“Joe,” Bailey whispered. “Sam. But they’re my friends!”

  Rage drove out terror. Never had he seen with such starkness, snuffed blood and sweat at such distances, felt each microscopic breath of air cold across his skin. His thoughts went in lightning flashes: Those are savages. Must have come from the north. Survivors in those parts after all. People that really went back to nature.

  The pilgrims stood numb. The invaders encircled them. The two groups were about equal in numbers—no, the civilized men amounted yet to four or five more—and the girls were in good physical shape too. Why didn’t they fight? An athlete could get in under one of those clumsily handled swords, pikes, clubs…take it away from the enemy…or at least make the enemy pay!

  Bailey had almost jumped forth to begin combat when Avis collected her wits, lifted both hands, and cried, “What is this? My fellow souls, my brothers, what are you doing?”

  A northerner barked a command. His company got to work. One or two of the victims tried to run, but didn’t get far. The slaughter of the men was over in seconds, though some would obviously take hours to die. Thereafter the gang seized the women.

  “No!” Avis wailed. “Not with animals!”

  She struggled until, impatiently, her attacker knocked her out with his fist. He broke her jaw. The other girls gave less trouble. While waiting their turn, a couple of northerners cut pieces off a dead man and ate them raw.

  Cynara had fainted. I’ve got to get her away, Bailey thought in his nightmare. Away from…this whole area? We’ve forgotten how to fight. We’ve no weapons, no training, no will even to defend ourselves. And, now the savages have discovered us. They’ll swarm in, killing, raping, enslaving, looting, burning. It was a mistake to believe we’d succeeded in making history stop.

  But no. I can’t desert my people.

  Maybe, just maybe he and she would be overlooked in this hollow, until the invaders and their captured women—if they didn’t simply murder the girls—had gone away. Maybe he and she could flee across the land, carrying their warning, somehow rally their gentle folk before it was too late.

  They might perhaps have done so They might conceivably have become the leader of a civilization that would apply scientific method to the perfection of war, exterminate the enemy, and proceed on momentum to conquer a good-sized empire. But Cynara woke, and moaned, precisely as a few woods-runners passed by on their way to the Custodian’s house. They called the rest.

  Had he been armed. Bailey might have held the entrance to his refuge for a while. But the first spear thrust in his shoulder convinced him that he needed room to operate, if he wasn’t helplessly to be butchered. He charged forth and did manage to acquire an ax. With much satisfaction, he killed its owner and backed toward his tree. But the northerners were already behind him.

  Then a club spattered his brains and he was dead.

  Death was a stormwind. No, wait, this wasn’t death, wasn’t chaos, was merely the senselessness of total sensory deprivation.

  “Zero,” God counted, “one, ten, eleven—”

  Oh, come off it, Bailey growled. Do You think I don’t recognize binary digits?

  That was the worst world so far, his thoughts continued. And not because of the cannibals, either. They were only poor and ignorant. But the civilized people, who never bothered to find out what was going on beyond their little bailiwick, who blandly accepted the deaths of I don’t know how many human creatures as a reasonable price for their own superior culture—ugh!

  Hey, now. What do I mean, “so far”? I want out, not further in.

  I should be able to find the way. I’d better be able to. Otherwise, good-bye, sanity.

  “—one hundred, one hundred one, one hundred ten—”

  Or in Arabic, four five, six, et cetera. That’s a computer. My nerves detect its impulses while it’s on standby. This indicates that somehow I’m coupled to it. When the thing goes into action—yes, the Simulator.

  The man-machine system. I the man, it the machine. Together we consider a problem in totality.

  What problem?

  Well, I’m a sociologist, working on the cause and cure of mental illness. Many kinds of solutions are being proposed…I remember talk of voluntary euthanasia… But oftentimes in the past, remedies proved worse than troubles. Consider the long-range effect of bread and circuses on the Roman proletariat; consider most revolutions and attempted Utopias. We need a way to improve in a less blind, trial-and-error fashion. And it’s not enough to devise a theoretically workable system. We have to know beforehand how it’ll feel in action, to those it acts on. For instance, a dole might make good economic sense under some circumstances, but might demoralize the recipients. How can you test a social reform in advance, from the inside?

