“Busting in on me like a—like a—a buster-in—”

  “But darling, I couldn’t leave you isolated. That’s your whole problem, you know, isolation. Think for a minute and you’ll see that I’m right. You should go out more.” Having reached him, she stopped and patted his shoulder. “You really should. Go join the other patients in the recreation rooms. They’re wonderful people when you get to know them, really they are. And the social hostesses are such dears too. They want to help you…help you enjoy yourself, help you get strong again. What is that beautiful old German saying? You know the one, it means—”

  “Kraft durch Freude,” Bailey suggested.

  “Does that mean ‘strength through joy’? Because that’s what I mean. But oh, dear, I must put these poor thirsty blossoms in water, mustn’t I?” Birdie started off. Her yellow ringlets jiggled, but her hips swung like solid masses. There was, in fact, a solidity about every aspect of her, a kind of absolute physical control—even in bed with him on a hot afternoon, she hadn’t sweated—that had been comforting at first: the Earth Mother image.

  Only, should the Earth Mother babble?

  “That was a Nazi motto,” Bailey said.

  “Oh, really? How interesting. You know so much, Duggie, darling. Once we get you well again, you’ll be able to find so many wonderful ways to help others. Won’t you?” She took an unbreakable plastic vase off a table and shook her head sadly at the dethorned roses already within. “Poor things. They have had their little day, I’m afraid. But if they helped brighten your life, that was their service, wasn’t it?”

  Bailey clenched his fists. “For instance,” he said, “I know the Nazis gassed people who didn’t fit into their scheme. But at least they didn’t preach positive thinking at them.”

  “No, I suppose not.” Birdie sent the roses reverently down the waste chute and took the vase, the buttercups, and her enormous handbag into the bathroom. “That poor man—Hitler, was that his name?—how he must have been starved for love!”

  She left the door open. He could have avoided seeing pink walls, teddy bears, and hobby horses by looking out the window. But for some morbid reason, he had to stare in that direction. Maybe, he though, this enable him to hate them better.

  “No doubt it was most unkind of other countries to make war on the Nazis,” he said around this teeth.

  Birdie set her handbag down on the flush tank and rummaged in it. “Certainly,” she replied. “I’m not saying that their prisoners should not have been rescued. If there really were prisoners. You know what wartime propaganda is like. With—what is it?—fifty years’ perspective, do you really and truly believe any human beings could behave that way? Honestly, I can’t.”

  “I can. I know what historical evidence is. I also know how human beings behave right now. Committing violent crimes, say.”

  “Yes, yes, darling, but don’t you understand? Let’s suppose those awful things were true. Or let’s be realistic and think about those deeds today that yes, I know, they are done…by poor, bewildered victims of an unfeeling society. Now, suppose that the people being attacked—or even people being herded into gas chambers and ovens, if they ever were—suppose they turned around and said, with love shining out of their eyes, “You too are victims. You are our brothers. Come, let us embrace each other.” Birdie leaned past the door to lay her own china-blue gaze directly upon him. “Don’t you see what that would do? Can’t you feel what a change would occur?”

  “The method doesn’t seem to have improved me any,” Bailey said with a jerky gesture of shoulders.

  “Well, it does take time.” Birdie returned to her task. From her handbag she drew a pocketknife and began trimming the buttercup stems. “But true love is infinite,” she said. “True love knows no impatience, no anger, no despair, no end.”

  He couldn’t stop himself; he must take first one step toward her, then another, while a roaring mounted in his skull. “Do you love me?” he said in a voice that sounded remote and hollow to him. “Or am I only your assignment?”

  “I love everyone,” she cooed.

  “In bed, too?”

  “Oh, Duggie, love isn’t jealous. Love is sharing. I use my body as just one way of loving you.”

  He was at the bathroom entrance, swaying on his feet. “But do you care for me?” he cried. “Me, alone, especially, not because I’m a—a—a featherless biped, but because I’m me!”

  She didn’t blush. He had never seen any such change in her creamy skin. But she did flutter her lashes downward. “Well,” she murmured, “I have thought, sometimes, if it would make you happy, we could get married when you’re well. Such a sweet name, don’t you think? Birdie Bailey.”

