“Hardly. We aren’t afraid of our blundering brothers with the armored hides, but we certainly don’t take wide chances to attract attention to ourselves. We like our freedom too much for that.
“You see, we aren’t play-acting at being odd. We actually enjoy and live the job of being individuals. But there is a logic to our madness. Nothing we do is folly.”
“But,” Themus objected, “what are the explanations for things like—” and he finger-listed several things that had been bothering him.
“The garbage is negatively polarized, so it touches nothing but its side of the sewer pipes,” explained Furth. “The beggar, who, by the way, is a professional numismatist, can sense the ‘structural aura’ of various metals, that’s how he knew how many and what type coins you had in your pocket. The Cave here is merely an adequate job of force-moving large areas of soil and rock, and atomic realignment…”
He explained for a few more minutes, Themus’s astonishment becoming deeper and deeper at each further revelation of what he had considered superhuman achievements. Finally, the young Watcher asked, “But why haven’t these discoveries been turned over to Kyben-Central?”
“There are some things our little categorizing brothers aren’t ready for, as yet,” explained Deere. “Even you were not ready. Chance saved you, you know.”
Themus looked startled. “Chance?”
“Well, chance and your innate intelligence, boy. We had to see if there was enough non-con in you to allow you to live. The reconditioning in your case would have been—ah—something of a failure. The five mad acts you were to perform not only had to be mad—they had to be logically mad. They each had to illustrate a point.”
“Wait a minute,” said Themus. “I had no idea what I was going to do. I just did it, that’s all.”
“Um-hm. Quite right, but if you didn’t know, at least your subconscious was able to put two and two together and come up with the proper four. The acts you did demonstrated you had courage enough to be a non-con, that you were smart enough to maneuver us Crackpots—so it would be easy enough for you to help us maneuver the Stuffs—that you could be a non-con thinker when you had to be, and even you knew you were too valuable to kill.
“Even if you weren’t in on it, your subconscious and the rest of us were.”
“But—but—what I don’t get is why did you try to stop me from seeing Boolbak and then let me go, and why does Boolbak hide from you and the Watchers both?”
“One at a time,” replied Deere. “Boolbak hides because he is mad. There are some like that in every group. He happens to be a genius, but he’s also a total madman. We don’t try to keep tabs on him, because we already have the inventions he’s come up with, but we don’t put him out of the way because he might get something new one of these days we don’t have, and then, too, he was a great man once, long before—” He stopped suddenly, realizing he had stumbled across the line between explanation and the saccharine swamp of the maudlin. “We’re not barbarians. Nor are we a secret underground movement. We don’t want to overthrow anything, we just want to do as we please. If our brothers feel like foaming up and ruling star systems, all well and good, it makes it easier for us to obtain the things we want, so we help them in a quiet way. Boolbak isn’t doing anyone any harm, but we didn’t think you were ready to be exposed to too much non-con thinking all at once, as we knew Boolbak would do. He always does.
“But Darfla was so concerned, and she seemed to like you, so we took a chance. It seemed to work out, luckily for you.”
Themus looked at the girl. She was staring at him as though a layer of ice covered her. He smiled to himself.
Any amount of ice can be thawed by the proper application of intensive heat.
“We didn’t want you to see him at first,” Deere went on, “because we knew he would dump the cart. But when you showed us you were flexible enough to do the five mad acts, we knew you could take what Boolbak had to say.
“And we let him explain it, instead of us, because he’s one damned fine storyteller. He can hold the interest. He’s a born minstrel and you’d believe him before us.”
“But why did he tell me all that? I thought you wanted it all kept quiet? He hardly knew me and he explained the whole situation, the way it really is. Why?” Themus inquired.
“Why? Because he’s completely out of his mind—and he’s a big-mouth to boot,” Deere stated, “We tolerate Boolbak, but we make sure he keeps away from the Watchers, for the most part. If he does get through, though, it eventually shuttles to Furth and we snap a lid on it. I suppose he was ready to tell you because Darfla brought you to him. He has a soft spot for her.
“What I want to know is, why did Darfla take you off your rounds in the first place?”
Darfla looked up. She had been idly running her toe through the mud near the pool. “I went through his dossier. He was too brilliant for the Corps. His record indicated any number of checkpoints of upper-level intelligence. So I went and found him. He didn’t react as most Stuffs would have, when I applied a few stimuli, such as ruining his dictobox.”
Themus winced at the memory of the dictobox.
“But what made you look up his dossier?” demanded Furth.
Darfla hesitated, and a gold blush crept up her cheeks. “I saw him get off the ship from Penares Base. I—well—I rather liked his appearance. You know.” She looked down again, embarrassed.
Deere made a gun with thumb and forefinger, pointed it at her, “If you don’t stop taking these things into your own hands! There’s a group who looks into things like that. We’d have gotten to him in time.”
Themus rubbed his nose in amazement. “I—I just can’t believe all this. It’s so fantastic. So unreal.”
“No more unreal to believe every man is a single brain with individual thoughts than to believe he’s a member of a group mind with the same thoughts for all.”
He clapped the Watcher on the back.
“Are you prepared to drop your life as a Watcher and become one of us? I think you’ll be quite a find. Your five acts were the maddest we’ve seen in a long time.”
“But I’m not a Crackpot. I’m a Stuffed Shirt. I’ve always been one.”
“Bosh! You were brought up to think you were one. We’ve shown you there are other ways to think, now use them.”
Themus considered. He’d never really had anything, as a member of the Kyben race—the rulers of the universe—but a constant unease and a fear of the Mines. These people all seemed so free, so clever, so—so—he was at a loss for words.
“Can you take me out of sight of the Corps?” he asked.
“Easiest thing in the world,” said Furth, “to make you drop out of sight as Themus, the Watcher, and make you reappear as—let’s say—Gugglefish, the Crackpot Mountebank.”
Themus’s face broke into the first full, unreserved smile he could recall. “It’s a deal, I suppose. I’ve always wanted to live in a madhouse. The only thing that bothers me is Uncle Boolbak. You fool the Stuffs by pretending madness, and, well—you consider Boolbak mad, so perhaps—”
He stopped when he saw the perplexed looks that came over the Crackpots’ faces. It was a germ of thought.
“Welcome home, maniac,” said Deere.
The pain in this one is the pain of a mind blocked from all joy and satisfaction by an outworn idea, an idée fixe, a monomaniacal hangup that tunnels the vision. Think of someone you know, even someone you love, trapped into a corrupt or self-destructive or anti-social behavior pattern by an inability to get around the roadblock of erroneous thinking. Pathetic.
The story is about a man and a woman. The woman is the good guy, the man is the dummy. When it appeared in Analog, Kelly Freas did a drawing that showed the man as the stronger of the two, his body positioned in such a way that it looked as if he was protecting the lesser female. Wrong. I tried to get Ben Bova, the editor of Analog, to get Kelly to alter the drawing, but it was too close to the publication deadline, so it went in that way.