The Minority Report and Other Classic Stories (31 page)

Feeling somewhat useless, Wiseman thanked the clerk and hung up. They had failed to dope out the soldiers-and-citadel war game; now it was out of their hands.

The bomb expert was a young man, with close-cropped hair, who smiled friendlily at them as he set down his equipment. He wore ordinary coveralls, with no protective devices.

“My first advice,” he said, after he had looked the citadel over, “is to disconnect the leads from the battery. Or, if you want, we can let the cycle finish out, and then disconnect the leads before any reaction takes place. In other words, allow the last mobile elements to enter the citadel. Then, as soon as they’re inside, we disconnect the leads and open her up and see what’s been taking place.”

“Is it safe?” Wiseman asked.

“I think so,” the bomb expert said. “I don’t detect any sign of radioactivity in it.” He seated himself on the floor, by the rear of the citadel, with a pair of cutting pliers in his hand.

Now only three soldiers remained. “It shouldn’t be long,” the young man said cheerfully. Fifteen minutes later, one of the three soldiers crept up to the base of the citadel, removed his head, arm, legs, body, and disappeared piecemeal into the opening provided for him. “That leaves two,” Fowler said.

Ten minutes later, one of the two remaining soldiers followed the one ahead of him.

The four men looked at each other. “This is almost it,” Pinario said huskily.

The last remaining soldier wove his way toward the citadel. Guns within the citadel fired at him, but he continued to make progress.

“Statistically speaking,” Wiseman said aloud, to break some of the tension, “it should take longer each time, because there are fewer men for it to concentrate on. It should have started out fast, then got more infrequent until finally this last soldier should put in at least a month trying to—”

“Pipe down,” the young bomb expert said in a quiet, reasonable voice. “If you don’t mind.”

The last of the twelve soldiers reached the base of the citadel. Like those before him, he began to dissemble himself.

“Get those pliers ready,” Pinario grated.

The parts of the soldier traveled into the citadel. The opening began to close. From within, a humming became audible, a rising pitch of activity.

“Now, for God’s sake!” Fowler cried.

The young bomb expert reached down his pliers and cut into the positive lead of the battery. A spark flashed from the pliers and the young bomb expert jumped reflexively; the pliers flew from his hands and skidded across the floor. “Jeez!” he said. “I must have been grounded.” Groggily, he groped about for the pliers.

“You were touching the frame of the thing,” Pinario said excitedly. He grabbed the pliers himself and crouched down, fumbling for the lead. “Maybe if I wrap a handkerchief around it,” he muttered, withdrawing the pliers and fishing in his pocket for a handkerchief. “Anybody got anything I can wrap around this? I don’t want to get knocked flat. No telling how many—”

“Give it to me,” Wiseman demanded, snatching the pliers from him. He shoved Pinario aside and closed the jaws of the pliers about the lead.

Fowler said calmly, “Too late.”

Wiseman hardly heard his superior’s voice; he heard the constant tone within his head, and he put up his hands to his ears, futilely trying to shut it out. Now it seemed to pass directly from the citadel through his skull, transmitted by the bone.
We stalled around too long,
he thought.
Now it has us. It won out because there are too many of us; we got to squabbling…

Within his mind, a voice said, “Congratulations. By your fortitude, you have been successful.”

A vast feeling pervaded him then, a sense of accomplishment.

“The odds against you were tremendous,” the voice inside his mind continued. “Anyone else would have failed.”

He knew then that everything was all right. They had been wrong.

“What you have done here,” the voice declared, “you can continue to do all your life. You can always triumph over adversaries. By patience and persistence, you can win out. The universe isn’t such an overwhelming place, after all…”

No, he realized with irony, it wasn’t.

“They are just ordinary persons,” the voice soothed. “So even though you’re the only one, an individual against many, you have nothing to fear. Give it time—and don’t worry.”

“I won’t,” he said aloud.

The humming receded. The voice was gone.

After a long pause, Fowler said, “It’s over.”

“I don’t get it,” Pinario said.

