She thought: two men . . . of the same colour, probably of the same race, roughly of the same age . . . and yet how could the contrast between them be intensified? The rebels' emissary was blond, virile and handsome, like a story-book gallant. He paced the floor as he spoke, as if his boundless energies would not permit him to rest, and gesticulated grandly. Any girl would have been proud to have him glance at her a second time . . . . Beside him the slim dark man at the desk seemed lifeless and impotent.
Any girl, perhaps . . . but after the first calm appraisal she paid the emissary scant attention. The only urge she felt was to go to the dark man and smooth the wrinkles from his poor, tired brow. To stroke his hair and whisper soothingly in his ear. But she did none of these things. Instead she tended to the machine that photographed and recorded the scene, watchful that not even the murmur of an indrawn breath was lost.
The blond man was nearing the end of his tirade, as apparently, the Prof was of his patience. For he spoke suddenly, cutting the other short in mid-sentence. And in his voice was an inkling of the power that had brought him to the position of World Controller.
'I have listened to you, as I would listen to an erring dog if it could speak, and now I ask you what it is that your leader . . . Zebedee . . .desires. What are his demands?'
The girl looked up quickly. She thought amazedly: what's wrong with him? She'd never known him in quite this mood before. Just, yes. But ruthless in opposing and stamping out any real danger to his regime, any menace that might nibble at the tiniest strut of the mighty edifice he had created and maintained for long years. His mildness irritated her, and she was only partly consoled by the rising impatience in his voice, the motive for which she could not settle in her mind.
'Zebedee, in the name of the Zeds,' he held himself proudly as he spoke, and his eyes were shining. Mad, thought the girl, quite mad. 'Zebedee demands nothing less than that the whole of the Americas be placed at his disposal, that the Zeds may dwell there and expand and bring to fruition their glorious destiny.'
The impertinence of it! The girl started to smile, but her face froze as she looked at the Prof. His face was a dark screen across which phantoms of thought fled. Hesitation, doubt, anger. She raised a hand to her lips to stifle a cry of bewilderment.
An interminable pause, then the dark face cleared. 'And if I refuse these demands? the Prof said evenly, and she could have wept in relief at the return of the old bite in his voice.
'Then as an earnest of our intentions we shall first take over the power plant at New Paris. Thence to others in Europe. Until finally we shall have not only the Americas but the entire world. And you will do nothing to oppose us.' He paused and smiled at the World Controller. His teeth were very white and very even.
The Prof stared stonily at him. 'You will return to your leader and tell him that the World Controller rejects his demands and orders him to disband his forces. The penalty for disobedience is death. Go.'
There was silence after the emissary had gone, bowing grandly to the girl, and smiling oddly at the World Controller. The click as the girl turned off the recorder seemed like the beat of a drum. At the sound the Prof turned. His shoulders had turned as if half the life had been drained out of him. The movement seemed to brush aside the restraint from the girl's lips and a torrent of angry words spilled out.
'Why did you let him go? You could have held him as hostage; forced out of him all the information you needed to stamp out this latest outbreak of madness. Why? Why?'
Like all absolutely sane people in those days she had a horror of madness and an entirely ruthless attitude towards anyone so afflicted. Small wonder in a world in which, due to the strain of the ever increasing artificiality of industrial civilization, with each succeeding generation the number of mentally unstable people had risen until there had come a time when the very existence of the normal citizens had been threatened by the gathering host of neurotics. It had been touch and go until the Prof and his associates had appeared, ousted the fumbling, ranting politicians and ruthlessly taken over the reins. Civilisation trembled for a moment, then settled back with a sigh. It had been called the beginning of the Age of Reason by certain writers. The Prof and his colleagues didn't mind. Others, less favorably inclined, called it dictatorship. The Prof didn't mind that either. What were names? You could call a spade an orange: it didn't alter the fact that you could still dig with the spade under its new cloak.
