Bryce Walton

If secrecy can be carried to the brink
of madness, what can happen when imprisonment
and time are added to super secrecy?

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Worlds of If Science Fiction, December 1957.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

We, Sam Lewis thought as he lay in the dark trying to sober up, are the living dead.

It was a death without honor. It was a death of dusty, sterile stupidity. It was wretched, shameful, a human waste, and far too ridiculous a business to bear any longer.

The hell with the war. The hell with the government. The hell with Secret Project X, Y, Z, or D, or whatever infantile code letter identified the legalized tomb in which Sam and the others had been incarcerated too long.

He flung his hand around in the dark in a gesture of self-contempt. And his hand found the soft contours of a woman's breast. Her warm body moved, sighed beside him as he turned his head and stared at the dim outline of Professor Betty Seton's oval face, soft and unharried in sleep. Unharried, and unmarried, he thought.

Good God. He detached his hand, slipped out of bed and stood in the middle of the floor, found his nylon coverall and sandals, dressed silently, and opened the door to get out of Betty's apartment, but fast.

He glanced back, his face hot with bitterness and his mouth twisting with disgust. She moved slightly, and he knew she was awake and looking at him.

"Darling," she said thickly, "don't go."

She was awake but still drifting in the euphoria of Vat 69.

He felt both sad and very mean. Then he shut the door behind him, ran out into the desert night. The line of camouflaged barracks on one side, the grounds including the lab buildings, all loomed up darkly under the starlight. He took a deep breath.

Now, he asked himself, have you the guts to get out, tell them off, make the gesture? It won't do any good. Nobody else will care or understand. They're too numb and resigned. You'll never get past the fence. The Guards will haul you in to the Wards and work you over. They'll work over what's left until what's left won't be worth carrying over to the incinerator with the other garbage in the morning. You'll be brainwashed and cleared until you're on mental rock bottom and won't even know what direction up is, and you won't give a damn.

But don't you have the guts even to make the gesture, just for the sake of what's left of your integrity, before they dim down your futile brain cells to a faint glow of final and perpetual mediocrity?

Betty and he had clung to some integrity, had made a point of not getting too intimate, a kind of challenge, a hold-out against the decadence of the Project. What was left now of any self-respect?

A security Guard with his white helmet and his white leather harness and his stungun, sauntered by and Lewis ducked into the shadows beside the barracks. His heart skipped several thumps as the Guard paused, looked at the entrance to Betty's apartment. Maybe someone had reported his liaison with Betty.

Beautiful and desirable as she was, and as much as he wanted to marry her, he had not been able to marry Betty Seton. If the war ever ended, if the security curtain was ever lifted, if they were ever let out of compulsive Government employment, then they would get married. That was what they had kept telling one another during quick secret meetings.

If, if, if——

Somewhere along the trail of this last alcoholic binge, one or both of them had abandoned what they had both considered an important tradition. It wasn't much, but they had clung to it against temptation, knowing that once they gave in, it wasn't much further to the bottom of skidhill.

Betty Seton had been a world famous physicist. Sam Lewis had been a top-rate atomics engineer. And what are we now, he thought, watching the Guard, except just a couple of alky bums looking for a few extra kicks to keep us from admitting we're dead?

A request for a marriage license had never been answered. Betty Seton did not have "Q" clearance for some reason. Sam had full clearance and worked in The Pit, the highest "Q" security section in the Project. And never the twain could meet. If their little tryst was discovered, Betty Seton would be taken to the mental wards and 'cleared', a polite term for having any security info you might have picked up cleaned out of your brain along with a great many other characteristics that made you a distinct personality. It was just one of those necessary evils. It had to be done. For security. Psychological murder in the name of Security.

The Guard walked on and disappeared around the corner of the end barracks building.

Lewis started walking aimlessly in the dark, up and down in front of the barracks, past the blacked out windows and doors and the shadowy hulks of the lab buildings, and beyond that the camouflaged entrances to other subterranean labs, the synthetic food plants, the stores, and supplies. The Project was self-sustaining; in complete, secure and sterile isolation from the world, from all of humanity.

He headed for Professor Melvin Lanier's apartment. Tonight the big party was at Lanier's. There was a drunken brawl going on all the time at someone's apartment. There was nothing else to do.

Liquor, tranquillizing drugs, wife-swapping, dope addiction, dream-pills, sleeping tablets, and that was it. That was what the Project had come to. Experimental work at the Project had wobbled to a dead end.