  He screamed in his torment, snatched the knife from her, and cut and cut and cut.

  “Please don’t do that,” she said. “That’s not a loving act.”

  He slashed her belly open. For a moment, through the darkness that brawled around him, he saw the wires, transistors, thermogenic superconductor leads, heavy-duty accumulator. He would have stopped his assault but his arm was already in motion.

  The knife faced the insulation around a cable. The powerplant short-circuited through him. It felt like hatred, lovely, clean, hell-blue hatred coursing inward, possessing him, making him one with its Ragnarok tide. But when his heart went into fibrillation, that hurt.

  In a cloud of smoke, Douglas Bailey fell on Birdie Carol.

  Of course she’s a machine, thought this late fragment of consciousness. No human being could’ve kept that up.

  Then his pulse stopped and he was dead.

  Death was a stormwind. It was as if he were blown, whirled, cast up and down and up again, in a howl and a whistle and a noise of monstrous gallopings. He did not know whether the wind was searing him with cold or heat. Nor did he wonder about it, for the lightnings blinded his eyes and the thunders rattled his teeth.

  Eyes? flashed a moment’s startlement. Teeth? But I’m dead…Wait a minute. Wait one bloody minute. How many deaths does that make?

  “Zero,” God counted, “one, ten, eleven, one hundred.”

  Why don’t You give me a chance to think? he yelled. By concentrating, he could maintain a certain equilibrium in chaos. He was Douglas Bailey. Sociologist. Psychoneurotic. Ending his life in an institution—three different lives and three different institutions, each as bad as the others.

  Why was the Simulator doing this to him?

  Well, the problem was real enough. Psychopathology was on the increase. Society had to cope somehow.

  But none of those three attempts was successful. Not really. Murderous indifference; murderous malevolence, murderous love. Which latter wasn’t actually love at all—anyhow, not a healthy kind. It was nothing but another way of trying to force people back into the very structure that had warped them.

  Love was acceptance of the loved one, whether he seem right or wrong; adjusting your behavior to his, within reasonable limits, not his to yours; giving him his freedom while always standing by to help if there should come trouble.

  “One hundred eleven, one thousand, one thousand one.”

  If social conditions were responsible for the epidemic, the cure lay in a basic reform. Change the conditions. Take off the unendurable pressures.

  Click. Chaos rested.

  No more compulsions, ordered Douglas Bailey. Let’s have the world’s first genuinely free civilization

  This he was granted.

  Fate the Fourth

  “Sure, I’m bitter,” said the man who sat at Bailey’s left. He was in his thirties, medium-sized, sandy-haired, and very drunk. “Who wouldn’t be?” He finished his bourbon on the rocks and set it noisily down on the bar. “ ’Nother,” he called. To his companion: “You care for ’nother?”

  “No, thanks,” Bailey said.

  “Aw, c’mon. I’ll buy. Leas’ I can do, way I been bending your ear. Good o’ you t’listen, me a stranger an’ so forth. But if Jim Wyman—tha’s my name, Jim Wyman—if Jim Wyman weeps on a shoulder, Jim Wyman ’spec’s t’ pay f’ privilege.”

  “That’s okay,” Bailey said. “I’m interested in what you’re telling me. I’ve been away for some years, you see. Just got back today. Things have changed.”

  “They sure have, Mr., uh, Mr.—they sure have. Place’ll never be ’erself again, tha’s f’ sure. Bartender!” Wyman roared. “Where’s ’at refill?”

  Bailey clenched his jaw for an embarrassing scene. He didn’t want to be thrown out. He wanted to rest in cool darkness, in the remembered elegance of mahogany and thick carpeting, nurse the single weak Scotch and water he dare allow himself, and spend an hour gathering back his courage. They had warned him that San Francisco, like every American city, had changed; they had not told him how shocking the change would be.

  The bartender considered Wyman for a moment, shrugged, and poured. Another symptom, Bailey thought. The Drake’s Tavern would never have served an obvious drunk aforetime. But when you looked twice, you also saw how dusty and shabby the Elizabethan decor had gone.

  “You were telling me you do R and D on computers,” he said in the hope of quieting Wyman.