The origins of the Prof were obscure. From the beginning he had been reticent about himself. It was hinted that he had been a professor in some odd corner of the world, but where and of what no one could tell. Even his name was unknown. He was merely the Controller. Though most people preferred his nickname, and he didn't mind. He had restored the world and many of its people to sanity. The incurables had been exterminated. Logically. The milder cases had been segregated into vast colonies to undergo treatment. The successful returned; the others were not allowed for long to draw sustenance from the earth nor breath from the air.
The revolts were a slight irritation, not a thorn, to the Prof. Now and again outbreaks of instability would occur among the assumed sane. The faces of the people would turn as if by clockwork to the Centre of Scientific Government. Not being a sorcerer the Prof could not foresee such revolts, but he could, and did, put them down when they occurred.
Or had, until the present trouble began. The girl was at a loss to explain his leniency.
He spoke at last. His voice was dull, flat. 'There would have been no point in detaining him. He would have told us nothing. You know how opposed I am to coercion.'
She sighed. It was one point on which they could never agree.
'Is there no end to this madness!' he said hoarsely. He pressed his hands to his face and gave a low cry.
She was by his side instantly, folding his head in her arms. He seized her and pulled her roughly onto his knee, stifling her mild protests with his lips.
After a while she disengaged herself gently. She smiled at him as she patted her hair back into place.
'Same time tonight?' he said.
She nodded. 'Tonight I'm Pat, out for a dinner date; but now I'm Private Secretary Smith, and we have a problem of the Zeds.'
Then she wished she had kept silent when she saw the tortured look return to his face.
A buzzer sounded. The visi came on with a faint click. A calm face peered from the screen. 'New Paris, Sir. The Zeds are converging on the power plant. Your instructions?'
'They didn't lose much time,' murmured Pat. She thought: now we'll see how long the Zeds will last! A word from the Prof and the advancing rebels would be blasted with radiations that would sear away their madness with a vengeance! She waited but the Prof made no sound.
She turned in amazement: and gasped. His features were working in horrible indecision.
The operator began to look perplexed. 'Only a few seconds remain, Sir,' he ventured.
With a savage jerk the World Controller snapped off the visi. He rose, and without a word strode from the room
. . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . .
The first part of their meal that night was eaten in an atmosphere of strained silence. There were a thousand questions the girl wanted to ask, but the mood of her escort swamped her customary frankness. Indeed, she was barely recovered from the surprise of seeing him at all after the events of the afternoon. Yet she knew he had something to tell her: he wouldn't have come otherwise. And, patiently, she waited, meanwhile enjoying the soft cadences of the hidden orchestra, and the excellent food and fine Italian Muscato, for she never allowed any mental stresses to impair the smooth efficiency of her physical self. But she watched him keenly, noting the turmoil in the depths of his eyes. The rest of his face was hidden by a fleshmask, far handsomer than his own features, yet she hated it, while conceding the validity of the discretionary impulse which caused him to don it.
Presently he looked up. 'Tell me, Pat, what do you really think of this business of the Zeds?'
It was unexpected. Mentally she tottered on one leg for a time. Then, gathering her faculties, after a moment's pause she said: 'Well, what is one supposed to think? I mean, is there any doubt about it? Can they be anything but quite mad? What sane person would think for a moment . . .'
'Sane . . .' he echoed. His eyes showed a sudden upsurge of feeling. He half-lifted a hand wearily then let it fall. 'What is sanity? Who is to know? Once it was easy to distinguish the mad from the sane: the majority were right and sane, the few who differed were wrong and insane. But now the insane almost outnumber the sane. The old rule doesn't apply any more. How are we to know? How can we be sure?
Pat felt herself floundering. Never before had the Prof spoken like this. He had always been so sure, so calm. Terror beat at her heart. Once let the Prof relax his grip and the world would soon sink into one vast asylum. But another thought arose, thrusting her terror aside. She looked at him anxiously. He was still speaking. 'I must look at their side of the arguments, too. Not to do so would be a direct contradiction of our most rigid tenets. Most unscientific.'
