Part 17 (1/2)

'The h.e.l.l we can't. I'll carry you.'

Magee grinned faintly. 'No, I mean it.' Dave persisted. 'How much farther is it?'

'Matter of two or three miles, maybe.'

'Climb aboard.' He took Magee pickaback and started on. The first few hundred yards were not too difficult; Magee was forty pounds lighter than Dave. After that the strain of the additional load began to tell. His arms cramped from supporting Magee's knees; his arches complained at the weight and the unnatural load distribution; and his breathing was made difficult by the clasp of Magee's arms around his neck.

Two miles to go-maybe more. Let your weight fall forward, and your foot must follow it, else you fall to the ground. It's automatic-as automatic as pulling teeth. How long is a mile? Nothing in a rocket s.h.i.+p, thirty seconds in a pleasure car, a ten minute crawl in a steel snail, fifteen minutes to trained troops in good condition. How far is it with a man on your back, on a rough road, when you are tired to start with?

Five thousand, two hundred, and eighty feet-a meaningless figure. But every step takes twenty-four inches off the total. The remainder is still incomprehensible-an infinity. Count them. Count them till you go crazy-till the figures speak themselves outside your head, and the jar! . . . jar! ...jar! . . . of your enormous, benumbed feet beats in your brain. Count them backwards, subtracting two each time-no, that's worse; each remainder is still an unattainable, inconceivable figure.

His world closed in, lost its history and held no future. There was nothing, nothing at all, but the torturing necessity of picking up his foot again and placing it forward. No feeling but the heartbreaking expenditure of will necessary to achieve that meaningless act.

He was brought suddenly to awareness when Magee's arms relaxed from around his neck. He leaned forward, and dropped to one knee to keep from spilling his burden, then eased it slowly to the ground. He thought for a moment that the Fader was dead-he could not locate his pulse, and the slack face and limp body were sufficiently corpse-like, but he pressed an ear to Magee's chest, and heard with relief the steady flub-dub of his heart.

He tied Magee's wrists together with his handkerchief, and forced his own head through the encircled arms. But he was unable, in his exhausted condition, to wrestle the slack weight into position on his back. Fader regained consciousness while MacKinnon was struggling. His first words were, 'Take it easy, Dave. What's the trouble?'

Dave explained. 'Better untie my wrists,' advised the Fader, 'I think I can walk for a while.'

And walk he did, for nearly three hundred yards, before he was forced to give up again. 'Look, Dave,' he said, after he had partially recovered, 'did you bring along any more of those pepper pills?'

'Yes-but you can't take any more dosage. It would kill you.'

'Yeah, I know-so they say. But that isn't the idea-yet. I was going to suggest that you might take one.'

'Why, of course! Good grief, Fader, but I'm dumb.'

Magee seemed no heavier than a light coat, the morning star shone brighter, and his strength seemed inexhaustible. Even when they left the highway and started up the cart trail that led to the Doctor's home in the foothills, the going was tolerable and the burden not too great. MacKinnon knew that the drugs burned the working tissue of his body long after his proper reserves were gone, and that it would take him days to recover from the reckless expenditure, but he did not mind. No price was too high to pay for the moment when he at last arrived at the gate of the Doctor's home-on his own two feet, his charge alive and conscious.

MacKinnon was not allowed to see Magee for four days. In the meantime, he was encouraged to keep the routine of a semi-invalid himself in order to recover the twenty-five pounds he had lost in two days and two nights, and to make up for the heavy strain on his heart during the last night. A high-caloric diet, sun baths, rest, and peaceful surroundings plus his natural good health caused him to regain weight and strength rapidly, but he 'enjoyed ill health” exceedingly because of the companions.h.i.+p of the Doctor himself-and Persephone.

Persephone's calendar age was fifteen. Dave never knew whether to think of her as much older, or much younger. She had been born in Coventry, and had lived her short life in the house of the Doctor, her mother having died in childbirth in that same house. She was completely childlike in many respects, being without experience in the civilized world Outside, and having had very little contact with the inhabitants of Coventry, except when she saw them as patients of the Doctor. But she had been allowed to read unchecked from the library of a sophisticated and protean-minded man of science. MacKinnon was continually being surprised at the extent of her academic and scientific knowledge-much greater than his own. She made him feel as if he were conversing with some aged and omniscient matriarch, then she would come out with some naive concept of the outer world, and he would be brought up sharply with the realization that she was, in fact, an inexperienced child.

He was mildly romantic about her, not seriously, of course, in view of her barely nubile age, but she was pleasant to see, and he was hungry for feminine companions.h.i.+p. He was quite young enough himself to feel continual interest in the delightful differences, mental and physical, between male and female.

Consequently, it was a blow to his pride as sharp as had been the sentence to Coventry to discover that she cla.s.sed him with the other inhabitants of Coventry as a poor unfortunate who needed help and sympathy because he was not quite right in his head.

He was furious and for one whole day he sulked alone, but the human necessity for self-justification and approval forced him to seek her out and attempt to reason with her. He explained carefully and with emotional candor the circ.u.mstances leading up to his trial and conviction, and embellished the account with his own philosophy and evaluations, then confidently awaited her approval.

