The Instant of Now Part 6

"A reception is good for them," the Vininese said. "We need heroes occasionally. It's fortunate you came when you did. The vagabonds have had a disturbing effect on morale and it's impossible to suppress the news entirely."

The vehicle stopped before the towering government building. Dirrul was led up a flight of stone steps to a wide porch overlooking the ma.s.s of cheering upturned faces in the public square. He stood motionless while speeches were made and gay ribbon was draped around his neck. The air shook with bright explosions--a huge flag was unfurled over the porch--band music began to blare and a tidal wave of precision-trained Vininese infantry wheeled into the square.

An official touched Dirrul's arm. "You must take the salute of our work-leaders now."

Dirrul was pushed back against the stone railing as an orderly mob filed past, blank-faced and chattering with meaningless pleasure. Many of them pressed forward to touch his hand before the guards tactfully hurried them on. When the organized confusion was at its height a tiny square of paper was slipped into his hand.

Dirrul had no idea which of the mob had given it to him and he dared not glance at it. But he managed to hide the paper in the band of his tunic.

Hour by hour the throng filed past, endless and meaningless. It was an agony for Dirrul. For the first time he looked into the face of his dream and saw the reality of Vinin--order, discipline, efficiency--and utter blankness. Unhappily he recalled one of Dr. Kramer's lectures.

"... Defiance of convention, confusion, frustration, stubbornness--yes and a touch of the neurotic too--these goad the individual into solving problems. And problem solving is progress. An orderly society that asks no questions of itself, a society that has no doubts, is a dying society...."

Dirrul understood the professor at last. He looked squarely at the fact of what he was, a traitor to his own people, on the verge of betraying them. He had been wonderfully deluded by his own self-deception.

But the job wasn't quite finished. The Vininese would not have gone to take Glenna from the hospital if they had understood his teleray. Let them splurge on their reception! He was unimpressed. When the time came for questions to be answered he would conveniently forget why he had been sent to Vinin. Nothing they could do would drag it out of him.

The crowd thinned and Dirrul was taken inside the building, where his Vininese host awaited him. Sighing deeply the Vininese stood up.

"These public displays do take so much of our time," he said, "but it's over now." This last seemed to amuse him and he repeated it softly before adding, "The Chief's ready to see you."

Remembering the note and the flimsy possibility that it might suggest a way out, Dirrul answered quickly, "But, sir, I really ought to clean up first."

"You Agronians have such weird notions of propriety!"

"I would feel more presentable to your Chief if--if I could have a bath. Perhaps I might even borrow a change of clothing."

The Vininese fingered his chin thoughtfully. "It might be more amusing. Yes, the Chief can wait a few minutes longer for you to satisfy your vanity."

He summoned a blank-faced liveried servant and asked for a clean worker's suit for Dirrul. Then he took Dirrul to the wall tube and they shot noiselessly to an upper floor. As he left Dirrul at the door of a luxurious suite, the Vininese said, "When you change your clothes, my friend, don't forget to take the disk out of your tunic.

The Chief will want it when you see him."

When he was sure he was alone Dirrul spread open the note. It was a crude drawing of a hearing aid and beneath it a cryptic sentence written in Agronian,

_I lost mine and so has Glenna now._

The signature was unmistakably Hurd's but the note made no sense.

Hurd's hearing was as sound as Dirrul's. He had never used a mechanical device--how could he have lost it then? _So has Glenna_--that must be the key. Hurd somehow knew about the vagabond raiding party that had rescued Glenna from the mental hospital. He must have escaped from the Vininese earlier himself. He was probably hiding somewhere in the capital.

Working on this hypothesis Dirrul made a guess that the thing Hurd had lost was his illusion about the Vininese system. The hearing aid symbolized what Hurd had been told about it, as opposed to the reality which he saw with his own eyes.

But such an interpretation didn't ring entirely true. It was too involved for an idea which could have been better expressed in four words--_I know the truth_. Tossing the note aside Dirrul turned on the water in the shower room and thoughtfully disrobed.

As he threw his tunic aside a violent paralyzing terror seized his mind, making his head sing with a screeching vibration. Blindly he s.n.a.t.c.hed up the tunic in order to stuff the cloth into his mouth so he would not cry out. But as soon as he pressed it against his skin his terror vanished, like a siren suddenly stilled.

The pattern of the real truth fell into place then. Now he understood the power of Vinin. Experimentally he took Sorgel's disk out of his tunic and laid it on a table. As soon as he did so the blinding nameless horror flamed up. When he held the disk again the exhausting emotion vanished.

