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Elbows on chair arms as usual, Freeman set his fingertips together. "How so?"
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he parried.
"For one thing, you've taken to talking to me in present-time mode for the
last three-hour session every day."
"You should be grateful for small mercies. Our prognostications show it would
be risky to maintain you in regressed mode."
"Half the truth. The rest can be found in your omission to use that expensive
three-vee setup you had installed. You realized that I thrive on high levels
of stimulus. But you're groping your way toward my lower threshold. You don't
want me to start functioning at peak efficiency. You think that even pinned
down like a butterfly on a board I may still be dangerous."
"I don't think of my fellow men as dangerous. I think of them as capable of
occasional dangerous mistakes."
"You include yourself?"
"I remain constantly alert for the possibility."
"Being on guard like that itself constitutes aberrant behavior."
"How can you say that? So long as you were fully on guard we failed to catch
you. In terms of your purposes that wasn't aberrant; it was functional. In the
end, however . . . Well, here you are."
"Yes, here I am. Having learned a lesson you're incapable of learning."
"Much good may it bring you." Freeman leaned back. "You know, last night I was
thinking over a new
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approach a new argument which may penetrate your obstinacy. Consider this.
You speak of us at
Tarnover as though we're engaged in a brutal arbitrary attempt to ensure that
the best minds of the current generation get inducted into government service.
Not at all. We are simply the top end of a series of cultural subgroupings
that evolved of their own accord during the second half of last century. Few
of us are equipped to cope with the complexity and dazzling variety of
twenty-first-century existence. We prefer to identify with small, easily
isolable fractions of the total culture. But just as some people can handle
only a restricted range of stimuli, and prefer to head for a mountain commune
or a paid-avoidance area or even emigrate to an underdeveloped country, so
some correspondingly not only cope well but actually require immensely strong
stimuli to provoke them into functioning at optimum. We have a wider range of
life-style choices today than ever before. The question of administration has
been rendered infinitely more difficult precisely because we have such breadth
of choice. Who's to manage this multiplex society? Must the lot not fall to
those who flourish when dealing with complicated situations?
Would you rather that people who demonstrably can't organize their own lives
were permitted to run those of their fellow citizens?"
"A conventional elitist argument. From you I'd have expected better."
"Elitist? Nonsense. I'd expected better from you. The word you're looking for
is 'aesthetic.' An oligarchy devoted by simple personal preference to the
search for artistic gratification in government
that's what we're after. And it would be rather a good system, don't you
think?"
"Provided you were in the top group. Can you visualize yourself in the lower
echelons, a person who obeys instead of issuing orders?"
'Oh, yes. That's why I work at Tarnover. I hope that perhaps within my
lifetime there will appear people so skilled in dealing with modern society
that I and others like me can step out of their way with a clear conscience.
In a sense I want to work myself out of a job as fast as possible."
"Resigning control to crippled kids?"
Freeman sighed. "Oh, you're obsessed with those laboratory-gestated children!
Maybe it will relieve your mind to hear that the latest batch six of them
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are all physically whole and run and jump and feed and dress themselves! If
you met them by chance you couldn't tell them from ordinary kids."
"So why bother to tell me about them? All that's registered in my mind is that
they may look like ordinary kids . . . but they never will be ordinary kids."
"You have a positive gift for twisting things. No matter what I say to you "
"I find a means of casting a different light on it. Let me do just that to
what you've been saying. You, and the others you mentioned, acknowledge you're
imperfect. So you're looking for superior successors.
Very well: give me grounds for believing that they won't just be projections
on a larger scale of your admittedly imperfect vision."
"I can't. Only results that speak for themselves can do that."
"What results do you have to date? You've sunk a lot of time and money in the
scheme."
"Oh, several. One or two may impress even a skeptic."
"The kids that look like any other kids?"
"No, no. Healthy adults like yourself capable of doing things that have never
been done before, such as writing a complete new identity into the data-net
over a regular veephone. Bear in mind that before trying to invent new talents
we decided to look for those that had been undervalued. The odds there were in
our favor. We have records from the past descriptions of lightning
calculators, musicians capable of improvising without a wrong note for hours
on end, mnemonists who commited whole books to memory
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by reading them through once . . . Oh, there are examples in every field of
human endeavor from strategy to scrimshaw. With these for guidelines, we're
trying to generate conditions in which corresponding modern talents can
flourish."
He shifted casually in his chair; he sounded more confident by the minute.
"Our commonest current form of mental disorder is personality shock. We have
an efficient way to treat it without machinery or drugs. We allow the sufferer
to do something he long ago wanted to do and lacked either the courage or the
opportunity to fit into his life. Do you deny the claim?"
"Of course not. This continent is littered coast to coast with people who were
compelled to study business administration when they should have been painting
murals or practicing the fiddle or digging a truck garden, and finally got
their chance when it was twenty years too late to lead them anywhere."
"Except back to a sense of solid identity," Freeman murmured.
"In the case of the lucky few. But yes, okay."
"Then let me lay this on you. If you hadn't met Miranda if you hadn't found
out that our suspicions concerning the genetic component of personality were
being verified by experiment would you have deserted from Tarnover?"
"I think sooner or later I'd have quit anyhow. The attitude that can lead to
using crippled children as experimental material would have disconnected me."
"You spin like a weather vane. You've said, or implied, repeatedly that at
Tarnover we're conditioning people not to rebel. You can't maintain at the
same time that what we're doing would have encouraged you to rebel."
Freeman gave his skull-like grin and rose, stretching his cramped limbs.
"Our methods are being tested in the only available lab: society at large. So
far they show excellent results. Instead of condemning them out of hand you
should reflect on how much worse the alternatives are. After what you
underwent last summer, you of all people should appreciate what I mean. In the
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