Stewards of the Flame (14 page)

“Yes.” Peter paused, then went on, “There’s no danger of killing you, you know. That’s what the heart monitor’s for; it’s linked to a computer programmed to cut at any sign of trouble. In certain situations we’d lay our lives on the line. Lab research isn’t one of them.”

“I wasn’t worried on that score.” He hadn’t been; instinctively he’d trusted them so far that it had not even occurred to him. But short of killing him, how much further was there to go? He’d already been taken past his breaking point. To continue the stimulus beyond that stage would either kill him or drive him insane; the former would almost be preferable. . . .

“Your sanity’s not at risk,” Peter said, with genuine warmth. “If you didn’t know that underneath, you wouldn’t have volunteered. You’re going to be okay when this is over.”

The reassurance, oddly enough, was convincing. No, Jesse knew, he would not be driven insane! He was still entirely sane despite having been sure, last night, that sanity was slipping from him. Things could not get any worse. What lay beyond would be pain, nothing more. He recalled Peter’s words:
What defeated you was fear of losing control, not pain itself.
He couldn’t stay in control; he now knew that. In any case, the data useful to them could be obtained only after he had lost it. That loss wasn’t going to destroy him.

“Don’t try to prove anything, to me or to yourself,” Peter went on. “Just stay conscious as long as you can. Okay, Jess?”

Nodding, Jesse once again willed his muscles to relax, discovering that they would now obey him.
Let it happen,
he told himself. A peculiar sort of calm spread through his body. He hadn’t imagined how it would feel to pass beyond terror.

The pain began more gradually than before. For what seemed many minutes it wasn’t hard to cope with; though his heart raced and his breathing grew labored, Jesse felt, ironically, in full command of himself. Why was Peter waiting? What point was there in drawing it out so long, when no valuable data would emerge at this stage?

Peter stood where his face was visible from the chair. It was tired, drawn; his vitality and forcefulness had drained away. He did not look like a superman. The impassiveness of his bearing was a pose, Jesse saw. However driven he might be by ideals, Peter was a compassionate man who suffered, in the emotional sense, as much as the subjects with whom he dealt. All at once Jesse grasped what this was costing him, what last night had surely cost.

“Peter,” he breathed. “I’m . . . okay. I don’t mind. Do . . . what you have to do, and don’t worry about me.”

Turning, Peter asked levelly, “Are you telling me to raise the intensity?”

“Yes. You’ve held off longer . . . than you needed to.”

Peter moved behind him, adjusting the headpiece slightly. “First, I want you to see some of the data.”

“Never mind. I’ll take your word that it’s worth getting.”

“I have to show you. Evaluating your ability to think under stress is part of the protocol.” He raised his voice, commanding, “Give us the visual, now.”

Blindingly, astonishingly, the entire wall across from them lit up. There was a huge pattern, strange shapes and bright colors. Jesse’s head spun. The effort of examining data struck him as one demand too many. Though he wasn’t close to cracking, the pain swamped him with dizziness and nausea. It was hard to focus his eyes on the display.

“It’s not just an EEG or brain scan image,” Peter was saying. “There’s more sophisticated input, and computer conversions have been done on it. But it shows brain functioning.”

“It’s . . . static. Unchanging.”

“This one’s from last night. We’ll go to real-time neurofeedback once you learn to interpret the format. See anything significant?”

“Well . . . it’s plain where I cracked up.” It was; the shapes of the pattern broke into fragments near the top of the wall. “The y-axis is time?”

“Yes, in this case. It’s not a graph, though; two dimensions are used in the pattern itself. We need another dimension for intensity of stimulus; that’s done with color. Spectrum sequence, in reverse because to most people red means maximum.”

Jesse grimaced. He had never gotten near the red zone; the image showed green shapes blending into yellow and ultimately, in the crisis area, into light orange. “It’s . . . straightforward,” he said. “Not much thought’s needed.”

“What I want you to do is predict the real-time data before you see it. What type of pattern?”

“Like the lower section . . . the regular pattern, before those breaks start.”

“And the color, Jess?”

“Green.”

“That’s where you’re wrong. You’ve been steady on red for the past five minutes.”

