The Past Through Tomorrow Page 61

  But he did not return it. I was so upset by that that I almost missed what he was saying. “Thank you, my boy. It’s always good news to a new pastor to hear that his ministrations are appreciated.”

  I guess my face gave me away. He added, “Something wrong?”

  I stammered, “Oh, no, reverend sir. You see, I’m a stranger myself. Then you aren’t the Reverend Baird?” I was in cold panic. Baird was my only contact with the brethren short of New Jerusalem; without someone to hide me I would be picked up in a matter of hours. Even as I answered I was making wild plans to steal another ship that night and then try to run the border patrol into Mexico.

  His voice cut into my thoughts as if from a great distance. “No, I’m afraid not, my son. Did you wish to see the Reverend Baird?”

  “Well, it wasn’t terribly important, sir. He is an old friend of my uncle. I was to look him up while I was here and pay my respects.” Maybe that nice Indian woman would hide me until dark?

  “That won’t be difficult. He’s here in town. I’m just supplying his pulpit while he is laid up.”

  My heart made a full turn at about twelve gee; I tried to keep it out of my face. “Perhaps if he is sick I had better not disturb him.”

  “Oh, not at all. A broken bone in his foot—he’ll enjoy a bit of company. Here.” The priest fumbled under his robes, found a piece of paper and a pencil and wrote out the address. “Two streets over and half a block down. You can’t miss it.”

  Of course I did miss it, but I doubled back and found it, an old vine-grown house with a suggestion of New England about it. It was set well back in a large, untidy garden—eucalyptus, palms, shrubs, and flowers, all in pleasant confusion. I pressed the announcer and heard the whine of an old-style scanner; a speaker inquired: “Yes?”

  “A visitor to see the Reverend Baird, if he so pleases.”

  There was a short silence while he looked me over, then: “You’ll have to let yourself in. My housekeeper has gone to the market. Straight through and out into the back garden.” The door clicked and swung itself open.

  I blinked at the darkness, then went down a central hallway and out through the back door. An old man was lying in a swing there, with one foot propped up on pillows. He lowered his book and peered at me over his glasses.

  “What do you want of me, son?”

  “Light.”

  An hour later I was washing down the last of some superb enchiladas with cold, sweet milk. As I reached for a cluster of muscatel grapes Father Baird concluded his instructions to me. “Nothing to do until dark, then. Any questions?”

  “I don’t think so, sir. Sanchez takes me out of town and delivers me to certain others of the brethren who will see to it that I get to General Headquarters. My end of it is simple enough.”

  “True. You won’t be comfortable however.”

  I left Phoenix concealed in a false bottom of a little vegetable truck. I was stowed like cargo, with my nose pressed against the floor boards. We were stopped at a police gate at the edge of town; I could hear brusque voices with that note of authority, and Sanchez‘ impassioned Spanish in reply. Someone rummaged around over my head and the cracks in the false bottom gleamed with light.

  Finally a voice said, “It’s okay, Ezra. That’s Father Baird’s handyman. Makes a trip out to the Father’s ranch every night or so.”

  “Well, why didn’t he say so?”

  “He gets excited and loses his English. Okay. Get going, chico. Vaya usted con Dios.”

  “Gracias, senores. Buenas noches.”

  At the Reverend Baird’s ranch I was transferred to a helicopter, no rickety heap this time, but a new job, silent and well equipped. She was manned by a crew of two, who exchanged pass grips with me but said nothing other than to tell me to get into the passenger compartment and stay there. We took off at once.

  The windows of the passenger space had been covered; I don’t know which way we went, nor how far. It was a rough ride, as the pilot seemed dead set on clipping daisies the whole way. It was a reasonable precaution to avoid being spotted in a scope, but I hoped he knew what he was doing—I wouldn’t want to herd a heli that way in broad daylight. He must have scared a lot of coyotes—I know he frightened me.

  At last I heard the squeal of a landing beam. We slid along it, hovered, and bumped gently to a stop. When I got out I found myself staring into the maw of a tripod-mounted blaster backed up by two alert and suspicious men.

