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The Altruist

"I put them right there!" Colonel Olaf Magrumssen said aloud.

He was referring to his office scissors, with which he wanted to cut some string. The string, designed for official use, was almost unbreakably tough, and Colonel Magrumssen had wrapped one end of it around a package containing a set of reports of the Department of Metallurgy, which was to be dispatched immediately. The other end of the string led through a hole in the wall to an automatic feeder spool somewhere behind the wall, and the scissors should have been on a small desk immediately under the point where the string emerged, because that was where the colonel always left them. Just now, however, they weren't there.

There wasn't anything else on the desk that they might have slipped behind; they weren't lying on the floor, and the desk had no drawers into which he could have put them by mistake. They were simply and inexplicably gone.

"Damn!" he said, holding the package in both hands and looking about helplessly. He was all alone in the Inner Sanctum which separated his residential quarters from the general office area of the Department of Metallurgy. The Sanctum, constructed along the lines of a bank vault, contained Metallurgy's secret files and a few simple devices connected with an automatic transportation system between Metallurgy and various other government departments. There was nothing around that would be useful in the present emergency.

"Miss Eaton!" the colonel bellowed, in some exasperation.

Miss Eaton appeared in the doorway a minute later, looking slightly anxious and slightly resentful, which was her normal expression. Otherwise, she was a very satisfactory secretary and general assistant to the colonel.

"Your scissors, Miss Eaton!" he ordered, holding up his package. "Kindly cut this string!"

* * *

Miss Eaton's gaze went past him to the desk, and her expression became more definitely resentful.

"Yes, sir," she said. She stepped up and, with a small pair of scissors attached by a decorative chain to her belt, cut the string.

"Thank you," said the colonel. "That will be all."

"There's a Notice of Transfer regarding Charles E. Watterly lying on your desk," Miss Eaton said. "You were to pass on it early this morning."

"I know." The colonel frowned. "You might get out Watterly's record for me, Miss Eaton."

"It's attached to the Notice of Transfer," Miss Eaton told him. She went out without waiting for a reply.

The colonel dropped the package into a depository that would dispatch it to its destination untouched by human hands, and turned to leave the Inner Sanctum. Still irritated by the disappearance, he glanced back at the desk.

And there the scissors were, just where he remembered having left them!

The colonel stopped short. "Eh?" he inquired incredulously, of no one in particular.

A long-forgotten childhood memory came chidingly into his mind . . . 

"Lying right there!" a ghostly voice of the past was addressing him again. "If it were a snake," the voice added severely, rubbing the lesson in, "it would bite you!"

The colonel picked up the scissors rather gingerly, as if they might bite him, at that. He looked surprised and alert now, all distracting annoyances forgotten.

Colonel Magrumssen was a logical man. Now that he thought back, there was no significant doubt in his mind that, the evening before, he had left those scissors on that desk. Nor that, after opening the Sanctum and sealing the package this morning, he had discovered they were gone.

Nor, of course, finally, that they now had returned again.

Those were facts. Another fact was that, aside from himself, nobody but Miss Eaton had entered the Inner Sanctum meanwhile—and she hadn't come anywhere near the desk.

Touching a sticky spot on one of the blades of the scissors, the colonel dabbed at it and noticed something attractively familiar about the pale brown gumminess on his finger.

He put the finger to his mouth. Why, certainly, he told himself—it's just taffy.

His mind paused a moment. Just taffy! it repeated.

Now wait a minute, the colonel thought helplessly.

One could put it this way, he decided: at some time last night or this morning, an Unseen Agency had borrowed his scissors for the apparent purpose of cutting taffy with them, and then had brought his scissors back . . . 

* * *

Perhaps it was the complete improbability of that explanation which made him want to accept it immediately. In the humdrum, hard-working decades following Earth's Hunger Years, Colonel Magrumssen had become a hobbyist of the Mysterious, and this was the most mysterious-looking occurrence he'd yet run into personally. He'd been trained in espionage during the last counter-revolution, and while the lack of further revolutions ultimately had placed him in an executive position in Metallurgy, his interests still lay in investigating the unexplained, the unpredictable, in human behavior, and elsewhere.

As a logical man, however, he realized he'd have to put in his customary day's work in Metallurgy before he could investigate the unusual behavior of a pair of office scissors.

