“Do not worry too much about what has happened. The Truth was more important than the damage done through minor over-eagerness, or through the, use of techniques too long dormant,”
Jacob wanted to tell Fagin how wrong he was. The “skills” he had unleashed were more than that. They were a deadly force within him. He feared that they had done more harm than good.
“What do you think will happen?” he asked, tiredly.
“Why I believe that humanity will discover that it has a powerful enemy. Your government will protest.How it does so will be of great importance, but it will not change the essential facts. Officially the Pila will disown Bubbacub’s unfortunate actions. But they are peevish and prideful, if you will excuse a painful but necessarily unkind description of a fellow sophont race.
“That is just one result of this event-chain. But do not worry overmuch. You did not do this thing. All that you did was make humanity aware of the danger. It was bound to happen. It always has happened to wolfling races.”
“But why!”
“That, my most esteemed friend, is one of the things I am here to try to discover. Though it may be of little comfort, please note that there are many who would like to see humanity survive. Some of us… care very much.”
20. MODERN MEDICINE
Jacob pressed against the rubber rimmed eyepiece of the Retinal scanner, and once again saw the blue dot dance and shimmer alone in a black background. Now he tried not to focus on it, ignoring its tantalizing suggestion of communion, as he waited for the third tachistoscopic image.
It flashed on suddenly, filling his entire field of view with a 3-D image in dull sepia. The gestalt he got in that first, unfocused instant was of a pastoral scene. There was a woman in the foreground, buxom and well fed, her old-fashioned skirts flying as she ran.
Dark, threatening clouds loomed on the horizon, above farm buildings set on a hill. There were people on the left… dancing? No, fighting. There were soldiers. Their faces were excited and — afraid? The woman was afraid. She fled with her arms over her head as two men in seventeenth-century body armor chased her, holding high their matchlocks with bayonets sharp. Their…
The scene blacked out and the blue dot was back. Jacob closed his eyes and pulled back from the eyepiece.
“That’s it,” Dr. Martine said. She bent over a computer console nearby, next to Physician Laird. “We’ll have your P-test score in a minute, Jacob.”
“You’re sure you don’t need any more? That was only three.” Actually, he was relieved.
“No, we took five from Peter to have a double-check. You’re just a control. Why don’t you just sit down and relax now, while we finish up here.”
Jacob walked over to one of the nearby lounge chairs, wiping his left cuff along his forehead to remove a thin sheen of perspiration. The test had been a thirty-second ordeal.
The first image had been, a portrait of a man’s face, gnarled and lined with care, a story of a life-time that he had examined for two, maybe three seconds, before it disappeared again, as seared as any ephemera could be into his memory.
The second had been a confusing jumble of abstract shapes, jutting and bumping in static disarray… somewhat like the maze of patterns around the rim of a sun-torus but without the brilliance or overall consistency.
The third had been the scene in sepia, apparently rendered from an old etching of the Thirty Years War. It was explicitly violent, Jacob recalled, just the sort of thing one would expect in a P-test.
After the overly dramatic “parlor scene” downstairs, Jacob was reluctant to enter even a shallow trance to calm his nerves. And he, found that he couldn’t relax without it. He rose and approached the console. Across the dome, near the stasis shell itself, LaRoque wandered idly as he waited, staring out at the long shadows and blistered rocks of Mercury’s North Pole.
“May I see the raw data?” Jacob asked Martine.
“Sure. Which one would you like to see?”
“The last one.”
Martine tapped on her keyboard. A sheet extruded from a slot beneath the screen. She tore it off and handed it to him.
It was the “pastoral scene.” Of course now he recognized its true content, but the whole purpose of the earlier viewing was to trace his reactions to the image during the first few instants he saw it, before conscious, consideration could come into play.
Across the image a jagged line darted back and forth, up and down. At every vertex or resting point was a small number. The line showed the path of his attention during that first quick glimpse, as detected by the Retinal Reader, watching the movements of his eye.
The number one, and the beginning of the trace, was near the center. Up to number six the focus line just drifted. Then it stopped right over the generous cleavage presented by the running woman’s bosom. The number seven was circled there.
There the numbers clustered, not only seven to sixteen, but thirty through thirty five and eighty two to eighty six, as well.
At twenty the numbers suddenly shifted from the woman’s feet to the clouds over the farmhouse. Then they moved quickly among the people and objects pictured, sometimes circled or squared to denote the level of dilation of the eye, depth of focus, and changes in his blood pressure as measured by the tiny veins in his retina. Apparently the modified Stanford-Purkinje eye scanner he had devised for this test, from Martine’s tachistoscope and other odds and ends, had worked.
Jacob knew better than to be embarrassed or concerned by his reflex reaction to the pictured woman’s breast. If he’d been female his reaction would have been different, spending more time with the woman, overall, but concentrating more on hair, clothes, and face.
What concerned him more was his reaction to the overall scene. Over to the left, near the fighting men, was a starred number. That represented the point at which he realized that the image was violent, not pastoral. He nodded with satisfaction. The number was relatively low and the trace darted immediately away for a period of five beats before returning to the same spot. That meant a healthy dose of aversion followed by direct instead of covert curiosity.
At first glance it looked like he’d probably pass. Not that he ever really doubted it.
“I wonder if anyone will ever learn how to fool a P-test,” he said, handing the copy to Martine.
“Maybe they will, someday,” she said as she gathered her materials. “But the conditioning needed to change a man’s response to instantaneous stimuli… to an image flashed so fast that only the unconscious has time to react… would leave too many side effects, new patterns that would have to show up in the test.
“The final analysis is very simple; does the subject’s mind follow a plus or zero sum game, qualifying him for Citizenship, or is it addicted to the sick-sweet pleasures of a negative sum. That more than any index of violence, is the essence of this test.”
Martine turned to Physician Laird. “That’s right, isn’t it, Doctor?”
Laird shrugged. “You’re the expert.” He had been allowing Martine to slowly win her way back into his good graces, still not quite forgiving her for prescribing to Kepler without consulting him.
After the denunciation downstairs, it became clear that she had never prescribed the Warfarin to Kepler at all. Jacob recalled. Bubbacub’s habit, aboard the Bradbury, of falling asleep on articles of clothing, carelessly left on cushions or chairs. The Pil must have done it as a subterfuge to enable him to plant, in Kepler’s portable pharmacopoeia, a drug that would cause his behavior to deteriorate.