The Past Through Tomorrow Read online

  “You leave my mother out of this!”

  I was the one doing the shouting and I came up out of my chair like a dog charging into battle. Zeb must have anticipated me exactly and shifted his weight before he spoke, for, instead of hanging one on his chin, I found my wrist seized in his fist and his other arm around me, holding me in a clinch that stopped the fight before it started. “Easy, Johnnie,” he breathed in my ear. “I apologize. I most humbly apologize and ask your forgiveness. Believe me, I wasn’t insulting you.”

  “So you say!”

  “So I say, most humbly. Forgive me?”

  As I simmered down I realized that my outbreak had been very conspicuous. Although we had picked a quiet corner to talk, there were already a dozen or more others in the lounge, waiting for dinner to be announced. I could feel the dead silence and sense the question in the minds of others as to whether or not it was going to be necessary to intervene. I started to turn red with embarrassment rather than anger. “Okay. Let me go.”

  He did so and we sat down again. I was still sore and not at all inclined to forget Zeb’s unpardonable breach of good manners, but the crisis was past. But he spoke quietly, “Johnnie, believe me, I was not insulting you nor any member of your family. That was a scientific demonstration of the dynamics of connotational indices, and that is all it was.”

  “Well—you didn’t have to make it so personal.”

  “Ah, but I did have to. We were speaking of the psychodynamics of emotion… and emotions are personal, subjective things which must be experienced to be understood. You were of the belief that you, as an educated man, were immune to this form of attack—so I ran a lab test to show you that no one is immune. Now just what did I say to you?”

  “You said— Never mind. Okay, so it was a test. But I don’t care to repeat it. You’ve made your point: I don’t like it.”

  “But what did I say? All I said, in fact, was that you were the legitimate offspring of a legal marriage. Right? What is insulting about that?”

  “But—” I stopped and ran over in my mind the infuriating, insulting, and degrading things he had said—and, do you know, that is absolutely all they added up to. I grinned sheepishly. “It was the way you said it.”

  “Exactly, exactly! To put it technically, I selected terms with high negative indices, for this situation and for this listener. Which is precisely what we do with this propaganda, except that the emotional indices are lesser quantitatively to avoid arousing suspicion and to evade the censors—slow poison, rather than a kick in the belly. The stuff we write is all about the Prophet, lauding him to the skies… so the irritation produced in the reader is transferred to him. The method cuts below the reader’s conscious thought and acts on the taboos and fetishes that infest his subconscious.”

  I remembered sourly my own unreasoned anger. “I’m convinced. It sounds like heap big medicine.”

  “It is, chum, it is. There is magic in words, black magic—if you know how to invoke it.”

  After dinner Zeb and I went to his cubicle and continued to bat the breeze. I felt warm and comfortable and very, very contented. The fact that we were part of a revolutionary plot, a project most unlikely to succeed and which would most probably end with us both dead in battle or burned for treason, affected
  We talked about this and that, in the course of which I learned more about the organization and discovered—was very surprised to discover—that not all of our comrades were brethren. Lodge Brothers, I mean. “But isn’t that dangerous?”

  “What isn’t? And what did you expect, old son? Some of our most valuable comrades can’t join the Lodge; their own religious faith forbids it. But we don’t have any monopoly on hating tyranny and loving freedom and we need all the help we can get. Anybody going our direction is a fellow traveler. Anybody.”

  I thought it over. The idea was logical, though somehow vaguely distasteful. I decided to gulp it down quickly. “I suppose so. I imagine even the pariahs will be of some use to us, when it comes to the fighting, even if they aren’t eligible for membership.”

  Zeb gave me a look I knew too well. “Oh, for Pete’s sake, John! When are you going to give up wearing diapers?”

  “Huh?”

