IS. The One-Eyed Man

(by Philip St. John)

A blank-faced zombie moved aside as Jimmy Bard came out of the Dictator’s office, but he did not notice it; and his own gesture of stepping out of the way of the worried, patrolling adult guards was purely automatic. His tall, well-muscled body went on doing all the things

long habit had taught it, while his mind churned inside him, rebelling hopelessly at the inevitable.

For a moment, the halls were free of the countless guards, and Jimmy moved suddenly to one of the walls, making quick, automatic motions with his hands. There was no visible sign of change in the surface, but he drew a deep breath and stepped forward; it was like breasting a strong current, but then he was inside and in a narrow passageway, one of the thousands of secret corridors that honeycombed the whole monstrous castle.

Here there could be no adults to remind him of what he’d considered his deficiencies, nor of the fact that those deficiencies were soon to be eliminated. The first Dictator Bard had shared the secret of the castle with none save the murdered men who built it; and death had prevented his revealing it even to his own descendants. No tapping would ever reveal that the walls were not the thick, homogenous things they seemed, for tapping would set off alarms and raise stone segments where needed, to make them as solid as they appeared. It was Jimmy’s private kingdom, and one where he could be bedeviled only by his own thoughts.

But today, those were trouble enough. Morbid fascination with them drove him forward through the twisting passages until he located a section of the wall that was familiar, and pressed his palm against it. For a second, it seemed cloudy, and then was transparent, as the energies worked on it, letting vibration through in one direction only. He did not notice the quiet sounds of those in the room beyond, but riveted his eyes on the queer headpieces worn by the two girls and single boy within.

Three who had reached their twelfth birthday today and were about to become adultsor zombies! Those odd headpieces were electronic devices that held all the knowledge of a complete, all-embracing education, and they were now working silently, impressing that knowledge onto the minds of their wearers at some two hundred million impulses a second, grooving it permanently into those minds. The children who had entered with brains filled only with the things of childhood would leave with all the information they could ever need, to go out into the world as full adults, if they had withstood the shock of education. Those who failed to withstand it would still leave with the same knowledge, but the character and personality would be gone, leaving them wooden-faced, soul-less zombies.

Once Jimmy had sat in one of those chairs, filled with all the schemes and ambitions of a young rowdy about to become a man.

But that time, nothing had happened! He could remember the conferences, the scientific attempts to explain his inability to absorb information from the compellor Aaron Bard had given the world, and his own tortured turmoil at finding himself something between an adult and a zombie, useless and unwanted in a world where only results counted. He had no way of knowing, then, that all the bitter years of adjusting to his fate and learning to survive in the contemptuous world were the result of a fake. It was only within the last hour that he had discovered that.

“Pure fake, carefully built up!” His Dictator father had seemed proud of that, even over the worry and desperation that had been on his face these last few days. “The other two before you who didn’t take were just false leads, planted to make your case seem plausible; same with “the half dozen later cases. You’d have burnedturned zombie, almost certainly. And you’re a Bard, someday to dictate this country! I took the chance that if we waited until you grew older, you’d pass, and managed to use blank tapes… . Now I can’t wait any longer. Hell’s due to pop, and I’m not ready for it, but if I can surprise them, present you as an adult… Be back here at six sharp, and I’ll have everything ready for your education.”

Ten years before, those words would have spelled pure heaven to him. But now the scowl deepened on his forehead as he slapped off the one-way transparency. He’d learned a lot about this world in those ten years, and had seen the savage ruthlessness of the adults. He’d seen no wisdom, but only cunning and cleverness come from the Bard psychicompellors.

“Damn Aaron Bard!”

“Amen!” The soft word came sighing out of the shadows beside the boy, swinging him around with a jerk. Another, in here! Then his eyes were readjusting to the pale, bluish glow of the passages, and he made out the crouched form of an elderly man, slumped into one of the comers. That thin, weary figure with the bitter mouth and eyes could never be a castle guard, however well disguised, and Jimmy breathed easier, though the thing that might be a weapon in the hands of the other centered squarely on him.

The old man’s voice trembled faintly, and there were the last dregs of bitterness in it. “Aaron Bard’s damned, all right. … I thought the discovery of one-way transparency was lost, though, along with controlled interpenetrability of matterstuff around which to build a whole new science! And yet, that’s the answer; for three days, I’ve been trying to find a trapdoor or sliding panel, boy, and all the time

the trick lay in matter that could be made interpenetrable. Amusing to you?”

“No, sir.” Jimmy held his voice level and quite normal. A grim ability to analyze any situation had been knocked into him during the years of his strangeness in a world that did not tolerate strangeness, and he saw that the man was close to cracking. He smiled quietlyand moved without facial warning, with the lightning reaction he had forced himself to learn, ripping the weapon out of weakened hands. His voice was still quiet. “I don’t know how you know those things, nor care. The important thing is to keep you from letting others know, and …”

Sudden half-crazed laughter cut off his words. “Go back to the others and tell them? Go back and be tortured again? They’d love that. Aaron Bard’s come back to tell us about some more of his nice discoveries! So sweet of you to call, my dear… . I’m damned, all right, by my own reputation.”