“That was what it was supposed to do,” Wiseman said. “It’s a therapeutic toy. Helps give the child confidence. The disassembling of the soldiers”—he grinned—“ends the separation between him and the world. He becomes one with it. And, in doing so, conquers it.”

“Then it’s harmless,” Fowler said.

“All this work for nothing,” Pinario groused. To the bomb expert, he said, “I’m sorry we got you up here for nothing.”

The citadel had now opened its gates wide. Twelve soldiers, once more intact, issued forth. The cycle was complete; the assault could begin again.

Suddenly Wiseman said, “I’m not going to release it.”

“What?” Pinario said. “Why not?”

“I don’t trust it,” Wiseman said. “It’s too complicated for what it actually does.”

“Explain,” Fowler demanded.

“There’s nothing to explain,” Wiseman said. “Here’s this immensely intricate gadget, and all it does is take itself apart and then reassemble itself. There
must
be more, even if we can’t—”

“It’s therapeutic,” Pinario put in.

Fowler said, “I’ll leave it up to you, Leon. If you have doubts, then don’t release it. We can’t be too careful.”

“Maybe I’m wrong,” Wiseman said, “but I keep thinking to myself:
What did they actually build this for?
I feel we still don’t know.”

“And the American Cowboy Suit,” Pinario added. “You don’t want to release that either.”

“Only the game,” Wiseman said. “Syndrome, or whatever it’s called.” Bending down, he watched the soldiers as they hustled toward the citadel. Bursts of smoke, again … activity, feigned attacks, careful withdrawals…

“What are you thinking?” Pinario asked, scrutinizing him.

“Maybe it’s a diversion,” Wiseman said. “To keep our minds involved. So we won’t notice something else.” That was his intuition, but he couldn’t pin it down. “A red herring,” he said. “While something else takes place. That’s why it’s so complicated. We were
supposed
to suspect it. That’s why they built it.”

Baffled, he put his foot down in front of a soldier. The soldier took refuge behind his shoe, hiding from the monitors of the citadel.

“There must be something right before our eyes,” Fowler said, “that we’re not noticing.”

“Yes.” Wiseman wondered if they would ever find it. “Anyhow,” he said, “we’re keeping it here, where we can observe it.”

Seating himself nearby, he prepared to watch the soldiers. He made himself comfortable for a long, long wait.

At six o’clock that evening, Joe Hauck, the sales manager for Appeley’s Children’s Store, parked his car before his house, got out, and strode up the stairs.

Under his arm he carried a large flat package, a “sample” that he had appropriated.

“Hey!” his two kids, Bobby and Lora, squealed as he let himself in. “You got something for us, Dad?” They crowded around him, blocking his path. In the kitchen, his wife looked up from the table and put down her magazine.

“A new game I picked for you,” Hauck said. He unwrapped the package, feeling genial. There was no reason why he shouldn’t help himself to one of the new games; he had been on the phone for weeks, getting the stuff through Import Standards—and after all was said and done, only one of the three items had been cleared.

As the kids went off with the game, his wife said in a low voice, “More corruption in high places.” She had always disapproved of his bringing home items from the store’s stock.

“We’ve got thousands of them,” Hauck said. “A warehouse full. Nobody’ll notice one missing.”

At the dinner table, during the meal, the kids scrupulously studied every word of the instructions that accompanied the game. They were aware of nothing else.

“Don’t read at the table,” Mrs. Hauck said reprovingly.

Leaning back in his chair, Joe Hauck continued his account of the day. “And after all that time, what did they release? One lousy item. We’ll be lucky if we can push enough to make a profit. It was that Shock Troop gimmick that would really have paid off. And that’s tied up indefinitely.”

He lit a cigarette and relaxed, feeling the peacefulness of his home, the presence of his wife and children.

His daughter said, “Dad, do you want to play? It says the more who play, the better.”

“Sure,” Joe Hauck said.

While his wife cleared the table, he and his children spread out the board, counters, dice and paper money and shares of stock. Almost at once he was deep in the game, totally involved; his childhood memories of game-playing swam back, and he acquired shares of stock with cunning and originality, until, toward the conclusion of the game, he had cornered most of the syndromes.