Only the pathetic and meaningless motions remained.

Still, he thought, as he walked in through the open door of Lanier's apartment, there is a war on. H-bombs and A-bombs outlawed, but anything less than that was sporting.

He wanted to do what he could, but he was squelched; just as everyone else here was smothered and rendered useless by regulations and a Government of complete and absolute secrecy carried to its ultimate stupid denominator in the hands of political and military incompetents.

Still, there is a war on, he thought again as he walked into the big living room filled with artificial light and even more artificial laughter. Was it possible to do something, just some little thing, to shake loose this caged brain?

A few more drinks, he thought, will help me reach another completely indecisive decision.

In another two hours he would have to report back to the Pit. No reason for it now. It was just his job, his patriotic duty. Progress in nuclear developments and reactor technology in the Pit had ground to a dismal halt for him over seven months ago.

Yes, no doubt about it, he needed a few more shots to make palatable for a while longer his standing membership in the walking dead.

Through shadows in the garden, shapes wavered about drunkenly to the throb of hi-fi. Lewis went to the robotic barkeep and started drinking. This time, however, he didn't feel any effects. He stood looking around, ashamed, made sicker by what he saw: some of the world's finest minds, top scientists, reduced to shallow burbling buffoons.

Dave Nemerov, Nobel Prize Winner in physics, weaved up to Sam and looked at him out of bleary eyes. "Hi, Sammy. All full of gloom again, boy?"

Nemerov, a chubby little man dressed in shorts and nothing else, frowned with drunken exaggeration. "Easy does it, Sammy. You might find the security boys giving you a lobotomy rap."

A drop of sweat ran down the side of Lewis' high-boned cheek.

"Well, what's the great physicist been doing for his country?" Lewis asked. He knew that Nemerov hadn't even been in his lab for over a month. He even remembered when Nemerov had griped about the shortage of technically trained personnel, the policy of secrecy that clouded, divided and obstructed his work, hampered his research until it finally was no longer worth the struggle. His story was the story of everyone in the Project. He couldn't get information from other departments and projects, because of secrecy. They were all cut off from one another. No information was ever released from the restricted list. Most important documents were secret, and had remained out of reach.

The only declassified documents available in the project were grade-school stuff that everybody had known twenty years ago.

For an instant, Nemerov appeared almost sober, and completely saddened.

"I've forgotten what I was working on," Nemerov said.

"Have another drink then," Lewis said, "and you'll forget that you've forgotten."

They clinked glasses. "Smile, Sammy," Nemerov said. "It can't last forever. We'll soon get the word. The war will be over."

"What war?" Lewis whispered.

"Ssshhh, Sammy, for God's sake!" Nemerov moistened his lips and looked around, but there weren't any Guards at the party. There never were. The Guards had a barracks of their own in the Commander's private sector. They never talked to civilians. They never attended parties. They kept strictly to themselves. So did the Commander. For almost a year now, as far as Lewis knew, no civilian in the Project had seen the Commander. His reports were issued daily. Occasionally his voice was heard on the intercom.

"Wonder who is winning the war out there?" Lewis said, to no one in particular. He thought of Betty. Some whiskey spilled from the shot glass.

"I wish you would shut up," Nemerov said hoarsely.

It still seemed incredible to Lewis, that the military psychologists had decided among themselves that, for the sake of security, all intercommunication between the Project and the outside was to be cut off. No news, no television, no radio, no nothing. For security, and also on the theory that scientists could work better completely cloistered up like medieval monks. Not even a phone-call. Absolute, one-hundred percent isolation. Legalized catatonia.

They had choked this Project to death, and he wondered how many others were dead, and where they were. He didn't know where this Project was, except that it was on the desert. He didn't even know for sure what desert. He had been drugged when he was brought here two years ago, for security you know.

Nemerov never mentioned his wife and kids any more. From the behavior of Nemerov and most of the others, you would think the outside no longer existed.

Cardoza, the cybernetic genius, came up, his eyes glazed with the effects of some new narcotic that Oliver Dutton, world renowned biochemist, had cooked up for want of anything better to do.

The wives of two other scientists hung on Cardoza's arms, their bodies mostly bare, their eyes dulled as they wandered about the room like radar for the promise of some emotional oasis in the wasteland.

"How you fellas like my robotic barkeep?" Cardoza yelled.

"It pours a nice glass of whiskey," Lewis said.