He locked the double doors of the Inner Sanctum behind him—locked them, perhaps, with exceptional attention to the fact that they were being locked—and went into the outer offices, to decide on Charles E. Watterly's Notice of Transfer.

The Department of Metallurgy, this section of which was under Colonel Olaf Magrumssen's supervision, was as smoothly operating an organization as any government coordinator could want to see. So was every other major organization—the simple reason being that employees who couldn't meet the stiff requirements of governmental employment were dropped quietly and promptly into the worldwide labor pool known as Civilian General Duty. Once CGD swallowed you, it was rather difficult to get out again; and life at those levels was definitely unattractive.

Charles E. Watterly's standing in Metallurgy was borderline at best, the colonel decided after going briefly over his record—a rather incredible series of preposterous mistakes, blunders, slip-ups and oversights. Watterly's immediate superior had made up a Notice of Transfer as a matter of course and sent it along to the colonel's desk to be signed. Signing it would send Charles E. Watterly automatically to Civilian General Duty.

The colonel was a tolerant man. He didn't care a particular hang how the Department of Metallurgy fared, providing his own position wasn't threatened. But even colonels who failed to keep their subordinates in line could wind up doing Civilian General Duty.

He could afford to give the unfortunate Watterly one more chance, the colonel decided. A man who could operate so consistently against his own interests should be worth studying for a while! And since Watterly's superior had passed the buck by making out the Notice of Transfer, the colonel summoned Miss Eaton and instructed her to have Watterly placed on his personal staff, on probation.

Miss Eaton made no comment. The airtight organization which was beginning to haul humanity, uncomfortably and sometimes brutally enough, out of the catastrophic decline of the Hunger Years did not encourage comment on one's superior's decisions.

"Mr. John Brownson of Statistics is here to see you," she announced.

* * *

"The two per cent Normal Loss," John Brownson, a personal assistant of the Minister of Statistics, informed Colonel Magrumssen presently, "has shown striking variations of late, locally. That's the situation in a nutshell. The check we're conducting in your department is of a purely routine nature."

He was relieved to hear that, the colonel said drily. What did Statistics make of these variations?

Brownson looked surprised.

"We've made nothing of them as yet," he admitted. "In time, we hope, somebody will." He paused and looked almost embarrassed. "Now in your department, we have localized one area of deviation so far. It happens to be the cafeteria."

The colonel stared. "The cafeteria?"

"The cafeteria," Brownson continued, flushing a trifle, "shows currently a steady point three increase over Normal Loss. Processed foodstuffs, of course, are so universally affected by the loss that almost any dispersal point can be used conveniently to check deviations. Similar changes are reported elsewhere in the capital area, indicating the possible development of a local trend . . ."

"Trend to what?" the colonel demanded.

Brownson shrugged thoughtfully. He wasn't, he pointed out, an analyst; he only produced the statistics.

"Well, never mind," said the colonel. "Our poor little cafeteria, eh? Let me know if anything else turns up, will you?"

Now that was an odd thing, he reflected, still idly, while he gazed after Brownson's retreating back. When you got right down to it, nobody actually seemed to know why there should be a two per cent untraceable loss in the annual manipulations of Earth's commodities! People like Brownson obviously saw nothing remarkable in it. To them, Normal Loss had the status of a natural law, and that was that.

Why, he realized, his reaction hovering somewhere between amusement and indignation, he'd been fooled into accepting that general viewpoint himself! He'd let himself be tricked into accepting a "natural law" which involved an element of the completely illogical, the inexplicable.

The colonel felt a flush of familiar excitement. Look, he thought, this could be—why, this is big! Let's look at the facts! 

He did. And with that, almost instantly, a breathtakingly improbable but completely convincing explanation was there in his mind.

Furthermore, it tied in perfectly with the temporary disappearance of his office scissors that morning!

Colonel Magrumssen conceded, however, with something like awed delight at his own cleverness, that it was going to be a little difficult to prove anything.

* * *

The problem suddenly had become too intriguing to put off entirely till evening, so the colonel sent Miss Eaton out to buy a bag of the best available taffy. And he himself made a trip to his private library in his living quarters and returned with a couple of books which had nothing to do with his official duties.

He proceeded to study them until Miss Eaton returned with the taffy, which he put in a drawer of his desk. Then, tapping the last page of the text he had been studying—the chapter was titled "Negative Hallucinations"—he reviewed the tentative conclusions he'd formed so far.

