“But don’t you suppose,” Laudermilk said, “that there have been catastrophes in the world before this? Not only local fires, but real catastrophes, that dislocated millions of people at a time. The great Missouri flood, for example, in 2097. The G.P.‘s and the U.M.‘s were mingled then, so thoroughly that it took five months to get them all sorted out. Or the powerplant explosion in the Urals in 2081. The Obprods and the Luchuvels both shot a great many of their own people then—there was a great stench about it in the World Court afterwards—but it really wasn’t at all necessary.”
Bass stared at him. “Why not?” he demanded.
“Because people looked at each other, and saw what they had been taught to see, plus a good deal that they made up themselves on the spot. And the stories grew in the telling. In Kentucky, for example, they don’t say that the Others have bat wings and fingers like pitchforks, or anything so tame and ordinary as that … they say that the Others are fifty feet tall, with heads that are all bones and teeth, and that worms crawl in and out of their eyes.”
Bass put his head in his hands. “We’d better move along now, Davy,” Laudermilk said to the pilot. “We’re very late.”
“Right.”
Bass felt the copter shudder and dip as the vanes were retracted; then the jets fired, the back-rest shoved hard against him, and the landscape below began to unreel majestically, carrying the fire, and Stamford, and all the scurrying little people in it out of sight.
“No,” said Laudermilk, “what you did was justified only because it helped us find you before the Stamford Guard did. And at that, Arthur, I doubt if you can appreciate now what a difficult situation you put us in. I had to disrupt my schedule with a very flimsy excuse, which will take weeks of work to cover up—and then when we did locate you, of course, we had to broadcast misdirections to the Stamford Guard units in order to give ourselves time to work. The consequences of that could be very serious indeed. You can consider yourself very fortunate, young man, that you’re as valuable to us as you are. I mean by that, of course, your genes. Yes. A very important strain. We thought it was lost.”
Bass chose one question at random out of the dozens that were crowding his mind. “Where are you taking me?”
“To Pasadena, Arthur.”
“Why?”
“To enroll you in the College. Not as Arthur Bass, of course—you’ve spoilt that name, I’m afraid. How would you like to be called Martyn? That’s an old and honorable name. Arthur Martyn. Yes. Rather too euphonious, if anything, but if you don’t mind—”
The submersible organ, whatever it was, that had choked Bass during his first interview with Laudermilk, was throttling him again now. “I don’t understand,” he managed.
“Arthur,” said the old man gently, “the people at the College are all like us —all sane. Faculty and students. There isn’t an angel-ridden person among them.”
Bass clutched the seat-arms fiercely, as if to make sure they were still there.
“Then,” he said desperately, “you mean that if I’d stayed in Glenbrook and not talked to anybody, or anything—”
“Yes,” said Laudermilk. “I’m afraid I must take the blame for that, Arthur. When I gave you the test this afternoon, your response was so well-acted that I wasn’t sure of you. And I assumed that was my error—that if you were acting, then your father must have told you about yourself, taught you to counterfeit the angel-reaction. He would have done so, of course, if he had lived. He was one of us, you know; so was your mother. I’ve checked the available records; there’s no doubt of it.”
Bass gaped at him. All at once things he had half-forgotten were coming back into focus. That book in his father’s study; a way both his parents had of looking at him sometimes, as if they knew a delightful secret that they mustn’t tell him just yet … and he had never, he realized abruptly, seen his angel outside the house they lived in. “I never had an angel at all,” he said aloud.
“No. Your parents, I rather think, persuaded you that you had by using a training film in darkened rooms—very difficult, and risky, but there’s no other way—people like us can’t be hypnotized. They kept you away from the cinema, I suppose, so that you wouldn’t realize you were being tricked.”
“I never saw a movie until I was ten.”
“Yes. You see, Arthur, twenty years ago we weren’t as well organized as we are now—we could neither support any great part of our numbers in hiding, as we do now in the College and other places, nor could we protect them adequately among ordinary people. So a great many of us—your parents included—had to sever their connections with us completely, and live just as if they were ordinary, orthodox citizens. We’re making up for that now; we’re gathering in their children.
“You see, those who pass the test I gave you are sent on to the College, where they’re given more thorough tests, and if they pass those, somehow or other they always fail their scholastic examinations, and we send them home. On the other hand, those who fail the first test are the ones we’re really after. We put them under immediate confinement, so they can’t betray themselves, ship them off to the College—and they stay. That was what I should have done with you.”
“But I still don’t understand,” said Bass. “You control the College of Religious Sciences—that must mean the Deacons are all your people—”
“Not all,” the Archdeputy corrected him. “Only a little more than thirty percent, and it’s taken us a long time to get that far. In another fifty years we’ll have complete control of the analogue machines—that’s their proper name, by the way—and something like half the Executive group will be our people, and perhaps thirty or forty percent of the Guard—like the two gentlemen who helped me coax you down off that roof.”
“And then,” said Bass, “you’ll stop all this—this—”
“Tyranny is the word, Arthur. It isn’t in any of the dictionaries you’ve seen, but you’ll learn it at the College, along with a lot of other old words. Politics. Democracy. Freedom … but the answer to your question is no. I’ll explain why, but first let me ask you a question. If we could somehow take Dean Horrock’s angel away from him tomorrow, would he be able to go on doing his job?”
“No. He wants to kill people.”
“Exactly. The group that you belong to now, Arthur, differs from the rest of the world’s population in two ways, not one. We’re immune to all forms of psychic compulsion—we owe that to a mutation—and we’re sane. That’s another word you’ll learn: the Mercantile jargon for it is ‘inherently stable.’
“Now do you begin to see? The analogue treatment was originally developed as a control for dangerously unstable persons—like your Dean. It worked so well that in the hundred and fifty years since then, mental instability has become the norm … we can’t get adequate figures, but we have good reason to believe that three people out of ten would be hopelessly insane without their ‘angels.’
“So all we can do is increase our own numbers as fast as we can, protect ourselves, consolidate our position, and try to keep the Mercantile system from smashing itself apart before we’re ready to take over. You know, there are some things even an ‘angel’ can’t do. It can’t keep a District Executive from making an irrational decision, for instance. You recall the protein-concentrate shortage last year? The man who made that mistake was replaced, naturally, but the man who replaced him isn’t much better. The angels can’t do anything about catatonia or epilepsy, either. More than three-quarters of the cases of ‘possession’ you hear about aren’t people like ourselves being caught, but normal people, so-called, collapsing into insanity. “The world our descendants will build eventually will be a good one, Arthur —no more hypnotism, in the analogue rooms or on the air or in the papers … and, I think, little insanity of any kind. But when the crash comes, it isn’t going to be pretty—that reminds me. I meant to show you these.” He handed Bass a half-dozen photographs. Bass examined them; they were not scenes of disaster, but pictures of girls about his own age. “Pretty” was evidently the word that had made Laudermilk think of them.