“Well, did he talk to that mad genius?” asked Deere.
Darfla nodded sullenly. “Just as you said. He knows.”
Deere turned to Themus. “Not quite all, however. Do you think you can take more, Watcher?”
Themus felt distinctly faint. One microscopic bit more added to the staggering burden of revelation he had had tossed on him, and he was prepared to sink through the floor.
However, Deere was not waiting for an answer. He motioned to a man in a toga and spiked belt, who came toward Themus. “See this man?” Deere asked.
Themus said yes. Deere tapped the man lightly on the chest, “Senior Watcher, First Grade, Norsim, lately disappeared from the barracks at Kyba-Base, Valasah.” He pointed to three others standing together near the front of the crowd. “Those three were top men in the Corps, over a period of ten years. Now they’re Crackpots.”
Themus’s eyebrows and hands asked, “But how?”
“There is a gravitating factor among Kyben,” Deere explained. “There are Crackpots who are brought up as Stuffs who realize when they get here that their thinking has been fettered. Eventually they come to us. They come to us for the simple reason that the intellect rises through the Watcher ranks, and for several reasons gets assigned here. We’ve made sure the smartest boys get their final assignment here with us.
“On the other side of the ledger there are noncons who go psycho from the responsibility of being a freethinker. They want supervision, they need their thinking directed. They eventually wind up as Kyben, after minor reconditioning so they don’t remember all this,” he waved his hand to indicate the Cave. “Now they’re somewhere out there and probably quite happy.”
“But how can you make a Watcher disappear so completely, when the whole garrison here is looking—”
“Simple,” said a voice from behind Themus.
Supervisor Furth just stood smiling.
Themus just stood choking.
The elder Watcher grinned at the confusion swirling about Themus’s face.
“How did—when were you—” Themus stuttered.
Furth raised a hand to stop him. “I was an unbending Stuff for a good many years, Themus, before I realized the Crackpot in me wanted out.” He grinned widely. “Do you know what did it? I was kidnapped, put in a barrel with a bunch of chattering pegullas, and forced to think my way out. I finally made it, and when I crawled out, all covered with pegulla dung, those grinning maniacs helped me up and said, ‘More fun than a barrel of pegullas!’”
Themus began to chuckle.
“That did it,” said Furth.
“But why do you send men like Elix back to the Mines? You must know how horrible it is. That isn’t at all consistent.”
Furth’s mouth drew down at the corner, “It is, when you consider that I’m supposed to be the iron hand of the Watcher garrison here on Kyba. We have to keep the Stuffs in line. They have to be maneuvered, while they think they’re maneuvering us. And Elix was getting too far out of line.”
“Do you know how close to being killed you came when we brought you here the first time?” Deere said.
Themus turned back to the pockfaced little man, “No. I—I—thought you’d just send me back and let the Corps deal with me.”
“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 noncon 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 noncon, 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 noncon 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 stepped over the line from explanation to bathos. “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 noncon 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.