“Only learned memory is erased. Instinct remains.”

  “I’m a behaviorist of sorts, Dr. Rines, and I just find it impossible to ascribe this to instinct. Bedwetting and fingersucking I can accept. Even homosexuality might be carried on the genes. But the environment has to have some influence.”

  “I don’t know that much about the different schools of thought.”

  “I suppose it isn’t all that significant. I’m just telling you where I come from, because that makes my conclusion from all this surprise even me.”

  “Conclusion?”

  “Hypothesis. Remarkable things are carried on the genes. Things we never supposed. A proclivity for surmounting all obstacles. A tendency to divorce sex from business. How can that be genetic? All I can guess is that something in the DNA, or a relationship between various proteins, is compatible with certain responses to the environment and incompatible with others. It’s in the genes. In which case, what the hell is a psychotherapist good for?”

  George shrugged. “I’ve always wondered that.”

  For a moment Dr. Manwaring looked annoyed. Theo he laughed. “So have I.

  We don’t help very many people, and we never help the people who need help the most. You aren’t a psychotherapist, are you? Yet I would have been pleased, despite all my years of training, if one of my dialogues with Marian Williamson had gone so smoothly.”

  “Thank you. You’ve been a tremendous help.”

  “Let me read the paper you write.”

  “I will. You don’t mind my using a tape of this conversation?”

  “Not at all. What are you going to call it?”

  “Call what?”

  “This effect. How about, ‘The Soul Syndrome.’ ”

  “Scientists who talk seriously about the soul get laughed out of symposiums, Dr. Manwaring.”

  “Then at least do me a favor and title the article ‘The Discovery of the Soul.’

  Because I think that’s what you found here. It may not live on after death, but it sure as hell is an inner force that controls the outer actions. The genuine unconscious. Freud would be proud of you. Even though Freud was an idiot.”

  They laughed. They had dinner together. And the next day, after George took Dr. Manwaring to the airport, he sat watching the planes take off. It surprised him, vaguely, that the planes were still following their normal domestic schedules. France had surrendered the day before, millions of American soldiers were coining home under terms of the surrender treaty. Britain was becoming a client state of Russia. A war had been fought and lost in thirty weeks, and during all that time America hadn’t stopped, hadn’t gone on rationing, hadn’t even buckled her belt a little tighter. The airlines still flew.

  And George Rines had an uninterrupted budget for researching into the human soul, of all things.

  No wonder we lost, George thought. We don’t even know when we’re at war.

  He went back to the laboratory and made a decision. The next experiment would have an entirely different purpose. The sleepers were beyond saving.

  But somec wasn’t. Somec might be useful.

  In the morning he had his own brain taped. And then, while the assistants were busy speculating on why the boss had done that, he went into another laboratory, put the normal dosage of somec into a syringe, and in front of a horrified graduate student he injected himself with the drug.

  It coursed through him quickly and painfully and it surprised him. “Dr.

  Rines,” the graduate student shouted. “That was somec.”

  “I know,” he answered impatiently, “and it hurts like hell. The braintapers have a tape of my own brain. Leave me for a couple of days, revive me, and play myself back into me.”

  “Why did you do this to yourself?”

  “It’s against the law to use human beings as guinea pigs. I promised myself I wouldn’t sue.” And then the somec turned hot in his veins and his memories fled out of his mind and he was asleep.

  He awoke disoriented. He remembered sitting down to be taped, remembered the helmet on his head with the needles that carried the currents. And now, abruptly, he was lying on a bed in the patient section of the lab, surrounded by his assistants.

  “Good morning,” he said.

  “You’re an idiot,” said Doran Waite. “Scientists don’t try their own magic potions anymore.”

  “I couldn’t legally ask anyone else to do this, and we had to know.”

  “So we’ll know. And if we were wrong about the rats and even your own brain patterns don’t fit inside your head anymore, what will you do then?”

  “Be out of circulation before the Russians come.” George laughed. No one else did.

  While waiting to see how George turned out, they kept working. They tried a control group, to see if any residual memories did, in fact, remain after the somec. They revived another five patients but did not play any braintapes into their heads. They remained like infants, utterly out of control of their bodies.

  After two weeks of no more progress than an infant of the same age, they were put back on somec.

  And George had no ill effects at all. “No disorientation,” he told the assistants who interviewed him. “No feeling that my memories are wrong at all. I feel fine.”

  When he had said that for five weeks, he started work on writing the final report. It took more than a month, with all the papers to be sorted through and interpreted, but the conclusion was basically this: There was nothing to be done to help the current sleepers, but by pretaping a person’s memories and then putting him on somec, with the tape to be replayed after he awakened, a person could be kept alive for an indefinite period of time with no damage whatsoever. It meant that now people who were dying of cancer could be safely put to sleep and revived when the cure was available. It meant that now a crew could be put on a spaceship and sleep their way to the stars and awaken at the other end, probably with no ill effects, though, of course, there hadn’t been time to test the effects of somec over several centuries. But it meant there was a chance.

