Martian Time-Slip Page 8

  Its advantage over a human teacher lay in its capacity to deal with each child individually. It tutored, rather than merely teaching. A teaching machine could handle up to a thousand pupils and yet never confuse one with the next; with each child its responses altered so that it became a subtly different entity. Mechanical, yes--but almost infinitely complex. The teaching machines demonstrated a fact that Jack Bohlen was well aware of: there was an astonishing depth to the so-called “artificial.”

  And yet he felt repelled by the teaching machines. For the entire Public School was geared to a task which went contrary to his grain: the school was there not to inform or educate, but to mold, and along severely limited lines. It was the link to their inherited culture, and it peddled that culture, in its entirety, to the young. It bent its pupils to it; perpetuation of the culture was the goal, and any special quirks in the children which might lead them in another direction had to be ironed out.

  It was a battle, Jack realized, between the composite psyche of the school and the individual psyches of the children, and the former held all the key cards. A child who did not properly respond was assumed to be autistic--that is, oriented according to a subjective factor that took precedence over his sense of objective reality. And that child wound up by being expelled from the school; he went, after that, to another sort of school entirely, one designed to rehabilitate him: he went to Camp Ben-Gurion. He could not be taught; he could only be dealt with as ill.

  Autism, Jack reflected, as he unscrewed the back of the Angry Janitor, had become a self-serving concept for the authorities who governed Mars. It replaced the older term “psychopath,” which in its time had replaced “moral imbecile,” which had replaced “criminally insane.” And at Camp B-G, the child had a human teacher, or rather therapist.

  Ever since his own son David had entered the Public School, Jack had waited to hear the bad news, that the boy could not be graded along the scale of achievement by which the teaching machines classified their pupils. However, David had responded heartily to the teaching machines, had in fact scored very high. The boy liked most of his Teachers and came home raving about them; he got along fine with even the most severe of them, and by now it was obvious that he had no problems--he was not autistic, and he would never see the inside of Camp B-G. But this had not made Jack feel better. Nothing, Silvia had pointed out, would make him feel better. Only the two possibilities lay open, the Public School and Camp B-G, and Jack distrusted both. And why was that? He did not know.

  Perhaps, he had once conjectured, it was because there really was such a condition as autism. It was a childhood form of schizophrenia, which a lot of people had; schizophrenia was a major illness which touched sooner or later almost every family. It meant, simply, a person who could not live out the drives implanted in him by his society. The reality which the schizophrenic fell away from--or never incorporated in the first place--was the reality of interpersonal living, of life in a given culture with given values; it was not biological life, or any form of inherited life, but life which was learned. It had to be picked up bit by bit from those around one, parents and teachers, authority figures in general . . . from everyone a person came in contact with during his formative years.

  The Public School, then, was right to eject a child who did not learn. Because what the child was learning was not merely facts or the basis of a money-making or even useful career. It went much deeper. The child learned that certain things in the culture around him were worth preserving at any cost. His values were fused with some objective human enterprise. And so he himself became a part of the tradition handed down to him; he maintained his heritage during his lifetime and even improved on it. He cared. True autism, Jack had decided, was in the last analysis an apathy toward public endeavor; it was a private existence carried on as if the individual person were the creator of all value, rather than merely the repository of inherited values. And Jack Bohlen, for the life of him, could not accept the Public School with its teaching machines as the sole arbiter of what was and what wasn’t of value. For the values of a society were in ceaseless flux, and the Public School was an attempt to stabilize those values, to jell them at a fixed point--to embalm them.

  The Public School, he had long ago decided, was neurotic. It wanted a world in which nothing new came about, in which there were no surprises. And that was the world of the compulsive-obsessive neurotic; it was not a healthy world at all.

  Once, a couple of years ago, he had told his wife his theory. Silvia had listened with a reasonable amount of attention and then she had said, “But you don’t see the point, Jack. Try to understand. There are things so much worse than neurosis.” Her voice had been low and firm, and he had listened. “We’re just beginning to find them out. You know what they are. You’ve gone through them.”