He settled back with a sigh of contentment. “That’s that,” he declared to his children. “Afraid I had a head start. After all, I’m not new to this type of game.” Getting hold of the valuable holdings on the board filled him with a powerful sense of satisfaction. “Sorry to have to win, kids.”

His daughter said, “You didn’t win.”

“You lost,” his son said.

“
What?”
Joe Hauck exclaimed.

“The person who winds up with the most stock
loses,”
Lora said.

She showed him the instructions. “See? The idea is to get rid of your stocks. Dad, you’re out of the game.”

“The heck with that,” Hauck said, disappointed. “That’s no kind of game.” His satisfaction vanished. “That’s no fun.”

“Now we two have to play out the game,” Bobby said, “to see who finally wins.”

As he got up from the board, Joe Hauck grumbled, “I don’t get it. What would anybody see in a game where the winner winds up with nothing at all?”

Behind him, his two children continued to play. As stock and money changed hands, the children became more and more animated. When the game entered its final stages, the children were in a state of ecstatic concentration.

“They don’t know Monopoly,” Hauck said to himself, “so this screwball game doesn’t seem strange to them.”

Anyhow, the important thing was that the kids enjoyed playing Syndrome; evidently it would sell, and that was what mattered. Already the two youngsters were learning the naturalness of surrendering their holdings. They gave up their stocks and money avidly, with a kind of trembling abandon.

Glancing up, her eyes bright, Lora said, “It’s the best educational toy you ever brought home, Dad!”

Scampering across the unplowed field the three boys shouted as they saw the ship: it had landed, all right, just where they expected, and they were the first to reach it.

“Hey, that’s the biggest I ever saw!” Panting, the first boy halted. “That’s not from Mars; that’s from farther. It’s from all the way out, I know it is.” He became silent and afraid as he saw the size of it. And then looking up into the sky he realized that an armada had arrived, exactly as everyone had expected. “We better go tell,” he said to his companions.

Back on the ridge, John LeConte stood by his steam-powered chauffeur-driven limousine, impatiently waiting for the boiler to warm.
Kids got there first,
he said to himself with anger.
Whereas I’m supposed to.
And the children were ragged; they were merely farm boys.

“Is the phone working today?” LeConte asked his secretary.

Glancing at his clipboard, Mr. Fall said, “Yes, sir. Shall I put through a message to Oklahoma City?” He was the skinniest employee ever assigned to LeConte’s office. The man evidently took nothing for himself, was positively uninterested in food. And he was efficient.

LeConte murmured, “The immigration people ought to hear about this outrage.”

He sighed. It had all gone wrong. The armada from Proxima Centauri had after ten years arrived and none of the early-warning devices had detected it in advance of its landing. Now Oklahoma City would have to deal with the outsiders here on home ground—a psychological disadvantage which LeConte felt keenly.

Look at the equipment they’ve got,
he thought as he watched the commercial ships of the flotilla begin to lower their cargos.
Why, hell, they make us look like provincials.
He wished that his official car did not need twenty minutes to warm up; he wished—

Actually, he wished that CURB did not exist.

Centaurus Urban Renewal Bureau, a do-gooding body unfortunately vested with enormous inter-system authority. It had been informed of the Misadventure back in 2170 and had started into space like a phototropic organism, sensitive to the mere physical light created by the hydrogen-bomb explosions. But LeConte knew better than that. Actually the governing organizations in the Centaurian system knew many details of the tragedy because they had been in radio contact with other planets of the Sol system. Little of the native forms on Earth had survived. He himself was from Mars; he had headed a relief mission seven years ago, had decided to stay because there were so many opportunities here on Earth, conditions being what they were…

This is all very difficult,
he said to himself as he stood waiting for his steam-powered car to warm.
We got here first, but CURB does outrank us; we must face that awkward fact. In my opinion, we’ve done a good job of rebuilding. Of course, it isn ‘t like it was before … but ten years is not long. Give us another twenty and we’ll have the trains running again. And our recent road-building bonds sold quite successfully, in fact were oversubscribed.