“But Aaron Bard’s been dead eighty years! His corpse is preserved in a glass coffin on exhibition; I’ve seen it myself.” And yet there was more than simple insanity here; the old man had known the two secrets which were discovered by Aaron Bard and which his son, the first Dictator, had somehow managed to find and conceal for his own ends after the inventor’s death in an explosion. Those secrets had been built into the palace as part of the power of his Dictatorship, until they had been lost with his death. But the old man was speaking again, his voice weak and difficult.

“What does a mere eighty-year span mean, or a figure of wax in a public coffin? The real body they held in sterile refrigeration, filled with counter-enzymes … my own discovery, again! You know of it?”

Jimmy nodded. A Russian scientist had found safe revival of dogs possible even after fifteen minutes of death; with later development, men had been operated on in death, where it served better than anesthesia, and revived again. The only limit had been the time taken by the enzymes of the body to begin dissolving the tissues; and with the discovery by Aaron Bard of a counteracting agent, there had ceased to be any theoretical limit to safe revival. Dying soldiers in winter had injected ampules of it and been revived days or weeks later, where the cold had preserved them. “Buteighty years!”

“Why notwhen my ideas were still needed, when my last experiment dealt with simple atomic power, rather than the huge, cumbersome U-235 method? Think what it would mean to an army! My son

didhe was very clever at thinking of such things. Eighty years, until they could perfect their tissue regrowing methods and dare to revive my body.” He laughed again, an almost noiseless wracking of his exhausted shoulders, and there was the hint of delirious raving in his voice now, though the words were still rational.

“I was so pathetically grateful and proud, when they revived me. I was always gratefully proud of my achievements, you know, and what they could do for humanity. But the time had been too longmy brain only seemed normal. It had deteriorated, and I couldn’t remember all I should; when I tried too hard, there were strange nightmare periods of half insanity. And their psychological torture to rip the secret from me didn’t help. Two months of that, boy! They told me my name was almost like a god’s in this world, and then they stopped at nothing to get what they wanted from that god! And at last I must have gone mad for a time; I don’t remember, but somehow I must have escapedI think I remember something about an air shaft. And then I was here, lost in the maze, unable to get out. But I couldn’t be here, could I, if the only entrance was through interpenetrable stone panels that I couldn’t remember how to energize?”

“Easy, sir.” Jimmy slipped an arm under the trembling body of Aaron Bard and lifted him gently. “You could, all right. There’s one out of order, in constant interpenetrable condition in an old air shaft. That’s how I first found all this, years ago… . There’s some soup I can heat in my rooms, and you won’t have to go back to them.”

He might as well do one decent and human thing, while his mind was still his own, untouched by the damnable education machine. And seeing this bitter, suffering old man, he could no longer hate Aaron Bard for inventing it. The man had possessed a mind of inconceivable scope and had brought forth inventions in all fields as a cat brings forth kittens, but their misuse was no fault of his.

And suddenly it occurred to him that here in his arms was the reason for the desperation his father felt. They couldn’t know of the interpenetrable panel, and the search that had undoubtedly been made and failed could have only one answer to them; he must have received outside help from some of the parties constantly plotting treason. With the threat of simple atomic power in such hands, no wonder his Dictator father was pulling all his last desperate tricks to maintain the order of things! Jimmy shook his head; it seemed that everything connected with Aaron Bard led to the position he was in and the inevitable education he must face. For a brief moment he

hesitated, swayed by purely personal desires; then his hand moved out to the panel, and he was walking through into his own room, the aged figure still in his arms.

Later, when the old scientist had satisfied some of the needs of his body and was sitting on the bed, smoking, his eyes wandered slowly over the rows of books on the shelves about the room, and his eyebrows lifted slightly. “The Age of Reason, even! The first books I’ve seen in this world, Jimmy!”

“Nobody reads much, anymore, so they don’t miss them at the old library. People prefer ‘vision for amusement and the compellor tapes if they need additional information. I started trying to learn things from them, and reading grew to be a habit.”

“Umm. So you’re another one-eyed man?”

“Eh?”

Bard shrugged, and the bitterness returned to his mouth. ” ‘In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man iskilled!’ Wells wrote a story about it. WherewhenI came from, men had emotional eyes to their souls, and my guess is that you’ve been through enough hell to develop your own. But this world is blind to such things. They don’t want people to see. It’s the old rule of the pack: Thou shalt conform! Jimmy, how did all this come to be?”

Jimmy frowned, trying to put it into words. The start had probably been when Aaron Bard tried his newly invented psychicompellor on his son. The boy had liked that way of learning, and stolen other experimental tapes, building with his cold, calculating little brain toward the future already. Unerringly, he’d turned to the army, apparently sensing the coming war, and making the most of it when it came. Fifteen years of exhausting, technological warfare had let him introduce the educator to furnish the technical men needed, and had seen him bring forth stolen secret of his father after stolen secret, once the accidental death of Bard had left him alone in possession of Bard’s files. With the war’s end, the old education system was gone, and boys of twelve were serving as technicians at home until they could be replaced for active duty when old enough.