The common starting point in the investigation of any unusual occurrence was to assume that nothing just occurred; that everything had a cause. The next step being, of course, the assumption that anything that happened was part of a greater pattern of events; and that if one got to see enough of it, the greater pattern generally made sense.

The mysterious disappearance and reappearance of his office scissors certainly seemed unusual enough. But when one tied it in with humanity's casual acceptance of the fact that some two per cent of Earth's processed commodities disappeared tracelessly every year, one might be getting a glimpse of a possible major pattern.

The colonel glanced back over a paragraph he had marked in "Negative Hallucinations":

Negative hallucinations are comprehensive in the sense that they also negate the sensory registration of any facts that would contradict them. Install in a hypnotic subject the conviction that there is no one but himself in the room; he will demonstrate that he does not permit himself to realize that he cannot see when another person present places both hands over his eyes . . .   

Assuming that it wasn't too logical of humanity to take Normal Loss for granted, one could conclude that humanity as a whole might be suffering from a very comprehensive negative hallucination—in which case, it wouldn't, of course, be permitting itself to wonder about Normal Loss.

It was a rather large assumption to make, the colonel admitted; but he might be in a position to test it now.

For one then could assume also that there was somebody around, some Unseen Agency, who was benefiting both by Normal Loss and by humanity's willingness to accept Normal Loss without further investigation.

An outfit who operated as smoothly as that shouldn't really have bungled matters by returning his scissors under such suspicious circumstances. But even that sort of outfit might be handicapped by occasional members who weren't quite up to par. Somebody, say, who was roughly the equivalent of a Charles E. Watterly.

The notion satisfied the colonel. He unlocked a desk drawer which contained a few items of personal interest to him. A gun, for one thing—in case life eventually turned out to be just a little too boring, or some higher-up decided some day that Colonel Magrumssen was ripe for a transfer and CGD. A methodical man should be prepared for any eventuality.

Beside the gun, carefully wrapped, was a small crystal globe, a souvenir from a vacation trip he'd made to Africa some years before. There had been a brief personal romance involved with the trip and the globe; but that part of it no longer interested the colonel very much.

The thing about the globe right now was that, when one pressed down a little button set into its base, it demonstrated a gradual succession of tiny landscapes full of the African sunlight and with minute animals and people walking about in it. All very lifelike and arranged in such a manner that one seemed to be making a slow trip about the continent. It was an enormously expensive little gadget, but it might now be worth the price he'd paid for it.

The colonel wrapped the globe back up and set it on the desk next to the bag of taffy. Then he went about finishing up the day's official business, somewhat amazed at the fact that he seemed to be accepting his own preposterous theory as a simple truth—that invisible beings walked the Earth, lived among men and filched their sustenance from Man's meager living supplies . . . 

But he hadn't, he found, the slightest desire to warn humanity against its parasites. That had nothing to do with the fact that nobody would believe him anyway. So far, he rather approved of the methods employed by the Unseen Agency.

By the time the next twenty-four hours were over, he also might have a fair idea of its purpose.

He laughed. The whole business was really outrageous. And he realized that, for some reason, that was just what delighted him about it.

* * *

He was sitting in his study, shortly after nine o'clock that evening, when he had the first indication that his plans were beginning to work out.

Up till then, he had remained in a curiously relaxed frame of mind. Having accepted the apparent fact of the Unseen Agency's existence, the question was whether its mysterious powers went so far that it actually could read his thoughts and know what he intended to do before he got around to doing it. If it could, his tricks obviously weren't going to get him anywhere. If it couldn't, he should get results—eventually. He felt he lost nothing by trying.

He was aware of no particular surprise then when things began to happen. It was as if he had expected them to happen in just that way.

He had pushed away the papers he was working on and leaned back to yawn and stretch for a moment. As if by accident, his gaze went to the mantel above the study's electronic fireplace, where he had placed the little crystal globe showing Africa's scenic wonders. He had left it switched to the picture of a burned brown desert, across which a troop of lean, pale antelopes trotted slowly toward a distant grove of palm trees.

From where he sat, he could see that the crystal no longer showed the desert view. Instead, Kilimanjaro's snow-covered peak was visible in it, reflecting the pink light of an infinitesimal morning sun.

The colonel frowned slightly, permitting a vague sense of disturbance—an awareness of something being not quite as it should be—to pass through his mind. Presumably, that awareness would reflect itself to some degree in his expression and might be noticed there by a sufficiently alert observer.

