“I don’t want to go through life wearing fetters,” he said abruptly.
“Tarnover talking!” she snapped.
“What?”
“Wear fetters? Wear fetters? I never heard such garbage. Has there ever been a time in the whole of history when someone with amazing exceptional gifts could be deluded into thinking they’re a handicap?”
“Sure,” he said at once. “How about conscripts who would rather maim themselves than obey a government order to go fight somebody they never met? Their gifts may have been no more than youth and health, but they were gifts.”
“That’s not being deluded. That’s being compelled. A recruiting sergeant with a gun on his hip—”
“Same thing! They’ve merely brought it into finer focus!”
There was a brief electric silence. At length she sighed.
“I give in. I have no right to argue with you about Tarnover—you’ve been there and I haven’t. And in any case it’s too early for a row. Go get showered and shaved, and then we’ll find some breakfast and talk about where we’re going next.”
IS THIS YOU?
Did you have trouble last night in dropping off to sleep?
Even though you were tired in spite of doing nothing to exhaust yourself?
Did you hear your heart? Did it break its normal rhythm?
Do you suffer with digestive upsets? Get a feeling that your gullet has been tied in a knot behind your ribs?
Are you already angry because this advertisement hits the nail on your head?
Then come to Calm Springs before you kill somebody or go insane!
COUNT A BLAST
“You’re beginning to be disturbed by me,” the dry hoarse voice announced.
Elbows on chair arms as usual, Freeman set his fingertips together. “How so?” he parried.
“For one thing, you’ve taken to talking to me in present-time mode for the last three-hour session every day.”
“You should be grateful for small mercies. Our prognostications show it would be risky to maintain you in regressed mode.”
“Half the truth. The rest can be found in your omission to use that expensive three-vee setup you had installed. You realized that I thrive on high levels of stimulus. But you’re groping your way toward my lower threshold. You don’t want me to start functioning at peak efficiency. You think that even pinned down like a butterfly on a board I may still be dangerous.”
“I don’t think of my fellow men as dangerous. I think of them as capable of occasional dangerous mistakes.”
“You include yourself?”
“I remain constantly alert for the possibility.”
“Being on guard like that itself constitutes aberrant behavior.”
“How can you say that? So long as you were fully on guard we failed to catch you. In terms of your purposes that wasn’t aberrant; it was functional. In the end, however … Well, here you are.”
“Yes, here I am. Having learned a lesson you’re incapable of learning.”
“Much good may it bring you.” Freeman leaned back. “You know, last night I was thinking over a new approach—a new argument which may penetrate your obstinacy. Consider this. You speak of us at Tarnover as though we’re engaged in a brutal arbitrary attempt to ensure that the best minds of the current generation get inducted into government service. Not at all. We are simply the top end of a series of cultural subgroupings that evolved of their own accord during the second half of last century. Few of us are equipped to cope with the complexity and dazzling variety of twenty-first-century existence. We prefer to identify with small, easily isolable fractions of the total culture. But just as some people can handle only a restricted range of stimuli, and prefer to head for a mountain commune or a paid-avoidance area or even emigrate to an underdeveloped country, so some correspondingly not only cope well but actually require immensely strong stimuli to provoke them into functioning at optimum. We have a wider range of life-style choices today than ever before. The question of administration has been rendered infinitely more difficult precisely because we have such breadth of choice. Who’s to manage this multiplex society? Must the lot not fall to those who flourish when dealing with complicated situations? Would you rather that people who demonstrably can’t organize their own lives were permitted to run those of their fellow citizens?”
“A conventional elitist argument. From you I’d have expected better.”
“Elitist? Nonsense. I’d expected better from you. The word you’re looking for is ‘aesthetic.’ An oligarchy devoted by simple personal preference to the search for artistic gratification in government—that’s what we’re after. And it would be rather a good system, don’t you think?”
“Provided you were in the top group. Can you visualize yourself in the lower echelons, a person who obeys instead of issuing orders?”
‘Oh, yes. That’s why I work at Tarnover. I hope that perhaps within my lifetime there will appear people so skilled in dealing with modern society that I and others like me can step out of their way with a clear conscience. In a sense I want to work myself out of a job as fast as possible.”
“Resigning control to crippled kids?”
Freeman sighed. “Oh, you’re obsessed with those laboratory-gestated children! Maybe it will relieve your mind to hear that the latest batch—six of them—are all physically whole and run and jump and feed and dress themselves! If you met them by chance you couldn’t tell them from ordinary kids.”
“So why bother to tell me about them? All that’s registered in my mind is that they may look like ordinary kids … but they never will be ordinary kids.”
“You have a positive gift for twisting things. No matter what I say to you—”
“I find a means of casting a different light on it. Let me do just that to what you’ve been saying. You, and the others you mentioned, acknowledge you’re imperfect. So you’re looking for superior successors. Very welclass="underline" give me grounds for believing that they won’t just be projections on a larger scale of your admittedly imperfect vision.”
“I can’t. Only results that speak for themselves can do that.”
“What results do you have to date? You’ve sunk a lot of time and money in the scheme.”
“Oh, several. One or two may impress even a skeptic.”
“The kids that look like any other kids?”
“No, no. Healthy adults like yourself capable of doing things that have never been done before, such as writing a complete new identity into the data-net over a regular veephone. Bear in mind that before trying to invent new talents we decided to look for those that had been undervalued. The odds there were in our favor. We have records from the past—descriptions of lightning calculators, musicians capable of improvising without a wrong note for hours on end, mnemonists who commited whole books to memory by reading them through once … Oh, there are examples in every field of human endeavor from strategy to scrimshaw. With these for guidelines, we’re trying to generate conditions in which corresponding modern talents can flourish.”
He shifted casually in his chair; he sounded more confident by the minute.
“Our commonest current form of mental disorder is personality shock. We have an efficient way to treat it without machinery or drugs. We allow the sufferer to do something he long ago wanted to do and lacked either the courage or the opportunity to fit into his life. Do you deny the claim?”
“Of course not. This continent is littered coast to coast with people who were compelled to study business administration when they should have been painting murals or practicing the fiddle or digging a truck garden, and finally got their chance when it was twenty years too late to lead them anywhere.”