  Why, sure. The man-machine linkage. The human component supplies more than a general directive. He furnishes his entire conscious-unconscious-visceral-genetic understanding of what it is to be human. This goes into the data banks, along with every other piece of information the machine already has. Then, as one unit, brain and computer assume a social change and deduce the consequences. Since the objective is to explore those consequences form an immediate, emotional standpoint, the result of the logic is presented as a “dream.”

  Perhaps the machine is a bit too literal-minded.

  Be that as it may…clearly, if an imaginary world turns out to be undesirable, there’s no point in exploring it further. The system must allow me to order that sequence broken off. Sort of like the way a person can tell himself to awake from a bad dream.

  Only in this case, for some damn depth-psychological reason, the signal for switch-off took the form of my own realistically simulated death. And that shocked me into partial amnesia, Hence I didn’t issue an unequivocal order to end the whole show. Hence the machine waited on standby, till my stream of semi-consciousness tossed up something that it could interpret as a command.

  The mind shuddered. Christ! I could’ve gone on this way till—till—

  Okay, Simulator. Take me home and stop operation.

  Click?

  You heard me, said Douglas Bailey.

  Creation began.

  O Ye of Little Fate

  He opened his eyes. Darkness lay upon them. He yelled and flung his arms about.

  “I say there, what’s the matter? Wait a tick. I’m right here.”

  Douglas Bailey forced himself to lie quietly. His chest heaved and his pulse thuttered.

  The induction helmet was pulled off his head. He looked into the blessed, familiar, British face of Michael Birdsong, his immediate superior, and at the wonder of his own laboratory. The knowledge of deliverance went through him in a wave.

  “Are you all right?” Birdsong asked. “Something go wrong?”

  “I…I dunno.” Bailey sat up on the couch, letting his legs hang down. He still trembled. “How long was I under?”

  “I didn’t clock you. But tell you in a minute.” Birdsong punched a key. The instrument-studded board clicked and extruded a printout. He tore the slip loose and read. “ ’Bout five seconds.”

  “Huh? Oh, well.” Struck with a sudden suspicion, Bailey said, “This is the real world, isn’t it?”

  “What? What? Indeed. What else? Unless you want to go the Bishop Berkeley route. But do tell me—”

  “No, wait.” Bailey waved a hand. “This is too important. I have my complete memory back, but it could be false. Let me check with yours. That might provide a clue. What’s the status of the mental epidemic?”

  Birdsong considered him narrowly before saying, “Well, as you wish. It’s following the usual yeast-cell growth law. Starting to level off, you know. Thus we should in time be able to commence large-scale treatment and cure. Meanwhile we’re dealing with the victims one way or another, best’s we can improvise. This program of yours and mine is aimed at finding a quicker, more basic answer.” Eagerness burst forth. “Did you?”

  “I don’t know.” Bailey slid his legs down till he stood erect, walked to the window and looked out across the city and the bay. “We’ll have to evaluate my data, and probably collect more, after we’ve installed a safety factor I’ve discovered we need. But later, later.” He laughed, with a slight lingering hysteria. “Right now, I’m content to know there are no basic answers—that we’re muddling along, in our slow, left-handed, wasteful, piecemeal, unimaginative human fashion—that, by God, I am back in the real world!”

  For the Duration

  There were four of them. Any one of them could have broken my back in his hands, but the Ns usually worked in teams of four, and came about four in the morning. That way, they were less hampered by crowds. People by day would gather to watch an N kicking in somebody’s ribs, and get in the way, but during the empty darkness before sunrise the noise of boots only made them thank Hare that they weren’t receiving such guests.

  As a professor at the University, I rated a single room all to my own family. After the boys grew up and Sarah died, that meant living quite alone in an eight-foot cubicle. I was therefore unpopular with everyone else in the tenement, I suspect; but my job being to think, I needed privacy.

  “Lewisohn?” It was a word spat out, not really a question, from the murk behind the flashbeam on my eyes.

  I couldn’t answer…my tongue was a block of wood between stiff jaws.