"This is only the beginning," Cardoza said, his mouth glistening and wet under his hopped-up eyes. "That barkeep's a perfect servant and can never make a mistake. Spent the last year building it. It can mix anything."

"It'll practically win the war for us," Lewis said. Nemerov wiped at his sweating face. The two straying wives stared dumbly.

Cardoza winced. "Don't be cutting, my friend," he said to Lewis. His mouth turned down at the corners. "I tried, just as the rest of us tried. To go on and develop what I was sent here to develop, I need "Q" clearance. I can't get it because when the war started I wasn't a citizen. Is that clear, Lewis?"

"Forget it," Lewis said.

"That's what I intend to keep on doing," Cardoza said. "Meanwhile, my little robotic barkeep is only the beginning. I'm working on other even more ingenious automata. One will do card tricks. Another is a tight-wire artist. And one can even tell fortunes."

"How about one that can drag humans out of a hat?" Lewis asked.

"Come on, ladies," Cardoza said as he moved away. "Let's go play Dr. McWilliams' new Q-X game."

"Ohhh," one of the wives said, giggling. "Something new?"

"Yeah," Lewis said to her, thinking of the fact that at one time, long ago and far away, McWilliams had been working on a theory supposed to have been aimed far beyond Einstein. "McWilliams' new mathmatical game. This one's also played in the dark. Mixed couples of course. Q-X, the big mathmatical discovery of the age. People get lost in pairs and later in the dark they add up to bigger numbers."

Lewis shoved off from the bar, and walked toward the far corner of the garden where he saw old Shelby Stenger, the great atomics expert, flat on his belly, lying in the moonlight with fountain water misting his face, snoring like a tired old dog, with a little thread of drool hanging out of the corner of his mouth.

Mac Brogarth, nuclear physicist, came waltzing grotesquely across the garden and toppled backward into the pool under the fountain and lay there too weak even to raise his head out of the water. He would have drowned if Lewis hadn't lifted it out for him.

The old man in Lewis' arms looked up at Lewis with a passing light of tragic sobriety.

"Sam Lewis," he said. "That's you, isn't it, Sam? I had a cabin up near Lake Michigan and I was going up there to finish important work. I'll never get back there, Sam. I know now that I never will. I never will."

Lewis stood up. Without seeing or hearing anyone, he walked out into the dry coolness of the starlit desert night.

He walked between the barracks, past the messhall toward the labs, turned down the length of that ominous looking hulk which concealed The Pit, and the Monster with which Lewis had worked until there was no use working any more. Beyond that, he saw the electric fence, and the white helmeted Guards standing at rigid attention.

He walked over there, his shoes crunching on sand and gravel, and looked into the Guard's face. It was a mask, expressionless, and rigid. Its eyes were hardly human, Lewis thought. It had many of the characteristics of Cardoza's robotic barkeep.

Lewis knew that the security Guards had been worked over in the Wards until there was no possibility of their being security risks. Any classified thought, even if it penetrated one side of their heads, quickly drained through the sieved brain and out the other side.

"Carry on, soldier," Lewis said. The Guard didn't seem to hear.

Lewis walked back toward the lab building covering The Pit.

The conflict was like a knife slicing him apart inside. What if he made a grandstand gesture now? It would be much worse perhaps than merely being sent into the Wards for a little mental working over. He would be found guilty of sabotage, tried by the Commander's kangaroo court martial, found guilty of being a traitor to his country, a foreign agent probably. He would be placed inside a gas chamber on a stool and a little gas pellet would be dropped on his lap.

And anyway, aside from his own punishment, would it be morally right? Maybe I'm the one who is crazy, he thought. Maybe it's hell out there, reduced to God knew what kind of social chaos. Maybe we're about to win. Maybe we're about to lose. Maybe as bad as it is, it's the best one could expect during the greatest crisis.

He went inside, and took the elevator down one floor into the lead-lined Pit.

He walked up to the control panel and looked through the thick layers of shielding transparent teflo-nite into the Pit, watching the Monster indirectly through the big lenticular screen disc above the control panel.

The Monster stood in the lead-lined Pit, inactive, as it had been inactive for months. And even before that, during the months when Lewis was learning to control the Monster until it seemed an extension of his own nervous system, its work had become useless, due to unobtainable documents and personnel, not to mention lack of communication with other research centers.