Those same boys, grown to men and desiring the same things he did, had made possible his move from General to President, and finally to Dictator. He’d even adopted the psychicompellor as his heraldic device. And the ever-increasing demands of technology made going back to old methods impossible and assured him a constant supply of young “realists.”

Bard interrupted. “Why? It would have been hardgetting an education was always difficult and becoming worse, which is why I tried to make the compellorbut it would have been worth it when they saw where it led. After all, without such help I managed to find a few thingseven if they turned out to be Frankenstein monsters!”

“But you depended on some odd linkage of simple facts for results, and most men can’t; they need a multitude of facts. And even then, we still follow you by rote in some things!”

“Too easy knowledge. They aren’t using itwhen they get facts, they don’t have the habits of hard thinking needed to utilize them. I noticed the meager developments of new fields… . But when they began making theseuhzombies…”

Jimmy punched a button and nodded toward the creature that entered in answer. It began quietly clearing the room, removing the evidence of Bard’s meal, while the scientist studied it. “There’s one. He knows as much as any adult, but he has no soul, no emotions, you might say. Tell him to do something, and he willbut he won’t even eat without orders.”

“Permanent mechanical hypnosis,” Bard muttered, and there was hell in his eyes. Then his mouth hardened, while the eyes grew even grimmer. “I never foresaw that, butyou’re wrong, and it makes it even worse! Youuh4719, answer my questions. Do you have emotions such as hatred, fear, or a sense of despair?”

Jimmy started to shake his head, but the zombie answered dully before him. “Yes, master, all those!”

“But you can’t connect them with your actionsis that right? You’re two people, one in hell and unable to reach the other?”

The affirmative answer was in the same dull tone again, and the zombie turned obediently and left at Bard’s gesture. Jimmy wiped sudden sweat from his forehead. He’d been hoping before that he might fail the compellor education as a release, but this would be sheer, unadulterated hell! And the psychologists must know this, even though they never mentioned it.

“And ten percent of us are zombies! But only a very few at first, until the need for ever more knowledge made the shock of education greater. By thenthe world had accepted such things; and some considered them a most useful by-product, since they made the best possible workers.” His own voice grew more bitter as he forced it on with the history lesson, trying to forget the new and unwelcome knowledge.

Bard’s son had built the monstrous castle with its secret means for spying, and had fled into the passages with his private papers to

die when his son wrested control from him. It was those moldy papers that had shown Jimmy the secret of escape when he’d stumbled into the labyrinth first. After that, the passage of Dictatorship from father to son had been peaceful enough, and taken for granted. On the whole, there had been little of the deliberate cruelty of the ancient Nazi regime, and the dictatorial powers, while great, were not absolute. The people were used to itafter all, they were products of the compellor, and a ruthless people, best suited by dictatorial government.

Always the compellor! Jimmy hesitated for a moment, and then plunged into the tale of his own troubles. “So I’m to be made into a beast, whether I like it or not,” he finished. “Oh, I could turn you in and save myself. If I were an adult, I would! That’s why I hate it, even though I might like it then. It wouldn’t be meit’d be just another adult, carrying my name, doing all the things I’ve learned to hate. I can save myself from becoming one of themby becoming one!”

“Requiescat in pace! Rest the dead in peace. If you wake them, they may learn they’ve made a ghastly mess of the world, and may even find themselves ruining the only person in all the world whom they like!” Aaron Bard shook his head, wrinkles of concentration cutting over the lines of pain. ‘The weapon you took from me isn’t exactly harmless. Sometime, during my temporary insanity, I must have remembered the old secret, since I made it then, and it’s atom-powered. Maybe, without a dictator”

“No! He’s weak, but he’s no worse than the others; I couldn’t let you kill my father!”

“No, I suppose you couldn’t; anyhow, killing people isn’t usually much of a solution. Jimmy, are you sure there’s any danger of your being made like the others?”

“I’ve seen the results!”

“But have you? The children are given no education or discipline until they’re twelve, and then suddenly filled with knowledge, for which they haven’t been prepared, even if preadolescents can be prepared for all thatwhich I don’t believe. Even in my day, in spite of some discipline and training, twelve-year-old boys were little hoodlums, choosing to group together into gangs; wild, savage barbarians, filled with only their own egotism; pack-hunting animals, not yet civilized. Not cruel, exactly, but thoughtless, ruthless as we’ve seen this world is. Maybe with the sudden new flood of knowledge for which they never worked, they make good technicians; but that

spurious, forced adulthood might very well discourage any real maturity; when the whole world considers them automatic adults, what incentive have they to mature?”

