Yet the audience knew that Jerry Crove had not repented.

  “My God, Crove, how long do you think I can keep doing this?” asked the prosecutor. He did not seem cheerful. In fact, Jerry thought he looked almost desperate.

  “Getting a little tough on you?” Jerry asked, grateful for the conversation because it meant there would be a few minutes between deaths.

  “What kind of man do you think I am? We’ll bring him back to life in a minute anyway, I tell myself, but I didn’t get into this business in order to find new, hideous ways of killing people.”

  “You don’t like it? And yet you have such a natural talent for it.”

  The prosecutor looked sharply at Crove. “Irony? Now you can joke? Doesn’t death mean anything to you?”

  Jerry did not answer, only tried to blink back the tears that these days came unbidden every few minutes.

  “Crove, this is not cheap. Do you think it’s cheap? We’ve spent literally billions of rubles on you. And even with inflation, that’s a hell of a lot of money.”

  “In a classless society there’s no need for money.”

  “What is this, dammit! Now you’re getting rebellious? Now you’re trying to be a hero?”

  “No.”

  “No wonder we’ve had to kill you eight times! You keep thinking up clever arguments against us!”

  “I’m sorry. Heaven knows I’m sorry.”

  “I’ve asked to be released from this assignment. I obviously can’t crack you.”

  “Crack me! As if I didn’t long to be cracked.”

  “You’re costing too much. There’s a definite benefit in having criminals convincingly recant on television. But you’re getting too expensive. The cost-benefit ratio is ridiculous now. There’s a limit to how much we can spend on you.”

  “I have a way for you to save money.”

  “So do I. Convince the damned audience!”

  “Next time you kill me, don’t put a helmet on my head.”

  The prosecutor looked absolutely shocked. “That would be final. That would be capital punishment. We’re a humane government. We never kill anybody permanently.”

  They shot him in the gut and let him bleed to death. They threw him from a cliff into the sea. They let a shark eat him alive. They hung him upside down so that just his head was under water, and when he finally got too tired to hold his head out of the water he drowned.

  But through all this, Jerry had become more inured to the pain. His mind had finally learned that none of these deaths was permanent after all. And now when the moment of death came, though it was still terrible, he endured it better. He screamed less. He approached death with greater calm. He even hastened the process, deliberately inhaling great draughts of water, deliberately wriggling to attract the shark. When they had the guards kick him to death he kept yelling, “Harder,” until he couldn’t yell anymore.

  And finally when they set up a screen test, he fervently told the audience that the Russian government was the most terrifying empire the world had ever known, because this time they were efficient at keeping their power, because this time there was no outside for barbarians to come from, and because they had seduced the freest people in history into loving slavery. His speech was from the heart—he loathed the Russians and loved the memory that once there had been freedom and law and a measure of justice in America.

  And the prosecutor came into the room ashen-faced.

  “You bastard,” he said.

  “Oh. You mean the audience was live this time?”

  “A hundred loyal citizens. And you corrupted all but three of them.”

  “Corrupted?”

  “Convinced them.”

  Silence for a moment, and then the prosecutor sat down and buried his head in his hands.

  “Going to lose your job?” Jerry asked.

  “Of course.”

  “I’m sorry. You’re good at it.”

  The prosecutor looked at him with loathing. “No one ever failed at this before. And I had never had to take anyone beyond a second death. You’ve died a dozen times, Crove, and you’ve got used to it.”

  “I didn’t mean to.”

  “How did you do it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What kind of animal are you, Crove? Can’t you make up a lie and believe it?”

  Crove chuckled. (In the old days, at this level of amusement he would have laughed uproariously. But inured to death or not, he had scars. And he would never laugh loudly again.) “It was my business. As a playwright. The willing suspension of disbelief.”

  The door opened and a very important looking man in a military uniform covered with medals came in, followed by four Russian soldiers. The prosecutor sighed and stood up. “Good-bye, Crove.”

  “Good-bye,” Jerry said.

  “You’re a very strong man.”

  “So,” said Jerry, “are you.” And the prosecutor left.

  The soldiers took Jerry out of the prison to a different place entirely. A large complex of buildings in Florida. Cape Canaveral. They were exiling him, Jerry realized.

  “What’s it like?” he asked the technician who was preparing him for the flight.

  “Who knows?” the technician asked. “No one’s ever come back. Hell, no one’s ever arrived yet.”

  “After I sleep on somec, will I have any trouble waking up?”

  “In the labs, here on earth, no. Out there, who knows?”

  “But you think we’ll live?”

  “We send you to planets that look like they might be habitable. If they aren’t, so sorry. You take your chances. The worst that can happen is you die.”

  “Is that all?” Jerry murmured.

  “Now lie down and let me tape your brain.”

  Jerry lay down and the helmet, once again, recorded his thoughts. It was irresistible, of course: when you are conscious that your thoughts are being taped, Jerry realized, it is impossible not to try to think something important. As if you were performing. Only the audience would consist of just one person. Yourself when you woke up.

