Riding home from Guinevere’s, Donald felt the Yatakangi claim oppressing his mind, a monstrous mattress of news. He hardly spoke to the others in the cab. He was half-dead from fatigue, having contrived only a couple of hours’ sleep before Delahanty broke in on his rest. Tiredness and the tranks he had taken had combined to mute his feelings all day long. He had not even been able to convert his fury at Schritt dogging him into decisive action.
Yet knowing he had let himself slide through his last day as a free agent before the maw of government engulfed him did not seem to disturb him unduly, and the reason why gradually emerged into awareness.
Yesterday, when he had left the Public Library after his stint of duty, the illusion had overtaken him that all the masses of New York were animate dolls, less than human, and he among them. Determined to prove he was not really inhabiting a hostile world, he had wandered from illusion into the harsh reality of a riot. A small one, granted—not like some that had taken place in Detroit, for example, with a death-toll in the hundreds—but final enough for the copter pilot who had been killed with clubs.
Suddenly, today, this was not the familiar world he had lived in for the past decade, but another plane of reality: a fearful one, like a jungle on an alien planet. The police captain had said that on present evidence it was a hundred per cent certain he would start a riot if he went for a harmless evening stroll. So not only the world, but he himself, was different from what he had imagined.
Caught like this, suspended between the wreck of former convictions and the solidification of new ones, he could no more have rebelled against the decision of the computer in Washington to activate him than he could have brought the dead pilot back to life.
Apathetically, not assigning meanings to the words, he heard Norman address Elihu.
“Did you put the scheme to GT today as you intended?”
“Yes.”
“And—?”
“Shalmaneser had already given them four possible reasons for my approaching them. This was the one he—I mean it—rated highest.” Elihu shuddered. “They had contingency plans prepared, trial budgets, even a tentative advertising programme. And they loved every moment while they were explaining how they’d pre-guessed me.”
“Their security must have been better than usual,” Norman said. “Not a word of it filtered through to me.”
“You referred to Shalmaneser as ‘he’,” Chad said. “Why?”
“The people at GT do it all the time,” Elihu muttered.
“Sounds as though he’s becoming one of the family. Norman, is there any truth in this propaganda about making Shalmaneser genuinely intelligent?”
Norman made a palm-up gesture to pantomime ignorance. “There’s a non-stop argument over whether his reactions are simple reflex any longer. But it’s out of my range, I’m afraid.”
“I think,” Chad grunted, “that if he really is intelligent nobody will recognise the fact. Because we aren’t.”
“When are they going to make the news public?” Norman inquired of Elihu.
“Not yet awhile. I insisted. I’m going back for further discussions tomorrow, and someone from State is supposed to join us—probably Raphael Corning, the synthesist. And you too, naturally, because I think you should make the first contact with Zadkiel on the company’s behalf.”
He concluded bitterly, “In view of what I’m wishing on them, though, I can’t help wondering if the Beninians will ever forgive me.”
It’ll be a relief to get away from here, Donald realised with amazement. Christ, I think I’d have been glad if they’d put me in jail this morning. I’d take a job on the moon, or at MAMP—anything, even in Yatakang—for the sake of being in a place that I expect to take me by surprise instead of my home city where things I thought were comfortable and ordinary got up and kicked me in the face.
* * *
When they entered the apt, Chad set off on a survey of the premises without asking permission, peering into each room in turn and shaking his head as though in wonderment. Over his shoulder he said, “Like coming back to a dream, know that? Like waking, and going back to sleep next night, and finding the dream’s been going on without you and here you are entering it at a later stage.”
“Do you think the kind of life you’ve been living the past few years is—is more real, then?” Elihu inquired. No one had invited him to sit down; because it was closest he took Norman’s favourite Hille chair and settled his bulk in it with much adjustment of his Beninian robe. He set aside his velvet-and-feathers headdress, rubbing the line it had indented across his forehead.
“More real? Sheeting hole, what a question! But the whole of modern so-called civilised existence is an attempt to deny reality insofar as it exists. When did Don last look at the stars, when did Norman last get soaked in a rainstorm? The stars as far as these people are concerned are the Manhattan-pattern!” He jerked his thumb at a window beyond which the city’s treasure-house of coloured light glimmered gaudily. “To quote myself—the habit that persuaded me I ought to quit trying to influence people because I’d run out of new ways to express my ideas—where was I? Oh yes. The real world can take you by surprise, can’t it? We just saw it happen at Gwinnie’s party. The real world got up in the middle of the apt and did it ever shake the foundations of those people!”
Sober, Norman said, “What’s the effect going to be, do you think?”
“Christ, why do you have to treat me as a Shalmaneser-surrogate? That’s the trouble with you corporation zecks—you trade your faculty of independent judgment against a bag of cachet and a fat salary. Mind if I help myself to a drink?”
Norman started. He pointed mutely at the liquor console, but Chad was already there scanning the dials.
“I saw some of the effect right there at the party,” Donald said. He wanted to shiver, but the muscles of his back refused to respond to the urge. “There was a man—doesn’t matter who. I read his lips. He was saying something about a girl he’d lost because he wasn’t allowed to be a father.”
“You can multiply him by a million as a start,” Chad said, raising a whistler from the console’s outlet. “Maybe a lot more. Though that party was hardly a fair sample. The sort of people who go to such romps are on average too selfish to make parents.”
He poured the whistler down his throat in a single gulp, nodded approval at the impact it made, and dialled another.
“Just a second,” Elihu put in. “Mostly, people talk as though it’s the parents who are the selfish ones. And this alarms me. I mean, I can see how having three, four or more children could be regarded as selfish. But two, which only maintains a balance—”
“It’s classic economic jealousy,” Chad said with a shrug. “Any society which gives lip-service to the idea of equal opportunity is going to generate jealousy of others who are better off than you are, even if the thing that’s in short supply can’t be carved up and shared without destroying it. When I was a cub the basis for this resentment was relative intelligence. I recall some people back in Tulsa who spread slanderous gossip about my parents for no better reason than that my sister and I were way ahead of all the other pupils in our school. Now the scarcity item is prodgies themselves. So two things happen: people who’ve been barred by a eugenics board, feeling they’ve been unjustly deprived, hide their sour-grapes pose behind a mask of self-righteousness—and a lot of people who can’t face the responsibility of raising prodgies seize on this as an excuse to copy them.”
“I have a grown son,” Elihu said after a moment. “I expect to be a grandfather in a year or two. I haven’t felt this effect you’re talking about.”
“Nor have I, on the personal level, but that’s mainly because I don’t like to choose my friends among the kind of people who react that way. Mark you, I’m not much of a father except in the biological sense—my marriage caved in. Also my books act as a splendid surrogate for the basic function children perform for their parents.”