Damon Knight - Orbit 19

Then, with minute quantities of highest harmonic frequency—esthetic energy—he delicately needled every mental mass within each executive’s personal universe which contained recordings of events within the Games Organization, directly energized or not, until each mass separated slightly, like a blooming flower, into its constituent pictures. [Esthetic energy is the “glue” by which mental pictures having mass, or enmassed pictures, cohere into aggregates, or mental masses, and the agency by which enmassed pictures are selected into masses according to significance, termed esthetic classification , analogous to DNA in a meat body. Conversely, only esthetic energy can explode a mass. A mental mass, as everyone now knows, occludes its pictures, and when it is automatically energized by the stimulus/response mind, basically because of harmful actions by the being in a significantly similar area, the significance of the mass is enforced upon the being, creating all his irrationality. P.T.] He viewed the pictures and nailed significant incidents for time, place, form, and event.

At no time during or after an examination did any executive have even an unformed awareness that he had been examined. The quantities of energy utilized were too infinitesimal, besides being of a type abundant in a mind; and the investigator was consummately skillful.

Garrett had chosen the latest, fastest, and most cautiously used investigatory procedure: direct examination of stimulus/response minds. The s/r mind, different in kind from the analytical mind, is particularly accommodating in searching for contrasurvival situations: it enmasses only unconfronted scenes; and only unconfronted scenes can cause trouble.

Thus Garrett was justified in expecting to locate the source of the trouble quickly. Anything unconfronted enough to cause stats to drop everywhere should be as obvious as a sinking ship.

He was disappointed.

There was the usual incompetence, but no gross incompetents; there were the usual rare succumb intentions, but no outright suppressors. Even the GO’s products, its games, were apparently survival—with two exceptions, possibly three.

One of the space-war games was as aberrated as hell itself, and one creation game was simply incomplete. Garrett would rectify these, but they were not what he was looking for. There was also one picture in one mind of a graph of the stats for a Game P-U. That was odd—but, no, not important, just one picture. He would have to examine the rest of the crew.

If Garrett had known then that the solution to his vital mission lay in that one picture, he could have saved over ten billion beings. For that picture indicated a game that made probable a hitherto impossible, even inconceivable occurrence: the death of spiritual beings.

Before examining the rest of the crew, Garrett decided to act on the data he had. It was midevening at GO headquarters. He intended himself just outside the limits of the org, mocked up his energy pattern, and extended his space out to the quartermaster.

A kilometer above the GO, a solitary being felt another presence, and then perceived an immensely powerful, high-waveband being.

“Yes, sir. Identity, please,” the thought connected.

“Fleet Admiral Garrett, quartermaster, here to confer with Admiral Howard.”

“Yes, sir!” The being disappeared and a millisecond later reappeared. “I’ll inform him that you’re here, sir,” he stated, and disappeared again. It was not every day that the Fleet Admiral visited GO headquarters.

Three seconds later, the Admiral appeared. He had met with Garrett frequently at Flag, and recognized his energy pattern.

“You caught us by surprise, sir,” Howard greeted his superior. “It’s been over five hundred years. But you can have the Chief’s office, which is ready as always.”

“Thanks, John, but I won’t be that long; just want to take up a few things with you. Can we meet in your office?”

“Yes, sir. Right now.”

The two beings located themselves in the Admiral’s executive suite. Howard’s body was already there. It was a rugged thirty-year-old Homo novus, which is Homo sapiens in every detail except for the energized mechanism, the trap, which pins a being inside a Homo sap body.

Garrett could tell that Howard had not been in his mahogany-paneled office when the quartermaster had announced him: the body had that spinny expression of having been just mocked up. It was recovering somewhat by soaking up the sunlight that radiated from the ceiling.

Even though this was a Level Ten org, bodies, desks, papers, and so on were still used—as they were on Flag Base. The policy was to use as much objective universe material as was necessary to establish identification, location, and, in general, order. Besides, bodies were fun now.

After checking to make sure that no other beings contained or were contained within their space, Garrett explained his visit.

“Formally I’m on a mission, John, the reasons for which are irrelevant at this moment. I’m in the first stage, investigation; however, I do have three orders which I suspect won’t affect much but nevertheless are needed.” Three sheets of paper appeared on the Admiral’s desk with orders neatly typed, signed, and sealed.

“I also need some data,” Garrett continued thoughtfully. “Everything you have and can collect on Game P-U in five days. I’ll be back then to get the data and give you the particulars on this mission. That’s all.”

“All right, sir,” Howard acknowledged. His body stood and saluted.

Garrett took his leave then, checking out with the quartermaster. He stopped his continual personal creation of energy and proceeded to examine the stimulus/response minds of the game creators for the same factors as the executives. And, finally, but most tediously, he examined the energized pictures and masses of the remaining one million crew members.

It should be understood that this exhaustive investigation of so large a group was no mere pleasant afternoon task. Mental pictures, especially when packed into their dark gray masses, are Augean stables to confront and control. After all, it had been mental pictures alone that had once degraded every being in the universe into the enslaved squalid hell of being bodies. S/r minds were tough stuff; only a being who had fully attained the high state of Level Ten could really competently handle the s/r minds of others.

But even more perverse was operating without creating and having energy of one’s own, without one’s unique and identifying energy pattern—an uncomfortable state for even so eminently able a being as the Fleet Admiral.

For most beings, such a state would be intolerable, a starkly incomprehensible void that would incapacitate them to the extent of extinguishing identity itself. But Garrett, along with some one thousand others of the Space Organization, handpicked for toughness and competence by the Commander in Chief himself, had been allowed to enter the still experimental Level Fifteen: freedom from the need for energy. Of those handpicked thousand, however, only a dozen could still, without their own energy, handle the murderously tough mental masses of others effectively enough to escape detection. Another’s mental masses were horrendous to manipulate even openly and having energy; without these, the difficulty multiplied a thousandfold.

Only by authorization of the Commander in Chief, an authorization rarely given or ordered, could one undertake undetectable direct mental examinations of others. And only one being—Roderick Garrett—was now authorized, by reason of competence and ethics, to conduct such examinations at will whenever the circumstances warranted it.