  But my escort gave the password, each of the guards questioned me separately, and we exchanged recognition signals. I got the impression that they were a little disappointed that they couldn’t let me have it; they seemed awfully eager. When they were satisfied, a hoodwink was slipped over my head and I was led away. We went through a door, walked maybe fifty yards, and crowded into a compartment. The floor dropped away.

  My stomach ‘caught up with me and I groused to myself because I hadn’t been warned that it was an elevator, but I kept my mouth shut. We left the lift, walked a way, and I was nudged onto a platform of some sort, told to sit down and hang on—whereupon we lurched away at breakneck speed. It felt like a rollercoaster—not a good thing to ride blindfolded. Up to then I hadn’t really been scared. I began to think that the hazing was intentional, for they could have warned me.

  We made another elevator descent, walked several hundred paces, and my hoodwink was removed. I caught my first sight of General Headquarters.

  I didn’t recognize it as such; I simply let out a gasp. One of my guards smiled. “They all do that,” he said dryly.

  It was a limestone cavern so big that one felt outdoors rather than underground and so magnificently lavish in its formations as to make one think of fairyland, or the Gnome King’s palace. I had assumed that we were underground from the descents we had made, but nothing had prepared me for what I saw.

  I have seen photographs of what the Carlsbad Caverns used to be, before the earthquake of ‘96 destroyed them; General Headquarters was something like that, although I can’t believe that the Carlsbad Caverns were as big or half as magnificent. I could not at first grasp the immensity of the room I was in; underground there is nothing to judge size by and the built-in range-finder of a human’s two-eyed vision is worthless beyond about fifty feet without something in the distance to give him scale—a house, a man, a tree, even the horizon itself. Since a natural cave contains nothing at all that is well known, customary, the human eye can’t size it.

  So, while I realized that the room I stood in was big, I could not guess just how big; my brain scaled it down to fit my prejudices. We were standing higher than the main floor and at one end of the room; the whole thing was softly floodlighted.. I got through craning my neck and ohing and ahing, looked down and saw a toy village some distance away below us. The little buildings seemed to be about a foot high.

  Then I saw tiny people walking around among the buildings—and the whole thing suddenly snapped into scale. The toy village was at least a quarter of a mile away; the whole room was not less than a mile long and many hundreds of feet high. Instead of the fear of being shut in that people normally experience in caves I was suddenly hit by the other fear, the fear of open spaces, agoraphobia. I wanted to slink along close to the walls, like a timid mouse.

  The guide who had spoken touched my arm. “You’ll have plenty of time for rubbernecking later. Let’s get going.” They led me down a path which meandered between stalagmites, from baby-finger size to Egyptian pyramids, around black pools of water with lilypads of living stone growing on them, past dark wet domes that were old when man was new, under creamy translucent curtains of onyx and sharp rosy-red and dark green stalactites. My capacity to wonder began to be overloaded and presently I quit trying.

  We came out on a fairly level floor of bat droppings and made good time to the village. The buildings, I saw as I got closer, were not buildings in the outdoors sense, but were mere partitions of that honeycomb plastic used for sound-deadening—space separators for effic
iency and convenience. Most of them were not roofed. We stopped in front of the largest of these pens; the sign over its door read ADMINISTRATION. We entered and I was taken into the personnel office. This room almost made me homesick, so matter of fact, so professionally military was it in its ugly, efficient appointments. There was even the elderly staff clerk with the nervous sniff who seems to be general issue for such an office since the time of Caesar. The sign on his desk described him as Warrant Officer R. E. Giles and he had quite evidently come back to his office after working hours to check me in.

  “Pleased to meet you, Mr. Lyle,” he said, shaking hands and exchanging recognition. Then he scratched his nose and sniffed. “You’re a week or so early and your quarters aren’t ready. Suppose we billet you tonight with a blanket roll in the lounge of B.O.Q. and get you squared away in the morning?”