  “It’s him,” grunted another voice. “Where’s the gahdam switch?” He found it, and light glared from the ceiling.

  I stumbled out of bed. “Get a move on, there,” said the corporal. He took the bust of Nefertiti, one of the three inanimate things I loved, off the shelf and threw it at my feet. A piece of shattering plaster bruised me.

  The second thing I loved, Sarah’s picture, got a revolver barrel driven through it. One of the green-clad men started for the third item, my shelf of books, but the corporal halted him. “Cut it out, Joe,” he said. “Doncha know the books go to Bloomington?”

  “Naw. Fack?”

  “Yeh. They say the Cinc collecks ’em.”

  Joe wrinkled his narrow forehead in puzzlement. I could follow his thoughts, in some queasy corner of my brain. Eggheads are all suspect; the Cinc is above suspicion; therefore the Cinc cannot be an egghead. But eggheads read books…

  Actually, Hare was a complex man. I had known him slightly, many years back when he was only an ambitious junior officer. He had a wide-ranging, inquisitive mind, and was a talented amateur cellist. He was not hostile to learning per se—he had plenty of thinkers on his own staff—what he distrusted was the mind which went too far. His saying: “This is not a time to question, it is a time to build,” had become a national slogan.

  “Getcha clothes on, fellow,” said the corporal to me. “And pack a toothbrush—you’ll be gone f’r quite a while.”

  “Hell, he won’t need no toothbrush,” said another N. “No teeth by tomorrow see?” He laughed.

  “Shut up. Arnold-Lewisohn-you-are-under-arrest-on-suspicion-of-violating-Section-10-of-the-Emergency-Reconstruction-Act.” That was the catchall section, which had made most other laws obsolete.

  At least they won’t beat me here, I thought, wishing my poor skinny frame wouldn’t shake so much. At least they’ll wait till we get to the station. And it may take as much as half an hour to get there and book me and start beating me.

  Or even longer, perhaps. Rumor had it that the Ns first quizzed a suspect under narco. If he didn’t spill the beans, they concluded he must have been conditioned, and turned him over to the third-degree boys. But I would reveal nothing, because I knew nothing; therefore—

  “My sons…they—” I fumbled my tongue in my mouth. “They haven’t anything to do with— Could I—”

  “No letters. Get a move on!”

  I groped my way into my clothes. It was very dark and quiet in the street below the window. A roadable plane whispered down the pavement. I wondered where it was bound and on what errand.

  “Let’s go.” The nearest N helped me along with a kick.

  We went down the rotting stairs and came out on the sidewalk. The night air was cold and wet in my lungs. A car waited, with the Cross-and-thunderbolt of the National Safety Corps luminous on its black flank.

  The roadable plane came around the corner once more and slithered to a halt. Through hazed eyes, I saw a city police emblem on it. A man got out.

  “What the hell do you want?” snapped the corporal.

  Then the gas rolled over us.

  I retained a wisp of consciousness. As if from very far away, I saw myself fall to the pavement. One of the Ns managed to draw his revolver and shoot before he collapsed, but his shot went wild.

  A tall man stooped over me. Beneath the wide-brimmed hat, his face was inhuman with a gas mask. He got me by the arms and dragged me to the plane. There were two others with him.

  We taxied down the street and purred into the sky. The light-speckled sprawl of Des Moines fell away behind us, and we rode alone under friendly stars.

  It took me a while to wake up and get over the post-anesthetic wretchedness. One of the men with me handed over a bottle. It was straight rum, and helped mightily.

  The tall man in the front seat turned around. “You are Professor Lewisohn, aren’t you?” he inquired anxiously. “Department of Cybernetics, New American University?”

  “Yes,” I mumbled.

  “Good.” His relief whistled out between his teeth. “I was afraid we might have rescued the wrong man. Not that we wouldn’t like to rescue everyone, you understand, but we could only use you at the Hideout. Our intelligence service isn’t perfect…we were told you were due to be picked up tonight, but sometimes the informers slip up.”

  I asked, idiotically: “Why tonight? You almost didn’t make it. Why not earlier?”