Jimmy thought back over his early childhood, before the education fizzle, and it was true that he and the other boys had been the egocentric little animals Bard described; there had been no thought of anything beyond their immediate whims and wants, and no one to tell them that the jungle rule for survival of the fittest should be tempered with decency and consideration for others. But the books had taught him that there had been problem children and boy-gangs before the compellorand they had mostly outgrown it. Here, after education, they never changed; and while the pressure of society now resisted any attempt on their part to change, that wasn’t the explanation needed; other ages had developed stupid standards, but there had always been those who refused them before.

“Do you believe that, sir?”

The old man shrugged slightly. “I don’t know. I can’t be sure. Maybe I’m only trying to justify myself. Maybe the educator does do something to the mind, carefully as I designed it to carry no personal feelings to the subject. And while I’ve seen some of the people, I haven’t seen enough of the private life to judge; you can’t judge, because you never knew normal people… . When I invented it, I had serious doubts about it, for that matter. They still use it as I designed itexactly?”

“Except for the size of the tapes.”

“Then there’s a wave form that will cancel out the subject’s sensitivity, blanket the impulse, if broadcast within a few miles. If I could remember itif I had an electronics laboratory where I could try itmaybe your fake immunity to education could be made real.”

Relief washed over the younger man, sending him to his feet and to the panel. “There is a laboratory. The first Dictator had everything installed for an emergency, deep underground in the passages. I don’t know how well stocked it is, but I’ve been there.”

He saw purpose and determination come into the tired face, and Aaron Bard was beside him as the panel became passable. Jimmy turned through a side way that led near the Senatorial section of the castle. On impulse he turned aside and motioned the other forward. “If you want an idea of our private life, take a look at our Senators and judge for yourself.”

The wall became transparent to light and sound in one direction

and they were looking out into one of the cloakrooms of the Senate Hall. One of the middle-aged men was telling a small audience of some personal triumph of his: “Their first kidburnedjust a damned zombie! I told her when she turned me down for that pimple-faced goon that I’d fix her and I did. I spent five weeks taking the kid around on the sly, winning his confidence. Just before education, I slipped him the dope in candy! You know what it does when they’re full of that and the educator starts in.”

Another grinned. “Better go easy telling about it; some of us might decide to turn you in for breaking the laws you helped write against using the stuff that way.”

“Hell, you can’t prove it. I’m not dumb enough to give you birds anything you could pin on me. Just to prove I’m the smartest man in this bunch, I’ll let you in on something. I’ve been doing a little thinking on the Dictator’s son… .”

“Drop it, Pete, cold! I was with a bunch that hired some fellows to kill the monkey a couple years agoand you can’t prove that, either! We had keys to his door and everything; but he’s still around, and the thugs never came back. I don’t know what makes, but no other attempt has worked. The Dictator’s got some tricks up his sleeve, there.”

Jimmy shut the panel off and grinned. “I don’t sleep anywhere near doors, and there’s a section of the floor that can be made interpenetrable, with a ninety-foot shaft under it. That’s why I wangled that particular suite out of my father.”

“These are the Senators?” Bard asked.

“Some of the best ones.” Jimmy went on, turning on a panel now and again, and Bard frowned more strongly after each new one. Some were plotting treason, others merely talking. Once something like sympathy for the zombies was expressed, but not too strongly. Jimmy started to shut the last panel off, when a new voice started.

“Blane’s weakling son is dead. Puny little yap couldn’t take the climate and working with all the zombies in the mines; committed suicide this morning.”

“His old man couldn’t save him from that, eh? Good. Put it into the papers, will you? I want to be sure the Dictator’s monkey gets full details. They were thick for a while, you know.”

Jimmy’s lips twisted as he cut off suddenly. “The only partly human person I ever knewthe one who taught me to read. He was a sickly boy, but his father managed to save him from euthanasia, somehow. Probably he went around with me for physical protection, since

the others wouldn’t let him alone. Then they shipped him to some mines down in South America, to handle zombie labor.”

“Euthanasia? Nice word for killing off the weak. Biologically, perhaps such times as these may serve a useful purpose, but I’d rather have the physically weak around than those who treat them that way. Jimmy, I think if my trick doesn’t work and the educator does things to you it shouldn’t, I’ll kill you before I kill myself!”

Jimmy nodded tightly. Bard wasn’t the killing type, but he hoped he’d do it, if such a thing occurred. Now he hurried, wasting no more time in convincing the other of the necessity to prevent such a change in him. He located the place he wanted and stepped in, pressed a switch on the floor, and set the lift to dropping smoothly downward.

“Power-is stolen, but cleverly, and no one has suspected. There are auxiliary fuel-batteries, too. The laboratory power will be the same. And here we are.”

He pointed to the room, filled with a maze of equipment of all kinds, neatly in order, but covered with dust and dirt from long disuse. Aaron Bard looked at it slowly, with a wry grin.

“Familiar, Jimmy. My son apparently copied it from my old laboratory, where he used to fiddle around sometimes, adapting my stuff to military use. With a little decency, he’d have been a good scientist; he was clever enough.”

