The Status Civilization Part 33

"Give me the name!" Barrent shouted.

"I should not, for your own good. The danger would be too great. Believe me, Will...."

"The name!"

"Very well. You will find the informer at Thirty-five Maple Street. But I earnestly advise you not to go there. You will be killed. You simply do not know--"

Barrent pressed the trigger, and the narrow beam scythed through the panel. Lights flashed and faded as he cut through the intricate wiring.

At last all the lights were dead, and a faint gray smoke came from the panel.

Barrent left the booth. He put the needlebeam back in his pocket and walked to Maple Street.

He had been here before. He knew this street, set upon a hill, rising steeply between oak and maple trees. Those lampposts were old friends, that crack in the pavement was an ancient landmark. Here were the houses, heavy with familiarity. They seemed to lean expectantly toward him, like spectators waiting for the final act of an almost forgotten drama.

He stood in front of 35 Maple Street. The silence which surrounded that plain white-shuttered house struck him as ominous. He took the needlebeam out of his pocket, looking for a rea.s.surance he knew he could not find. Then he walked up the neat flagstones and tried the front door. It opened. He stepped inside.

He made out the dim shades of lamps and furniture, the dull gleam of a painting on the wall, a piece of statuary on an ebony pedestal.

Needlebeam in hand, he stepped into the next room.

And came face to face with the informer.

Staring at the informer's face, Barrent remembered. In an overpowering flood of memory he saw himself, a little boy, entering the closed cla.s.sroom. He heard again the soothing hum of machinery, watched the pretty lights blink and flash, heard the insinuating machine voice whisper in his ear. At first, the voice filled him with horror; what it suggested was unthinkable. Then, slowly, he became accustomed to it, and accustomed to all the strange things that happened in the closed cla.s.sroom.

He _learned_. The machines taught on deep, unconscious levels. The machines intertwined their lessons with the basic drives, weaving a pattern of learned behavior with the life instinct. They taught, then blocked off conscious knowledge of the lessons, sealed it--and fused it.

What had he been taught? _For the social good, you must be your own policeman and witness. You must a.s.sume responsibility for any crime which might conceivably be yours._

The face of the informer stared impa.s.sively at him. It was Barrent's own face, reflected back from a mirror on the wall.

He had informed on himself. Standing with the gun in his hand that day, looking down at the murdered man, learned unconscious processes had taken over. The presumption of guilt had been too great for him to resist, the similarity to guilt had turned into guilt itself. He had walked to the robot-confessor's booth, and there he had given complete and d.a.m.ning evidence against himself, had indicted himself on the basis of probability.

The robot-confessor had pa.s.sed the obligatory sentence and Barrent had left the booth. Well-trained in the lessons of the cla.s.sroom, he had taken himself into custody, had gone to the nearest thought-control center in Trenton. Already a partial amnesia had taken place, keyed to and triggered by the lessons of the closed cla.s.sroom.

The skilled android technicians in the thought-control center had labored hard to complete this amnesia, to obliterate any remnants of memory. As a standard safeguard against any possible recovering of his memory, they had implanted a logical construct of his crime beneath the conscious level. As the regulations required, this construct contained an implication of the far-reaching power of Earth.

When the job was completed, an automatized Barrent had marched out of the center, taken a special expressway to the prison s.h.i.+p depot, boarded the prison s.h.i.+p, entered his cell, and closed the door and left Earth behind him. Then he had slept until the checkpoint had been pa.s.sed, after which the newly arrived guards awakened the prisoners for disembarkation on Omega....

Now, staring at his own face in the mirror, the last of the conscious lessons of the cla.s.sroom became conscious:

_The lessons of the closed cla.s.sroom must never be consciously known by the individual. If they become conscious the human organism must perform an immediate act of self-destruction._

Now he saw why his conquest of Earth had been so easy; it was because he had conquered nothing. Earth needed no security forces, for the policeman and the executioner were implanted in every man's mind.

Beneath the surface of Earth's mild and pleasant culture was a self-perpetuating robot civilization. An awareness of that civilization was punishable by death.

And here, at this moment, the real struggle for Earth began.

