CHAPTER FIVE: "Boy, You Are Dumb!"

While the memory cells chattered and called up dreams, the immense city soared outward among the stars, at what seemed like a breakneck pace after the tentative first explorations of Scranton within the local group. The streets were thronged 24 hours a day with myriads of people hurrying on unimaginable errands; and in addition to the constant flitting of Tin Cabs, there was often the distant but edgy roar of subway trains coursing through tunnels bored through the very granite keel of the city. All of this activity seemed purposeful and even cheerful, but it was also extremely bewildering.

Chris's schooling left him very little time to explore it. Not all of his education was machine education, either, for, as he slowly realized, no one really leans anything through hypnopaedia; machine teaching at its best enables the student to accumulate nothing better than facts; it does not show how to tie them together, let alone how to do something with them. To train the intelligence-not just the memory-a real human tutor is required.

The one assigned to Chris, a stocky, fierce, white-haired woman named Dr. Helena Braziller, was far and away the best teacher Chris had ever encountered in his life-and far and away the worst taskmaster. The City Fathers wore him out only by taxing his memory; whereas Dr. Braziller made him work.

"The fundamental equation of the Blackett-Dirac scholium reads as follows: where P is magnetic moment, U is angular momentum, C and G have their usual values, and B is a constant with the value 0.25 approximately. A first transform of this identity gives: which is the usual shorthand form of the primary spindizzy equation, called the Locke Derivation. Blackett, Dirac and Locke all assumed that it would hold true for large bodies, such as gas-giant planets and suns. Show on the blackboard by dimensional analysis why this assumption is invalid."

As far as Chris was concerned, the answer could have been much more simply arrived at; Dr. Braziller could just have told him that this relationship between gravitation and the spin of a body applied only to electrons and other submicroscopic objects, and disappeared, for all practical purposes, in the world of the macrocosm; but that was not her way. Had she only told him that, it would have come into his mind as a fact like any other fact-for instance, like the facts that the memory cells of the City Fathers were constantly pouring into his ears and eyes-but by her lights he would not have understood it. She wanted him to repeat not only the original reasoning of Blackest, Dirac and Locke, but to see for himself, not just because she told him so, where they had gone astray, and hence why a natural law which had first been proposed in the gas-lit, almost prehistoric year of 1891, and was precisely formulated as the Lande Factor in 1940, nevertheless failed to lift so much as a grain of sand off the Earth until the year 2019.

"But Dr. Braziller, why isn't it enough to see that they made a mistake? We know that now. Why repeat it?"

"Because that's what all these great men have labored toward: so that you could do it right, yourself. Up until about the thirteenth century, nobody in the world except a few dedicated scholars could do long division; then Fibonacci introduced the Arabic numbers to the West. Now, any idiot can do what it took a great mind to do in those days. Are you going to complain that because Fibonacci found a better way to do long division, you shouldn't be required to learn why it's better? Or that because a great inventor like Locke didn't understand dimensional analysis, you should be allowed to be just as ignorant, after all these years? They spent their lives making things simple for you that were enormously difficult for them and until you understand the difficulties, you can't possibly understand the simplifications. Go back to the blackboard and try again."

Being in a "live" class had its compensations, though; and one of these was Piggy Kingston-Throop. Piggy-his real name was George, but nobody ever called him that, not even Dr. Braziller-was not much of a prize as a friend and companion, but he was the only member of the small class who was exactly Chris's age; all the others were much younger. From this Chris deduced that Piggy was not a student, which turned out to be true.

Piggy seemed glad enough to encounter someone who was as retarded as he was, whatever the reasons, and who knew less than he did about a great many subjects which were commonplaces to him. And in many ways he was quite a pleasant sort of fellow; blond, plump and affable, with a ready wit and a tendency to be unimpressed by almost everything that other people considered important. In this last, he made a particularly good foil for Chris, who in his ignorance and in the strangeness of his situation often could not help but be earnest to the point of grimness over what later turned out to be trivia.

Not that Chris allowed these differences over value judgments always to be resolved in Piggy's favor; they quarreled over them almost from the beginning. The first of these tangles, which soon proved to be a model for the others, involved the subject of the antiagathic drugs.