  I said that would be perfectly satisfactory and he seemed relieved.

  10

  I GUESS I had been expecting to be treated as some sort of a conquering hero on my arrival—you know, my new comrades hanging breathlessly on every word of my modest account of my adventures and hairbreadth escapes and giving thanks to the Great Architect that I had been allowed to win through with my all-important message.

  I was wrong. The personnel adjutant sent for me before I had properly finished breakfast, but I didn’t even see him; I saw Mr. Giles. I was a trifle miffed and interrupted him to ask how soon it would be convenient for me to pay my formal call on the commanding officer.

  He sniffed. “Oh, yes. Well, Mr. Lyle, the C.G. sends his compliments to you and asks you to consider that courtesy calls have been made, not only on him but on department heads. We’re rather pushed for time right now. He’ll send for you the first spare moment he has.”

  I knew quite well that the general had not sent me any such message and that the personnel clerk was simply following a previously established doctrine. It didn’t make me feel better.

  But there was nothing I could do about it; the system took me in hand. By noon I had been permanently billeted, had had my chest thumped and so forth, and had made my reports. Yes, I got a chance to tell my story— to a recording machine. Flesh-and-blood men did receive the message I carried, but I got no fun out of that; I was under hypnosis at the time, just as I had been when it was given to me.

  This was too much for me; I asked the psychotechnician who operated me what the message was I carried. He answered stiffly, “We aren’t permitted to tell couriers what they carry.” His manner suggested that my question was highly improper.

  I lost my temper a bit. I didn’t know whether he was senior to me or not as he was not in uniform, but I didn’t care. “For pity’s sake! What is this? Don’t the brethren trust me? Here I risk my neck—”

  He cut in on me in a much more conciliatory manner. “No, no, it’s not that at all. It’s for your protection.”

  “Huh?”

  “Doctrine. The less you know that you don’t need to know the less you can spill if you are ever captured—and the safer it is for you and for everybody. For example, do you know where you are now? Could you point it out on a map?”

  “No.”

  “Neither do I. We don’t need to know so we weren’t told. However,” he went on, “I don’t mind telling you, in a general way, what you were carrying—just routine reports, confirming stuff we already had by sensitive circuits mostly. You were coming this way, so they dumped a lot of such stuff into you. I took three spools from you.”

  “Just routine stuff? Why, the Lodge Master told me I was carrying a message of vital importance. That fat old joker!”

  The technician grudged a smile. “I’m afraid he was pulling— Oh!”

  “Eh?”

  “I know what he meant. You were carrying a message of vital importance —to you. You carried your own credentials hypnotically. If you had not been, you would never have been allowed to wake up.”

  I had nothing to say. I left quietly.

  My rounds of the medical office, psych office, quartermaster, and so forth had begun to give me a notion of the size of the place. The “toy village” I had first seen was merely the administrative group. The power plant, a packaged pile, was in a separate cavern with many yards of rock wall as secondary shielding. Married couples were quartered where they pleased— about a third of us were female—and usually chose to set up their houses (or pens) well away from the central grouping. The armory and ammo dump were located in a side passage, a safe distance from offices and quarters.

  There was fresh water in abundance, though quite hard, and the same passages that carried the underground streams appeared to supply ventilation—at least the air was never stale. It stayed at a temperature of 69.6 Fahrenheit and a relative humidity of 32%, winter and summer, night and day.

  By lunchtime I was hooked into the organization, and found myself already hard at work at a temporary job immediately after lunch—in the armory, repairing and adjusting blasters, pistols, squad guns, and assault guns. I could have been annoyed at being asked, or ordered, to do what was really gunnery sergeant work, but the whole place seemed to be run with a minimum of protocol—we cleared our own dishes away at mess, for example. And truthfully it felt good to sit at a bench in the armory, safe and snug, and handle calipers and feather gauges and drifts again—good, useful work.

  Just before dinner that first day I wandered into the B.O.Q. lounge and looked around for an unoccupied chair. I heard a familiar baritone voice behind me: “Johnnie! John Lyle!” I whirled around and there, hurrying toward me, was Zebadiah Jones—good old Zeb, large as life and his ugly face split with a grin.