Jimmy watched, some measure of hope coming to him, as the old man began working. He cleared the tables of dust with casual flicks of a cloth and began, his hands now steady. Wires, small tubes, coils, and various other electronic equipment came from the little boxes and drawers, though some required careful search. Then his fingers began the job of assembling and soldering them into a plastic case about the size of a muskmelon, filled almost solidly as he went along.

“That boy who taught you how to readwas he educated at the age of twelve?”

“Of courseit’s compulsory. Everyone has to be. Or” Jimmy frowned, trying to remember more clearly; but he could only recall vague hints and phrases from bits of conversation among Blane’s enemies. “There was something about falsified records during the euthanasia judgment proceedings, I think, but I don’t know what records. Does it matter?”

Bard shrugged, scribbling bits of diagrams on a scrap of dirty paper before picking up the soldering iron again. “I wish I knew… . Umm? In that fifteen-year war, when they first began intensive use of

the compellor, they must have tried it on all types and ages. Did any scientist check on variations due to such factors? No, they wouldn’t! No wonder they don’t develop new fields. How about a book of memoirs by some soldier who deals with personalities?”

“Maybe, but I don’t know. The diary of the first Dictator might, if it could be read, but when I tried after finding it, I only got hints of words here and there. It’s in some horrible codenarrow strips of short, irregularly spaced letter groups, pasted in. I can’t even figure what kind of a code it is, and there’s no key.”

“Key’s in the library, Jimmy, if you’ll look up Brak-O-Typemachine shorthand. He considered ordinary typing inefficient; one time when I thoroughly agreed with him. Damn!” Bard sucked on the thumb where a drop of solder had fallen and stared down at the tight-packed parts. He picked up a tiny electrolytic condenser, studied the apparatus, and put it down again doubtfully. Then he sat motionlessly, gazing down into the half-finished object.

The work, which had progressed rapidly at first, was now beginning to go more slowly, with long pauses while the older man thought. And the pauses lengthened. Jimmy slipped out and up the lift again, to walk rapidly down a corridor that would lead him to the rear of one of the restaurants of the castle. The rats had been blamed for a great deal at that place, and they were in for more blame as Jimmy slid his hands back into the corridors with coffee and food in them.

Bard gulped the coffee gratefully as he looked up to see the younger man holding out the food, but he only sampled that. His hands were less sure again. “Jimmy, I don’t knowI can’t think. I get so far, and everything seems clear; thenpfftl It’s the same as when I first tried to remember the secret of atomic power; there are worn places in my minderoded by eighty years of death. And when I try to force my thoughts across them, they stagger and reel.”

“Grandfather Bard, you’ve got to finish it! It’s almost five, and I have to report back at six!”

Bard rubbed his wrinkled forehead with one hand, clenching and opening the other. For a time, then, he continued to work busily, but there were long quiet intervals. “It’s all here, except this one little section. If I could put that in right, it’d workbut if I make a mistake, it’ll probably blow out, unless it does nothing.”

Jimmy stared at his watch. ‘Try it.”

“You solder it; my hands won’t work anymore.” Bard slipped off the stool, directing the boy’s hands carefully. “If I could be sure of

making it by going insane, as I did the atom-gun, I’d even force my mind through those nightmares again. But I might decide to do almost anything else, instead… . No, that’s the antennaone end remains free.”

The hands of the watch stood at ten minutes of six as the last connection was made and Bard plugged it into the socket near the floor. Then the tubes were warming up. There was no blowout, at least; the tubes continued to glow, and a tiny indicator showed radiation of some form coming from the antenna. Jimmy grinned, relief stronger in him, but the older man shook his head doubtfully as they went back to the lift again.

“I don’t know whether it’s working right, son. I put that last together by mental rule of thumb, and you shouldn’t work that way in delicate electronic devices, where even two wires accidentally running beside each other can ruin things! But at least we can pray. And as a last resortwell, I still have the atom-pistol.”

“Use it, if you need to! I’ll take you to the back wall of my father’s inner office, and you can stay there watching while I go around the long way. And use it quickly, because I’ll know you’re there!”

It took him three tries to find a hallway that was empty of the guards and slip out, but he was only seconds late as his father opened the door and let him in; the usual secretaries and guards were gone, and only the chief psychologist stood there, his small stock of equipment set up. But the Dictator hesitated.

“Jimmy, I want you to know I have to do this, even though I don’t know whether you have any better chance of passing it now than when you were a kidthat’s just my private hunch, and the psychologist here thinks I’m wrong. Butwell, something I was counting on is probably stolen by conspiracy, and there’s a helluva war brewing in Eurasia against us, which we’re not ready for; the oligarchs have something secret that they figure will win. It’s all on a private tape I’ll give you. I don’t know how much help you’ll be, but seeing you suddenly normal will back up the bluff I’m planning, at least. We Bards have a historic destiny to maintain, and I’m counting on you to do your part. You must pass!”