"You're going to be a citizen, aren't you, Piggy?"

"Oh, sure. I'm all set."

"I wish I were. My trouble is, I don't even know what I want to do-let alone what I'm good at."

Piggy turned and stared at him. They had paused on the way from school on the Tudor Tower Place bridge leading over 42nd Street. Long ago, the view from here across First Avenue to the East River had been blocked by the UN Building, but that had been demolished during the Terror, and there was nothing to mark where it had stood but a plaza; and on the far side of that, starry space itself.

"What do you mean, do?" Piggy said. "Oh, maybe you'll have a little trouble, what with not having been born here. But there's ways around that. Don't believe everything they tell you."

Like many of the things Piggy said, fully 80 per cent of this speech meant nothing to Chris. In self-defense, he could do nothing but answer the question. "You know all this better than I do. But the laws do say pretty clearly that a man has to be good for something before he's allowed to become a citizen and be started on the drug treatments. Let's see; there are supposed to be three ways to go about it; and I ought to have them straight, because I just had them put into my head a few days ago."

He concentrated a moment. He had discovered a useful trick for dredging up the information which had been implanted in his mind from the memory cells: If he half closed his eyes and imagined the gray gas, in a moment he would begin to feel, at least in retrospect, the same somnolence under which the original facts had been imparted, and they would come back in very much the same words. It worked equally well this time; almost at once, he heard his own voice saying, in a curious monotone imitation of the City Fathers:

"'There are three general qualifications for citizenship. They are: (1) Display of some obviously useful talent, such as computer programming, administration, or another gift worth retaining, as opposed to depending upon the accidents of birth to provide new such men for each succeeding generation; (2) a demonstrable bent toward any intellectual field, including scientific research, the arts and philosophy, since in these fields one lifetime is seldom enough to attain masterhood, let alone put it to the best use; and (3) passage of the Citizenship Tests, which are designed to reveal reserves and potentials in the late-maturing eighteen-year-old whose achievement record is unimpressive. No master how you slice it, it doesn't sound easy!"

That's only what the City Fathers say, Piggy said scornfully. "What do they know about it? They're only a bunch of machines. They don't know anything about people. Those rules don't even make sense."

"They make sense to me," Chris objected. "It's a cinch the antiagathics can't be given to everybody-from what I hear, they're scarcer than germanium. On Scranton, the big boss wouldn't even allow them to be mentioned in public. So there's got to be some way of picking who gets them and who doesn't."

"Why?"

"Why? Well, to begin with, because a city is like an island-an island in the middle of the biggest ocean you can think of, and then some. Nobody can get on, and nobody can get off, except for a couple of guys now and then. If everybody gets this drug and lives forever, pretty soon the place is going to be so crowded that we'll all be standing on each other's feet.

"Ah, cut, it out. Look around you. Are we all standing on each other's feet?”

"No, but that's because the drugs are restricted, and because not everybody's allowed to have children, either. For that matter, look at you, Piggy-your father and your mother are both big wheels on this town, but you're an only child, and furthermore, the first one they've been allowed to have in a hundred and fifty years."

"Leave them out of this," Piggy growled. "They didn't play their cards right, I'll tell you that. But that's none of your business."

"All right. Take me, then. Unless I turn out to be good for something before I'm eighteen-and I can't think what it would be-I won't be a citizen and I won't get the drugs. Or even if I do get to be a citizen, say by passing the Tests, I'll still have to prove myself useful stock before I'm allowed to have even one kid of my own. That's just the way it has to be when the population has to be kept stable; it's simple economics, Piggy, and there's a subject I think I know something about"

Piggy spat reflectively over the railing, though it was hard to tell whether or not he was expressing an opinion, and if so, whether it referred to economics alone or to the entire argument. "All right, then," he said. "Suppose you get the drugs, and they let you have a kid. Why shouldn't they give the kid the drugs too?"

"Why should they, unless he qualifies?"

"Boy, you are dumb! That's what the Citizenship Tests are for, can't you see that? They're an out-an escape hatch, a dodge-and that's all they are. If you don't get in any other way, you get in that way. At least you do if you've got any sort of connections. If you're a nobody, maybe the City Fathers rig the Tests against you-that's likely enough. But if you're a somebody, they're not going to be too tough. If they are, my father can fix their wagon-he programs 'em. But either way, there's no way to study for the Tests, so they're obviously a sell."