He dismissed the feeling and turned back to his papers.

What he caught in that moment, from the corner of his eye, couldn't exactly be described as motion. It was hardly more than a mental effect, a fleeting impression of shifting shadows, light and lines, as if something had alighted for an instant on the farthest edge of his vision and been withdrawn again.

The colonel didn't look up. A chill film of sweat covered the backs of his hands and his forehead. That was the only indication he gave, even to himself, of feeling any excitement. Without moving his eyes, he could tell that the gleaming crystal globe had vanished from its place on the mantel.

* * *

How did they do it? In some way, they were cutting off the links of awareness that existed between all rational human beings. They were broadcasting the impression that they, and the things they touched, and the traces of their activities did not exist. Once the mind accepted that, it would refuse to acknowledge any contradictory evidence offered by its senses of reasoning powers.

He'd started out by assuming that there was something there, so the effect of the negative hallucination was weakened in him. Every new advance in understanding he made now should continue to weaken it—and there was one moment when the Unseen Agency's concrete reality must manifest itself in a manner which his mind, at this point, couldn't refuse to accept. That was the instant in which it was manipulating some very concrete item, such as the crystal globe, in and out of visibility.

It was obvious, at any rate, that the Agency couldn't read his thoughts. He'd tricked it, precisely as he'd set out to do, into making a hurried attempt to resolve his apparently half-formed suspicion that someone might have been playing with the globe behind his back. It showed a certain innocence of mind. But, presumably, people who had such unusual powers mightn't be accustomed to the sort of devious maneuvering and conscious control of emotion and thought which was required to survive at an acceptable level in the colonel's everyday world.

He became aware suddenly of the fact that the crystal globe had been returned to its place on the mantel. For that same instant, he was aware also of a child-shape, definitely a girl, standing on tiptoe before the mantel, still reaching up toward the globe—and then fading quickly, soundlessly, beyond the reach of his senses again.

That was considerably more than enough—

He'd been thinking of some super-powered moron, of the Charles E. Watterly type, not a child! But it made even better sense this way, and it took only a few seconds of flexibility to adapt his plans to include the new factor.

* * *

The colonel took two white cards and a lead pencil out of a drawer of the desk at which he was working. He unhurriedly printed three words on the first card and five on the second. Putting the cards into his pocket, he finally looked up at the globe

As he expected, it showed the scene he'd last been studying himself—brown desert, the grove of palms and the antelopes.

He gazed at it for a moment, as if absently accepting this correction of the Unseen Agency's lapse as any good hypnotic subject should. And then, still casually, he took the bag of fresh taffy he'd had Miss Eaton buy that afternoon out of the desk drawer. He opened it, opening his mind simultaneously to the conviction that the child-shape would come now to this new bait.

Almost instantly, he realized, with a sense of sheer delight, that she was there!

At any rate, there was an eagerness, an innocent greed, swirling like a gusty, soundless little wind of emotion about him, barely checked now by the necessity of remaining unseen. He took out a piece of the taffy and popped it solemnly into his mouth, and the greed turned into a shivering young rage of frustration, and a plea, and a prayer: Oh, make him look away! Just once! 

The colonel put the paper bag into his pocket, walked deliberately to the mantel and propped one of the two cards up against the globe.

There was a fresh upsurge of interest, and then an almost physically violent burst of other emotions behind him.

For the three words on the card read:

I SAW YOU!

Whistling soundlessly, the colonel waited a moment and replaced that card with the next one. He scratched his jaw and, as an apparent second thought, produced three pieces of taffy from his pocket, which he arranged into an artistic little pyramid in front of the card. He turned and walked back to his desk.

When he looked around from there, the card was gone.

So were the three pieces of taffy.

He waited patiently for over a minute. Something white fluttered momentarily before the globe on the mantel and the card had reappeared. For a moment again, too, the child became visible, looking at him still half in alarm, but also half in laughter now, and then vanished once more.

Reading what was written on the card, the colonel knew he'd won the first round anyway. His reaction wasn't the feeling of alert, cautious triumph he'd expected, but a curious, rather unaccountable happiness.

The five words he'd printed on the card had been:

DON'T WORRY—I WON'T TELL

That message was crossed out now with pencil. Underneath it, two single words had been printed in a ragged slope, as if someone had been writing very hurriedly:

THANK YOU!