Jimmy only half heard it. He was staring at the headpiece, looking something like a late-style woman’s hat with wires leading to a little box on the table, and varicolored spools of special tape. For a second, as it clamped down over his face, he winced, but then stood it in stiff silence. In the back of his mind, something tried to make itself

noticedbut as he groped for it, only a vague, uneasy feeling remained. Words and something about the psychologist’s face…

He heard the snap of the switch, and then his mind seemed to freeze, though sounds and sights still registered. But he knew that the device in the room so far below had failed! The pressure on his brain was too familiar by description; the Bard psychicompellor was functioning. For a second, before full impact, he tried to tear it off, but something else seemed to control his mind, and he sat rigidly, breathing hard, but unable to stop it. His thoughts died down, became torpid, while the machine went on driving its two hundred million impulses into his brain every second, doing things that science still could not understand, but could use.

He watched stolidly as the spools were finished, one by one, until his father produced one from a safe and watched it used, then smashed it. The psychologist bent, picked up one last one, and attached it. … The face of the man was familiar… . “Like to have the brat in front of a burner like those we use in zombieing criminals… .”

Then something in his head seemed to slither, like feet slipping on ice. Numbed and dull of mind, he still gripped at himself, and his formerly motionless hands were clenching at the arms of the chair. Something gnawing inside, a queer distortion, that … Was this what a zombie felt, while its mind failed under education?

The psychologist bent then, removing the headset. “Get up, James Bard!” But as Jim still sat, surprise came over his face, masked instantly by a look of delighted relief. “So you’re no zombie?”

Jim arose then, rubbing his hands across his aching forehead, and managed to smile. “No,” he said quietly. “No, I’m all right. I’m perfectly all right! Perfectly.”

“Praise be, Jimmy.” The Dictator relaxed slowly into his chair. “And now you know… . What’s the matter?”

Jim couldn’t tell him of the assurance necessary to keep Aaron Bard from firing, but he held his face into a pleasant smile in spite of the pain in his head as he turned to face his father. He knew now everything. Quietly, unobtrusively, all the things he hadn’t known before were there, waiting for his mind to use, along with all the things he had seen and all the conversations he had spied upon in secret.

He had knowledgeand a mind trained to make the most of it. The habits of thinking he had forced upon himself were already busy with the new information; even the savage, throbbing pain couldn’t

stop that. Now he passed his hand across his head deliberately, and nodded to the outer office. “My head’s killing me, Father. Can’t I use the couch out there?”

“For a few minutes, I guess. Doctor, can’t you give the boy something?”

“Maybe. I’m not a medical doctor, but I can fix the pain, I think.” The psychologist was abstract, but he turned out. The Dictator came last, and they were out of the little room, into the larger one where no passages pierced the walls and no shot could reach him.

The smile whipped from the boy’s face then, and one of his hands snapped out, lifting a small flame gun from his father’s hip with almost invisible speed. It came up before the psychologist could register the emotions that might not yet have begun, and the flame washed out, blackening clothes and flesh and leaving only a limp, charred body on the floor.

Jim kicked it aside. “Treason. He had a nice little tape in there, made out by two people of totally opposite views, in spite of the law against it. Supposed to burn me into a zombie. It would have, except that I’d already studied both sides pretty well, and it raised Ned for a while, even then. Here’s your gun, Father.”

“Keep it!” The first real emotion Jim had ever seen on his father’s face was there now, and it was fierce pride. “I never saw such beautiful gun work, boy! Or such a smooth job of handling a snake! Thanks be, you aren’t soft and weak, as I thought. No more emotional nonsense, eh?”

“No more. I’m cured. And at the meeting of the Senators you’ve called, maybe we’ll have a surprise for them. You go on down, and I’ll catch up as soon as I can get some amidopyrene for this headache. Somehow, I’ll think of something to stop the impeachment they’re planning.”

“Impeachment! That bad? But howwhy didn’t you”

“I did try to tell you, years ago. But though I knew every little treason plot they were cooking then, you were too busy to listen to a nonadult, and I didn’t try again. Now, though, it’ll be useful. See you outside assembly, unless I’m late.”

He grinned mirthlessly as his father went down the hall and away from him. The look of pride in his too-heavy face wouldn’t have stayed there if he’d known just how deep in treason some of the fine Senator friends were. It would take a dozen miracles to pull them through. Jim found the panel he wanted, looked to be sure of privacy, and slipped through, tracing quickly down the corridor.

But Aaron Bard wasn’t to be found. For a second he debated more searching, but gave it up; there was no time, and he could locate the old man later. It wasn’t important that he be found at the moment. Jim shrugged and slipped into one of the passages that would serve as a shortcut to the great assembly room. The headache was already disappearing, and he had no time to bother with it.