Chris was shaken, but he said doggedly: "But they're not supposed to be that kind of test at all. I mean, they're not supposed to show whether or not you're good at dimensional analysis, or history, or some other subject. They're supposed to show up gifts that you were born with, not anything that you got through schooling or training."

"Spindizzy whistle. A test you can't study for is a test you can't pass unless it's rigged-otherwise it doesn't make any sense at all. Listen, Red, if you're so sold on this idea that everybody who: gets to take the drugs has to be a big brain; what about the guardian they handed you over to? He's got no kids of his own, and he's nothing but a cop but he's almost as old as the Mayor!"

Up to now, Chris had felt vaguely that he had been holding his own; but this was like a blow in the face.

Chris had originally been alarmed to find that his ID card assigned him lodgings with a family, and horrified when the assignment number turned out to belong to Sgt. Anderson. His first few weeks in the Andersons' apartment-it was in the part of the city once called Chelsea-were prickly with suspicion, disguised poorly by as much formality as his social inexperience would allow.

It soon became impossible, however, to continue believing that the perimeter sergeant was an ogre; and his wife, Carla, was as warm and gracious a woman as Chris had ever met. They were childless, and could not have welcomed Chris more whole-heartedly had he been one of their own. Furthermore, as the City Fathers had of course calculated, Anderson was the ideal guardian for a brand-new young passenger, for few people, even the Mayor, knew the city better.

He was, in fact, considerably more than a cop, for the city's police force was also its defense force-and its Marines, should the need for a raid or a boarding party ever arise. Technically, there were many men on the force who were superior to the perimeter sergeant, but Anderson and one counterpart, a dark taciturn man named Dulany, headed picked squads and were nearly independent of the rest of the police, reporting directly to Mayor Amalfi.

It was this fact which opened the first line of friendly communication between Chris and his guardian. He had not yet even seen Amalfi with his own eyes. Although everyone in the city spoke of him as if they knew him personally, here at last was one man who really did, and saw him several times a week. Chris was unable to restrain his curiosity.

"Well, that's just the way people talk, Chris. Actually hardly anyone sees much of Amalfi, he's got too much to do. But he's been in charge here a long time and he's good at his job; people feel that he's their friend because they trust him."

"But what is he like,?"

"He's complicated-but then most people are complicated. I guess the word I'm groping for is 'devious.' He sees connections between events that nobody else sees. He sizes up a situation like a man looking at a coat for the one thread that'll make the whole thing unravel. He has to-he's too burdened to deal with things on a stitch-by-stitch basis. In my opinion he's killing himself with overwork as it is."

It was to this point that Chris returned after his upsetting argument with Piggy. "Sergeant, the other day you said that the Mayor was killing himself with overwork. But the City Fathers told me he's several centuries old. On the drugs, he ought to live forever, isn't that so?"

"Absolutely not," Anderson said emphatically: "Nobody can live forever. Sooner or later, there'd be an accident, for one thing. And strictly speaking, the drugs aren't a 'cure' for death anyhow. Do you know how they work?"

"No," Chris admitted. "School hasn't covered them yet."

"Well, the memory banks can give you the details-I've probably forgotten most of them. But generally, there are several antiagathics, and each one does a different job. The main one, ascomycin, stirs up a kind of tissue in the body called the reticulo-endothelial system-the white blood corpuscles are a part of it-to give you what's called 'nonspecific immunity.' What that means is that for about the next seventy years, you can't catch any infectious disease. At the end of that time you get another shot, and so on. The stuff. isn't an antibiotic, as the name suggests, but an endotoxin fraction-a complex organic sugar called a mannose; it got its name from the fact that it's produced by fermentation, as antibiotics are.

"Another is TATP-triacetyltriparanol. What this does is inhibit the synthesis in the body of a fatty stuff called cholesterol; otherwise it collects in. the arteries and causes strokes, apoplexy, high blood pressure and so on. This drug has to be taken every day, because the body goes right on trying to make cholesterol every day."

"Doesn't that mean that it's good for something?" Chris objected tentatively.

