Alfred Coppel: Turning Point

Twisted, pious, hypocrite ! thought Merrick.

“I am sure, sir,” Graves was saying placatingly, “that when we have shown you the Creche you will see that there is no menace.”

Erikson scowled at Graves deliberately. “There is menace enough in the blasphemy of android life, my son. Everywhere there are signs of unrest among the things you have built here. On Mars, human beings have died at their hands!”

Merrick’s face showed his disgust. “Frankly, I don’t believe that. Androids don’t kill.”

“We shall see, my son,” Erikson said settling the belt of his energy screen more comfortably about his hips. “We shall see.”

Merrick studied Erikson’s face. There was a tiny scar under his chin. That would be where the transmitter was planted. He had no doubt that every word of this conversation was being monitored by the Fanatics outside the Creche. The turning point was coming inexorably nearer. He only hoped that he had the physical and moral courage to face it when it arrived.

“Very well, Sweyn Erikson,” he said finally. “Please come with me.”

Four hours later they were in Merrick’s office. The preliminary stage of his plan had failed, just as he had known it would. He was almost glad. It had been a vacillating expediency, an attempt to hide the facts and avoid the necessity of facing the challenge squarely. Stage two was about to begin, and this time there would be no temporizing.

The Prophet glared angrily across the desk-top. “Do you take me for a child? You have shown me nothing. Where are the protoplasm vats? The brain machines? Where are the bodies assembled? I warned you against trickery, Han Merrick!”

Merrick glanced across the room at his wife. She sat rigid in her chair, her face a pale mask. He would get no help from her.

“You must realize, Erikson,” he said, “That you are forcing me to jeopardize five centuries of work for the chimera of Human Supremacy. Let me warn you now that your life is of no importance to me when balanced against that. When the Board of Psychotechnicians appointed my family custodians of the Creche centuries ago, they did so because they knew we would keep faith—”

“The last member of the founding Board died more than two hundred years ago,” snapped the Prophet.

“But the Creche is here, and I am here to guard it as my forefathers did,” Merrick said. Once again he was conscious of a strange ambivalence in his attitude. He must guard something he considered wrong against the intrusion of a danger even more wrong. His hand sought the scored grip of the old automatic in his pocket. Could he actually kill?

“You speak of Human Supremacy as a chimera,” Sweyn Erikson said, “It is no such thing. It is the only vital force left in the world. Robotism is a menace more deadly, a blasphemy more foul than any Black Mass of history. You are making Man into an anachronism on the face of his own planet. This cannot be! I will not let it be….”

Merrick stared. Could it be that the man actually believed that the poison he peddled was the food of the gods?

“I will try one last attempt at reason, Erikson,” Merrick said deliberately. “Look back with an unprejudiced mind, if you can, over the centuries since the Atom War. What do you see?”

“I see Man emasculated by the robot!”

“No! You see atomic power harnessed and in use for the first time after almost a millenium of muddling. You see Man standing on the Moon and the habitable planets—and soon to reach out for the stars! A new Golden Age is dawning, Prophet! And why? Whence have come the techniques?” Even as he spoke, Merrick knew he was ignoring the obvious, the all-too-apparent cracks in the social structure that no scientific miracles could cure. But were those cracks the fault of robotism or were they in fact a failing inherent in Man himself? He was not prepared to answer that. “From where are the techniques drawn?” he asked again.

Erikson met his glance squarely. “Not from the mindless horrors you spawn here!”

“Emotionless, Prophet,” corrected Merrick pointedly, “Not mindless.”

“Soulless! Soulless and mindless, too. Never have these zombies been able to think as men!”

“They are not men.”

“Nor are they the architects of the future!”

“I think you are wrong, Prophet,” Merrick said softly.

“Man is the ultimate,” Erikson said.

“You talk like a fool,” snapped Merrick.

“ Han! ” There was naked terror in his wife’s voice, but he rushed on, ignoring it.

“How dare you say that Man is the ultimate? What right have you to assume that nature has stopped experimenting?”

Sweyn Erikson’s lip curled scornfully. “Can you be implying that the robots—”

Merrick leaned across the desk to shout full in the Prophet’s face: “ You fool! They’re not robots! ”

The robed man was suddenly on his feet, face livid.

“Han!” cried Virginia Merrick, “Not that way!”

“This is my affair now, Virginia. I’ll handle it in my own way!” the Director said.

“Remember the mob outside!”

Merrick turned agate-hard eyes on his wife. Presently he looked away and said to the Prophet. “Now I will show you the real Creche!”

There were robots everywhere—blank-eyed, like sleep walkers. They reacted to commands. They moved and breathed and fed themselves. Under rigid control they performed miracles of intuitive calculation. But artificiality was stamped upon them like a brand. They were not human.

In the lowest vaults of the Creche, Merrick showed the Prophet the infants. He withheld nothing. He showed him the growing creatures. He explained to him the tests and signs that were looked for in the hospitals maintained by the World State and the Council of Ten. He let him watch the young ones taking their Primary Conditioning. Courses of hypnotic instruction. Rest, narcosynthesis. Semantics. Drugs and words and more words pounding on young brains like sledgehammer blows, shaping them into something acceptable in a sapient world.

In other chambers, other age groups. Emotion and memory being moulded into something else by hypnopedia. Faces becoming blank and expressionless.

“Their minds are conditioned—enslaved,” Merrick said bitterly. “Then they are primed with scientific facts. Those techniques we discussed. This is where they come from, Prophet. From the minds of your despised androids. Only will is suppressed, and emotion. They are shaped for the sociography of a sapient culture. They mature very slowly. We keep them here for from ten to fifteen years. No human brain could stand it—but theirs can.”

Truth dangled before his eyes, but Erikson’s mind savagely rejected it. The pillars upon which he had built his life were crumbling….

The two men stood in a vast hall filled with an insidious, whispering voice. On low pallets, fully a score of physically mature androids lay staring vacuously at a spinning crystal high in the apex of the domed ceiling.

“—you had no life before you where created here to serve Man the master you had no life before you were created here to serve Man the master you had—” the voice whispered into the hypnotized brains.

“Don’t look up,” Merrick warned. “The crystal can catch a human being faster than it can them . This is hypnotic engineering. The rhythm of the syllables and their proportion to the length of word and sentence are computed to correspond to typed encephalographic curves. Nothing is left to chance. When they have reached this stage of conditioning they are almost ready for release and purchase by human beings. Only a severe stimulation of the brain can break down the walls we have built in their minds.”