“That’s not possible! What did you do, drug me?” It could have been done while he slept, he supposed.

“Of course not. What would we gain by that?”

“I’m not sure,” Jesse declared, “what you’re gaining by any of this.”

“Right now I’m getting routine confirmation of well-known fact: the human mind doesn’t perceive pain in terms of raw intensity. There are components of resistance and fear.” Again he called out to the control booth. “Let’s have real-time.”

The real-time display was centered, with no time dimension. It was indeed clear red. The pattern was alive, moving, and drew him in somehow, as if it were a tunnel through which he was passing. As Jesse watched, the color of the shapes began to deepen. He found himself gasping again. His arm was on fire and he didn’t need the feedback to be aware of the intensity surge. And yet, Peter was right. It wasn’t just that he could take more when he wasn’t fighting it—his perception was drastically altered.

“Keep your eyes on the pattern,” Peter said.

“How soon will it . . . break up?”

“Probably it won’t. That’s up to you.”

“It wasn’t up to me last night.”

“You were given no feedback last night. What’s more, you were in a different frame of mind. You panicked.”

“That’s all the breaks mean—panic? God, Peter . . . it’s really rubbing it in to show me this stuff. ”

“Hardly that,” Peter said. “Initial feedback’s meant to be encouraging.”

“I don’t follow,” Jesse protested, anger giving him strength to speak out forcefully. “It was bad enough believing that everyone has a limit and mine simply wasn’t high enough to meet the standard. But now, to see I didn’t come close to my limit and blew my chance through loss of nerve—” He broke off as the red deepened further. The shapes shifted, wavered.

“Keep your eyes on it!” Peter repeated. “You have control over your mind’s response. There is no personal limit. It’s a matter of acquired skill.”

“The skill I’m . . . unqualified to learn.” The skill that let them feel this
without suffering,
Jesse thought, gripped by an anguish not merely physical. Whatever Peter might say, anyone who could do that was superhuman! There was an unbridgeable gulf between him and such people, between him and Carla. . . .

“Did I tell you that you’re unqualified?” Peter asked.

“Why—why not in so many words . . . but what am I here for if . . . if not to provide data from a washout?”

“You’re here to learn, like the rest of us. Your potential is exceptionally high, as a matter of fact.”

Stunned, Jesse jerked forward against the straps. “All right, Peter—stop!” he burst out in rage. “I mean it. Stop right now.”

Without hesitation Peter raised his hand toward the control booth, fingers clenched into a fist. The pain stopped instantly, so fast that its absence felt like zero-g. Disoriented momentarily, Jesse found himself still staring at the feedback pattern, frozen on the wall before him. It was dark red, with no trace of irregularity.

He turned to Peter. “I’ve taken a lot,” he said. “I was willing to take as much as you asked for. But not this—not to be told I could have learned if I’d been stronger, or even that I can learn now as a guinea pig instead of as part of the Group.”

Incredibly, Peter smiled, the sparkling smile that Jesse had always found so disarming. “You weren’t listening,” he said, bending to unfasten the strap buckles. “Which isn’t surprising, since you’re too new at this to be fully alert under that much stimulus; I’d have cut anyway in another minute or two. I said you can learn
like the rest of us.
As one of us. You’re progressing very, very fast.”

“No,” Jesse declared. “Not as a reward for volunteering, when I can’t pass the normal aptitude test.”

“Pass it? God, Jess, you’re so far above the norm that the people in the control booth scarcely believe what they’re seeing. I hold some trainees’ hands for days while they develop to the level you’ve reached in one morning.”

As he removed the sensors Peter went on, “What you’ve just been through is a necessary step in the training. It’s hell, but it’s worth it—the skill once acquired is permanent. We don’t do this to anyone we don’t plan to take that far. You’ve been in the Group since you pledged, conditional only on your own willingness to stick with it.”

“Despite having cracked up last night?” Jesse mumbled, not bothering to hide bitterness.

“Everybody cracks the first time. The session can’t end until it happens. The fear of it has to be gotten out of the way.”

Jesse stared at him, outraged and bewildered. “Everybody . . . Peter, you knew ahead of time? You deliberately broke me?”