  But he thought this: That this starship and the others that would be and had been sent out to colonize in prison worlds were not really what the Russians thought they were. True, the prisoners sent in the Gulag ships would be away from earth for centuries before they landed, and many or most of them would not survive. But some would survive.

  I will survive, Jerry thought as the helmet picked up his brain pattern and transferred it to tape.

  Out there the Russians are creating their own barbarians. I will be Attila the Hun. My child will be Mohammed. My grandchild will be Genghis Khan.

  One of us, someday, will sack Rome.

  Then the somec was injected, and it swept through him, taking consciousness with it, and Jerry realized with a shock of recognition that this, too, was death: but a welcome death, and he didn’t mind. Because this time when he woke up he would be free.

  He hummed cheerfully until he couldn’t remember how to hum, and then they put his body with hundreds of others on a starship and pushed them all out into space, where they fell upward endlessly into the stars. Going home.

  1979

  A Sleep and a Forgetting

  There is no remembrance of former things; neither shall there be any remembrance of things that are to come with those that shall come after.

  —Ecclesiastes 1:11

  There was nothing remarkable about a rat failing to run a maze. What was remarkable was that five rats ran the maze perfectly, and five did not.

  “My Lord,” whispered George Rines.

  “Run it again?” asked Vaughn Shirten, the lab assistant who tended the rats.

  “Of course.”

  The five rats who had failed before failed again. The others ran the maze perfectly.

  “Vaughn, do you have five rats that have never run a maze at all?”

  “Rats of every kind. Smart, stupid, and psychologically virgin.” He brought five virgins from the ratroom and put them in their first maze. There was no significant difference between the performance of the virgins and the five rats who had failed to run the maze before.

  “My God,” whispered George Rines. “What have we done?”

  “Made rive smart rats stupid, looks like.”

  Two days before, all ten rats had run the maze perfectly. They had been divided randomly into two groups. Five of the rats were then given a drug; a day later they were given another. Those were the five that had forgotten how to run the maze.

  “I’m not worried about the rats,” George said.

  “I am,” said Vaughn.

  “We’ve been giving that drug to people.”

  Vaughn looked at him blankly. “People? A stupid drug? Who needs a drug to make people stupid?”

  “Somec, Vaughn. Somec.”

  It was Vaughn’s turn to look shocked. “I thought they tested that!”

  “All the tests but this one, Vaughn.”

  “But, haven’t they woken up any of the people who’ve gone on somec?”

  “Not yet.” George smiled wanly. “They all had cancer. They didn’t want to be wakened until there was a cure.”

  “Somec.” Vaughn laughed. “Some miracle drug!”

  “It isn’t funny,” George said.

  “You signed a contract,” Dr. Tell insisted. “You can’t publish without my consent.”

  George shook his head. “I can’t publish scholarly papers. So if you won’t let me take it to fellow scientists, I’ll take it to the press. They’ll print the story.”

  Tell glared; restrained himself from shouting; said, “You bastard. You would.”

  “It isn’t enough just to stop authorizing it. The formula is public knowledge—

  what’s to stop some grad student from whipping it up in his lab for a friend?

  Even the life support isn’t hard to arrange.”

  “You don’t seem to understand.” Slowly, carefully. The smile that had launched a thousand research projects made a struggle to appear on his face.

  It failed. “There is more at stake than somec.”

  George closed his eyes.

  “There’s a thing called independent research. We checked everything. We were so careful, George. We even did rat tests. Gave somec to some rats, not to others, and then taught them both mazes. There was no effect. How were we to know that somec impaired memory?”

  “It doesn’t impair, Dr. Tell. It eliminates.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “I’m pretty damn sure.”

  “Pretty damn isn’t sure enough, George. There’s that jackass of a senator who’ll stand up and piously denounce federally funded projects that make basket cases out of people who already have problems. He’ll do it, you know, and that’ll mean funds cut off from everything.”

  “So what will you do, pretend everything’s all right? They’re not that far from curing some types of cancer now, and when they can fix it they’ll wake up the sleepers who have that cancer and they’ll find that they’re vegetables.”

  “I don’t know what we’re going to do yet!” Dr. Tell shouted.

  “We’re going to warn the public.”

  “We’re going to keep it quiet until we know what we’re going to do.”

  “And when will that be?”

  “I don’t know.”

  George stood up. “I didn’t think so. I know, Dr. Tell. It’d be nice to tell the press, there was a disaster, but this is how we’re going to solve it in the future.

  But we can’t do that, can we? So we’re going to warn people, and warn them now, that somec does exactly what we’ve claimed it does, with one side effect.

  It wipes out memory.”

  “Dammit, George, we don’t know that!”

  “We suspect it. That’s enough.”

  “If you do this, George, I can promise you that you’ll never have a research or teaching job in the United States of America. Or Britain. Or anywhere!”

  “In five years there’ll be Russian troops all over America and none of us will have teaching jobs except those of us who know what we’re doing in a laboratory. No more fund-raising experts, Dr. Tell. So I’m really not worried about your threat.”