  It meant that immortality of a sort was within reach.

  And, report in hand, or rather, in briefcase, George Rines flew back to Washington and went straight to Senator Maxwell’s office. The senator was in a meeting. George waited. And when the senator returned, George didn’t give him time to say hello.

  After a few minutes of George explaining all the implications of somec combined with braintaping, the senator wearily shook his head.

  “Starships, George? Immortality? Who really gives a damn anymore?”

  The despair was so thick in the room that George caught himself holding his breath, as if not to breathe it in. A moment ago he had been excited, had been sure he could communicate that excitement to Senator Maxwell.

  Instead the senator handed him a short press release. “Go ahead and read it.

  The President’s reading it to the press right now.”

  It said:

  “Today Russian troops entered New York State and Maine from Quebec. The National Guard is trying to cope with the emergency as U.S. Army units converge on the area. We believe that the aggression will be dealt with shortly, but in, the meantime we are proceeding with an orderly evacuation of New York City, Buffalo, Rochester, and other major cities that seem to be primary targets for the enemy.

  “Throughout our administration we have struggled to maintain at least a semblance of detente. We have struggled for peace. Let the court of world opinion decide whether we have done badly. But the time for peace and restraint has ended. We will fight as necessary to preserve our great nation.

  “Because I know it will be asked, I answer the question, ‘Will we use nuclear weapons?’ The answer is an unequivocal no. I wish I could say the reason was altruistic. But blood will be shed anyway. The reason we will not launch our missiles is because today our aerial photographs showed that the Russians did not remove their missiles from Quebec or Cuba after all. Today they removed the camouflage so we would know how futile an attempt to launch missiles would be. Because the moment we begin preparations for launch; the enemy will have destroyed us. It is that simple. So we will fight on the ground and in the air and on the sea with conventional weapons, and, God willing, we shall prevail. Pray for our soldiers. And pray for their commanders.”

  George set the paper back on the senator’s desk, slowly.

  “We used to joke about the day the Russians invaded.”

  The senator buried his face in his hands. “The press release doesn’t even begin to tell the story; George. The Russians aren’t meeting any resistance.”

  “The National Guard—”

  “The National Guard is breaking and running at every confrontation. The National Guard is taking its weapons and going home, presumably to protect their families. And we all saw what our Army can do in Europe. It can run.

  But it can’t fight.”

  George felt sick. “But I thought—”

  “No one thought. Nobody gives a damn. For the last five years we’ve been in the worst situation the world could possibly be in, and no one stopped making money long enough to notice.” The senator picked up the first few folders of George’s report. “Starships. I wish I had one now. I would fly far, far away. I’ll make a bet with you, George. I’ll bet you that the enemy’s in Washington within two weeks. And I’ll bet you that the U.S. surrenders within a month.

  And I’ll bet you that during all that time, we outnumbered them and outgunned them three or four to one.”

  “I hope you’re wrong.”

  “I’m being optimistic, George. Now get the hell out of my office and take your starships with you.”

  George had to call his secretary at Berkeley, which was hard, since the phone lines were crowded, but he got the number of Aggie’s lawyer. He caught him in his office just as he was leaving.

  “After a year, now, you suddenly decide to call,” the lawyer said.

  “Things are worse than anyone thinks,” George insisted. “Give me Aggies phone number.”

  “She’s forbidden me to give you any information as to her whereabouts, Mr.

  Rines, and I don’t have time to argue with you. I have a case in court in half an hour and I have to leave immediately.”

  “A case in court! You idiot, I can’t believe you’re going to a case in court!

  You’re in New Jersey! The Russians aren’t two hundred miles away! And you have a case in court!”

  “Don’t be an alarmist.”

  “Listen, listen to me. I just talked to Senator Maxwell. He estimates we only have a few days. Days, he said. I have passes and clearances that can let me use high priority aircraft to get Aggie and the girls to California, where it’s safer. Do you understand that? I can save their lives or at least let them live without being inconvenienced and heaven knows they love not to be inconvenienced, particularly by bullets, so give me their telephone number and their address and don’t give me any more argument.”

  The lawyer, still reluctantly, gave George the telephone number and the address. It was a Virginia telephone number, and the address was in Sterling Park. Half an hour if the roads were clear.

  And, to his surprise, the roads were nearly clear. It was as if there were no war at all. Business as usual. Delivery trucks, the normal number of cars. No exodus into the countryside. No panic. Not even a sense of grim determination to fight. The only grimness was from the habitual speeders who resented the presence of drivers going the normal rate of speed. George was one of those who sped. He turned on the radio, sure enough, the news was blaring out every fifteen minutes. But in between they were still playing music. The top forty on some stations; easy listening on others; a talk station was interviewing a man who swam the Chesapeake Bay once a week.

