our propaganda campaign in favor of common sense.—Sure, it’ll take some tricky timing, but we can swing it.—”

For a moment, as he laid the phone down, his face sagged with an old grief. He had just condemned some scores of people, most of whom were merely bewildered and misled, to death. But it couldn’t be helped. He had the life and freedom of several million human beings to save—the price was not exorbitant.

“Uneasy sits the butt that bears the boss,” he muttered, and looked at his appointment list. There was an hour yet before the representative from Albany arrived. That was going to be a hot one to handle. The city was breaking state and national laws every day—it had to—and the governor was outraged. He wanted to bring the whole state back under his own authority. It wasn’t an unreasonable wish, but the times weren’t ripe; and when they eventually were, the old forms of government would be no more important than the difference between Homoousian and Homoiousian. But it was going to take a lot of argument to convince the Albany man of that.

Meanwhile, though, he had an hour free. He hesitated for a split second between working on the new rationing system and on the plans for extending law and order to outer Jersey. Then he laid both aside in favor of the latest report on the water situation.

THERE was a dimness in the laboratory which made the pulsing light at the machine’s heart stand out all the brighter, weirdly blue and restless between the coils and the impassive meter faces. Grunewald’s face was corpse-colored as he bent over it.

“Well,” he said unnecessarily, “that seems to be that.”

He flicked the main switch, and the electric hum whined and the light died. For a moment he stood thoughtfully regarding the anesthesized rat within the coils. Hairlike wires ran from its shaven body to the meters over which Johansson and Lewis stood.

Lewis nodded. “Neural rate jumps up again.” He touched the dials of the oscilloscope with finicking care. “And just about on the curve we predicted. You’ve generated an inhibitor field, all right.” There would be other tests to make, detailed study, but that could be left to assistants. The main problem was solved.

Grunewald reached in with thick, oddly delicate hands and took out the rat and began extracting the probes. “Poor little guy,” he murmured. “I wonder if we’re doing him a favor.”

Corinth, hunched moodily on a stool, looked up sharply.

“What use is intelligence to him?” pursued Grunewald. “It just makes him realize the horror of his own position. What use is it to any of us, in fact?”

“Would you go back, yourself?” asked Corinth.

“Yes.” Grunewald’s square blond face held a sudden defiance. “Yes, I would. It’s not good to think too much or too clearly.”

“Maybe,” whispered Corinth, “maybe you’ve got something there. The new civilization—not merely its technology, but its whole value system, all its dreams and hopes
—will have to be built afresh, and that will take many generations. We’re savages now, with all the barrenness of the savage’s existence. Science isn’t the whole of life.”

“No,” said Lewis. “But scientists—like artists of all kinds, I suppose—have by and large kept their sanity through the change because they had a purpose in life to start with, something outside themselves to which they could give all they had.” His plump face flashed with a tomcat grin. “Also, Pete, as an old sensualist I’m charmed with all the new possibilities. The art and music I used to swoon over have gone, yes, but I don’t appreciate good wine and cuisine the less; in fact, my perception is heightened, there are nuances I never suspected before.”

It had been a strange conversation, one of a few words and many gestures and facial expressions thrown into a simultaneous discussion of technical problems:

“Well,” Johansson had said, “we’ve got our inhibitor field. Now it’s up to you neurologists to study it in detail and find out just what we can expect to happen to life on Earth.”