* * *

By two o'clock that night, the colonel was still wide awake, though he had followed his methodical pattern of living by going to bed at midnight, as usual. Whatever the Unseen Agency's reaction might be, it wouldn't be bound by any conventional restrictions.

There was the chance, of course, that they would decide it was necessary to destroy him. Since he couldn't protect himself successfully against invisible opponents, the colonel wasn't taking any measures along that line. He'd accepted the chance in bringing himself to their attention.

They also might decide simply to ignore him. He couldn't, he conceded, do much about it if they did. Everyday humanity had its own abrupt methods of dealing with anyone who tried to dispel its illusions, and he, for one, knew enough not to make any such attempt. But the Unseen Agency should have curiosity enough to find out how much he actually knew and what he intended to do about it. . . . 

His eyes opened slowly. The luminous dial of the clock beside his bed indicated it was three-thirty. He had fallen asleep finally; and now there were—presences—in his room.

After his first involuntary start, the colonel was careful not to move. The channels of awareness that had warned of the arrival of the Unseen Agency seemed to be approximately the same he had used unwittingly in sensing the emotions of the child earlier that night. Under the circumstances, he might regard theirs as more reliable than his eyes or ears.

Apparently encouraged by his acceptance of the fact, his mind reported promptly that the child herself was among those present—and that there was a new quality of stillness and expectancy about her now, as if this were a very important event to her, too.

Of the others, the colonel grew aware more gradually. But as he did, he discovered the same sense of waiting expectancy about them, almost as if they were trying to tell him that the next move actually was up to him, not them. In the instant he formed that conclusion, his feeling of their general presence seemed to resolve itself into the recognition of a number of distinct personalities who were presenting themselves to him, one by one.

The first was a grave, aged kindliness, but with a bubble of humor in it—almost, he thought, surprised, like somebody's grandmother.

Two and Three seemed to be masculine, darker, thoughtfully judging.

And, finally, there was Four, who appeared to come into the room only now, as if summoned from a distance to see what her friends had found—a personality as clear and light as the child's, but an adult intelligence nevertheless. Four joined the others, observant and waiting.

Waiting for what?

That, the colonel gathered, was for him to experience in himself and understand. His awareness of their existence had been enough to attract their attention to him. Moving and living securely beyond the apparent realities of civilization, as if it were so much stage scenery which had hypnotized the senses of all ordinary human beings, they seemed ready to welcome and encourage any discoverer, without fear or hostility, as one of themselves.

He could sense dimly the quality of their strange ability, and the motives that had created it. The ruthless mechanical rigidity of the human society that had developed out of the Hunger Years had been the forcing factor. These curious rebels must have felt a terrible necessity to escape from it to have found and developed in their own minds a means of bypassing society so completely—the means being, essentially, so perfect a control of the outgoing radiations of thought and emotion that they created no slightest telltale ripple in the ocean of the subconscious human mind and left a negative impression there instead.

But they were not hiding from anyone who followed the same path they had taken.

There was a sudden unwillingness in him to go any further in that direction at the moment. Full understanding might lie in the very near future; but it was still in the future.

As if they had accepted that, too, he could sense that the members of the Unseen Agency were withdrawing from him and the room. Four was last to go; lingering a moment after the others had left, as if looking back at him; a light, clear presence as definite as spoken words or the touch of a hand.

A moment after she had left, the colonel realized, with something of a shock, that for the first time in his adult life, he had fallen in love. . . . 

* * *

First thing he did next morning was to have himself measured for a new uniform of the kind he'd always avoided—the full uniform of his rank, white and gold, and with the extra little flourishes, the special unauthorized richness of cloth that only a colonel-and-up could afford or get away with. It was the sort of gesture, he felt, that Four might appreciate. And he had a reason for wanting to stay away from Metallurgy that morning for the four hours or so it might take to complete the suit.

He was in the position of a strategist who, having made an important gain, can take time out to consolidate it and consider his next moves. He preferred to do that beyond the range of any too observant eyes—and mind.

That Four and her kind should be content to live—well, like mice, actually—behind the scenery of the world, subsisting on the crumbs of civilization, was ridiculous. They seemed to have no real understanding of their powers, and of the uses to which they could be put.

It was the most curious sort of paradox.

The colonel found a park bench and settled down to investigate the problems presented by the paradox.

