Authors: Lawrence Sanders
“Yes.”
“Does Maya visit you?”
“Yes.”
“Every day?”
“Yes. I want to be alone with her. I want a screen around us. So those grinning apes can’t watch.”
“I’ll arrange it.”
There were many others questions I wanted to ask. Can a disembodied head still love? What form of political society did he envision for his corporate world? Did he believe, as Paul Bumford obviously did, that instinctive sexuality was an operative base on which to predicate the political nature of
Homo sapiens
? Had he done any computing of the existence of a primitive slave factor in the psychology of our species? And much, much more.
But the sight of Lewisohn’s head did not encourage conversation. Particularly of an intimate nature.
“All right,” I said. “I’ll leave you now.”
“I don’t want to see you again,” he thought. “Ever. If you continue to come here, I will stop serving. I will tell the Chief Director that.”
“Very well,” I said. Understanding. But saddened. “I won’t come again. Good-bye, Lewisohn.”
Then
the obscenities started. Loud, rancid virulence, spewing from the loudspeaker. The serving staff looked up, startled. I turned away. Followed by that screamed filth. Created in his brain. Transformed into electrical signals. Scanned by laser. Amplified electronically. Transmitted to the GPA-1 computers. Translated, triggering taped vocal responses. Returned to Operating Theater D. Verbal excrement flung at my back as I walked out of there.
I plunged into the DCS campaign. Serving in Paul’s office in the basement of the EOB. At that point in time, late August, 1999, our staff had incubated to more than fifty objects. Following what seemed to be an inexorable law of megagrowth in all bureaucratic agencies. Most of our servers were assigned to Congressional liaison, and it was to this area that Paul and I devoted most of our time.
The signal from the Chief Director, based on Sady Nagle’s estimate, was that passage in the House was assured. We switched our push to the Senate. Profiting from experience, we concentrated j on the staffs of individual Senators and of the subcommittee and full committee that would first consider the new Department.
Attempting to convince individual Senators was counterproductive. Difficult though it may be to believe, in August, 1999, only eighteen members of the entire US Congress had a scientific background. The great majority were lawyers, businessmen, exsoccer stars, and former television performers. They simply did not have the conditioning to comprehend our proposals. Some staff members had, at least, a rudimentary understanding of our numbers, computer studies, plans, and projections. It was their utilization we sought.
As I endured an apparently endless succession of lunches, conferences, cocktail parties, private colloquies, and dinners, I realized the enormity of what President Harold K. Morse had accomplished.
He had established an executive advisory board of scientists during his administration. He had enlarged the Science Academy and helped bring it to a level of conditioning efficiency surpassing West Point, Annapolis, the Air/Space Academy, and the Academy of International Cooperation. I became aware that our Department of Creative Science was merely one more step—but perhaps a quantum jump—Morse might have effectualized a decade earlier. If he had not stopped.
I spoke to Grace Wingate about this. Recalling my meeting with President Morse in 1990. Shortly before he suicided.
“I thought he was assassinated,” she said.
“No,” I said, “I don’t think so. The only object who could possibly benefit from his assassination would have been his VP. And he didn’t have the brain—or the ambition-—to manipulate it. ” “How did you meet Morse?”
“He called me in. I had published a very minor, almost poetic paper on the nature of genius.”
“The nature of genius? Nick, isn’t that outside your disciplines?”
“It is now. It wasn’t then; I was young.”
“What did you say about genius?”
“I took as my text: ‘Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,/and waste its sweetness on the desert air.’ Thomas Gray. Not so, I said. I argued that genius unknown is genius nonexistent. Like a tree falling unheard in an isolated forest. It produces no sound. No receiver. Genius, I said, must be appreciated to exist. ” “Do you really believe that?”
“I was certain at the time I wrote it. I’m not so certain now. Anyway, that paper was how I came to meet President Morse. It was published in an obscure Southern Literary journal. But he scanned it. I believe he scanned
everything.
He called me to the White House, and I had a marvelous hour with him. Whatabrain!” “What did he talk about?”
“Everything! He dazzled me. He seemed to know all I knew, and a lot more besides. A very inquiring brain. A curious brain. Always asking, always prying.”
