“I’ve thought about that a good deal. According to classic psychology, it is. I’m not unusually resistant to hypnotic drugs; I go under all right. But the censor mechanism just doesn’t respond. I’ve had the fanciful notion that I may be a mutation, developed in response to the analogue treatment as an anti-survival factor. But I don’t know. As far as I’ve ever been able to find out, there are no more like me.”
“Umm,” said Wolfert, puffing at his pipe. “Should think your next move would be to get married, have children, see if they were immune too.”
Falk stared at him soberly. “Wolfert - no offense, but can you imagine yourself settling down happily in a community of maniacs?”
The other’s face flushed slowly. He took the pipe out of his mouth, looked down at it. Finally he said, “All right, I know what you mean.”
“Maybe you don’t,” said Falk, thinking, I’ve offended him. Couldn’t kelp it. “You’ve been out here ten years, haven’t you?”
Wolfert nodded.
“Things are getting worse,” Falk told him. “I’ve taken the trouble to look up some statistics. They weren’t hard to find; the damned fools are proud of them. The number of persons in mental institutions has gone steadily down since 1980, when the world-wide analogue program got under way. Extension of analogue program, steadily up. The two curves cancel out perfectly.
“There are fewer and fewer people that have to be put away in madhouses - not because of any improvement in therapy, but because the analogue techniques are getting better and better. The guy who would have been hopelessly insane fifty years ago now has a little man inside his head, steering him around, making him act normal. On the outside he is normal; inside, he’s a raving madman. Worse still, the guy who would have been Just a little bit cracked fifty years ago - and gotten treatment for it - is now just as mad as the first guy. It doesn’t matter any more. We could all be maniacs, and the world would go on just as before.”
Wolfert grimaced wryly, “Well? It’s a peaceful world, anyhow.”
“Sure,” said Falk. “No war or possibility of war, no murders, no theft, no crime at all. That’s because every one of them has a policeman inside his skull. But action begets reaction, Wolfert, in psychiatry as well as physics. A prison is a place to get out of, if it takes you a lifetime. Push one plunger down, another will rise. Just a few years more, I think - ten or twenty, say - and you’ll see that madhouse curve rise again. Because there’s no escape from the repression of the Guardians except a further retreat into insanity. And eventually a point is reached where no amount of treatment can help. What are they going to do then?”
Wolfert tamped his pipe out slowly and stood up, sucking absently at the stem. “You say they,” he said, “meaning the psychiatrists who really govern Earth, I suppose. You’ve evidently figured out what you’re going to do.”
Falk smiled. “Yes. With your help - I’m going to the stars.”
The other stood frozen a moment. “So you know about that,” he said. “Well - Come into the next room. I’ll show it to you.”
Falk had known about the Doorway, but not that it looked like this. It was a cubicle of something that looked like slick brown glass. Ten feet high, six wide and deep. Inside, at waist level on the far wall, a lever - curiously shaped, like the head of an old-fashioned walking stick, the slightly curved bar of the L parallel to the wall. Nothing more than that. The floor of Wolfert’s hut had been assembled around it. It was the reason for the hut’s existence, for Wolfert’s dearly bought presence on Mars.
“So that’s it,” said Falk. He took a step toward it.
“Stay where you are,” Wolfert said sharply. “The area in front of the entrance is booby-trapped.”
Falk stopped and looked at Wolfert, then at the metal cabinets bolted to the floor on either side of the Doorway. Now that he looked at them closely, he could see the lenses of black-light beams and, above them, metal cones that he supposed were discharge points.
Wolfert confirmed it. “If anything ever comes out, the current is supposed to get him. If it doesn’t, I’m here.” He put his hand on the rapid-fire automatic at his belt.
Falk sat down slowly on a bench next to the wall. “Why?” he asked. “Why are they so afraid of whatever might come out of the Doorway?”
The other leaned awkwardly against the wall and began refilling his pipe. “You don’t know the whole story, then,” he said. “Tell me what you do know, and I’ll fill in the gaps.”
Falk said slowly, “I was able to find out that the Doorway existed - that the first Mars expedition, in ‘76, had found it here. Apparently it was known to be an interstellar transportation system, but as far as I could learn nobody had ever actually tried it out. I knew that a caretaker had been left here - your predecessor, I take it after the idea of colonizing Mars was abandoned. But I didn’t know any of the reasons.”
Wolfert grinned briefly and straightened away from the wall. As he talked, he paced back and forth across the room, glancing at Falk only occasionally. “It’s a transportation system, all right. Put an object in that cubicle, press the lever down - the object vanishes. So does most of the crowbar or whatever you use to work the lever. Ffft - gone.
“We don’t know how old it is and have no way of telling. The material it’s made of is harder than diamond. About half of it is underground. That was the way it was found - sitting perfectly level on the surface of the desert. I believe it must have some sort of self-leveling mechanism built into it so that it’s always available no matter what happens to the surface.
“Other ruins have been found on Mars, but, they’re all stone and quite primitive; nothing like this. The first expedition tried to get into its innards and find out what made it go, of course, but they couldn’t. You can see in, but there’s nothing to see.” He gave his quick, bitter smile. “It’s frustrating. Makes a physicist feel like a backward student in a kindergarten.
“We know that it’s part of an interstellar network. One man did try it out - a member of the first expedition, one of the group that found the Doorway in the first place. He saw the cubicle and the lever - stepped in and pressed it to find out what would happen. He found out, all right, but I don’t suppose the rest of us will ever know. The second expedition brought along a batch of powerful all-wave senders and sent them through. They picked up the first signal five years later, from the general direction of Regulus. Two more after seven years, then four during the thirteenth year, all from different directions. The other eight have yet to be heard from.”
He stopped pacing and looked at Falk. “Now do you understand? The thing has no selectivity - it’s completely random. We could walk through there and step out onto the planet of another star, all right - but it would take us a million years to find the way back by trial and error.” He knocked his pipe out against the heel of his hand, letting the dottle fall on the floor. “There it sits, the doorway to the stars. And we can’t use it.”
Falk leaned back against the wall, trying to absorb the idea. “Maybe there are only a dozen or so stars in the network,” he suggested.
Wolfert’s thin mouth drew down at the corners. “Don’t be a fool,” he said. “Would the race that could build that” - he gestured toward the cubicle - “stop at a dozen stars, or a thousand? The devil! They owned the galaxy!” Nervously he began to fill his pipe again. “Sixty billion stars,” he said. “And according to current theory, all the mainliners have planets.”