He was, he decided, a practical man. As such, he'd remained occluded, till now, to their solution of the problems of a society with which he was basically no more contented than they had been. But he had adjusted effectively to the requirements of that society, while they had withdrawn from it in the completest possible fashion this side of suicide.

To put it somewhat differently, he had learned how to influence and manipulate others to gain for himself a position comfortably near the top. They had learned how to avoid being manipulated.

But if a man could do that—without losing the will to employ his powers intelligently!

The colonel checked the surge of excitement which arose from that line of reflection, almost guiltily. The structure of society might be—and was—more than ripe for an overhauling. But he was quite certain that Four's people would not be willing to follow his reasoning just yet. Their whole philosophy of living was oriented in the opposite direction of ultimate withdrawal.

But give me time, he thought, Just give me time! 

Four showed herself to him that afternoon.

He'd returned to his office—the white-and-gold uniform had created a noticeable stir in the department—and instructed Miss Eaton to send someone out for a lunch tray from the cafeteria.

A little later, he suddenly realized that Four was standing in the door of the office behind him. He knew then that, for some reason, he had expected her to come.

He was careful not to look around, but he sensed that she both approved of the white uniform and was laughing at him for having put it on to impress her. The colonel's ears reddened slightly. He straightened his shoulders, though, and went on working.

Next, the child-shape slipped by before his desk, an almost visibility. He glanced up at it, and it smiled and disappeared as abruptly as if it had gone through a door in mid-air and closed the door behind it. A moment later Four stood just beyond the desk, looking down at the colonel, no less substantial than the material of the desk itself.

He stared up at her, unable to speak, aware only of a slow, strong gladness welling up in him.

Then Four vanished—

Someone had opened the door of the office behind him.

"Your lunch, sir," the familiar voice of Charles E. Watterly muttered apologetically.

The colonel let his breath out slowly. But it didn't matter too much, he supposed. Four would be back.

"Thank you, Watterly," he said, with some restraint. "Set it down, please."

Watterly's angular shape appeared beside him and suddenly seemed to teeter uncertainly. The colonel moved an instant too late. The coffee pot lay on its side in the brown puddle that filled the lunch tray on the desk. The rest of the contents were about evenly distributed over the desk, the carpet, and the white uniform.

On his feet, flushed and angry, the colonel looked at Watterly.

"I'm sorry, sir!" Watterly had fallen back a step.

Now, this was interesting, the colonel decided, studying him carefully. This was the familiar startled white face, its slack mouth twisted into an equally familiar, frightened grin. But why hadn't he ever before noticed the incredible, cold, hidden malice staring at him out of those pale blue eyes?

Not a bungler. A hater. The airtight organization of society kept it suppressed so well that he had almost forgotten how the underdogs of the world could hate!

He let the rage in him ebb away.

Anger was pointless. It was the compliment one paid an equal. To withdraw beyond the reach of human malice, as Four and the rest of them had done, was a better way—for the weak. For those who were not, the simplest and most effective way was to dispose of the malicious by whichever methods were handiest, and forget about them.

* * *

At seven in the evening, Miss Eaton looked in at the colonel's central office and inquired whether he would need her any more that day.

"No, thank you, Miss Eaton," said the colonel, without looking up. "A few matters I want to finish by myself. Good night."

There was silence for a moment. Then Miss Eaton's voice blurted suddenly, "Sometimes it's much better to finish such matters in the morning, sir!"

The colonel glanced up in surprise. Coming from Miss Eaton, the remark seemed out of character. But she looked slightly resentful, slightly anxious, as always, and not as if she attributed any importance to her words.

"Well, Miss Eaton," the colonel said genially, while he wondered whether it had been a coincidence, "I just happen to prefer not to wait till tomorrow."

Miss Eaton nodded, as though agreeing that, in that case, there was no more to be said. He listened to her heels clicking away through the glass-enclosed aisles of the general offices, and then the lights went out there, and Colonel Magrumssen was sitting alone at his desk.

It was odd about Miss Eaton. He was almost certain now it had been no coincidence. Her personality which, for a number of years, he'd felt he understood better than one got to understand most people, had revealed itself in a single sentence to be an entirely different sort of personality—a woman, in fact, about whom he knew exactly nothing! At any other time, the implications would have fascinated him. Tonight, of course, it made no difference any more.