“About what?”
“Well, for instance, he recalled an obso gerontological theory: that every object, at birth, has a built-in clock. The clock is wound for a finite number of heartbeats, respirations, and so forth. When the clock runs down, the object stops. And nothing can be done to keep the clock ticking. That theory has been demolished now, but it was potent at the time. President Morse wondered, almost casually, if the same theory could be extended to human emotions. Suffering. Enthusiasm. Pain. Hope. And so forth. If we were bom with a finite quantity of each. And when they were expended, they were gone. Depleted. Never to be renewed.”
“Nick, he
did
suicide?”
“I have no doubt of it. Grace, I’ve never told anyone this—it’s still ultrasecret—but after Morse stopped, I was assigned as a member of an ad hoc committee of physicians to investigate. Our report was unanimous. It’s filed away somewhere. He had always been a light drinker, but we found operative evidence of heavy alcoholic intake followed by massive barbiturate ingestion. There was little doubt about it. It was deliberate. He suicided.”
“But why?”
“You want my theory? That’s all I can give you—a theory. His wife. A dreadful ef. But he needed her. I think—this is just my own hypothecation—I think that he finally used up all his need. It was depleted. And he found that, without it, he didn’t want to live. No reason to live. Does that make sense?”
“Is your need for me depleted?”
I groaned and took her into my arms.
We were in our safe house, our secret garden. A late August day so fulsome it was almost blowsy.
“Nick, you seem ...”
“Seem?”
“So—so reflective?”
“Do I? Talking of President Morse, I suppose. Remembering. ” “You have such a marvelous memory.”
“A curse. Sometimes.”
“You mean it’s nice to forget?”
"The brain’s natural therapy. Only occasionally it doesn’t serve. Things buried must be dredged to the surface. And faced. Examined.”
“Nick, do you know everything?”
“Everything,” I assured her solemnly.
We laughed. Hugged. Then I drew back, looked at her for the first time.
I had kissed, or touched, almost every part of her. Except for those hidden places I wanted to keep inviolate. Sacred. The smooth brow I could assimilate. And vulval ears. Pale flame of hair, soft lips, sharp nose, somber eyes, pointed chin. Her whippy corpus. So important. But not important.
Her.
The giving. Hers and mine.
Neither of us restrained, and we made mad vows of what we might cheerfully do at the other’s bidding. Suffer. Suicide. It was a game. With the grave significance of all games. I needed her so much. And she needed me. I
knew.
We sat together that afternoon until the sky deepened. Mostly in silence. Occasionally exchanging trivia.
“What’s your favorite color?”
“Have you ever eaten natural rabbit?”
“Can you swim?”
“Do you like the scent of gardenia?”
“Do you ever pray?”
“Who was the first object you used?”
Still exploring. Still learning. Still going deeper. To profound places of such intimacy that, I think, we were both shocked. But could not end. Having come that far, we could not see a limit. We must go farther. Deeper yet. And so we did.
Strange, the way we disrated to obso speech:
“I love you. Do you love me?”
“I love you.”
And didn’t think it strange.
Finally, inevitably, we had to separate. I gave her the gift I had brought. A tiny jeweled scarab. A dung beetle. With a little clamp clasp. It bewitched her. She pressed it to her lip?
“Can you wear it?” I asked. Anxiously.
“Always,” she said. “Hidden.”
We both laughed with joy.
And that’s how we parted.
I stayed in Washington, D. C., for several days. A period preceding and following Service Dsy. I spent most of my time in the DCS office in the EOB, although I visited Hospice No. 4 several times prior to September 8. I made no effort to see Lewisohn’s head, as I had promised him. But I monitored his progress via daily status reports from the medical staff assigned to ham. And I viewed films that had .been made of him, without his knowledge, by a microminiaturized camera concealed in the viewing screen in front of his bell jar.
On the evening of September 8,1999,1 returned late to the Chevy Chase place. Having spent the day in Alexandria completing my final report on Operation Lewisohn. Paul Bumford and Mary Bergstrom were home, watching a live TV broadcast from the US Government’s permanent moon colony. Potable water had recently been discovered, at a depth of approximately 10 kilometers.