'But you wouldn't argue with a mad dog. You can't postulate while he's tearing your throat out. Remember some years ago the Party who imagined they were destined to rule because they all had in common the fact that they lisped, and claimed that this impediment in their speech was a sure sign of royal blood! You disposed of them quickly enough! Now we have the latest revolt. And what is it? No less than a Party whose members hold the theory that happiness should be confined to those whose first name begins with 'Z'! And one of the obstacles on their road to happiness is apparently you, and your entire regime! Is there any possible argument?
'That's just it,' said the Prof, 'There is a very valid argument in their favour, or should I put it this way: there is no logical, scientific argument against them.'
The girl's hand flew to her mouth. The Prof watched her internal struggle in silence for a moment, then, just as she was about to speak he took hold of her hand and gently lowered it to the table. 'No, wait! Let me try and explain. Let's look at these revolts from the point of view of their propaganda, since that is the basic factor of all such affairs, and, indeed, of most human aspirations. Now propaganda as such may be concerned with values, or with general propositions, or with matters of fact. The propaganda of the revolts in question is concerned with the first, that is with values. Or to be more precise, ultimate values. But ultimate values are not matters as to which argument is possible. If a man maintains that misery is desirable, and that it would be a good thing if everybody always had violent toothache, we may disagree with him, and we may laugh at him when we catch him going to the dentist, but we cannot prove that he is mistaken, as we could if he said that iron is lighter than water.
'Similarly, the Zeds. They claim that they are best fitted to rule because their names begin with 'Z'. If we exterminate them it would be merely a pragmatic refutation of their belief. It would be due to the strong right arms of the solid legions of Johns and Georges, but it would not be scientific proof that they were wrong and we were right. Their thesis would remain logically as valid as its antithesis. Don't you see?' There was almost a plea in his last words.
The girl gazed dumbly at the figure before her. There was a dampness on her fingers from his palm. She saw the conflict aflame in his eyes, and a cold wind from some far-off place caressed her forehead. She wanted to speak but the words would not come. In her mind's eye she saw the first crumbling of the mighty edifice. Mad. Mad. . . that it should come to him of all people! How could he believe such stuff? Madness . . or was it something she couldn't understand? Could it be that she? . . . Her brain went over it again feverishly, and she . . . understood. How logical it all was in truth! It was the ultimate madness, logical madness, scientific reasoning carried to its ultimate, ridiculous extreme! Long, long ago a man named Huxley had written a satire on the same theme. But even he hadn't anticipated the fantastic stupidity of the end!
She started to speak but instead took a long drink from the glass at her elbow. How tight her throat was!
As she replaced the glass, as if it were a signal, the lights dimmed, went out, then returned. There was a low murmur in the distance. Shots. Cries. Then suddenly the place was a tumult of sound. Hastily-barked orders, screaming women. The orchestra had wailed dismally into silence at the flickering of the lights. The room was suddenly filled with armed men, men with their eyes shining with fanaticism. 'The Zeds!' someone was shouting over and over again.
With panic rising within her, Pat thought: This is it! Who'd have thought that they would follow up their initial success so rapidly? She wanted to run, but curiosity overcame her panic. What would the Prof do now? She turned.
He had risen to his feet and stripped off his fleshmask. He stood, gazing stonily at the rebels. The girl's heart leapt. He could beat them yet! Oh, he could! he could!
'The Prof!' A dark form came leaping towards the World Controller, weapon upraised, eyes gleaming with hate. The scene hazed before Pat, and she cried out in terror. She was dimly aware of a harsh command and a leaping figure. Then the mist lifted and she saw the blond form of the rebel emissary standing near, smiling. The would-be assassin had slunk away. She looked at the newcomer. Zebedee! Zebedee himself, she thought in amazement.
He gave her a quick bow, then paid her no more attention. His smiling gaze was turned upon the Prof. 'I said you would do nothing to oppose us, did I not?' The white teeth flashed, then he turned peremptorily on his heel. 'Come, Zakariah!' he said.
The World Controller followed him like a whipped dog.
The girl screamed, then began to laugh. She laughed as if she would never stop.
Data entered by Judy Bemis
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