The Monster was part of a general plan to compensate for the out-lawing of A- and H-bombs. The most deadly conceivable compromise. The Pit was a deadly sea of radioactivity in which only a mechanical robot monster could work. Outside the Pit, Lewis directed the Monster whose duty was the construction of drone planes. A few had been built, but they weren't quite effective, and now it was impossible to go on with the experimentation. The parts were all there. Everything was there except certain vital classified documents that could not be cleared into this particular Project.

Thousands of drone planes were to have been built, and perhaps were being built in some other Project, but not in this one. Thousands of drone planes with raw, un-shielded atomic engines, light and inordinately powerful with an indefinite cruising range, remote controlled, free of fallible human agency, loaded with bacteriological bombs, the terrible gas known as the G-agent, and in addition, loaded 'spray' tanks that would spew deadly gamma rays and neutrons over limitless areas of atmosphere.

Lewis moved his hands over the sensitive controls, and through the lenticular disc, watched The Monster respond with the delicate gestures of a gigantic violinist. The Monster was a robot, ten times bigger than Cardoza's barkeep, and when Lewis moved his hands, the Monster moved its own huge mandibles as its electro-magnum, colloid brain, picked up Lewis' mental directions.

The Monster was immune to radiation, and bacteriological horrors. It swam in death as unconcerned as a lovely lady wallowed in a pink bubble-bath.

Lewis sat in the twilight of the Pit making the monster move about in its futile rounds. Lewis loved the Monster and felt the wasteful tragedy of its magnificent potential. A wonder of the world, a reaffirmation of man's imagination and his powers of reason, the Monster was built for what might seem horribly destructive ends, but its potential was for limitless achievement of the best and most far-reaching in man. Yet here it was, doing nothing at all. Standing in a sea of radioactive poison, a gigantic symbol of man's stupidity to man.

Could a man know the truth and continue to deny it, and still remain sane? You could go on living that way. You could take happy pills, sleeping pills, dream-pills and stay lushed-up on government liquor. But sooner or later you would have to face the horrible empty waste. After that loomed the face of madness.

And yet, Lewis thought, how do I know that I know the truth? I'm cut off. No info, no communication. For all I know we're the only people left in the world. An oasis of secrecy surrounded by desert.

Lewis walked back up to the first floor, and out into the night, heading for Betty Seton's apartment. Maybe she was sober enough now to talk this thing over. The hell with security regulations. Just the same, he walked along in the shadow next to the building to avoid any eye-witness of his proposed rendezvous.

Science, he thought, was really another name for freedom. It couldn't function without freedom of thought, freedom of inquiry. You couldn't mix it up with security and cut off communication, because communication is the essence of science. An idea is universal, and how can you go on thinking when you're no longer a part of the world?

Whatever the decision arrived at in Lewis' own heart might otherwise have been, he was never to know. His decision was made for him by an hysterical laugh, the sound of scuffling on boards, and another laugh. He came around the corner of the barracks and saw the Guard manhandling Betty Seton down the steps of her apartment building.

The guard was big, built like a wedge, with a flat bulldog face bunched up under his white helmet. The Guard's brain had been carefully honed down to an efficient, completely unintelligent but precise fighting machine level. He neither knew nor cared why he did anything. But he was handicapped by having Betty Seton in one hand. He was whirling, raising his stungun with the other hand, when Lewis hit him.

Lewis drove in with his weight behind first a solid long blow that broke a rigid wall of muscle in the Guard's belly, turned it to soft clay. Betty fell free and lay laughing on the gravel. Her face was a white smear in the starlight.

Lewis brought his knee up into the Guard's face as he bent over, sank another one into the soft belly, kicked the Guard in the crotch, stamped on his booted foot, came back and ran forward again, driving his shoulder again into the Guard's belly. The Guard's feet hit the bottom step, he smashed into the boards, and his helmet flew off as his head thudded on the stanchion.

The Guard just shook his shaven head, started to get up heavily, reaching again for his stungun, his face expressionless. Lewis heard footsteps pounding around the corner, slashing on gravel.

More Guards. Dehumanized and insensitive, they were almost as invulnerable as so many robots—

He turned, ran past Betty Seton, stilly lying there with only a thin housecoat around her, not laughing now, but looking suddenly sober and horrified.

"Betty!"

She stared up at him. A block away he could hear the Guards coming and he kept on running. He yelled back.

"Get a jeep. Get Brogarth, Cardoza, Nemerov, anybody. We're breaking out of here."

"Where?" he heard her yelling after him as he went around the corner.

He glanced back around the corner and saw the herd of mechanized human beings slogging toward him.

"Near the gate," Lewis said.

He ran toward the Pit.