I waved to them, went into the kitchen to mix a vodka-and-Smack. I took it up to my room. No plans except to relax. Perhaps scan some scientific journals that had accumulated. Listen to some music. I was in a cautiously euphoric mood. I had heard nothing more about the Scilla investigation. I had not seen another checkered cap. The Arthur Raddo business already seemed ancient history. It would, I told myself, all go away. Still, I thought it might be wise to find a new safe place to meet Grace Wingate. In affairs of this sort, as in crime and espionage, habitual patterns prove fatal.
Shortly before midnight, Paul knocked on my door. Carrying his own brandy and one for me.
“Busy?” he asked.
“Come on in,” I said. “How are things on the moon?”
“Those lunatics.” He laughed. “Because of the discovery of water, they’re talking about an enormous increase in the size of our colony. Eventually applying for admission into the US as a state.”
“Oh?” I said. “That’s interesting. And what have you been up to?”
He slouched into a club chair facing me. Put his brandy glass to his lips. Stared at me.
“Well?” I asked.
“On the Ultimate Pleasure project,” he said. “I received a preliminary report today. From Ben Baker, your father’s production manager. Only on the factory in which servers are getting the actual UP injection. For the past week, production was up 69.8 percent. ’ ’
“Sounds good,” I said.
“Good?” Paul said. “Incredible! When you consider that only 38.6 percent of the servers signed the Informed Consent Statement. But that 38.6 percent accounted for the total production surplus. Your father should be delighted.”
“He will be,” I said. “Nothing from the control or placebo factories?”
“Nothing yet. Should be in this week. Nick, have you given any more thought to what we discussed?”
“Brainstorming a society to maximize the UP?”
“Yes.”
“I’ve computed it. Some. I still feel you’re overvaluing the UP. It doesn’t make sense to me to predicate a political infrastructure on sexuality.”
“You think that’s what I’m doing, Nick?” This with a tinselly smile.
“Aren’t you?”
“Far from it. But even if what you allege is operative, moral philosophies have been based on sexuality; why not political philosophies?”
“I’m not tracking.”
"Nick, I’m no! overvaluing the UP. Per se. I’m utilizing its most salient characteristic: the slave factor. If preliminary numbers hold up, it’s present in approximately 85 percent of all UP fantasies.”
“And so?”
“I think the slave factor is more than a symptom of sexopathy. I believe there is also emotional surrender, political surrender. Even, in obso terminology, spiritual surrender. In other words, 85 percent of all objects obtain their Ultimate Pleasure from total devotion, or submission, to objects, ideas, or ideals outside themselves. It’s this principle of abasement I want to utilize in predicating a new political structure for our society. It maximizes a very basic, very instinctive human drive the UP has uncovered.”
“And what about the unaffected 15 percent?”
“Ah.” He nodded wisely. “You are tracking. Nick, those 15 percent of objects impervious to the slave factor are the big, unanswered question. A lot of heavy research to be done there. I think the answers will be found by psychobiologists. Can I activate a team? ’ ’ His sudden question caught me off balance. He was going so fast, pushing so hard, that I was dazzled. I needed time to compute. I waffled. . . .
“What do you think such a project would find?” I said.
"You want me to guess? That’s all I can do at this point in time—guess. Nick, I believe research psychobiologists will find a common denominator in those 15 percent of objects unaffected by the slave factor. In addition, I think they’ll find a definite correlation with genetic rating. All, or most of those 15 percent, will be found in the top and top-plus GR’s.”
“And what will that mean?” I asked. Knowing his answer. “Nick, don’t you see? It demands a class society based on genetic ratings. The managers would be immune to the UP, but able to utilize it objectively for the good of society. Can I activate that research project?”
“No,” I said. “I won’t approve it. If I learn you’ve started it without my permission, I’ll stop it and have you up on charges.” His face turned to stone.
“Why?” he said. Barely audible.
“Because you’re starting with a preconception. Paul, you and I both know that any research project can prove anything you want it to prove. If strongly ruled. Contradata is simply disregarded. Even the structure of the project itself—organization, selection of personnel—weights the results. You already know what you want your project to find. If I let you go ahead, they’ll find it. You know it and I know it.”