the inquisition ended sooner than i thought it would. after the awful intrusion, there isn't any farther awareness of time. after you are thoroughly invaded, after your private soul, every naked cell of your brain is peeled open, exposed to the raw glaring light, after that you no longer care. what is you has been obliterated the way a shadow is eaten by the burn of cold light.
your identity is gone. they take it. you are theirs, all of you belongs to them. you feel them pouring out your mind down to the pitiful dregs as though they are pouring cups of coffee.
the pain is a shredding, ripping, raveling horror. after that there is no feeling at all, and this is worse.
i told them everything i knew. what i couldn't tell, they tapped, tearing chunks out the way you would rip pages and chapters out of a book.
the responsible humanists, scientists, intellectuals had known what was coming. they prepared for it, and set up the plan before the last days of the egghead purge. they set up the future saboteurs by a long intricate process of psychodynamic conditioning. they did it in the universities before the schools were purged. promising students were selected, worked on.
fredricks, a psychology student, was subjected to repeated hypnotic experiments. a blind professor named o'hara did most of it. it was all there finally in fredrick's head, but then it was all suppressed and finally fredricks himself forgot that he knew. a delayed hypnotic response pattern, an analogue, is set up. later it will be triggered off by a phrase, a word, a series of words repeated at conditioned response intervals.
ten years later he was working inside, inside security itself. when circumstances were right, a blind courier was to have triggered off fredrick's suppressed knowledge allowing him to sabotage the entire department of records and scientific method. so many scientists and intellectuals had already been purged that few remained among the available personnel of security who could have repaired a simple gasoline motor without a step-by-step chart taken from the department of records.
it would have been a master coup for the underground.
but mesner had traced fredrick's identity back to drake university, back to o'hara. he had gotten suspicious, and removed fredricks from security.
the blind girl had whispered the key phrase just the same, in order that fredricks might face the ordeal of the inquisition with as much pride, strength, and courage as possible.
"only a free man, a man who fully respects himself as an individual and a human being," fredricks told his inquisitors, "only a man who has learned why he is living, can die like a man."
then they killed me.
they tried to get more out of me, but what they wanted to know, i knew nothing whatever about. i knew nothing about the underground, or the headquarters of the eggheads.
but by then i was dead, and what they did was of no importance. i was no longer me. there was no awareness of being me. i had joined dirkson and the renegade bio-chemist and all the others.
i was hopping up and down in a cage before the tevee cameras, and a reporter was talking to millions of smiling, care-free citizens and telling them how another vicious crackpot had been captured just in time to avert some terrible disaster which would have disturbed the status quo.
then i was taken away.
"are you awake now, mr. fredricks?"
i opened my eyes. i was in a clean white room lying near a barred window. an attractive nurse smiled at me. she was holding a clipboard and making notations on a report pad.
"how do you feel now, fred?" painfully, i turned and saw several ghosts standing and sitting on the other side of the bed. i could see a door behind them, partly opened onto a softly lit corridor.
there was dr. malden, a famous anthropologist whom i had last seen in a newspaper headline during the purge. and dr. marquand, nobel prize winner in electrobiology. and dr. martinson, one time head of the un research foundation. dr. rothberg, social psychologist. all dead, all purged, bipped and confined years ago. all ghosts.
only they were there. and they were alive, and they seemed glad to see me. all i knew was that i was alive again. i was aware of being me. and somehow i knew that these forgotten names were also alive again.
rothberg handed me a cigarette and the nurse lit it for me. i remembered that once i had liked cigarettes.
"so what's happened," i said. my voice was weak. my insides felt as though they were filled with grinding pieces of broken razor blades.
"you're in zany-ward no. 104," dr. rothberg said.
"i don't believe i quite understand," i said carefully.
"you will," dr. rothberg said. "let's just say for a starter that when a man is bipped and brought here, we try to put him back together again. it's a long painful process. sometimes he's not quite the same, but we've done pretty good work. we rebuild burned-out circuits. we have to know exactly what you were before you were bipped, and we try to duplicate the pattern. regeneration is slow and rough. you'll be all right."
they shook hands with me and smiled down at me and went out. the pretty nurse gave me a pill and i lay back and thought about it. it was logical enough, and i started to laugh. during the months after that while the slow process of re-learning and regeneration continued, i learned more about the zany-wards. serious as it was, and as much as there was yet to be done, it was always amusing.
as eggheads were apprehended and confined, they were rehabilitated, put back together again, in a way you could say fissioned. the eggheads are the inmates. they run the zany-wards which are used also as bases of operation in a continuing attempt to disrupt the era of normalcy. great scientific labs are concealed underground.
when security inspection committees appear on the scene, we all put on our acts. we dance, make faces, act like monkeys and giggle.
doctor rothberg told me yesterday that if our sabotage work doesn't soon cause people to rebel against the era of normalcy, it won't be long before we'll be the only sane people left in the world.