  And he had nodded, because he did know what she meant. He himself had had a psychotic interlude, in his early twenties. It was common. It was natural, And, he had to admit, it was horrible. It made the fixed, rigid, compulsive-neurotic Public School seem a reference point by which one could gratefully steer one’s course back to mankind and shared reality. It made him comprehend why a neurosis was a deliberate artifact, deliberately constructed by the ailing individual or by a society in crisis. It was an invention arising from necessity.

  “Don’t knock neurosis,” Silvia had said to him and he understood. Neurosis was a deliberate stopping, a freezing somewhere along the path of life. Because beyond lay--.

  Every schizophrenic knew what lay there. And every exschizophrenic, Jack thought, as he remembered his own episode.

  The two men across the room from him gazed at him queerly. What had he said? Herbert Hoover was a much better head of the FBI than Carrington will ever be. “I know I’m right,” he added. “I’ll lay you odds.” His mind seemed fuzzy, and he sipped at his beer. Everything had become heavy, his arm, and the glass itself; it was easier to look down rather than up. . . . He studied the match folder on the coffee table.

  “You don’t mean Herbert Hoover,” Lou Notting said. “You mean J. Edgar--“

  Christ! Jack thought in dismay. Yes, he had said Herbert Hoover, and until they had pointed it out it seemed O.K. What’s the matter with me? he wondered. I feel like I’m half asleep. And yet he had gone to bed at ten the night before, had slept almost twelve hours. “Excuse me,” he said. “Of course I mean . . .” He felt his tongue stumble. With care he said, “J. Edgar Hoover.” But his voice sounded blurred and slowed down, like a turntable losing its momentum. And now it was almost impossible for him to raise his head; he was falling asleep where he sat, there in Notting’s living room, and yet his eyes weren’t closing--he found when he tried that he couldn’t close them. His attention had become riveted on the match folder. Close cover before striking, he read. Can you draw this horse? First art lesson free, no obligation. Turn over for free enrollment blank. Unblinking, he stared on and on, while Lou Notting and Fred Clarke argued about abstract ideas such as the curtailment of liberties, the democratic process . . . he heard all the words perfectly clearly, and he did not mind listening. But he felt no desire to argue, even though he knew they both were wrong. He let them argue on; it was easier. It simply happened. And he let it happen.

  “Jack’s not with us tonight,” Clarke was saying. With a start, Jack Bohlen realized they had turned their attention on him; he had to do or say something, now.

  “Sure I am,” he said, and it cost him terrific effort; it was like rising up out of the sea. “Go on, I’m listening.”

  “God, you’re like a dummy,” Notting said. “Go home and go to bed, for chrissakes.”

  Entering the living room, Lou’s wife Phyllis said, “You’ll never get to Mars in the state you’re in now, Jack.” She turned up the hi-fl; it was a progressive jazz group, vibes and double bass, or perhaps it was an electronic instrument playing. Blonde, pert Phyllis seated herself on the couch near him and studied him. “Jack, are you sore at us? I mean, you’re so withdrawn.
”

  “It’s just one of his moods,” Notting said. “When we were in the service he used to get them, especially on Saturday night. Morose and silent, brooding. What are you brooding about right now, Jack?”

  The question seemed odd to him; he was not brooding about anything, his mind was empty. The match folder still filled up his range of perception. Nevertheless, it was necessary that he give them an account of what he was brooding over; they all expected it, so, dutifully, he made up a topic. “The air,” he said. “On Mars. How long will it take me to adjust? Varies, among different people.” A yawn, which never came out, had lodged in his chest, diffusing throughout his lungs and windpipe. It left his mouth hanging partly open; with an effort he managed to close his jaws. “Guess I better go on,” he said. “Hit the sack.” With the use of all his strength he managed to get to his feet.

  “At nine o’clock?” Fred Clarke yelled.

