"Incommunicado" - читать интересную книгу автора (Maclean Katherine)

“Covering up something. There’s only one situation I know of that would make you try to cover.” Pierce’s voice sharpened with determination. “It must have happened. Listen, Cliff, I’m going to give this to you straight. I know the inside of your head better than you do. I know how you feel about those fluent fast-talking friends of yours at the station and on the job. You’re afraid of them—afraid they’ll find out you’re just a dope. Something has happened at Pluto Station project, and, it is still happening—something bad, and you think it is your fault, you don’t know it, but you feel guilty. You’re trying to cover up. Don’t do it. Don’t cover up!”

“Listen,” Cliff stammered, “I—”

“Shut up,” Pierce said briskly. “This is shock treatment. One level of your personality must have cracked. It would under that special stress. You had an inferiority complex a yard wide. You’re going to reintegrate fast on another level right now. File away what I said and listen for the next shock. You aren’t a dope. You’re an adjustable analogue.”

“A what?”

“An adjustable analogue. You think with kinesthetic abstractions. Other people are arithmetic computers. They think with arbitrarily related blocks of memorized audio-visual symbols. That’s why you can’t talk with them. Different systems.”

“What the devil—”

“Shut up. You’ll get it in a minute. I ought to know this. I was matched into your feelings for half an hour at a time at Pluto Station. It took me four days to figure out what happened. Your concepts aren’t visual, they are kinesthetic. You don’t handle the problems of dynamics and kinetics with arbitrary words and numbers related by some dead thinker, you use the raw direct experience that your muscles know. You think with muscle tension data. I didn’t dare follow you that far. I don’t even guess what primitive integration center you have reactivated for that kind of thinking. I can’t go down there. My muscle tension data abstracts in the forebrain. That’s where I keep my motives and my ability to identify with other people’s motives. If I borrowed your ability, I might start identifying with can openers.”

“What the—”

“Pipe down,” said Pierce, still talking rapidly. “You’re following me and you know it. You aren’t stupid but you’re conditioned against thinking. You don’t admit half you know. You’d rather kid yourself. You’d rather be a humble dope and have friends, than open your eyes and be an alien and a stranger. You’d rather sit silent at a station bull session and kick yourself for being a dope, than admit that they are word-juggling, talking nonsense. Listen, Cliff—you are not a dope. You may not be able to handle the normal symbol patterns of this culture, but you have a structured mind that’s integrated right down to your boots! You can solve this emergency yourself. So what if your personality has been conditioned against thinking? Everybody knows the standard tricks for suspending conditioning. Put in cortical control, solve the problem first, whatever it is, and then be dumb afterwards if that’s what you want!”

After a moment Cliff laughed shakily. “Shock treatment, you call it. Like being whacked over the head with a sledge hammer.”

“I think I owed you a slight shock,” Pierce said grimly. “May I go?”

“Wait a sec, aren’t you going to help?”

Pierce sounded irritable. “Help? Help what? You have more brains than I have, solve your own problems: pull yourself together, Cliff, and don’t give me any more of this raving about a whole station full of people going bats! It’s not true!” He switched off.

Cliff sat down on the nearest thing resembling a chair, and made a mental note never to antagonize psychologists. Then he began to think.



Once upon a time the New York Public Library shipped a crate of microfilm to Station A. The crate was twenty by twenty and contained the incredible sum of the world’s libraries. With the crate they shipped a librarian, one M. Reynolds to fit the films into an automatic filing system so that a reader could find any book he sought among the uncounted other books. He spent the rest of his life trying to achieve the unachievable, reduce the system of filing books to a matter of perfect logic. In darker ages he would have spent his life happily arguing the number of bodiless angels that could dance on the point of a pin.

The station people became used to seeing him puttering around, assisted by his little boy, or reading the journal of symbolic logic, or, temporarily baffled, trying to clear his mind by playing games of chess and cards, in which he beat all comers.

Once he grew excited by the fact that computers worked on a numerical base of two, and sound on the log of two. Once he grew interested in the station’s delicate system of automatic controls and began to dismantle it and change the leads. If he had made a wrong move, the station would have returned to its component elements, but no one bothered him. They remembered the chess games, and left the automatics to him. They were satisfied with the new reading desks, and after a while there was a joke that if you made a mistake they would give you a ham sandwich, and a joke that the automatics would deliver pretty girls and blow up if you asked for a Roc’s egg, but still no one realized the meaning of Doc Reynolds’ research.

After all, it was simply the proper classification of subjects, and a symbology for the library keyboard that would duplicate the logical relations of the subjects themselves. No harm in that. It would just make it easier for the reader to find books—wouldn’t it.



Once again Cliff stood under the deep assault of sound. This time it was tapes of two of Archy’s best jazz concerts, strong and wild. Once again the rhythms fitted themselves into the padded beat of his heart, the surge of blood in his ears, and other, more complex rhythms of the nerves, subtly altering and speeding them in mimicry of the pulse of emotions, while flute notes played, with the sound of Reynolds’ automatics, automatics impassioned, oddly fitting and completing the deeper surges of normal music.

Cliff stood, letting the music flow through him, subtly working on the pattern of his thought. Suddenly it was voices, a dreamlike clamor of voices surging up in his mind and closing over him in a great shout, and then passing, and then the music was just music, very good music with words. He listened calmly, with enjoyment.

It ended, and he left the room and went whistling down the corridor walking briskly, working off some energy. It was the familiar half ecstatic energy of learning, as if he had met a new clarifying generalization that made all thought much simpler. It kept hitting him with little sparks of laughter as if the full implication of the idea still automatically carried their chain reaction of integration into dim cluttered corners of the mind releasing them from redundancy and the weariness of facts.

He passed someone he knew vaguely, and lifted a hand in casual greeting.

“Reep beeb,” he said.