It was not forthcoming. 'I don't understand your viewpoint,' she said. 'You broke his nose, yet he had done you no harm of any sort. You expect me to approve that?'

'But Persephone,' he protested, 'you ignore the fact that he called me a most insulting name.'

'I don't see the connection,' she said. 'He made a noise with his mouth-a verbal label. If the label does not fit you, the noise is meaningless. If the label is true in your case-if you are the thing that the noise refers to, you are neither more, nor less, that thing by reason of some one uttering the verbal label. In short, he did not damage you.

'But what you did to him was another matter entirely. You broke his nose. That is damage. In self-protection the rest of society must seek you out, and determine whether or not you are so unstable as to be likely to damage some one else in the future. If you are, you must be quarantined for treatment, or leave society-whichever you prefer.'

'You think I'm crazy, don't you?' he accused.

'Crazy? Not the way you mean it. You haven't paresis, or a brain tumor, or any other lesion that the Doctor could find. But from the viewpoint of your semantic reactions you are as socially unsane as any fanatic witch burner.'

'Come now-that's not just!'

'What is justice?' She picked up the kitten she had been playing with. 'I'm going in-it's getting chilly.' Off she went into the house, her bare feet noiseless in the gra.s.s.

Had the science of semantics developed as rapidly as psychodynamics and its implementing arts of propaganda and mob psychology, the United States might never have fallen into dictators.h.i.+p, then been forced to undergo the Second Revolution. All of the scientific principles embodied in the Covenant which marked the end of the revolution were formulated as far back as the first quarter of the twentieth century.

But the work of the pioneer semanticists, C. K. Ogden, Alfred Korzybski, and others, were known to but a handful of students, whereas psycho-dynamics, under the impetus of repeated wars and the frenzy of high-pressure merchandising, progressed by leaps and bounds.

Semantics, 'the meaning of meaning', gave a method for the first time of applying the scientific method to every act of everyday life. Because semantics dealt with spoken and written words as a determining aspect of human behavior it was at first mistakenly thought by many to be concerned only with words and of interest only to professional word manipulators, such as advertising copy writers and professors of etymology. A handful of unorthodox psychiatrists attempted to apply it to personal human problems, but their work was swept away by the epidemic ma.s.s psychoses that destroyed Europe and returned the United States to the Dark Ages.

The Covenant was the first scientific social doc.u.ment ever drawn up by man, and due credit must be given to its princ.i.p.al author, Dr Micah Novak, the same Novak who served as staff psychologist in the revolution. The revolutionists wished to establish maximum personal liberty. How could they accomplish that to a degree of high mathematical probability? First they junked the concept of 'justice'. Examined semantically 'justice' has no referent-there is no observable phenomenon in the s.p.a.ce-time-matter continuum to which one can point, and say, 'This is justice.' Science can deal only with that which can be observed and measured. Justice is not such a matter; therefore it can never have the same meaning to one as to another; any 'noises' said about it will only add to confusion.

But damage, physical or economic, can be pointed to and measured. Citizens were forbidden by the Covenant to damage another. Any act not leading to damage, physical or economic, to some particular person, they declared to be lawful.

Since they had abandoned the concept of 'justice', there could be no rational standards of punishment. Penology took its place with lycanthropy and other forgotten witchcrafts. Yet, since it was not practical to permit a source of danger to remain in the community, social offenders were examined and potential repeaters were given their choice of psychological readjustment, or of having society withdraw itself from them-Coventry.

Early drafts of the Covenant contained the a.s.sumption that the socially unsane would naturally be hospitalized and readjusted, particularly since current psychiatry was quite competent to cure all non-lesional psychoses and cure or alleviate lesional psychoses, but Novak set his face against this.

'No!' he protested. 'The government must never again be permitted to tamper with the mind of any citizen without his consent, or else we set up a greater tyranny than we had before. Every man must be free to accept, or reject, the Covenant, even though we think him insane!'

The next time David MacKinnon looked up Persephone he found her in a state of extreme agitation. His own wounded pride was forgotten at once. 'Why, my dear,' he said, 'whatever in the world is the matter?'

Gradually he gathered that she had been present at a conversation between Magee and the Doctor, and had heard, for the first time, of the impending military operation against the United States. He patted her hand. 'So that's all it is,' he observed in a relieved voice. 'I thought something was wrong with you yourself.'

'”That's all-” David MacKinnon, do you mean to stand there and tell me that you knew about this, and don't consider it worth worrying about?'

'Me? Why should I? And for that matter, what could I do?'

'What could you do? You could go outside and warn them-that's what you could do . . . As to why you should-Dave, you're impossible!' She burst into tears and ran from the room.

He stared after her, mouth open, then borrowed from his remotest ancestor by observing to himself that women are hard to figure out.

Persephone did not appear at lunch. MacKinnon asked the Doctor where she was.

'Had her lunch,' the Doctor told him, between mouthfuls. 'Started for the Gateway.'

'What! Why did you let her do that?'

'Free agent. Wouldn't have obeyed me anyway. She'll be all right.'

Dave did not hear the last, being already out of the room and running out of the house. He found her just backing her little motorcycle runabout out of its shed. 'Persephone!'

'What do you want?' she asked with frozen dignity beyond her years.