  Later, as he walked home to his own apartment, along the cool dark streets of Oakland, he felt fine. He wondered what had been wrong back there at Notting’s. Maybe bad air or the ventilation.

  But something was wrong.

  Mars, he thought. He had cut the ties, in particular his job, had sold his Plymouth, given notice to the official who was his landlord. And it had taken him a year to get the apartment; the building was owned by the nonprofit West Coast Co-op, an enormous structure partly underground, with thousands of units, its own supermarket, laundries, child-care center, clinic, even its own psychiatrist, down below in the arcade of shops beneath the street level. There was an FM radio station on the top floor which broadcast classical music chosen by the building residents, and in the center of the building could be found a theater and meeting hall. This was the newest of the huge cooperative apartment buildings--and he had given it all up, suddenly. One day he had been in the building’s bookstore, waiting in line to buy a book, and the idea came to him.

  After he had given notice he had wandered along the corridors of the co-op arcade. When he came to the bulletin board with its tacked-up notices, he had halted automatically to read them. Children scampered past him, on their way to the playground behind the building. One notice, large and printed, attracted his attention.

  HELP SPREAD THE CO-OP MOVEMENT TO NEWLY COLONIZED

  AREAS. EMIGRATION PREPARED BY THE CO-OP BOARD IN

  SACRAMENTO IN ANSWER TO BIG BUSINESS AND BIG LABOR UNION

  EXPLOITATION OF MINERAL-RICH AREAS OF MARS. SIGN UP NOW!

  It read much like all the co-Op notices, and yet--why not? A lot of young people were going. And what was left for him on Earth? He had given up his co-op apartment, but he was still a member; he still had his share of stock and his number.

  Later on, when he had signed up and was in the process of being given his physical and his shots, the sequence had blurred in his mind; he remembered the decision to go to Mars as coming first, and then the giving up of his job and apartment. It seemed more rational that way, and he told that story to his friends. But it simply wasn’t true. What was true? For almost two months he had wandered about, confused and despairing, not certain of anything except that on November 14, his group, two hundred co-op members, would leave for Mars, and then everything would be changed; the confusion would lift and he would see clearly, as he had once at some vague period in the past. He knew that: once, he had been able to establish the order of things in space and time; now, for reasons unknown to him, both space and time had shifted so that he could not find his bearings in either one.

  His life had no purpose. For fourteen months he had lived with one massive goal: to acquire an apartment in the huge new co-op building, and then, when he had gotten it, there was nothing. The future had ceased to exist. He listened to the Bach suites which he requested; he bought food at the supermarket and browsed in the building bookstore . . . but what for? he asked himself. Who am I? And at his job, his ability faded away. That was the first indication, and in some ways the most ominous of all; that was what had first frightened him.

  It began with a weird incident which he was never able fully to account for. Apparently, part of it had been pure hallucination. But which part? It had been dreamlike, and he had had a moment of overwhelming panic, the desire to run, to get out at any cost.

  His job was with an electronics firm in Redwood City, south of San Francisco; he operated a machine which maintained quality control along the assembly line. It was his responsibility to see that his machine did not deviate from its concept of acceptable tolerances in a single component: a liquidhelium battery no larger than a match-head. One day he was summoned to the personnel manager’s office, unexpectedly; he did not know why they wanted him, and as he took the elevator up he was quite nervous. Later, he remembered that; he was unusually nervous.

  “Come in, Mr. Bohlen.” The personnel manager, a finelooking man with curly gray hair--perhaps a fashion wig-- welcomed him into his office. “This won’t take but a moment.” He eyed Jack keenly. “Mr. Bohlen, why aren’t you cashing your paychecks?”

  There was silence.

  “Aren’t I?” Jack said. His heart thudded ponderously, making his body shake. He felt unsteady and tired. I thought I was, he said to himself.

  “You could stand a new suit,” the personnel manager said, “and you need a haircut. Of course, it’s your business.”