  “Haven’t you gotten it through your head yet that the whole ‘pariah’ notion is this tyranny’s scapegoat mechanism that every tyranny requires?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Shut up. Take sex away from people. Make it forbidden, evil, limit it to ritualistic breeding. Force it to back up into suppressed sadism. Then hand the people a scapegoat to hate. Let them kill a scapegoat occasionally for cathartic release. The mechanism is ages old. Tyrants used it centuries before the word ‘psychology’ was ever invented. It works, too. Look at yourself.”

  “Look, Zeb, I don’t have anything against the pariahs.”

  “You had better not have. You’ll find a few dozen of them in the Grand Lodge here. And by the way, forget that word ‘pariah.’ It has, shall we say, a very high negative index.”

  He shut up and so did I; again I needed time to get my thoughts straight. Please understand me—it is easy to be free when you have been brought up in freedom; it is not easy otherwise. A zoo tiger, escaped, will often slink back into the peace and security of his bars. If he can’t get back, they tell me he will pace back and forth within the limits of bars that are no longer there. I suppose I was still pacing in my conditioned pattern.

  The human mind is a tremendously complex thing; it has compartments in it that its owner himself does not suspect. I had thought that I had given my mind a thorough housecleaning already and had rid it of all the dirty superstitions I had been brought up to believe. I was learning that the “housecleaning” had been no more than a matter of sweeping the dirt under the rugs—it would be years before the cleansing would be complete, before the clean air of reason blew through every room.

  All right, I told myself, if I meet one of these par— no, “comrades,” I’ll exchange recognition with him and be polite—as long as he is polite to me! At the time I saw nothing hypocritical in the mental reservation.

  Zeb lay back, smoking, and let me stew. I knew that he smoked and he knew that I disapproved. But it was a minor sin and, when we were rooming together in the Palace barracks, I would never have thought of reporting him. I even knew which room servant was his bootlegger. “Who is sneaking your smokes in now?” I asked, wishing to change the subject.

  “Eh? Why, you buy them at the P.X., of course.” He held the dirty thing out and looked at it. “These Mexican cigarettes are stronger than I like. I suspect that they use real tobacco in them, instead of the bridge sweepings I’m used to. Want one?”

  “Huh? Oh, no, thanks!”

  He grinned wryly. “Go ahead, give me your usual lecture. It’ll make you feel better.”

  “Now look here, Zeb, I wasn’t criticizing. I suppose it’s just one of the many things I’ve been wrong about.”

  “Oh, no. It’s a dirty, filthy habit that ruins my wind and stains my teeth and may eventually kill me off with lung cancer.” He took a deep inhalation, let the smoke trickle out of the corners of his mouth, and looked profoundly contented. “But it just happens that I like dirty, filthy habits.”

  He took another puff. “But it’s not a sin and my punishment for it is here and now, in the way my mouth tastes each morning. The Great Architect doesn’t give a shout in Sheol about it. Catch on, old son? He isn’t even watching.”

  “There is no need to be sacrilegious.”

  “I wasn’t being so.”

  “You weren’t, eh? You were scoffing at one of the most fundamental— perhaps the one fundamental—proposition in religion: the certainty that God is watching!”

  “Who tol
d you?”

  For a moment all I could do was to sputter. “Why, it isn’t necessary. It’s an axiomatic certainty. It’s—”

  “I repeat, who told you? See here, I retract what I said. Perhaps the Almighty is watching me smoke. Perhaps it is a mortal sin and I will burn for it for eons. Perhaps. But who told you? Johnnie, you’ve reached the point where you are willing to kick the Prophet out and hang him to a tall, tall tree. Yet you are willing to assert your own religious convictions and to use them as a touchstone to judge my conduct. So I repeat: who told you? What hill were you standing on when the lightning came down from Heaven and illuminated you? Which archangel carried the message?”

  I did not answer at once. I could not. When I did it was with a feeling of shock and cold loneliness. “Zeb… I think I understand you at last. You are an—atheist. Aren’t you?”

  Zeb looked at me bleakly. “Don’t call me an atheist,” he said slowly, “unless you are really looking for trouble.”

  “Then you aren’t one?” I felt a wave of relief, although I still didn’t understand him.