"Cholesterol? Sure it is. It's absolutely essential in the development of a fetus, so women have to lay off TATP while they're carrying a child. But it's of no use to men-and men are far more susceptible to circulatory diseases than women.

"There are still two more antiagathics in use now, but they're minor; one, for instance, blocks the synthesis of the hormone of sleep, which again is essential in pregnancy but a thundering, nuisance otherwise; that one was originally found in the blood of ruminant animals like cows, whose plumbing is so defective that they'd die if they ,lay down."

"You mean you never sleep?"

"Haven't got the time for it," Anderson said gravely. "Or the need any longer, thank goodness. But ascomycin and TATP between them prevent the two underlying major causes of death: heart diseases and infections. If you prevent those alone, you extend the average lifetime by at least two centuries.

"But death is still inevitable, Chris. If there isn't an accident, there may be cancer, which we can't prevent yet-oh, ascomycin attacks tumors so strongly that cancer doesn't kill people any longer, in fact the drug even offers quite a lot of protection against hard radiation; but cancer can still make life so agonizing that death is the only humane treatment. Or a man can die of starvation, of being unable to get the antiagathics. Or he can die of a bullet-or of overwork. We live long lives in the cities, sure; but there is no such thing as immortality. It's as mythical as the unicorn. Not even the universe itself is going to last forever."

This, at last, was the opportunity Chris had been hoping for, though he still hardly knew how to grasp it.

"Are-are the drugs ever stopped, once a man's been made a citizen?"

"Deliberately? I've never heard of such a case," Anderson said, frowning. "Not on our town. If the City Fathers want a man dead, they shoot him. Why let him linger for the rest of his seventy-year stanza? That would be outrageously cruel. What would be the reason for such a procedure?"

"Well, no tests are foolproof. I mean, supposing they make a man a citizen, and then discover that he really isn't-uh-as big a genius as they thought he was?"

The perimeter sergeant looked at Chris narrowly, and there was quite a long silence, during which Chris could clearly hear the pulsing of his own blood in his temples. At last Anderson said slowly:

"I see. It sounds to me like somebody's been feeding you spindizzy whistle. Chris, if only geniuses could become citizens, how long do you think a city could last? The place'd be depopulated in one crossing. That isn't how it works at all. The whole reason for the drugs is to save skills-and it doesn't matter one bit what the skills are. All that matters is whether or not it would be logical to keep a man on, rather than training a new one every four or five decades.

"Take me for an example, Chris. I'm nobody's genius; I'm only a boss cop. But I'm good at my job, good enough so that the City Fathers didn't see any reason to bother raising and training another one from the next generation; they kept this one, which is me; but a cop is, all the same, all I am. Why not? It suits me, I like the work, and when Amalfi needs a boss cop he calls me or Dulany-not any officer on the force, because none of them have the scores of years of experience at this particular job that we do under their belts. When the Mayor wants a perimeter sergeant he calls me; when he wants a boarding squad he calls Dulany; and when he wants a specific genius, he calls a genius. There's one of everything on board this town-partly because it's so big-and so long as the system works, no need for more than one. Or more than X, X being whatever number you need."

Chris grinned. "You seemed to remember the details all right."

"I remembered them all," Anderson admitted. "Or all that they gave me. Once the City Fathers put a thing into your head, it's hard to get rid of."

As he spoke, there was a pure fluting sound, like a brief tune, somewhere in the apartment. The perimeter sergeant's heavy head tipped up; then he, too, grinned.

"We're about to have a demonstration," he said. He was obviously pleased. Be touched a button on the arm of his chair.

"Anderson?" a heavy voice said. Chris thought instantly that the father bear in the ancient myth of Goldilocks must have sounded much like that.

"Yes-Here, sir."

"We're coming up on a contract. It looks fairly good to me and the City Fathers, and I'm about to sign it. Better come up here and familiarize yourself with the terms, just in case: This'll be a rough one, Joel."

"Right away." Anderson touched the button, and his grin became broader and more boyish than ever.

"The Mayor!" Chris burst out.

"Yep."

"But what did he mean?"

"That he's found some work for us to do. Unless there's a hitch, we should be landing in just a few days."