  Putting his hand to his scalp, Jack felt about, puzzled; did he need a haircut? Hadn’t he just had one last week? Or maybe it was longer ago than that. He said, “Thanks.” He nodded. “O.K., I will. What you just said.”

  And then the hallucination, if it was that, happened. He saw the personnel manager in a new light. The man was dead.

  He saw, through the man’s skin, his skeleton. It had been wired together, the bones connected with fine copper wire. The organs, which had withered away, were replaced by artificial components, kidney, heart, lungs--everything was made of plastic and stainless steel, all working in unison but entirely without authentic life. The man’s voice issued from a tape, through an amplifier and speaker system.

  Possibly at some time in the past the man had been real and alive, but that was over, and the stealthy replacement had taken place, inch by inch, progressing insidiously from one organ to the next, and the entire structure was there to deceive others. To deceive him, Jack Bohlen, in fact. He was alone in this office; there was no personnel manager. No one spoke to him, and when he himself talked, no one heard; it was entirely a lifeless, mechanical room in which he stood.

  He was not sure what to do; he tried not to stare too hard at the manlike structure before him. He tried to talk calmly, naturally, about his job and even his personal problems. The structure was probing; it wanted to learn something from him. Naturally, he told it as little as possible. And all the time, as he gazed down at the carpet, he saw its pipes and valves and working parts functioning away; he could not keep from seeing.

  All he wanted to do was get away as soon as possible. He began to sweat; he was dripping with sweat and trembling, and his heart pounded louder and louder.

  “Bohlen,” the structure said, “are you sick?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Can I go back down to my bench now?” He turned and started toward the door.

  “Just a moment,” the structure said from behind him.

  That was when panic overtook him, and he ran; he pulled the door open and ran out into the hall.

  An hour or so later he found himself wandering along an unfamiliar street in Burlingame. He did not remember the intervening time and he did not know how he had gotten where he was. His legs ached. Evidently he had walked, mile after mile.

  His head was much clearer. I’m schizophrenic, he said to himself. I know it. Everyone knows the Symptoms; it’s catatonic excitement with paranoid coloring: the mental health people drill it into us, even into the school kids. I’m another one of those. That was what the personnel manager was probing.

  I need medical help.

  As Jack removed the power supply o
f the Angry Janitor and laid it on the floor, the master circuit of the school said, “You are very skillful.”

  Jack glanced up at the middle-aged female figure and thought to himself, It’s obvious why this place unnerves me. It’s like my psychotic experience of years ago. Did I, at that time, look into the future?

  There had been no schools of this kind, then. Or if there had, he had not seen them or known about them.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  What had tormented him ever since the psychotic episode with the personnel manager at Corona Corporation was this: suppose it was not a hallucination? Suppose the so-called personnel manager was as he had seen him, an artificial construct, a machine like these teaching machines?

  If that had been the case, then there was no psychosis.

  Instead of a psychosis, he had thought again and again, it was more on the order of a vision, a glimpse of absolute reality, with the façade stripped away. And it was so crushing, so radical an idea, that it could not be meshed with his ordinary views. And the mental disturbance had come out of that.

  Reaching into the exposed wiring of the Angry Janitor, Jack felt expertly with his long fingers until at last he touched what he knew to be there: a broken lead. “I think I’ve got hold of it,” he said to the master circuit of the school. Thank God, he thought, these aren’t the old-fashioned printed circuits; were that that the case, he would have to replace the unit. Repair would be impossible.

  “My understanding,” the master circuit said, “is that much effort went into the designing of the Teachers re problems of repair. We have been fortunate so far; no prolonged interruption of service has taken place. However, I believe that preventive maintenance is indicated wherever possible; therefore I would like you to inspect one additional Teacher which has as yet shown no signs of a breakdown. It is uniquely vital to the total functioning of the school.” The master circuit paused politely as Jack struggled to get the long tip of the soldering gun past the layers of wiring. “It is Kindly Dad which I want you to inspect.”