Later, there would have been the electric knife and three hundred thousand mindless children to be sent to the protected schools, not sent back to their homes because, with the hate and fear in the hearts of men, there was no guarantee that these mindless ones would be permitted to live, once having evidenced the forbidden abilities — mathematical and mechanical ability, a creative turn of mind, an overweening curiosity.
They would form the labor pool after training.
But in the year that Peter Lucas had been one of the three hundred children, they had been gathered in the pens in the salt flats and there had been more examinations, more intricate tests.
Peter Lucas and four others had been selected and sent to a special school which used the forbidden books and taught forbidden knowledge. At twenty he had been assigned to the Bureau of Improvement. Ladu had set it up with a fixed quota of sixty. Each year five children would be withdrawn from those who were to be made nearly mindless. Each year five young men were graduated from the special school. And each year the five most unstable of the workers at the Bureau of Improvement were subjected to the electric knife.
In two more weeks the new ones would arrive. And Peter Lucas knew that he had won himself extinction through his attitude.
He went into his two-room house. It had the barren simplicity of a cell. Directly above the television screen was the microphone which recorded every sound from the house, every fragment of conversation.
The house was clean and shining. His evening meal was under the glass dome on the tiny steam table. The food would keep warm. During the next hour he was permitted to exercise in the small area allotted to him. From then on he would be restricted to his house. Any request to visit another worker had to be submitted in writing and approved two weeks in advance of the date. Such visits were limited to one hour and a guard was detailed to escort the visitor to the door of the worker he wished to visit, and wait there to escort him back.
It had been a long time since Peter Lucas had had a visitor, or had visited anyone.
He took a long shower, turned on the television screen and watched the insipid entertainment while he ate. It was a melodrama. The villain was a man who had somehow escaped the screening tests and was working on a secret weapon to destroy the world. The hero killed the villain just as he was about to loose his weapon. It ended with a little sermon.
He felt the tension mounting in him as he ate, and he forced himself to smoke a leisurely cigarette. He knew that while he was at work the house had been carefully inspected for any evidence of forbidden experimentation.
He went to his bed, stretched out and let his left hand fall, almost as though by accident, against the cool, smooth plastic of the wall. The wax was still firm in the grooves he had cut with the tiny saw. He slowly exhaled, the tension going out of him.
With a thumbnail he pared the wax away, slid the tiny panel down, removed therefrom the device which had occupied his mind for six years, which had kept him from going quietly mad under the restraint, as had so many others.
Each bit of it had been smuggled past the search.
The lead for the little half-pound cup had been brought out, a gram at a time. He had melted it and moulded it with the heat obtained by making a minor adjustment in the heat coils on the steam table.
The infinitesimal tube, socketed in the lead cup, had been the most difficult. He had waited for fourteen months to smuggle that out. First it had been necessary to mold soft rubber around the tube, make a crude slingshot, wait until Morrit left the room for a few minutes, stretch the spring wire across the window and project the little ball of sticky rubber out so that it fell in the fenced passage.
Heartbreakingly, he had missed the passage with the first two tries. The third tube had landed properly. On his way back to his house that night he had located it, and, not daring to bend over, had stopped, pressed his heels together so that the rubber clung to the inside of one shoe.
Four lengths of silver wire, forced into the edge of the lead cup, focused the energy of the tube. Each silver wire was forty millimeters long. Halfway along their length, suspended by spiderweb strands of copper wire, was a crude open-ended tube of lead, the opening pointing toward the tiny, powerful tube socketed in the lead cup.
Midway in the little cylinder of lead was a milligram of an unstable isotope which he had found five years before, secreted in one of the forbidden books, probably hidden there by a desperate man during the science purge.
The device was pathetically small, and his theories of its operation were necessarily vague due to his directed training. With an adequate power source, which he hoped to obtain in the form of one of the tiny powerful batteries used in wrist radios, hearing aids and similar devices, the activated tube would subject the isotope to a stimulus which would, he hoped, cause it to throw off, like bullets from a gun, a stream of focused matter which would stimulate the molecular activity of any inert substance. Arbitrarily assuming that the difference between a liquid, a solid and a gas lay only in the index of molecular activity, he hoped to be able to turn any solid into a liquid and then a gaseous state.
Behind the lead cup was a metallic frame for the battery. He took the screw from the tooth cavity, used it to make rigid another portion of the battery frame.
To complete it he would need the battery and a thin strip of hard copper. The completed device would be held in one hand, the battery against the heel of his hand, the wires pointing away from him. Firing would be accomplished by pressing the copper strip, not yet obtained, against the battery terminal, thus activating the tube.
Condemned never to commit any questionable research to writing, Lucas had been forced to carry all the complicated formulae in his mind, achieving at last a receptivity that enabled him to see the equations as though they were written in white fire against a velvet backdrop.
He had two weeks to snatch from under Ellen Morrit’s watchful eye a larger item than any yet taken, to get it past the search.
It was impossible.
Probably the best he could do was to commit his formulae to paper, to hide the paper with the incomplete device, to hope that the next person to inhabit the small white house would be able to carry it further.
He replaced the device, slid the panel shut, melted the wax with a match flame, rubbing it smooth with his thumbnail.
Chapter Two
Mad Scientist
Arden Forester, Director of Search, was a smallish lean man with a spare body, a corded neck and an expression of intent curiosity.
He walked, snapping his heels firmly against the corridor floor, conscious of the fit of his gray uniform, conscious of the weight of responsibility. He and the Chief of the Bureau of Improvement and the Resident Psychiatrist formed the committee to determine which five workers should be removed to make way for the new ones.
He thought of himself as a hard and vigorous man, full of snap. When he used the word in his mind it had two syllables: Suh-NAP! The last syllable came out with a whipcrack. No nonsense from these workers!
He bunched his thin hard knuckles and straightened his shoulders, taking a salute from one of the young guards.
He turned sharply into the office of the Bureau Chief, clicked his heels and saluted. As always, he detested having to salute paunchy Dale Evan. Why, the man didn’t even keep himself physically fit! How could you be mentally alert if you were smothered?
Sargo, the resident psychiatrist, sat near Evan. Evan acknowledged the salute with a slight motion of his pudgy hand, said, “Sit down, Arden. Sit down. We have to go over the list again. It’s down to eight. I’ve had the monitors wait. You probably, saw them in the hall.”