  “No, I am not. Not that it is any of your business. My religious faith is a private matter between me and my God. What my inner beliefs are you will have to judge by my actions… for you are not invited to question me about them. I decline to explain them nor to justify them to you. Nor to anyone… not the Lodge Master… nor to the Grand Inquisitor, if it comes to that.”

  “But you do believe in God?”

  “I told you so, didn’t I? Not that you had any business asking me.”

  “Then you must believe in other things?”

  “Of course I do! I believe that a man has an obligation to be merciful to the weak… patient with the stupid… generous with the poor. I think he is obliged to lay down his life for his brothers, should it be required of him. But I don’t propose to prove any of those things; they are beyond proof. And I don’t demand that you believe as I do.”

  I let out my breath. “I’m satisfied, Zeb.”

  Instead of looking pleased he answered, “That’s mighty kind of you, brother, mighty kind! Sorry—I shouldn’t be sarcastic. But I had no intention of asking for your approval. You goaded me—accidentally, I’m sure—into discussing matters that I never intend to discuss.” He stopped to light up another of those stinking cigarettes and went on more quietly. “John, I suppose that I am, in my own cantankerous way, a very narrow man myself. I believe very strongly in freedom of religion—but I think that that freedom is best expressed as freedom to keep quiet. From my point of view, a great deal of openly expressed piety is insufferable conceit.”

  “Huh?”

  “Not every case—I’ve known the good and the humble and the devout. But how about the man who claims to know what the Great Architect is thinking? The man who claims to be privy to His Inner Plans? It strikes me as sacrilegious conceit of the worst sort—this character probably has never been any closer to His Trestle Board than you or I. But it makes him feel good to claim to be on chummy terms with the Almighty, it builds his ego, and lets him lay down the law to you and me. Pfui! Along comes a knothead with a loud voice, an I.Q. around 90, hair in his ears, dirty underwear, and a lot of ambition. He’s too lazy to be a farmer, too stupid to be an engineer, too unreliable to be a banker—but, brother, can he pray! After a while he has gathered around him other knotheads who don’t have his vivid imagination and self-assurance but like the idea of having a direct line to Omnipotence. Then this character is no longer Nehemiah Scudder but the First Prophet.”

  I was going along with him, feeling shocked but rather pleasantly so, until he named the First Prophet. Perhaps my own spiritual state at that time could have been described as that of a “primitive” follower of the First Prophet—that is to say, I had decided that the Prophet Incarnate was the devil himself and that all of his works were bad, but that belief did not affect the basics of the faith I had learned from my mother. The thing to do was to purge and reform the Church, not to destroy it. I mention this because my own case paralleled a very serious military problem that was to develop later.

  I found that Zeb was studying my face. “Did I get you on the raw again, old fellow? I didn’t mean to.”

  “Not at all,” I answered stiffly, and went on to explain that, in my opinion, the sinfulness of the present gang of devils that had taken over the Church in no way invalidated the true faith. “After all, no matter what you think nor how much you may like to show off your cynicism, the doctrines are a matter of logical necessity. The Prophet Incarnate and his cohorts can pervert them, but they can’t destroy them—and it doesn’t matter whether the real Prophet had dirty underwear or not.”

  Zeb sighed as if he were very tired. “Johnnie, I certainly did not intend to get into an argument about religion with you. I’m not the aggressive type—you know that. I had to be pushed into the Cabal.” He paused. “You say the doctrines are a matter of logic?”

  “You’ve explained the logic to me yourself. It’s a perfect, consistent structure.”

  “So it is. Johnnie, the nice thing about citing God as an authority is that you can prove anything you set out to prove. It’s just a matter of selecting the proper postulates, then insisting that your postulates are ‘inspired.’ Then no one can possibly prove that you are wrong.”

  “You are asserting that the First Prophet was not inspired?”

  “I am asserting nothing. For all you know, I am the First Prophet, come back to kick out the defilers of my temple.”

  “Don’t be—” I was all wound up to kick it around further when there came a knock at Zeb’s door. I stopped and he called out, “Come in!”

