Nick read it without interest, not believing it and at the same time not really caring. As far as he was concerned, Thors Provoni no longer existed, captured or otherwise. But Bobby seemed fascinated by the news. Fascinated—and repelled.
“They won’t ever capture Provoni,” Bobby said.
“You’re saying it too loud,” Nick said, his lips close to his boy’s ears. He felt deeply uneasy.
“What do I care if somebody hears me?” Bobby said hotly. He gestured at the streams of men and women flowing by them. “They all agree with me anyhow.” He glared up at his father with churning wrath.
“When Provoni left,” Nick said, “and headed out of the Sol System, he betrayed all mankind, Superior and—otherwise.” He believed this strongly. They had argued this many times, but never had they been able to integrate their conflicting views about the man who had promised to find another planet, another useful world, on which Old Men could live . . . and govern themselves. “Provoni was a coward,” Nick said, “and subpar mentally. I don’t even think he was worth chasing. Anyhow, they’ve evidently found him.”
“They always say that,” Bobby said. “Two months ago they told us that within twenty-four hours—”
“He was subpar,” Nick broke in sharply. “And so he doesn’t count.”
“We’re subpar, too,” Bobby said.
“I am,” Nick answered. “But you’re not.”
They continued on in silence; neither of them felt like talking to the other.
Civil Service Officer Norbert Weiss withdrew a green slip from the processing computer behind his desk and read with care the information thereon.
APPLETON, ROBERT.
I remember him, Weiss thought to himself. Twelve years old, ambitious father . . . what had the boy shown on the prelim test? A marked E-factor, considerably above the average. But—
Picking up his interdepartmental v-fone, he dialled his superior’s extension.
Jerome Pikeman’s pocked, elongated face appeared, showing the stress of overwork. “Yes?”
“The Appleton boy will be in here shortly,” Weiss said. “Have you made a decision? Are we going to pass him or are we not?” He held the green slip before the scanner of the fone, refreshing his superior’s memory.
“The people in my department don’t like his father’s servile attitude,” Pikeman said. “It’s so extreme—in respect to authority—that we feel it could readily generate its negative in his son’s emotional development. Flunk him.”
“Completely?” Weiss said. “Or pro tem?”
“Flunk him forever. Totally out. We’ll be doing him a favour; he probably wants to drop out.”
“The boy scored very high.”
“But not exceptional. Nothing we have to have.”
“But out of fairness to the boy—” Weiss protested.
“Out of fairness to the boy we’re turning him down. It isn’t an honour or a privilege to get a federal rating, it’s a burden. A responsibility. Don’t you find it so, Mr. Weiss?”
He had never thought about it that way. Yes, he thought; I am overtaxed by my job, and the pay is slight and, as Pike-man says, there’s no honour, only a sort of duty. But they would have to kill me to make me give it up. He wondered why he felt this way.
In September of 2120 he had obtained his Civil Service status, and he had worked for the government since, under first an Unusual Council Chairman, then a New Man Chairman . . . whichever group held ultimate control, he, like other Civil Service employees, stayed on, performing their skilled functions. Skilled—and talented.
He, himself: he had since childhood defined himself legally as a New Man. His cerebral cortex showed visible Rogers nodes—and, in intelligence-testing, he displayed, on cue, the proper ability. At nine years of age he had out-thought a mature Old Man; at twenty he could mentally plot a random table of one hundred numbers . . . as well as much else. For example, he could, without the use of a computer, plot the course-position of a ship subject to three gravities; by his innate mental processes he could project its locus at any given moment. He could deduce a wide variety of correlates from a given proposition, either theoretical or actual. And at thirty-two—
In a widely distributed paper he had presented objections to the classic theory of limits, showing in his own unique way, a possible return—at least theoretically—to Zeno’s concept of progressively halved motion, utilizing as a fulcrum Dunne’s theory of circular time.
And as a result of this he held a minor post in a minor branch of the government’s Federal Bureau of Personnel Standards. Because what he had done, although original, was not much. Not compared with the advances made by other New Men.
They had changed the map of human thought . . . in fifty short years. Changed it into something which the Old Men, the persons of the past, could neither understand nor recognize. Bernhad’s Theory of Acausality, for example—in 2103 Bernhad, working at the Zürich Polytechnic Institute, had demonstrated that Hume, in his enormous skepticism, had been fundamentally right: custom, and nothing else, linked events understood by the Old Men as cause-and-effect He had brought Leibnitz’s monad theory up to date—with devastating results. For the first time in human history it had become possible to predict outcomes of physical sequences on the basis of a spectrum of variable predicates, each equally true, each as much “causal” as the next. Applied sciences had because of this taken a new form, one which the Old Men could not deal with; in their minds a principle of acausality meant chaos: they could predict nothing.
And there had been more.
In 2130 Blaise Black, a certified G-sixteen New Man, had upset Wolfgang Pauli’s Synchronicity principle. He had shown that the so-called “vertical” line of connectivity operated as a predictable factor, as easily plotted—using the new methods of random selection—as the “horizontal” sequence. Thus, the distinction between the sequences was effectively obliterated—freeing abstract physics from the burden of a double determination—making all computations, including those derived from astrophysics, fundamentally easier. Black’s System, as it was called, ended at last any reliance on Old Man theory and practice.
Contributions by Unusuals had been more specific; they had to do with operations involving actual entities. So—at least as he, a New Man, saw it—his race had contributed the underlying pinions of the reshaped map of the universe, and the Unusuals had done their work in the form of application of these general structures.
The Unusuals, he knew, would not have agreed with this. But that did not bother him.
I have a G-three rating, he said to himself. And I have done a little; I have added a jot to our collective knowledge. No Old Man, however gifted, could have done so. Except perhaps Thors Provoni. But Thors Provoni had been absent for years; he did not stir the sleep of either Unusuals or New Men. Provoni raged and roamed the outskirts of the galaxy, searching, in his wrath, for something vague, something even metaphysical. An answer, to so speak. A response. Thors Provoni yelled into the emptiness, dinning out his noise in hope of a response.
God help us, Weiss thought, if he ever finds it.
But he was not afraid of Provoni; neither were his peers. A few nervous Unusuals muttered among themselves as the months turned into years and still Provoni did not die and was not captured. Thors Provoni constituted an anachronism: he remained the last of the Old Men who could not accept history, who dreamed of orthodox and thoughtless action . . . he lived in a dismal past, most of it not even real, a dreamless and dead past which could not be recalled, even by a man as gifted, as educated, as active as Provoni. He is a pirate, Weiss said to himself, a quasi-romantic figure, steeped in exploits. In a sense I will miss him when he dies. After all, we emerged from the Old Men; we are related to him. Distantly.