  It worked. The man’s voice even became less slurred. “Yes. At the Med Center. Or rather, I did. Till yestiddy. Not now. Projec’ canceled. And it would’a been the bigges’ breakthrough since—since…No, bigger. Fun-damental!”

  “What was the project?”

  It turned out to be something that Bailey had seen discussed in theoretical terms before he fell sick. Direct man-machine linkages were an old idea, and of course the powered prosthetic limbs, hooked into an amputee’s nervous system, that had been developed around 1980, were a familiar case. But integration of the human brain and a computer presented difficulties on another order of magnitude. The connection wasn’t the problem. You didn’t need wires into the skull or any such nonsense. By amplification and induction, impulses could flow both ways, neuron to transistor and back again, through purely electromagnetic channels. But how to develop a common language, that was the question. It had never been shown that any particular encephalography pattern corresponded to any particular thought, and indeed the evidence was against it. Thought appeared to be the incredibly complex functioning of the entire cortical network.

  “But we got th’ basic approach,” Wyman said. “We figured how to proceed. Idea is, you don’t need any special codes. Jus’ need a one-one match. Kind of like languages. You can say same thing in English an’ German, to th’ extent diff’rent words mean same thing. They proved in neurophysiology section, brain can incorporate any digital code into own processes, long’s there’s unique correspondence. Nex’ the math boys worked out a bunch o’ theorems. You see, new data made the whole problem one o’ conformal mapping. Topological. You see? Once we had those theorems in our hot li’l fists, why, away we go. R and D. Develop right kind o’ computer an’ right kind programmin’—not easy, take effort, staff, sev’ral years’ work—but we know damn well we can do it. An’ do you know what success’d mean?”

  Bailey nodded eagerly. He was feeling better minute by minute. Intoxicated though Wyman was, he talked the language of science. And to hear that, after the past lost years, was like homecoming. Bailey’s discipline had been sociology, but it too was pretty well mathematized these days, and—

  And the man-computer system had fantastic potentialities. In effect, the machines immense store of data, memory-scanning, rate, ability to perform logical operations in microseconds, would be added to—integrated with—the human’s creativity and conation. During their linkage, the two would be one, a continuously self-programming calculator, a mind so powerful that IQ would have no meaning. They/he/it would, for the first time in intellectual history, consider the totality of a problem.

  Certain obvious dangers must be guarded against, and no doubt less obvious ones would manifest themselves as work progressed. But the ultimate rewards seemed worth any risk.

  “Well, we’re not gonna do it.” Wyman sagged above his glass. “No funds ’vailable. Got final word yestiddy. So now I’m busy gettin’ stonkered.”

  “Why no funds?” Bailey asked. “I should think NSF would bury any such proposal under a truckload of gigabucks.”

  “Huh? Where you been, pal? Time past when NSF had money t’ hand out. Nor NIH. We applied to ’em both. To ever’body in sight. Nope. Mental health too ’spensive. Otherwise government can barely keep a few existin’ programs goin’. Defense—think Defense’d be in’ested, wouldn’ you? Well, hell, yes, sure they’re int’rested, but you know what shape they’re in. Air Force takin’ payin’ passengers, USS Puerto Rico on the high seas as a floatin’ casino…jus’ so the service can finance a nickel’s worth o’ defense. Tha’s why we backed down on the Guyana issue last year. Oh, the President tried t’ save face, yattered ’bout ‘honorable settlement without military pressure’…but damn it, whole world knows there was military pressure—on us—by Venezuela, f’ Chris’ sake!”

  A tear dropped into Wyman’s drink. “Damn that man,” he mumbled. “Damn him to the smoggies’ pit in Hell. Damn him till half pas’ eternity. He’s the one ruined us. I bet the French government put ’im up to it. I bet any ’mount you like, he wrote his books an’ made his speeches on purpose.”

  “Who are you talking about?” Bailey inquired.

  “You know. The professor. The Frenchman. Can’t pr’nounce’s goddamn name. One with th’ ideas ’bout preservin’ the nuts.”

  “Wait a minute.” Bailey stiffened in his chair. His skin prickled “You don’t mean Michel Chanson d’Oiseau?”

