Arthur Zagat - The Golden Age of Science Fiction Volume IX

Hart shook his head. “It sounds awfully real to be purely—” He, too, caught himself up. “Of course, you’re only positing a fiction.”

Burnett started putting his desk papers away. “I’m leaving now. The Preliminary begins soon. Want to come?”

The man’s face was stolidly blank except for his brown eyes which burned like a zealot’s. Fascinated by them, Hart agreed. It would be best to return anyway. Some of the bystanders had looked too curiously at him when he had left. Who would willingly leave a Rite when it was approaching its climax?

The Plaza was now thronged and the sacrificial pile towered over a hundred feet in the cleared center area. Then, as the first collective Ah! arose, a giant slagger lumbered in from the east, the direction prescribed for such commencements. Long polarity arms glided smoothly out of the central mechanism and reached the length for Total Destruction.

“That’s the automatic setting,” parents explained to their children.

“When?” the children demanded eagerly.

“Any moment now.”

Then the unforeseen occurred.

There was a rumbling from inside the pile and a huge jagged patchwork of metal shot out, smashing both arms. The slagger teetered, swaying more and more violently from side to side until it collapsed on its side. The rumbling grew. And then the pile, like a mechanical cancer, ripped the slagger apart and then absorbed it.

The panicking crowd fell back. Somewhere a child began crying, provoking more hubbub. “Sabotage!” people were crying. “Let’s get away!”

Nothing like this had ever happened before. But Hart knew instantly what had caused it. Some high-level servo mechanisms had not been thoroughly disconnected. They had repaired their damages, then imposed their patterns on the material at hand.

A second slagger came rushing into the square. It discharged immediately; and the pile finally collapsed and disintegrated as it was supposed to.

The crowd was too shocked to feel the triumph it had come for, but Hart could not share their horror. Burnett eyed him. “Better look indignant,” he said. “They’ll be out for blood. Somebody must have sabotaged the setup.”

“Catch the culprits!” he shouted, joining the crowd around him. “Stop anti-social acts!”

“Stop anti-social acts!” roared Burnett; and, in a whisper: “Hart, let’s get out of here.”

As they pushed their way through the milling crowd, a loudspeaker boomed out: “Return home in peace. The instincts of the people are good. Healthy destruction forever! The criminals will be tracked down… if they exist.”

“A terrible thing, friend,” a woman said to them.

“Terrible, friend,” Burnett agreed. “Smash the anti-social elements without mercy!”

Three children were clustered together, crying. “I wanted to set the right example for them,” said the father to anyone who would listen. “They’ll never get over this!”

Hart tried to console them. “Next week is High Holy Day,” he said, but the bawling only increased.

The two men finally reached a side avenue where the crowd was thinner. “Come with me,” Burnett ordered, “I want you to meet some people.”

He sounded as if he were instituting military discipline but Hart, still dazed, willingly followed. “It wasn’t such a terrible thing,” he said, listening to the distant uproar. “Why don’t they shut up!”

“They will—eventually.” Burnett marched straight ahead and looked fixedly in the same direction.

“The thing could have gobbled up the city if there hadn’t been a second slagger!” said a lone passerby.

“Nonsense,” Burnett muttered under his breath. “You know that, Hart. Any self-regulating mechanism reaches a check limit sooner than that.”

“It has to.”

They turned into a large building and went up to the fiftieth floor. “My apartment,” said Burnett as he opened the door.

There were about fifteen people in the large living room. They rose, smiling, to greet their host. “Let’s save the self-congratulations for later,” snapped Burnett. “These were merely our own preliminaries. We’re not out of the woods yet. This, ladies and gentlemen, is our newest recruit. He has seen the light. I have fed him basic data and I’m sure we’re not making a mistake with him.”

Hart was about to demand what was going on when a short man with eyes as intense as Burnett’s proposed a toast to “the fiasco in the Plaza.” Everyone joined in and he did not have to ask.

“Burnett, I don’t quite understand why I am here but aren’t you taking a chance with me?”

“Not at all. I’ve followed your reactions since your first visit to the library. Others here have also—when you were completely unaware of being observed. The gradual shift in viewpoint is familiar to us. We’ve all been through it. The really important point is that you no longer like the kind of world into which you were born.”

“That’s true, but no one can change it.”

“We are changing it,” said a thin-faced young woman. “I work in a servo lab and—.”

“Miss Wright, time enough for that later,” interrupted Burnett. “What we must know now, Mr. Hart, is how much you’re willing to do for your new-found convictions? It will be more work than you’ve ever dreamed possible.”

He felt as exhilarated as he did in the months after High Holy Day. “I’m down to under ten hours labor a week. I’d do anything for your group if I could get more work.”

Burnett gave him a hearty handshake of congratulation… but was frowning as he did so. “You’re doing the right thing—for the wrong reason. Every member of this group could tell you why. Miss Wright, since you feel like talking, explain the matter.”

“Certainly. Mr. Hart, we are engaged in an activity of so-called subversion for a positive reason, not merely to avoid insufficient work load. Your reason shows you are still being moved by the values that you despise. We want to cut the work-production load on people. We want them to face the problem of leisure, not flee it.”

“There’s a heart-warming paradox here,” Burnett explained. “Every excess eventually undermines itself. Everybody in the movement starts by wanting to act for their beliefs because work appears so attractive for its own sake. I was that way, too, until I studied the dead art of philosophy.”

“Well—” Hart sat down, deeply troubled. “Look, I deplore destroying equipment that is still perfectly useful as much as any of you do. But there is a problem. If the destruction were stopped there would be so much leisure people would rot from boredom.”

Burnett pounced eagerly on the argument. “Instead they’re rotting from artificial work. Boredom is a temporary, if recurring phenomenon of living, not a permanent one. If most men face the difficulty of empty time long enough they find new problems with which to fill that time. That’s where philosophy showed me the way. None of its fundamental mysteries can ever be solved but, as you pit yourself against them, your experience and capacity for being alive grows.”

“Very nice,” Hart grinned, “wanting all men to be philosophers. They never have been.”

“You shouldn’t have brought him here,” growled the short man. “He’s not one of us. Now we have a real mess.”

“Johnson, I’m leader of this group!” Burnett exploded. “Credit me with a little understanding. All right, Hart, what you say is true. But why? Because most men have always worked too hard to achieve the fruits of curiosity.”

“I hate to keep being a spoil-sport, but what does that prove? Some men who had to work as hard as the rest have been interested in things beyond the end of their nose.”