  We pounded each other on the back and swapped insults. “When did you get here?” I finally asked him.

  “Oh, about two weeks ago.”

  “You did? You were still at New Jerusalem when I left. How did you do it?”

  “Nothing to it. I was shipped as a corpse—in a deep trance. Sealed up in a coffin and marked ‘contagious’.”

  I told him about my own mixed-up trip and Zeb seemed impressed, which helped my morale. Then I asked him what he was doing.

  “I’m in the Psych & Propaganda Bureau,” he told me, “under Colonel Novak. Just now I’m writing a series of oh-so-respectful articles about the private life of the Prophet and his acolytes and attending priests, how many servants they have, how much it costs to run the Palace, all about the fancy ceremonies and rituals, and such junk. All of it perfectly true, of course, and told with unctuous approval. But I lay it on a shade too thick. The emphasis is on the jewels and the solid gold trappings and how much it all costs, and I keep telling the yokels what a privilege it is for them to be permitted to pay for such frippery and how flattered they should feel that God’s representative on earth lets them take care of him.”

  “I guess I don’t get it,” I said, frowning. “People like that circusy stuff. Look at the way the tourists to New Jerusalem scramble for tickets to a Temple ceremony.”

  “Sure, sure—but we don’t peddle this stuff to people on a holiday to New Jerusalem; we syndicate it to little local papers in poor farming communities in the Mississippi Valley, and in the Deep South, and in the back country of New England. That is to say, we spread it among some of the poorest and most puritanical elements of the population, people who are emotionally convinced that poverty and virtue are the same thing. It grates on their nerves; in time it should soften them up and make doubters of them.”

  “Do you seriously expect to start a rebellion with picayune stuff like that?”

  “It’s not picayune stuff, because it acts directly on their emotions, below the logical level. You can sway a thousand men by appealing to their prejudices quicker than you can convince one man by logic. It doesn’t have to be a prejudice about an important matter either. Johnnie, you savvy how to use connotation indices, don’t you?”

  “Well, yes and no. I know what they are; they are supposed to measure the emotional effects of words.”

&n
bsp; “That’s true, as far as it goes. But the index of a word isn’t fixed like the twelve inches in a foot; it is a complex variable function depending on context, age and sex and occupation of the listener, the locale and a dozen other things. An index is a particular solution of the variable that tells you whether a particular word used in a particular fashion to a particular reader or type of reader will affect that person favorably, unfavorably, or simply leave him cold. Given proper measurements of the group addressed it can be as mathematically exact as any branch of engineering. We never have all the data we need so it remains an art—but a very precise art, especially as we employ ‘feedback’ through field sampling. Each article I do is a little more annoying than the last—and the reader never knows why.”

  “It sounds good, but I don’t see quite how it’s done.”

  “I’ll give you a gross case. Which would you rather have? A nice, thick, juicy, tender steak—or a segment of muscle tissue from the corpse of an immature castrated bull?”

  I grinned at him. “You can’t upset me. I’ll take it by either name… not too well done. I wished they would announce chow around here; I’m starved.”

  “You think you aren’t affected because you were braced for it. But how long would a restaurant stay in business if it used that sort of terminology? Take another gross case, the Anglo-Saxon monosyllables that naughty little boys write on fences. You can’t use them in polite company without offending, yet there are circumlocutions or synonyms for every one of them which may be used in any company.”

  I nodded agreement. “I suppose so. I certainly see how it could work on other people. But personally, I guess I’m immune to it. Those taboo words don’t mean a thing to me—except that I’m reasonably careful not to offend other people. I’m an educated man, Zeb—‘Sticks and stones may break my bones, et cetera.’ But I see how you could work on the ignorant.”

  Now I should know better than to drop my guard with Zeb. The good Lord knows he’s tripped me up enough times. He smiled at me quietly and made a short statement involving some of those taboo words.