They were already beginning session when he arrived, even so, and he slipped quietly through the Dictator’s private entrance, making his way unnoticed to the huge desk, behind a jade screen that would hide him from the Senators and yet permit him to watch. He had seen other sessions before, but they had been noisy, bickering affairs, with the rival groups squabbling and shouting names. Today there was none of that. They were going through the motions, quite plainly stalling for time, and without interest in the routine. This meeting was a concerted conspiracy to depose the Dictator, though only the few leaders of the groups knew that Eurasian bribery and treason were the real reasons behind it.

It had been in the making for years, while those leaders carefully built up the ever-present little hatreds and discontents. Jim’s status had been used to discredit his father, though the man’s own weaknesses had been more popular in distorted versions. As Jim looked, he saw that the twelve cunning men lured to treason by promises of being made American Oligarchs, though supposedly heading rival groups, were all still absent; that explained the stalling. Something was astir, and Jim had a hunch that the psychologist’s corpse would have been of no little interest to them. The two honest group leaders were in session, grim and quiet; then, as he looked, the twelve came in, one by one, from different entrances. Their faces showed no great sense of defeat.

Naturally. The Dictator had no chance; he had tried to rule by dividing the now-united groups and by family prestige, and had kept afloat so long as they were not ready to strike; the methods would not stand any strain, much less this attack. He had already muffed one attack opportunity while the leaders were out. A strong man would have cut through the stalling and taken the initiative; a clever orator, schooled in the dramatics and emotions of a Webster or a Borah might even have controlled them. But the Dictator was weak, and the compellor did not produce great oratory; that was incompatible with such emotional immaturity.

But the Dictator had finally been permitted to speak, now. He should have begun with the shock of Jim’s adulthood to snap them

out of their routine thoughts, built up the revival of Aaron Bard and his old atomic power work, to make them wonder, and then swept his accusations over them in short, hard blows. Instead, he was tracing the old accomplishments of the Bard Family, stock, familiar phrases with no meaning left in them.

Jim sat quietly; it was best that his father should learn his own weakness, here and now. He peered down to watch the leading traitor, and the expression on the man’s face snapped his head around, even as his father saw the same thing and stopped talking.

An arm projected from the left wall, waving a dirty scrap of paper at them, and Jim recognized the sheet Bard had used for his diagrams. Now the arm suddenly withdrew, to be replaced by the grinning head of Aaron Bardbut not the face Jim had seen; this one contained sheer lunacy, the teeth bared, the eyes protruding, and the muscles of the neck bunched in mad tension! As Jim watched, the old man emerged fully into the room and began stalking steadily down the aisles toward the Dictator’s desk, the atom-gun in one hand centered squarely on Jim’s father.

He had full attention, and no one moved to touch him as his feet marched steadily forward, while the scrap of paper in his hand waved and fluttered. Now his voice chopped out words and seemed to hurl them outward with physical force. “Treason! Barbarism! Heathen idolatry!”

For a second, Jim took his eyes from Bard to study his father, then to spring from the chair in a frantic leap as he saw the Dictator’s nerve crack and his finger slip onto one of the secret tiny buttons on the desk. But the concealed weapon acted too quickly, though there was no visible blast from it. Aaron Bard uttered a single strangled sound and crumpled to the floor!

“Get back!” Jim wasted no gentleness on his father as he twisted around the desk to present the crowding Senators with the shock of his presence at assembly on top of their other surprise. He had to dominate now, while there was a power hiatus. He bent for a quick look. “Coagulator! Who carries an illegal coagulator here? Some one of you, because this man is paralyzed by one.”

Mysteriously, a doctor appeared and nodded after a brief examination. “Coagulator, all right. His nerves are cooked from chest down, and it’s spreading. Death certain in an hour or so.”

“Will he regain consciousness?”

“Hard to say. Nothing I can do, but I’ll try, if someone will move him to the rest room.”

Jim nodded and stooped to pick up the scrawled bit of paper and the atom-gun. He had been waiting for a chance, and now fate had given it to him. The words he must say were already planned, brief and simple to produce the impact he must achieve, while the assembly was still disorganized and uncertain; if oratory could win them, now was the time for it. With a carefully stern and accusing face, he mounted the platform behind the desk. His father started to speak, then stopped in shock as Jim took the gavel, rapped for order, and began, pacing with words in a slow rhythm while measuring the intensity for his voice by the faces before him.

“Gentlemen, eighty years ago, Aaron Bard died on the eve of a great war, trying to perfect a simple atomic release that would have shortened that war immeasurably. Tomorrow you will read in your newspapers how that man’s own genius preserved his body and enabled us to revive him on this, the eve of an even grimmer war.

“Now, a few moments ago, that same man gave his life again in the service of this country, killed by the illegal coagulator of some cowardly traitor. But he did not die in vain, or before he could leave us safely to find his well-earned rest. He has left his mark on many of us; on me, by giving me the adulthood that all our scientists could not; on some of you, in this piece of paper, he has left a grimmer mark… .

“You saw him emerge from a solid wall, and it was no illusion, however much he chose to dramatize his entrance; the genius that was his enabled him to discover a means to search out your treason and your conspiracy in your most secret places. You heard his cry of treason! And one among you tried to silence that cry, forgetting that written notes cannot be silenced with a coagulator.