He ran down the steps, into the console room and looked into the lenticular disc where a ghostly blue radiance shadowed the walls.

"We're going to do ourselves some good after all, Monster," Lewis said tightly.

He gripped the controls and sent the Monster its last set of orders. It hurled tons of drone plane motors into the shielding walls, and its huge mandibles ripped open the shielding and peeled it away like a food canister. Smoke began to boil. Flames crackled in blue arcs. Steel beams crumbled like wax. Globs of concrete fell in a cloud of dust swirling debris.

Lewis grabbed the intercom, dialed the Commander's office. No answer. He got through the exchange and got the Commander's apartment. He heard a drunken whine and behind that the drunken depraved laughter of officers and their wives and the sound of bongo drums.

"The Monster's breaking out of the Pit," Lewis said. "It's shooting out more than enough deadly radioactivity to kill all of you if you don't get the hell out and get out fast."

"What, what's that?"

"If you think I'm having a nightmare," Lewis continued, "take a look out the window, Commander."

Lewis dropped the intercom. The Monster could go quite a distance before it stopped, its remote control radius probably not exceeding three miles.

The Monster went out of the Pit, taking walls and flooring with it. The entire structure trembled, beams fell, ceilings crumbled, and the Monster went through the smoking debris like a juggernaut.

A Guard lay crushed under a steel beam. Lewis took the stungun from his hand and went up the debris choked stairs. Outside, he saw figures streaming out into the starlight, and the lab buildings bursting into flames. He also saw the Monster, glowing with bluish radiance, moving straight ahead toward the electric fence.

The siren was screaming and howling. Shadows seemed to be streaming toward air-raid shelters. That was all right. The security curtain was torn down. They could come back up later into the light and wonder what had happened and find out where they really were.

Guards were running about like ugly toys out of control, looking, listening for commands.

Lewis ran through thickening smoke, and saw the jeep by the South Gate. Betty was in it, together with Brogarth and Nemerov.

"Hurry, hurry, run," he heard Betty scream.

The Guard was cutting at an angle toward Lewis, between him and the jeep. Beyond the Guard was a gaping hole in the fence and on the other side of that he could see the gigantic flickering nimbus of the Monster still walking toward the East.

Lewis kept running. Five feet away he brought up the stungun and shot the Guard in the face. Lewis jumped under the wheel of the jeep, slammed it into gear and they headed down the concrete strip and straight for the gap in the fence.

"What happened to Cardoza?" Lewis asked.

Brogarth said from the back seat, "He said he didn't want to be labeled a security risk and be executed for sabotage."

Nemerov was drunk and he kept mumbling incoherently, and sometimes giving out with bits and pieces of half remembered poetry.

About a mile out in the sand and next to a wall of sandstone, they waited for any signs of pursuit. There were none. They rested there until morning, only an hour and a half away, and when they looked back toward the location of the Project, they could see nothing that looked any different from sand, brush, rocks and red sandstone.

"Perfect camouflage," Nemerov said as the jeep started up again. "You could walk within fifty feet of that fence and never know there was any Project there."

Later a hot wind came up and they ran into the Monster lying dead on its face with dust devils dancing over it.

An old prospector leading a burro came around the wall of sandstone and looked at the Monster, then at the occupants of the jeep.

"Howdy, folks," he said.

"Hello," Lewis said. "We're lost. Where are we and which way do we go to get to civilization?"

"What's that thing?" the prospector asked, looking at the Monster.

"A scientific experiment that was never finished," Lewis said.

"What I figured," the prospector said. "You scientists out here always up to something." He pointed to the right. "Keep going that way and you'll find a narrow road. Follow it and you'll hit the middle of the valley and a highway right into the Chocolate Mountains."

Lewis knew where he was. The Chocolate Mountains walled off the rushing Colorado River from the Imperial Valley and Los Angeles farther on.

"Thanks," Lewis said.

"How's the war going these days?" Betty asked.

The prospector scratched his head and replaced his felt hat. He looked at them oddly.

"You must have been holed up in the hills a long time, Miss. There ain't been any war for two years. They started one, but the first couple of days scared everybody too much and they called the whole thing off. Where you folks been anyways, to the Moon?"

"Practically," Lewis said.

As the jeep moved away, Nemerov turned and looked back at the Monster and the old prospector who still stood there gazing at it.

"'My name,'" Nemerov said, "'is Ozymandias, King of Kings. Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair. Round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare the lone and level sands stretch far away.'"