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Title: Security
Author: Bryce Walton
Release Date: October 4, 2019 [EBook #60421]
Language: English
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SECURITY ***
Produced by Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online
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SECURITY
BY 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.'"
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