«Hm-m-m… well…»
«Ewerybody have his place in society. Ewerybody happy wit life, nobody have conflicts wit felluw man—dat are goal nos. And we are close to it.»
«It sounds nice,» muttered Hart. He shrugged. «Not much I can do about it, anyway.» His eyes swung back to the doctor’s. «Now what about me?»
«Well…» Chang was obviously steeling himself. He smiled with a false geniality. «Well, we have seweral possibilities. Dere are a weader station in Greenland, or a small farm in Brazil, or—»
«Hold on!» Hart reached out and grabbed the doctor’s tunic. His throat choked with a sudden rage and, under that, a gathering horrible dismay. «What do you think you’re doing? Am I going to be stuck somewhere out of the sight of man and forgotten?»
«I—»
«Come on,» snarled Hart. The fist he lifted was shaking. «Spit out the truth, or you’ll be spitting out your teeth.»
Chang disengaged himself and held the smaller man with an effortless strength. His face was twisted. «I—I are sorry, Tov Hart,» he said, very quietly. «It waar raally a cruel kindness to wake du. But I are afraid dat—du are right.»
Hart sagged, the anger draining from him and leaving only a vast hollow void. Dimly, he heard Chang’s voice: «Du have nuw place in world. Du belong to nuw famly or group. Du have no traits wort perpetuating—indeed, we would not want children wit cancer tendency duurs. Psychotests show du as unstable, egocentric, unable to adjust to cityless world, to close familial relationship, to—anything. No one would want to associate wit completely unintegrated, hopelessly neurotic—foreigner.
«Best du find a quiet place where du can serve—out of sight.»
Hart rebelled. Bitterly, desperately, he tried to escape.
There must be something. He had been the admired leader of his little clique. Broad knowledge, sardonic humor, a way with women, ready money, all had combined to impress and delight. Surely the world had not changed so much!
No compulsion was put on him. He went where and when he chose; he spent a good three months prowling this new Earth, riding the free public transport and using an unlimited government credit card to buy necessities. And he found that the world had indeed changed.
The tall, healthy, serene folk were polite to him, and no more. But they had nothing in common with him. He belonged to no group and, for eugenic and other reasons, could not be adopted into one, and all social functions were within such alliances. He did not follow their jokes, his manners were gauche compared to the formality now accepted; his learning and background were from a period too remote to interest any but scholars. There was no underworld, no demimonde. Morality was somewhat changed, but it was never violated.
For his part, Hart began to be bored. It was not entirely a subjective attitude rising out of resentment at inferiority. These people were slow-speaking, formal, calm; they lacked the tension and the acrid mirth of the twentieth century. They were not weaklings in any sense, but they were—innocent.
There was no entertainment except what groups provided for themselves—singing, dancing, amateur showmanship, a great deal of hobbycraft. The reason for the absence of professional entertainment was basically the same as that for the lack of large-scale industry. The group society was deliberately throwing the individual and the family on their own resources. Now that there were no external challenges of war, poverty, famine, disease, now that history had slowed almost to a standstill, man must return to a degree of primitive self-sufficiency and independence if he was not to become the glorified termite inhabiting a purposeless machine city.
Hart saw the reasoning, but it seemed puritanical to him. And he could not sympathize with a people who deliberately submitted to it. A man who plowed his own fields when science had advanced to the point where everyone could eat out of cans was a fool. To be sure, the man was conditioned to like it, and certainly the food was better than the sterilized pap of twentieth century canneries, but even so…
Hart tried to leave Earth altogether. But he lacked the physique and the technical skill which would justify a spaceship in hauling him. And from what he read of the spatial colonies, he was likely to find a still more alien society out there.
In the end, desperately, he took the weather-station job.
For a while that was better. He was alone, away from the subtler and crueler isolation of strangers’ company, and he was not entirely useless. The vast windswept snowfields, the far mysterious glimmer of northern lights wavering over enormous mountains, the snug hut which had access to the books and music of all history, were all somehow comforting. He barely spoke to the pilot of the occasional supply rocket, and refused to be relieved.
He couldn’t go back to a world which had no use for him. He could stay here and dream of what had been, out here in the wind-whining loneliness, alone in the dark with the ghosts of his own time whispering to him…
They muttered in the dark corners, they wavered in the auroras and the pale cold sunlight, ghosts of the past, calling to him over a gulf of time. Time began to be meaningless, and space. In this unreal landscape of ice and snow and dark, wind blowing up between the frosty stars, it was hard to say where the solid world left off and the dreams began.
Hart realized vaguely that he was slipping. But it didn’t matter. Certainly he couldn’t return to the politeness of the world, more cold and remote than the flying haggard moon, he couldn’t leave his old friends here… Why, his relief would sweep the dust out of the cabin, dust which had once been human, dust which had once lain in his arms or laughed at his humor… Now the wind laughed, hooting around the house and rattling the shutters in appreciation of Hart’s jokes.
Waldor Rostom Chang looked, with horror creeping behind his eyes, at the thing which mumbled on the floor of the airjet. Hart was almost completely catatonic now.
«If we had knuwed!» said the doctor. «If we had uwnly knuwed!»
«How skood we?» asked the pilot, a weather-service technician. «De job waar just ‘made’ work, to give de poor felluw someting to do. Reports his waar filed in de wastebasket. And he had bee-an su unsuwciable dat de supply pilots simply left stuff his witout ewen seeing him. It waar uwnly when he had quit reporting for seweral days dat we got alarmed.»
«I newwer drea-amed he would go crazy, ewen when he had bee-an dere two yaars witout relief,» said Chang. «After all, a modern man could stand it easily. And de twentyet century mind waar too strange to mind nos, completely unintegrated as it waar, for de psychotechnics to spot de instability in him.»
«And nuw what will we do wit him?»
«We cannot help de poor jorp. Psychiatry nos are preventive, mental disease su long forgetted dat we have no real curative technique—teories, records of old cure metods, yes, but nuw experenced mental doctors.» Chang shrugged. «All we can do is put Hart back in de Crypt till such day as psychiatry have evolved cure for su extreme a case as his. And dere are su little need for psychocuring today dat I fear it will be a long, long time befuwere Hart can be outtaken again.»
The pilot grinned mirthlessly. «By den,» he said, «society may be su alien dat Hart, once cured, will relapse into insanity too deep for dem to handle—so dey will have to put him back in de Crypt…» He spied his goal and sent the airjet slanting downward.
MACCANNON