  “Someday soon I plan to swim it the long way. The only real danger is from the pollution. One swallow of the water is like smoking a pack a day for ten years.” Laughter from the studio audience.

  Am I living in the same world with these people? George couldn’t believe the indifference. If all the world is crazy, I must be the one who’s insane.

  But he got to Sterling Park, and found his wife and daughters packing a four-wheel-drive vehicle.

  “Aggie,” he said, and when Agle turned around George was relieved to see that she was happy to see him, that her arms reached out instinctively for him, and he embraced her and told her he could get them to California immediately, it’s a good thing they were packing, and hurry.

  “We are hurrying,” Aggie said. “But George, you don’t understand. We’ve been ready for this for a year now. We knew this was going to happen. We know where we’re going to go. And it isn’t California.”

  “But California’s safer.”

  “No place is safer, George, except away from the cities. We didn’t know you’d be here, George, but we have enough to spare. We even have an extra sleeping bag. Come with us, George.”

  She meant it. She wanted him. And he remembered the lonely nights coming home to his apartment. He almost said yes. But then he remembered his work at Berkeley.

  “I can’t,” he said. “I have work to do. Why do you think I have the priority passes?”

  “Work?” she said, and her face turned, bitter. “Playing with rats?”

  “Aggie, I’ve found the way that we can travel to the stars!”

  “And we’ve found the way we can travel to the hills. Which do you think is more practical?”

  She turned her back on him and went back to loading the jeep. He watched for another fifteen minutes or so, trying to think of something to say. Finally he said good-bye.

  “Good-bye, Daddy,” Diane said.

  “I’m afraid for you,” he said.

  Aggic turned to him and acidly retorted, “Afraid? You’ll never notice the war, George.”

  “I notice it.”

  “You know it’s going on. But it won’t change anything, will it? You’ve got work to do. Save the world. Go to the stars. Clean up rat shit. Nothing, but nothing, can interfere with that.”

  The words stung. She had said them before, during their many quarrels before the separation, but they stung now, because he saw that he was no different from Aggie’s lawyer, both trying to conduct business as usual, both shutting out the storms that would soon sweep the world away. Almost.

  Almost he said, “I’ll go with you.” But he could not. It was impossible.

  “It’s impossible,” he said. “I am what I am. I can’t change.”

  Aggie smiled a little then. “How fatal for you. I am also what I am. I wish it weren’t true. I wish I could cultivate your oblivion to reality.”

  “I wish I could think my work was as trivial as you do.”

  “If wishes were fishes.”

  “We’d never starve.” And they laughed in memory of a joke they had shared years ago when they still shared jokes. And then George got back in his car and, because he had priority passes, he was able to get on one of the few airplanes that wasn’t shuttling troops to the front, and he was in Berkeley when the news came about the surrender.

  The troops had begun fighting, but they kept coming to cities in their slow retreat. And in every city they came to, most of the citizens had refused to evacuate. “Declare us an open city,” the mayors would say. “There are too many people to evacuate, and a battle would kill thousands. Millions. Declare us an open city.” And so the military declared it an open city and moved on.

  In less than a week they were at the outskirts of Washington, D.C., and when the general commanding the division that had just left Baltimore realized that even now Congress couldn’t make up its mind, he surrendered and went home. And by that night, the war was over, except for a few futile pockets of resistance in the South and the West and the Midwest.

  The first Russian troops to arrive in Berkeley only three days later found George Rines standing guard over his files with a few like-minded graduate assistants, as others, led by Doran Waite, tried to break in to burn the papers.

  “You can’t let the Russians have this!”

  “I can’t let this knowledge be destroyed!” George yelled back. And then the submachine guns were pointed at them and the fight was over and the files were safe for posterity and it was only then that George realized that what he was fighting for was not knowledge, but his command of it, and the Russian scientists came only a week later and George was out of a job. They occasionally visited him to ask questions, but other than that, he was not allowed into the building. “Security,” the Russians told him. “You might try to destroy something.”

  Eventually, however, they let him back in, offering him a position as a lab assistant. He took it.

  And he watched in frustration as they kept making mistakes, kept violating simple rules of procedure, and he realized serious research was dead here.

  Enough had been done that somec and braintaping could be done on a fairly large scale. It didn’t occur to the Russians, or they were forbidden to let it occur to them, that there was a great deal more theoretical work to be done on the question of man’s soul.

  “Am I correct,” the Russian supervisor asked him one day, “in believing that your final report declares that these sleepers can never be revived?”

  “Not as themselves. Not as sane human beings. They’d have to be cared for as infants.”

  “And they all have cancer?”

  “Or something else.”

  That evening, at closing time, Goerge heard a Russian casually mention the fact that the bodies of the sleepers had all been sent to the mortuary for cremation.

  “What?” George asked. He had heard correctly, they told him. “But they’re people!” he insisted, shouting at the supervisor, whom he accosted in the lobby of the research building.