  “Tha’s uh man. Tha’s uh man. Shansong Dwahso. Bet he was really a Chinese agent, name like that. He knew this big, sloppy, soft-hearted, fat-headed country ’ud go for his ideas—go overboard for’m—fall overboard, into a sea o’ manure. He’s the one ruined us. Ruined my pro-jec’. Ruined my country. Now we can’t do damn thing but support buncha worthless crackpated bums.” Wyman raised his glass. “Destruction to Shansong Dwaho!”

  “No.” Bailey rose. His chair clattered to the floor.

  “Huh?” Wyman blinked at him.

  I shouldn’t let myself get angry, Bailey knew. I’m not well yet. They told me I must be careful, not get excited, always keep my emotions under control, till my nerves have grown much steadier. But the rage mounted nevertheless, chilling, nauseating, shaking him. He said harshly, “For your information, I am one of those worthless crackpated bums.”

  “Uh? You?”

  “Don’t believe me?” Bailey drew his wallet out of his pants. (He had said they really needn’t issue him so good a suit, but they told him that morale was important to his recovery.) He flipped it open to the card that certified him as mentally ill. “I was discharged this morning, after five years in Napa State Hospital,” he said. “Before I took sick, I was a useful member of society. But then I went through such a nightmare as you in your smugness can’t begin to imagine. They saved me at Napa. They couldn’t have been more kind. As well as their knowledge permitted, they patched my mind together again. I’m on an outpatient basis now. When I’m fully cured, as I hope eventually I will be, I’ll go back to work. And I’ll gladly pay my share of the tax bill for helping those who aren’t well.”

  “Bu—but—” Wyman tried to talk Bailey trampled over him.

  “What would you have the country do? In the past twenty years, the rate of mental illness has grown almost exponentially. You have to do something. What’s your choice? Kill us? Brainscrub us? Exile us? Leave us to starve? Those are all possible policies. But I, along with a good many million fellow human beings, I say thank God that Chanson d’Oiseau showed us the decent way to handle the problem—and I say to hell with you!”

  He dashed the contents of his glass in Wyman’s face.

  “Bartender!” Wyman screamed. “You see what he did? You see what this suck-the-public-tit psycho did uh me?”

  ”Watch your language,” the bartender replied. “He’s certified, isn’t he? So the law says we gotta make allowances.”

  “It does? Bailey exclaimed. Delighted, he emptied Wyman’s glass over Wyman’s head.

  “Hey,” the bartender said. “Have a heart, buddy. I got to clean up the mess.”

  Bailey turned on his heel and strode out.

  Sunlight fell brilliant on the street from a cloudless sky full of wind and gulls. Bailey tried to ignore its illumination of the shabbiness of once-proud buildings, dirty sidewalks, drab display windows, scanty traffic, ill-clad pedestrians. The cost was certainly great but the obligation must be met. As Chanson d’Oiseau had written—Bailey savored the noble, often-read passage in his mind, and turned it to English while he walked:

  “Having shown in the foregoing chapters that epidemic madness arises from a situation that man has created, collectively (through overpopulation, overmechanization, regimentation, depersonalization, everything against which the deepest instincts of the human animal revolt), I now consider what must be done about these revolting human animals. Their numbers are, in truth, creating such a burden and a hazard that compassion for them tends to die. Yet their condition, it is due not to any fault of their own, but to a massive failure of society. Hence one must find a social cure for this social disease.

  “The solution that I shall propose and develop in detail is of the most radical. But what does ‘radical’ mean? The word comes from the Latin radix, meaning Racine—meaning root, and thus radical proposals are those which go to the root of the matter.

  “Obviously, clinical services must be provided free, to the maximum extent required in every individual case. But psychiatry is imperfect. There are few or no absolute cures. The patient who verges on instability, or who has regained a measure of stability after institutionalization, he should not be subjected ever to the same intolerable pressures that brought on his illness. Rather, he must be freed from them. His whole task is to recover, or at least not to grow worse. Therefore he should receive a public stipend, adequate for the support of him and his dependents at a decent standard of living. And, as long as his behavior does not constitute an outright menace to others, he should be free of legal restrictions, permitted to work off his impulses in any way that it has necessity—”