  “Think you’d have come…think you’d have believed public enemies like us, you with three sons to worry about?” he answered in a dispassionate tone. “Now you’ve got to join us. The Committee will warn your boys and help them disappear, but we can’t hide them forever; the N Corps is bound to smell them out in time. So your only chance of saving them, as well as yourself, is to help stage a revolution inside a month.”

  “Me?” I squeaked.

  “Achtmann wants a cyberneticist. You’ll find out.”

  “Say, Bill.” There was a Western twang in the voice at my left. “Been wonderin’—I’m new at this game—why’d you use the gas? I could’a plugged them four goons in four seconds.”

  The tall man at the controls chuckled. “I prefer gas in cases like this,” he said. “Those Ns are already dead men—they let an egghead be taken away from them. This way, they’ll be rather more slow about dying.”

  The Hideout was, of all places, Virginia City, Nevada. I could remember when it was a booming tourist trap, but in this era of scarcity and restrictions, when nobody except the highest officials owned cars, it was a ghost town. A few bearded, half-crazy squatters remained, ignored by the police as harmless, shunned by the rancher and Renoite as unconventional and therefore possible subversives.

  Only…when those grizzled forms had tottered into the underground rooms and joined the several hundred people who never looked on the sun, their backs straightened and their voices grew crisp and they were on the Committee for the Restoration of Freedom.

  It took me some days to get used to the set up. Like most folk, I had thought of the Committee as being a few scattered lunatics—like some, I had often wished it were more. And it turned out to be more, much more.

  But then, it had had fifteen years in which to organize.

  “We began as a bare handful,” said Achtmann. “I shouldn’t say ‘we,’ I was only thirteen at the time, but my father was one of the founders. It’s grown since then, believe me, it’s grown. There are almost ten million men sworn to our cause, waiting for the word. We estimate another ten million will join us when we do rise, though of course without training and organization they can’t offer much except moral support.”

  He was a rather short young man, but lithe as a cat. His eyes were blue blowtorch flames under a wheaten shock of hair. He was never still, and he chainsmoked from his rising before dawn to his going to bed sometime after midnight.

  Only the Cinc and a few others could get that many cigarettes. Acthmann consumed a month’s ration in a day. But the underground felt privileged to contribute to him. I did too, after the first hour.

  Because Achtmann was the last hope of free men.

  “Ten million people?” It seemed an impossibly large number to keep concealed. “Good Lord, how—”

  “Our agents sound out various prospects…oh, carefully, carefully,” he explained. “The likeliest ones are finally given a narco and a psych profile is taken. If they’re suitable, they’re in. If not—” He grimaced. “Too bad. But we can’t risk some stupid innocent pouring out the whole works.”

  I didn’t like that part of it. I wondered if Kintyre, the tall man who directed my rescue and was fond of cats and children, if he had ever put a bullet through the head of some well-intentioned, unsuitable soul. To forget, I went on with practical questions.

  “But the N dragnet must pull in some of…our…people now and then,” I objected. “They must find out—”

  “Oh, they do. They have a pretty fair estimate of our numbers, our general system. But so what? The organization is in cells; nobody in our rank and file knows more than four other members. There are countersigns, changed at irregular short intervals—we’ve learned, I tell you. In fifteen years, at the price of a good many lives and setbacks, we’ve learned.”

  Then, all at once, ten million seemed a ridiculously small number. Why, there were forty million in the armed forces and the reserves alone, not counting two million Ns and—

  Achtmann grinned at me when I objected. “Just let us seize Bloomington, knock off Hare and enough Ns, and we’ve won. The bulk of the people are passive, they’ll be too scared to act one way or another. The armed forces—well, some of them will fight, but you’d be surprised how many officers are Committee members. And in the N Corps itself—where d’you think we get all our information?” His finger stabbed at me, and he spoke with his usual feverish haste. “Look, for a long time now, ever since World War II, mediocrity has been on the march. World War III and the Hare dictatorship have simply given mediocrity a gun and a club to enforce itself. Isn’t that going to gall every able-minded man in the world? Didn’t he chafe you? So the intelligent, inquiring people will tend to drift into our cause—we smuggle some of ’em back into the enemy’s camp—and because of being able, they soon rise high in the enemy’s ranks!”