“I had to. You made it damned hard for me to do, too. For a while there, I was afraid I’d have to use intensities high enough to spoil today’s demonstration.”

“But then you were lying when you told me it meant I’d be out. God damn you, Peter—you were just trying to motivate me.” The deception was the worst of it, Jesse realized. How could he have so misjudged this man’s sincerity?

“You needed stronger motivation than pride,” Peter agreed. “But I didn’t lie to you. I told you that if you chose to quit you’d be out. There was no choice involved in what you screamed at me after you lost control.” Peter waved a hand toward the still-illuminated wall. “We go by objective measurements. The mind-patterns in the data. You refused to quit before the pattern changed.”

“Then for God’s sake, why did you let me believe I hadn’t made the grade?”

“For one thing, to put you into a mood that would make this demonstration work. If you hadn’t been resigned to cracking up again, you couldn’t have stopped fighting.”

That was true, perhaps. But there had been more to the deception. “What was the point of all the rigamarole about the good of science? Even that bit about needing naive subjects was a lie—”

“No,” Peter said. “The effectiveness of the protocol depends on not telling you what we’re testing for, or what stressors we’re going to employ.”

Stressors—beyond the overt stimulus? Oh, God.
Psychological
stresses. Tolerance of fear, failure, despair; the physical suffering had been a mere instrument. “You weren’t judging me last night,” Jesse realized. “The test was
today
.”

“The only thing that counted last night was your refusal to quit,” Peter agreed. “Beyond that, the first session shows nothing about aptitude or commitment. What matters is how you get along the second time.”

“Expecting to fail, you mean.” Jesse frowned. He’d been warned about manipulation, and he had agreed; but that did not make him like it.

“It’s not an arbitrary test,” Peter explained. “It is built in, a principle behind this kind of learning. Willpower is counterproductive. In order to gain true volitional control, you must be wholly, unreservedly willing to lose control—to let what comes, come, with full consent to the consequences. That’s true with lots of skills, and the others are harder to acquire than this one. We have to be sure you won’t get in over your head.”

“I don’t understand—”

“Not yet. But you’ve had the first lesson under circumstances designed to make it indelible. You now know what doesn’t work, and what does.”

“What about that data you claimed to need from people who can’t learn?”

“It would be invaluable, as I told you,” Peter said. “But we’re never going to get any, since by definition it would have to come from unconsenting victims. Anyone without aptitude to learn volitional control would be incapable of volunteering to come back in here. That’s why I knew from the start just now that you’d be all right.”

Jesse didn’t reply. He was a long way from not minding pain, or even comprehending such a state. Yet he’d begun to believe that he might attain it.

~
 
16
 
~

After showering, they went upstairs. Jesse had lost track of time below ground. When they left the elevator, the noonday sun was pouring in through the windows of the deserted Lodge kitchen. Voices came from the common room, happy voices, laughter. New people had arrived to enjoy their time off from work.

“We have more skills than you’ve heard about,” Peter told him, pausing before heading in to join them, “and some will come as a shock to you. Much of what you meet will be confusing at first. Bear with us.”

Jesse nodded. With his hand on the door, Peter stopped. “You have no ties in the city,” he said reflectively. “So you can live here full time if you want, unlike the rest of us, who can only come during offshifts.”

“I’d like to, but I’ll pay my way,” Jesse said. So far, clean clothes had been regularly provided for him as well as his meals. “Can I log onto the local Net from here? I’ll transfer my account to a colonial bank.”

Peter shook his head. “That’s the last thing we want you to do! You’ve got legal access to funds that can be spent offworld—don’t let Undine’s government find out about them. Save your money for when we need it.”

“I thought you were allowed to import goods.”

“Those we’re supposed to have, yes. But the Hospital has a monopoly on medical supplies; stuff for our hospices and infirmaries has to be smuggled in. That gets expensive. And later—” Peter broke off, not finishing the thought. “To get back to the point,” he said, “most people we bring into the Group have jobs. Training must be gradual, spread over many weeks, not only because of their limited time at the Lodge but because it’s—disorientating, sometimes. Too much so to get up and go to work the next day as if nothing had changed. With you I’d like to try something different. Faster, more intensive.”