“Come, now—that’s hardly just!”
“What is justice?” She picked up the kitten she had been playing with. “I’m going in—it’s getting chilly.” And off she went, her bare feet noiseless in the grass.
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 dictatorship, 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 in England and Alfred Korzybski in the United States, were known to but a handful of students, whereas psychodynamics, under the impetus of repeated wars and the frenzy of high-pressure merchandising, progressed by leaps and bounds. It is true that the mathematical aspects of semantics, as developed by Albert Einstein, Eric T. Bell, and others, were well known, even popular, but the charlatans who practiced the pseudoscience of sociology refused to apply the methods of science to their monopoly.
Semantics, “the meaning of meaning,” as Ogden expressed it, or “theory of evaluations” as Korzybski preferred to call it, gave a method for the first time of applying the scientific viewpoint and procedure 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 copywriters and professors of etymology. A handful of unorthodox psychiatrists alone attempted to apply it to personal human problems, but their work was swept away by the epidemic mass psychoses that destroyed Europe and returned the United States to the Dark Ages.
The Covenant was the first scientific social document ever drawn up by a man, and due credit must be given to its principal author, Colonel Micah Novak, the same Novak who served as staff psychologist in the revolution. The revolutionists wished to establish in the United States the maximum personal liberty possible for every one. Given the data—the entire social matrix—how could they accomplish that?
First they junked all previous concepts of justice. Examined semantically, justice has no referent—there is no observable phenomenon in the space-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; 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, could be pointed to and measured. Citizens were forbidden by the Covenant to damage another, and laws were passed to anticipate such damage. Any act not leading to damage, physical or economic, to some person, they declared to be legal.
As 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 probable 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.
During the formulation of the Covenant, some assumed that the socially unsane would naturally be forced to undergo hospitalization for readjustment, particularly since current psychiatry was quite competent to cure all nonlesioned psychoses and cure or alleviate lesional psychoses, but Novak set his face against this and opposed it with all the power of his strong and subtle intellect. “Not so!” he argued. “The government must never again be permitted to tamper with the mind of any citizen without his consent, or else we set up a means of greater tyranny than we have ever experienced. Every man must be free to reject the Covenant, even if we think him insane!”
The next time 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 operations 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? Anyhow, 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.
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 monocycle runabout out of its shed. “Persephone!”
“What do you want?” she asked with a frozen dignity beyond her years.
“You mustn’t do this! That’s where the Fader got hurt!”
“I am going. Please stand aside.”
“Then I’m going with you.”
“Why should you?”
“To take care of you.”
She sniffed. “As if anyone would dare to touch me.”
There was a measure of truth in what she said. The doctor and every member of his household enjoyed a personal immunity unlike that of anyone else in Coventry. As a natural consequence of the set-up, Coventry had almost no competent medical men. The number of physicians who committed social damage was small. The proportion of such that declined psychiatric treatment was negligible, and this negligible remainder were almost sure to be unreliable bunglers in their profession. The doctor was a natural healer, in voluntary exile in order that he might enjoy the opportunity to practice his art in the richest available field. He cared nothing for dry research; what he wanted was patients that he might make well.
He was above custom and above law. In the Free State the Liberator depended on him for insulin to hold his own death from diabetes at arm’s length. In New America his beneficiaries were equally powerful. Even among the Angels of the Lord the Prophet himself accepted the dicta of the doctor without question.
But MacKinnon was not satisfied. Some ignorant fool, he was afraid, might do the child some harm without realizing her protected status. He got no further chance to protest; she started the little runabout suddenly and forced him to jump out of its path. When he had recovered his balance she was far down the lane.
Persephone was back in less than four hours. He had expected that; if a person as elusive as Fader had not been able to “reach the gate at night, it was not likely that a young girl could do so in daylight.
His first feeling was one of simple relief, then he eagerly awaited an opportunity to speak to her. During her absence he had been turning over the situation in his mind. It was a foregone conclusion that she would fail; he wished to rehabilitate himself in her eyes; therefore, he would help her in the project nearest her heart—he himself would carry the warning to the Outside!