His gaze returned reflectively to a copy of the Notice of Transfer by which Charles E. Watterly had been removed from Metallurgy some hours before, to be returned to the substratum of Earth's underdogs, where he obviously belonged.

It had seemed the logical thing to do, the colonel realized with a feeling of baffled resentment. What did one more third-rate human life among a few billions matter?

But it seemed his unseen acquaintances believed it did matter, very much. Somewhere deep in his mind, ever since he had signed the Transfer, a cold, dead area had been growing which told him, as clearly as if they had announced it in so many words, that he wouldn't be able to contact them again.

Notices of Transfer weren't revocable, but he felt, too, that it wouldn't have done him much good if they had been. One committed the unforgivable sin, and that was that.

He had pushed Watterly back down where he belonged. And he was no longer acceptable.

There was one question he would have liked answered, the colonel decided, as he went on methodically about the business of cleaning up his department's top-level affairs for his successor.

What, actually, was the unforgivable sin?

A half hour later, he decided he wasn't able to find the answer. Something involved with Christian charity, or the lack of it, apparently. He had sinned in degrading Watterly. Civilization similarly had sinned on a very large scale against the major part of humanity. And so they had withdrawn themselves both from civilization and from him.

He shook his head. He might still be misjudging their motives—because it still didn't seem quite right!

On the proper form and in a neat, clear hand, he filled out his resignation from Metallurgy and from life, to make it easy for the investigators. He frowned at the line headed REASONS GIVEN and decided to leave it blank.

He laid down the pen and picked up the gun and squinted down its barrel distastefully. And then somebody who now appeared to be sitting in the chair on the other side of his desk remarked:

"That mightn't be required, you know."

* * *

The colonel put the gun down and folded his hands on the desk. "Well, John Brownson!" he said, politely surprised. "You're one of them, too?"

The assistant to the Minister of Statistics shrugged.

"In a sense," he admitted. "In about the same way that you're one of them."

The colonel thought that over and acknowledged that he didn't quite follow.

"It's very simple," Brownson assured him, "once you understand the basic fact that we're all basically altruists—you and I and every other human being on Earth."

"All altruists, eh?" the colonel repeated doubtfully.

"Not, of course, always consciously. But each of us seems to know instinctively that he or she is also, to some extent, an irrational and therefore potentially dangerous animal. The race is developing mentally and emotionally, but it hasn't developed as far as would be desirable as yet."

"That, at any rate, seems to be a fact," the colonel conceded.

"So there is a conflict between our altruism and our irrationality. To solve it, we—each of us—limit ourselves. We do not let our understanding and abilities develop beyond the point at which we can trust ourselves not to use them against humanity. Once you accept that, everything else is self-explanatory."

Now how could Brownson hope to defend such a statement, the colonel protested after an astonished pause, after taking a look at history? Or, for that matter, at some of the more outstanding public personalities in their immediate environment?

But the assistant to the Minister of Statistics waved the objection aside.

"Growth isn't always a comfortable process," he said. "Even the Hunger Years and our present social structure might be regarded as forcing factors. The men who appear primarily responsible for this stage of mankind's development may not consciously look on themselves as altruists, but basically, as I said, that is the only standard by which we do judge our activities—and ourselves! Now, as for you—"

"Yes?" said the colonel. "As for me?"

"Well, you're a rather remarkable man, Colonel Magrumssen. You certainly gave every indication of being prepared to expand your understanding to a very unusual degree—which was why," John Brownson added, somewhat apologetically, "I first directed your attention to the possible implications of Normal Loss. Afterward, you appear to have fooled much more careful judges of human nature than I am. Though, of course," he concluded, "you may not really have fooled them. It's not always easy to follow their reasoning."

"Since you're being so informative," the colonel said bluntly, "I'd like to know just who and what those people are."

"They're obviously people who can and do trust themselves very far," Brownson said evasively. "A class or two above me, I'm afraid. I don't know much about them otherwise, and I'd just as soon not. You're a bolder man than I am, Colonel. In particular, I don't know anything about the specific group with which you became acquainted."

"We didn't stay acquainted very long."

"Well, you wouldn't," Brownson agreed, studying him curiously. "Still, it was an unusual achievement."

* * *

The colonel said nothing for a moment. He was experiencing again a hot resentment and what he realized might be a rather childish degree of hurt, and also the feeling that something splendidly worthwhile had become irretrievably lost to him through a single mistake. But, for some reason, the feeling was much less disturbing now.