  It was Sister Magdalene.

  She nodded at Zeb, smiled sweetly at my open-mouthed surprise and said, “Hello, John Lyle. Welcome.” It was the first time I had ever seen her other than in the robes of a holy deaconess. She seemed awfully pretty and much younger.

  “Sister Magdalene!”

  “No. Staff Sergeant Andrews. ‘Maggie,’ to my friends.”

  “But what happened? Why are you here?”

  “Right at the moment I’m here because I heard at dinner that you had arrived. When I didn’t find you in your own quarters I concluded that you would be with Zeb. As for the rest, I couldn’t go back, any more than you or Zeb—and our hideout back in New Jerusalem was getting overcrowded, so they transferred me.”

  “Well, it’s good to see you!”

  “It’s good to see you, John.” She patted me on the cheek and smiled again. Then she climbed on Zeb’s bed and squatted tailor-fashion, showing a rather immodest amount of limb in the process. Zeb lit another cigarette and handed it to her; she accepted it, drew smoke deep into her lungs, and let it go as if she had been smoking all her life.

  I had never seen a woman smoke—never. I could see Zeb watching me, confound him!—and I most carefully ignored it. Instead I grinned and said, “This is a wonderful reunion! If only—”

  “I know,” agreed Maggie. “If only Judith were here. Have you heard from her yet, John?”

  “Heard from her? How could I?”

  “That’s right, you couldn’t—not yet. But you can write to her now.”

  “Huh? How?”

  “I don’t know the code number off hand, but you can drop it at my desk—I’m in G-2. Don’t bother to seal it; all personal mail has to be censored and paraphrased. I wrote to her last week but I haven’t had an answer yet.”

  I thought about excusing myself at once and writing a letter, but I didn’t. It was wonderful to be with both of them and I didn’t want to cut the evening short. I decided to write before I went to bed—while realizing, with surprise, that I had been so much on the go that, so far as I could remember, I hadn’t even had time to think about Judith since… well, since Denver, at least.

  But I did not get to write to her even later that night. It was past eleven o’clock and Maggie was saying something about reveille coming early when an orderly showed up: “The Comma
nding General’s compliments and will Legate Lyle see him at once, sir.”

  I gave my hair a quick brush with Zeb’s gear and hurried away, while wishing mightily that I had something fit to report in, rather than a civilian suit much the worse for wear.

  The inner sanctum was deserted and dark except for a light that I could see in the far inner office—even Mr. Giles was not at his desk. I found my way in, knocked on the door frame, stepped inside, clicked my heels and saluted. “Legate Lyle reports to the Commanding General as ordered, sir.”

  An elderly man seated at a big desk with his back to me turned and looked up, and I got another surprise. “Ah, yes, John Lyle,” he said gently. He got up and came toward me, with his hand out. “It’s been a long time, hasn’t it?”

  It was Colonel Huxley, head of the Department of Applied Miracles when I was a cadet—and almost my only friend among the officers at that time. Many was the Sunday afternoon that I had relaxed in his quarters, my stock unhooked, free for the moment from the pressure of discipline.

  I took his hand. “Colonel—I mean ‘General,’ sir… I thought you were dead!”

  “Dead colonel into live general, eh! No, Lyle, though I was listed as dead when I went underground. They usually do that when an officer disappears; it looks better. You’re dead, too—did you know?”

  “Uh, no, I didn’t, sir. Not that it matters. This is wonderful, sir!”

  “Good.”

  “But— I mean, how did you ever—well—” I shut up.

  “How did I land here and in charge at that? I’ve been a Brother since I was your age, Lyle. But I didn’t go underground until I had to—none of us do. In my case the pressure for me to join the priesthood became a bit too strong; the Superintendent was quite restless about having a lay officer know too much about the more abstruse branches of physics and chemistry. So I took a short leave and died. Very sad.” He smiled. “But sit down. I’ve been meaning to send for you all day, but it’s been a busy day. They all are.