Frank Herbert - High-Opp

“I’m Grace London, Navvy’s sister. He sent me as soon as he found out. Pay close attention. You’re to be transferred to the Arctic Labor Pool for weather survey.”

Her eyes made him uncomfortable, staring at him so queerly. This obviously was more grapevine poppycock! But he remembered the accuracy of Navvy’s other prediction. It was as though the thought opened a door on the Arctic, letting in a blast of icy air. “That’s penalty service,” he whispered, subdued. “High mortality.” Roper’s name! Had they read his angry thoughts?

“Oh, darling, I’m so happy you’re not mad at me,” she said. “Kiss me again.” She made a low smacking around with her lips, bent and whispered, “It will be discovered too late. A big mistake. So sorry. Eulogies for poor dead Mr. Movius. Posthumous restoration of rank.”

A dead High-Opp , he thought. Her mood of urgency began to creep through his numbness. He muttered, “Darling, I’ve missed you, too.” He moved to make the bedsprings squeak, whispered, “Why?”

“No time for explanations,” she whispered and blushed as he again squeaked the springs. “Do exactly what I say. After I’ve gone, wait for darkness, then go out and catch a Commerce Transport. Ride it to the end of the line and go into the Carhouse. Find Clancy in the office. He’ll give you the keys to his locker, a change of clothes and instructions where to go from there.” She squeezed his hand, said in a loud, clear voice, “Darling, why don’t you come to my place tonight? This is too open here.” The springs protested as she stood.

Still in a semi-fog, he arose, watched her open the door, glance up and down the hallway, duck out.

The air held the charged feeling of static electricity after she had gone. As the mood of it melted away, he felt let down, unsure. Pop-mag pap! he thought. Who’d want to spy on a bachelor room in a Warren? And that nonsense about the Arctic Labor Pool. Mistakes like that just weren’t made.

But he had been low-opped. And the official question, when put to closer scrutiny, appeared to have been phrased toward that end. “For tax economy reasons!” But who would want to spy on… Then he remembered. A privilege of the top five ranks was an apartment in a building where freedom from spy beams was maintained by a master scrambler on the roof. A High-Opp phone could not be tapped for the same reason. He’d been living away from this sort of thing for too long. Bu-Con was always spying on the Warrens, looking for Sep activity.

Movius cleared the box off the corner of his bed, lay back. Navvy had sent his sister. Sometimes drivers were unaccountably loyal. He’d had more freedom than most drivers, too. Birthdays off, personal trips. Now, maybe Navvy was returning the favor.

The bed felt hard, uncomfortable beneath him, more like a gymnasium mat than a bed. Gymnasium! He’d lost his privilege card for the gymnasium. No more sessions on the mat with Okashi, no more steam baths, no masseuse. No more of anything that had made his life bearable. They’d even take his library permit for the reserved stacks. Back to the apathy of the Warrens.

What have I come to? he wondered. Climbing up through the bureaus and departments was enough once. The competitive game. In fact, as he thought about it, that was all there had been. Pay attention to the game, live by the rules, believe the rules. Looking at his world now was like awakening after the loss of a pair of dark glasses which had obscured his vision.

Cecelia and Helmut!

He pounded a fist against the bed until it hurt. Cecelia had been an expensive trinket, a badge of office.

The Red Slip. Opinion SD22240368523ZX.

Almighty Opinion!

The full import of his loss began to come through to his consciousness. He caught himself sighing, felt like a shell vacuumed of everything but weary resentment.

Navvy had sent his sister. Navvy was right this morning. Is he right this time? What am I going to do? The question conjured up a vision of Movius’ father. “Never ask what you’re going to do, son. Ask how you’re going to do it.” Ah, yes. His positive father, full of history, discipline and good intentions gone astray. A history teacher in an age which sought to forget its own past, living out his life as a common laborer in the LP Warrens, ladling the knowledge of remembering contraband books into his son.

His father had started him on this road. The old man had died when Movius was twenty, the year he’d made the Calculation Corps. He couldn’t remember his mother. She had died in the educator purges. “The people must have a scapegoat, Dan. Give them their own knowledge to fight. Laugh while they destroy their salvation!” That was his father again; his father in the bitter mood, showing the growing son how to adopt protective coloration: “Act dumb when you’re with the dumb; act smart when you’re with the smart. But never act more intelligent than the man above you.”

The old man had taught too well.

Movius twisted on the bed. Damned low-opp mattress!

Where had it all begun? Ah, the history books again, the forbidden, hate-provoking history books. Low-opped all! It had started in the Twentieth Century with polls to predict the outcome of the crude elections of that era. Sampling methods were improved for almost a century during which emphasis on the sample poll became greater and greater.

Then along came Julius Stackman, born in the Twenty-First Century, following the wars which ended in world government. Stackman and his queer mind which linked a series of electronic relays into the Brownian Movement Regulator. Absolute random.

Give the machine a job: Supply a nine-digit code number for every responsible adult of age sixteen or over. Next, select three numbers. Every person in the world with those three numbers repeated in his code and in that series step up to a registration kiosk. Give code number, name and thumbprint. Click, click, click, click. Answer the question, please. If you don’t register and answer and you haven’t an adequate excuse, off you go the Arctic Labor Pool or the Sewer Maintenance Gangs. Who wants to be in the ALP or the SMG? Better to get up from your sickbed, answer the question. Register your opp.

Unless you happen to know somebody in the Very-High-Opp.

“ Bill was with me. Official business.”

You might also know somebody in the Seps, too, who could get you a rubber stamp of your thumbprint. Then a friend could register your opp. But this method wasn’t well known.

Give the machine a job!

“What would be an absolute formalization of randomness?”

Out of this came the Mathematics of Impellation, reducing the so-called “laws of chance” to a set of usable factors and reducing the correlative error in a sample-poll to something negligible.

All of this from the square root of minus one.

And more, too. For a time there was a boom in small hand computers for games such as chess. The computers showed the optimum move under any set of conditions. With both players using them, it became evident that the person making the first move always won. A few purists barred the computers, but they were always running into flashy winners with hidden computers. Interest died. Almost fifty years passed before the invention of a new type of game based on Rorschach cards. The ink blots elicited strictly personal reactions under which the rules of the game changed. Formalization was loose. Some people still played these games. Nathan O’Brien of Bu-Psych was an expert.

They gave the machine the job and the machine became the government.

There developed around the poll-taking function a hierarchy of bureaus—The Bureau of the Census (Bu-Sen), The Bureau of Opinions (Bu-Opp), The Bureau of Questionnaires (Bu-Q), The Bureau of Control (Bu-Con), The Bureau of Information (now Bu-Blah even in its own halls), The Bureau of Psychology (Bu-Psych), The Bureau of Transportation (Bu-Trans), The Bureau of Communication (Bu-Comm) and on top of the pyramid, The Bureau of Coordination (The Bureau).