"The way it seemed to me," he said finally, "was that they were willing to accept me as an equal—whatever class they're in—until I fired Watterly. That wasn't it, then?"

"No, it wasn't. They were merely acknowledging that you had accepted yourself as being in that class, at least temporarily. That seems to be the only real requirement."

"If I knew instinctively that I couldn't meet that requirement, on a completely altruistic basis," the colonel said carefully, "why did I accept myself as being in their class even temporarily?"

John Brownson glanced reluctantly at the gun on the desk. For a moment, the colonel was puzzled. Then he grinned apologetically.

"Well, yes, that might explain it," he admitted. "I believe I've had it in mind for some time. Life had begun to look pretty uninteresting." He poked frowningly at the gun. "So it was just a matter of satisfying my curiosity—first?"

"I wouldn't know what your exact motive was," Brownson said cautiously. "But I presume it went beyond simple curiosity."

"Well, supposing now," said the colonel, tapping the gun, "that on considering what you've told me, I decided to change my mind."

Brownson smiled. "If you change your decision, you'll do it for good and sufficient reasons. I'd be very happy—and, incidentally, there's no need to blame yourself for Watterly. Watterly knew he couldn't trust himself in any position above Civilian General Duty. If you hadn't had him sent back there, he would have found someone else to do it. Self-judgment works at all levels."

"I wasn't worrying much about Watterly," the colonel said. He reflected a moment. "What actually induced you to come here to talk to me?"

"Well," said Brownson carefully, "there was one who expressed an opinion about you so strongly that it couldn't be ignored. I was sent to make sure you had the fullest possible understanding of what you were doing."

The colonel stared. "Who expressed an opinion about me?'

"Your Miss Eaton."

* * *

"Miss Eaton?" The colonel almost laughed. For a moment, he'd had a wild, irrational hope that Four had showed concern about him. But Four hardly would have been obliged to go to John Brownson for help.

"Miss Eaton," Brownson smiled wryly, "has a wider range of understanding than most, but not enough courage to do anything about what she knows. The bravest thing she ever did was to speak to you as she did tonight. After that, she didn't know what else to do, so—well, she prayed. At any rate, it seemed to be a prayer to her."

"For me?"

"Yes, for you."

"Think of that!" said the colonel, astonished. "That was why you came?"

"That's it."

The colonel thought about Miss Eaton for a moment, and then of what a completely fascinating, interesting world it was—if one could only become really aware of it. It seemed unreasonable that people should be going thorough life in blind, uneasy dissatisfaction, never quite realizing what was going on around and behind them. . . . 

Of course, a good percentage of them might drop dead in sheer fright if they ever got a sudden inkling of what was there. For one thing, quite enough power to extinguish nine-tenths of the human life on Earth between one second and the next.

And the thought of that power and various perhaps not too rational manipulations of it, he reflected truthfully, might have been the really fascinating part of it all to him.

"Well, thank you, Brownson," he said.

There was no answer.

* * *

When the colonel looked up, the chair on the other side of the desk was empty. Brownson seemed to have realized that he'd done the best he could. The others, being wiser, would have known all along there was nothing to be done. His self-judgment stood.

"Damn saints!" the colonel said, grinning. The trouble was that he still liked them.

Trying not to think of Four again, he picked up the gun and then a final thought came to him. He laid it down long enough to write neatly and clearly behind REASONS GIVEN on the resignation form: IF IT WERE A SNAKE, IT WOULD BITE YOU!

A slim hand moved the gun away and a light voice laughed, at the inscrutable message he had written. Then his own hand was taken and he smiled back at Four, while the room stayed substantial and he did not.

It was remarkable how easily and completely one could retreat from the world, clear to the point of invisibility. There had always been people like that, people who could lose themselves in a crowd or be totally unnoticeable at a party. They just hadn't carried their self-effacement far enough. Probably the pressure of reality hadn't been as savage as it was now, to compel both extremes of assertion and withdrawal.

Normal Loss would rise an infinitesimal amount, the colonel thought with amusement—he'd have to live, too. The world wouldn't know why, of course.

The devil with this world. He had his own to go to, and a woman of his own to go with.

"You didn't really think I was going to kill myself, did you?" he asked Four, feeling the need to make her understand and respect him. "It was only a trick to get your attention."

"As if you had to," she laughed tenderly.

 

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