Learned behavior patterns intertwined with basic life drives forced Barrent to raise the needlebeam, to point it toward his head. This was what the robot-confessor had tried to warn him about, and what the mutant girl had skrenned. The younger Barrent, conditioned to absolute and mindless conformity, had to kill himself.

The older Barrent who had spent time on Omega fought that blind urge. A schizophrenic Barrent fought himself. The two parts of him battled for possession of the weapon, for control of the body, for owners.h.i.+p of the mind.

The needlebeam's movement stopped inches from his head. The muzzle wavered. Then slowly, the new Omegan Barrent, Barrent-2, forced the weapon away.

His victory was short-lived. For now the lessons of the closed cla.s.sroom took over, forcing Barrent-2 into a contrasurvival struggle with the implacable and death-desiring Barrent-1.

Chapter Thirty

Conditioning took over and flung the fighting Barrents backward through subjective time, to those stress points in the past where death had been near, where the temporal life fabric had been weakened, where a predisposition toward death had already been established. Conditioning forced Barrent-2 to re-experience those moments. But this time, the danger was augmented by the full force of the malignant half of his personality--by the murderous informer, Barrent-1.

Barrent-2 stood under glaring lights on the blood-stained sands of the Arena, a sword in his hand. It was the time of the Omegan Games. Coming at him was the Saunus, a heavily armored reptile with the leering face of Barrent-1. Barrent-2 severed the creature's tail, and it changed into three trich.o.m.otreds, rat-sized, Barrent-faced, with the dispositions of rabid wolverines. He killed two, and the third grinned and bit his left hand to the bone. He killed it, and watched Barrent-1's blood leak into the soggy sand....

Three ragged men sat laughing on a bench, and a girl handed him a small gun. "Luck," she said. "I hope you know how to use this." Barrent nodded his thanks before he noticed that the girl was not Moera; she was the skrenning mutant who had predicted his death. Still, he moved into the street and faced the three Hadjis.

Two of the men were mild-faced strangers. The third, Barrent-1, stepped forward and quickly brought his gun into firing position.

Barrent-2 flung himself to the ground and pressed the trigger of his unfamiliar weapon. He felt it vibrate in his hand and saw Hadji Barrent's head and shoulders turn black and begin to crumble. Before he could take aim again, his gun was wrenched violently from his hand.

Barrent-1's dying shot had creased the end of the muzzle.

Desperately he dived for the weapon, and as he rolled toward it he saw the second man, now wearing the Barrent-1 face, take careful aim.

Barrent-2 felt pain flash through his arm, already torn by the trich.o.m.otred's teeth. He managed to shoot this Barrent-1, and through a haze of pain faced the third man, now also Barrent-1. His arm was stiffening rapidly, but he forced himself to press the trigger....

_You're playing their game_, Barrent-2 told himself. The death-conditioning will wear you down, will kill you. _You must see through it, get past it. It isn't really happening, it's in your mind_....

But there was no time to think. He was in a large, circular, high-ceilinged room of stone in the cellars of the Department of Justice. It was the Trial by Ordeal. Rolling across the floor toward him was a glistening black machine shaped like a half-sphere, standing almost four feet high. It came at him, and in the pattern of red, green, and amber lights he could see the hated face of Barrent-1.

Now his enemy was in its ultimate form: the invariant robot consciousness, as false and stylized as the conditioned dreams of Earth.

The Barrent-1 machine extruded a single slender tentacle with a white light winking at the end of it. As it approached, the tentacle withdrew, and in its place appeared a jointed metal arm ending in a knife-edge.

Barrent-2 dodged, and heard the knife sc.r.a.pe against the stone.

_It isn't what you think it is_, Barrent-2 told himself. _It isn't a machine, and you are not back on Omega. This is only half of yourself you are fighting, this is nothing but a deadly illusion._

But he couldn't believe it. The Barrent machine was coming at him again, its metal hide glistening with a foul green substance which Barrent-2 recognized immediately as Contact Poison. He broke into a sprint, trying to stay away from the fatal touch.

_It isn't fatal_, he told himself.

Neutralizer washed over the metal surface, clearing away the poison. The machine tried to ram him. Barrent tried half-heartedly to push it aside.

It crashed into him with stunning force, and he could feel ribs splintering.

_It isn't real! You're letting a conditioned reflex talk you to death!