  “And if the Russians don’t come, Cassandra?”

  “I will have saved some lives.”

  “ ‘You’re out for headlines, you bastard, if it destroys American science in the process! You want to be a crusader! You want to—”

  The door slammed, and George didn’t hear the rest of the speech. In a way, he knew Dr. Tell was right. George’s own first impulse was to keep his discovery silent. He had wrestled with the problem all night, had hardly slept, but he decided at about four a.m. that he really had no choice. Either he could be the crusader who was hated by other scientists, or he could be one of the bastards who hushed it up, hated by the rest of the world. The rest of the world was bigger. And none of the scientists would be left mindless.

  He returned to his office to clean out his desk and load his books into boxes.

  The reporters would be meeting him at his home in three hours. There was no point in pretending to stay at the Institute. His letter of resignation was already on the Director’s desk. It was, almost a formality, telling Dr. Tell. But he was the man who was supervising the whole somec project, he had to know.

  I feel like a murderer. So much hope for somec. But is it my fault? No. We were too excited. We thought we had tested everything. We deserve to be punished for acting too quickly, too unthoroughly.

  Punished? George frowned at the thought. Not a matter of punishment or guilt or anything. Just stop the somec and find a way to get around the problem.

  When he pulled the Scientific Americans off the shelf, they scattered in every direction. There were quite a few of them, most of the recent ones dogeared where he meant to read an article sometime soon. It was the only way he had to keep up on fields other than his own.

  Perhaps in order to avoid thinking about the announcement he was going to make to the reporters in a couple of hours, or perhaps because moving out of the office was so distasteful to him, George picked up the top magazine and opened it to the first dog-eared page. He skimmed; read two more articles; then opened another magazine. Braintaping was the title of the first article he turned to; “Instantaneous teaching by establishing currents in the brain? It may be within reach.” It intrigued George enough to lead him into the magazine. And what he found there meant that he wouldn’t pack up after all.

  It took half an hour to finish the entire article. It took another ten minutes to get in telephone contact with Doran Waite, the man whose name led off the article. And it took three minutes to verify the hope that the article gave.

  “Yes, Dr. Rines, that’s right. We can’t do it with complicated mammals like primates, but with rats we can take the entire learning of one rat and put it into the head of another. For quite a while, they’re okay.”

  “And after a while?”

  “They’re not okay. They go crazy.”

  “Dr. Waite, can you come out here? Or better still, can I go out there?”

  It took another fifteen minutes to get reservations, and then George left his office without calling home. The reporters could wait until tomorrow. Then he’d have the hopeful note Dr. Tell wanted, the one that could forestall drastic government action, the one that might save the,hundreds of people whose memories were already irrevocably lost.

  When it became clear to the reporters who showed up at his house that George Rines was not there and would not be there, they called his office and were told that he had resigned and left. Most gave up then; a few did not; one actually went to the Institute and talked to everyone. No one would talk.

  Except for the ratman, the lab assistant who cared for the behavioral testing animals. Vaughn Shirten.

  The headline was large, the editor was willing to go with the story when he saw the copy of the press release that the reporter had found on George’s desk, the one he didn’t mean to release. It was quoted from extensively, along with a few juicier quotes from Vaughn. “It seems highly likely that at least some of those who have taken somec have been partially or completely deprived of their memory,” said George’s release. “That means that a hell of a lot of folks won’t even know haw to speak or go to the bathroom,” Vaughn added helpfully. “It means that they won’t have anything left but their instincts. And human beings don’t have as much instinct as a planaria.”

  It was three a.m. in Berkeley when the motel operator finally agreed to call room 215.

  “Yes?” George asked sleepily.

  “I’m terribly sorry, Mr. Rines. But they insisted that it’s an emergency. I told them they just couldn’t because we weren’t sure that the G. Rines . . . but there’s a government man on the phone, and a U.S. Senator called, and your wife.”

  “You’re kidding,” George said. “Let me talk to my wife.”

  “It is you then? I’m so relieved.”

  “Yeah, you’re fine, let me talk to my—”

  “George!” Aggie’s voice was anguished. “Oh, George, how could you have just gone off like this—”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t think I’d end up staying overnight.”

  “You might have called!”

  “It was after midnight here when I got to the motel. It would have been two a.m. there. I didn’t want to wake you up.”

  “Did you think I could sleep?”

  “I’m sorry. Now you know where I am—” he yawned, “can we go back to sleep?”

  “George!” she shouted. “Don’t fall asleep! You can’t tell me you didn’t know there’d be phone calls!”

  “About what?”

  “Your interview in the paper.”

  “I didn’t do an interview—”

  “That’s what I told the Senator, but he kept demanding until the reporter found that article and the phone numbers on your desk and called Dr. Waite and—”

  “You called Dr. Waite?”

  “And he said you had been there all day and George, Dr. Tell called and so did Ron Hubbard and they said you’re fired, even though you resigned, and George, there’ve been phone calls all evening—”