Looking back Dirrul saw an abundance of evidence that might have given him a clue, had he not spent so much mental effort bolstering his illusion of Vinin. There was the circ.u.mstance of his own unrelenting terror when he was without the disk in the ravine--the painful sight of his captors puncturing the prisoners' eardrums--the soundless talk of the vagabonds, like the lip-reading of the deaf--the bleak orderliness of the cheering mobs--and, most obvious of all, the strange transmitters atop the well-guarded stone block-buildings.

It was all there, even to the final cruelty to the children. What was it the Vininese had said? "The adjustment is sometimes very severe but on the whole the casualties are light." And the very young, before they were taken from their parents, didn't need disks because they were in what the Vininese had called "the instinct period."

Dirrul knew what Hurd's drawing meant. Somehow Hurd had lost his hearing, perhaps as a result of the beating the police had given him on Agron. In any case only the deaf could think rationally on Vinin.

Hurd was telling Dirrul to shatter his own sense of hearing if he still had the will to think and act for himself. The nightmare Dirrul had witnessed in the ravine was not torture but the bravery of desperate men attempting to rescue rational minds.

The Rational Potential--the gift of the legendary Earthmen! Like the processes of thought itself it could never be wiped out by argument or reason once it was understood. The Earthmen had wasted centuries trying to undo their own evolved rationality before they realized it could not be done. Now, on a higher level in another plane, the Vininese were struggling to submerge the Earthmen's second achievement of the Rational Potential.

It was done by their transmitters. A wave of some sort--probably subsonic or supersonic--continuously filled the Vininese atmosphere.

The Vininese who wore the disks were protected against it. The others succ.u.mbed if they retained their hearing. As Dirrul himself had discovered in the ravine, when he did not consciously think the terror diminished.

All Vininese children were given a basic education. It built up their automatic responses, established correct stimulus-response behavior patterns. Then, for the ma.s.ses, the protective disks were eliminated and the screeching fear pounded at them until the processes of creative thinking were destroyed, leaving a backlog of malleable and obedient habit patterns. The problem solving was done for them by their masters.

The Vininese Confederacy--half the galaxy--was peopled by billions upon billions of robot races, ruled by a handful of men with absolute power. To that Dirrul would have betrayed his planet! To slavery and to the destruction of the Rational Potential, all for the slippery dream of orderliness and efficiency which masqueraded as progress.

He could save Agron today--but for how long? Sorgel would bewitch countless other discontented Agronian fools. The Movement would try again and one day the Vininese s.p.a.ce fleet would penetrate the Agronian Nuclear Beams. Dirrul had to escape. He had to go home and tell the truth about Vinin.

And it was impossible. He was completely trapped with no visible way out for himself.

VIII

Dirrul stood in front of the metal-surfaced reflector, fingering the cap of his ear. To survive as a thinking being he must deafen himself.

Yet he hesitated. Self-inflicted violence was the negation of the Rational Potential.

Then, slowly, he developed a new idea. He could use the power of Vinin, to save Agron if not himself!

There came a knock on his door. Dirrul drew on his tunic as a stranger entered the room.

"The Chief is impatient--you must come at once."

Durril was led through a metal-roofed tunnel into a wide sunny transparent-walled room at the top of the building. The door closed behind him. He was alone with a tall smooth-faced man, exotically costumed in a tight black suit crusted with white jewels and framed by a white cloak thrown loosely around his shoulders. He sat back of a tremendous desk--behind his chair was a tilted panel of dials, levers and tiny glowing lights, running the length of the room under the ceiling-high window.

"It is always a pleasure to welcome a hero of the Vininese Confederacy," the Chief said without getting up. His tone was slow, tired, emotionless. His eyes were without expression. "May I ask your name?"

"Dirrul--Edward Dirrul."

"And you come from Agron with a message from our agent," he said, speaking Agronian. "So much we got from your teleray. In fifty days--actually forty-nine from now, by your time--your local Movement will have use for a Vininese s.p.a.ce-fleet. I have already dispatched Sub-units B and C. Now, if you will give me the details of your Plan I can code-wave them to my commander."

"There's been a mistake, sir. What I really meant when I sent the message was--"

"So you've discovered the truth." The Chief's hand darted toward a cubicle of his desk and he held a metal-barreled weapon aimed steadily at Dirrul. "These things are always so tedious. Give me your disk."

"Of course," Dirrul agreed readily but as he felt in his pocket the Chief gestured negatively with his weapon.

"No, keep it." After a pause he added, "You're certain that you know, Dirrul?"

"I've seen the transmitters."

"Then why aren't you afraid? Why do you consent so readily? The others are always terrified--they'll confess to anything if I promise to let them keep the disks. Have you ever heard the sound, Dirrul? Do you really know what it's like?"