“Nor can you silence his last and greatest discovery, here in this weapon you saw him canyportable atomic power… .

“Now there will be no war; no power would commit such suicide against a nation whose men shall be equipped as ours shall be. You may be sure that the traitors among you will find no reward for their treason, now. But from them, we shall have gained. We shall know the folly of our petty, foreign-inspired hatreds. We shall know the need of cleansing ourselves of the taint of such men’s leadership. We shall cease trying to weaken our government and shall unite to forge new bonds of strength, instead.

“And because of that unintended good they have done us, we shall be merciful! Those who leave our shores before the stroke of midnight shall be permitted to escape; those who prefer to choose their

own death by their own hands shall not be denied that right. And for the others, we shall demand and receive the fullest measure of justice!

“In that, gentlemen, I think we can all agree.”

He paused then for a brief moment, seeming to study the paper in his hand, and when he resumed, his voice was the brusque one of a man performing a distasteful task. “Twelve menmen who dealt directly with our enemies. I shall read them in the order of their importance: First, Robert Sweinend! Two days ago, at three o’clock in his secretary’s office, he met a self-termed businessman named Yamimoto Tung, though he calls himself”

Jim went on, methodically reciting the course of the meeting, tensing inside as the seconds stretched on; much more and they would know it eouldn’t all come from one small sheet of paper!

But Sweinend’s hand moved then, and Jim’s seemed to blur over the desk top. Where the Senator had been, a shaft of fireatomic fireseemed to hang for a second before fading into nothing. Jim put the gun back gently and watched eleven men get up from their seats and dart hastily away through the exits. Beside him, his father’s face now shone with great relief and greater pride, mixed with unbelieving wonder as he stood up awkwardly to take the place the boy was relinquishing. The job had been done, and Jim had the right to follow his own inclinations.

Surprisingly to him, the still figure on the couch was both conscious and sane, as the boy shut the door of the little room, leaving the doctor outside. Aaron Bard could not move his body, but his lips smiled. “Hello, Jimmy. That was the prettiest bundle of lies I’ve heard in a lot more than eighty years! I’m changing my saying; from now on, the one-eyed man is kingso long as he taps the ground with a cane!”

Jimmy nodded soberly, though most of the strain of the last hour was suddenly gone, torn away by the warm understanding of the older man and relief at not having to convince him that he was still normal, in spite of his actions since education. “You were right about the compellor; it can’t change character. But I thought … after I shot the psychiatrist… How did you know?”

“I had at least twenty minutes in which to slip back and examine my son’s diary, before your education would be complete.” His smile deepened, as he sucked in on the cigarette that Jimmy held to his lips, and he let the smoke eddy out gently. “It took perhaps ten minutes to learn what I wanted to know. During the war, his notes are

one long paean of triumph over the results on the preadolescents, dissatisfaction at those who were educated past twenty! And he knew the reason, as well as he always knew what he wanted to. Too much information on a young mind mires it down by sheer weight on untrained thoughts, even though it gives a false self-confidence. But the mature man, with his trained mind, can never be bowed down by mere information; he can use it. … No, let me go on. Vindication of my compellor doesn’t matter; but this is going to be your responsibility, Jimmy, and the doctor told me I’m short of time. I want to be sure. … In twenty yearsbut that doesn’t matter.

“The compellor is poison to a twelve-year-old mind, and a blessing to the adult. You can’t change that overnight; but you can try, and perhaps accomplish a little. Move the age up, but carefully. By rights I should repair the damage I helped cause, but I’ll have to leave it to you. Be ruthless, as you were nowmore ruthless than any of them. A man who fights for right and principle should be. Tap the ground with your cane! And sometimes, when none of the blind are around, you can look up and still see the stars! Now”

“Grandfather Bardyou never were insane in there!”

The old man smiled again. “Naturally. I couldn’t look on and see the only one of my offspring that amounted to anything needing help without doing something, could I? I threw in everything I could, knowing you’d make something out of it. You did. And I’m not sorry, even though I wasn’t exactly expectingthis… . How long after my heart begins missing?”

“A minute or two!” Aaron Bard obviously wanted no sympathy, and the boy sensed it and held back the words, hard though he found it now. Emotions were better expressed by their hands locked together than by words.

“Good. It’s a clean, painless death, and I’m grateful for it. But no more revivals! Cremate me, Jimmy, and put up a simple markerno name, just A One-Eyed Man!”

“Requiescat in PaceA One-Eyed Man! I promise!”

The old head nodded faintly and relaxed, the smile still lingering. Jimmy swallowed a lump in his throat and stood up slowly with bowed head, while a tumult of sound came in from the great assembly hall. His father was finally abdicating and they were naming him Dictator, of course. But he still stood there, motionless.

“Two such stones,” he muttered finally. “And maybe someday I’ll deserve the other.”

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