A Handful of Time (8 page)

It was a small, tense man who interviewed me. He held a cold pipe and kept glancing at it as though it were going to make some remark. Dr. Thane was his name. When I’d finished my story he lighted the pipe and smoked for a moment. Not purposely leaving me hanging in the air and waiting to see his reaction. Pondering what he would say to me in turn. Then he put the pipe down. He did not have the annoying habit of clattering his pipe between his teeth as he spoke.

“You have remarkable insight,” he said, meaning it. “Most people don’t trust their own senses any more. We just assume they’re distorted. One of the bad side-effects of scientific training. We tend to forget that all information starts with the senses in the first place. And science has nothing so subtle to offer as the human eye.”

“In other words,” I said, amazed that it had turned out to be so easy, “you believe my story.”

He smiled, splitting the bleached face that went with his small, tense frame. “Nothing so naive. It’s not a matter of evaluating your sincerity. It happens I’ve got a team working on these messages. But let me say here and now I didn’t know they were messages. You’ve furnished the most valuable information we’ve had so far.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, “but it sounds to me like you’re making paradoxes. If you didn’t know there were messages, how could you be looking for them? I don’t understand.”

He lighted the pipe again, blowing smoke into the pleasant litter of books and papers on his desk. A man not given to the pigeon-holing and precision that keeps you on the mere edges of ideas. I liked him. The shared smoke that drifted around the office made me feel less strange and presumptuous.

“You started out with the messages and ended up with the theory. Because you had the native good sense to trust yourself.

“We went at it from the other end. We started out with the theory and ended up one step short of the message.”

“What theory?”

“Our project was a study in motivation. We’re attached to psychological warfare. What we wanted to know was what had motivated the great cultural changes of history. Our ultimate interest, of course, was to be able to motivate cultural changes for the better, instead of for the worse, as sometimes happens in history. Particularly, we would like to be able to motivate the enemy by psychological infiltration in case of war. Hell, not in case of war. Right now. Before a war makes everything too late.

“I’m not a psychologist. I’m a historian. But I don’t make a move without a psychologist at my elbow. I don’t pretend that a knowledge of what people have done in the past gives you a knowledge of why they did it.

“So we looked for motivation and came to the same conclusion as you did when you thought the problem through. All I can add to what you’ve told me is that you’ve got experts backing you up.”

“Then you found
no
real motivation from within the… do you call it culture?”

“We have to call it something. Yes. No motivation. Now don’t get me wrong. A lot of people would quarrel with this. A lot of experts. But as far as we’re concerned, we’re satisfied that the great cultural changes of history have been motivated from outside in some way.

“Subliminal motivation was only one of the possibilities we explored. Several people on the project were particularly interested in subliminal motivation because it is a new thing and we’re just beginning to crack the surface of its possibilities. I hoped my mixed metaphors don’t get on your nerves.”

“I don’t know them from the straight kind.”

“I’ve spent too much time among scholars. You get self-conscious about things like that. I cut out cigarettes and took up a pipe because my colleagues kept saying,
‘As
a cigarette should.’

“Well, we settled on a characteristic of our culture to study. A recent change. The switch from a saving to a debt economy. Do you have any idea what would happen if people suddenly stopped spending more than they have and started saving?”

“I’ve thought about it,” I said. “Our economy would break down. A depression would hit. Then war. The end of things.”

“You’re more right than you know. I am personally acquainted with a man who could press a button and end the world. Not immediately, of course. But he could make a good beginning.”

The dead pipe had gone stale and unpleasant. Dr. Thane stoked it up again and blew fresh smoke around.

“We began to investigate, as I say, the phenomenon of a credit society. We picked certain typical suburbs where expenditures far outrun income. We found people blithely running into more debt than they could pay off in a hundred years. Most people actually didn’t know how much money they owed. All they knew was how much the payments were every month. Were they worried? Not on your life. They felt that what they were doing was right. The proper way to live. They would feel guilty doing anything else.

“We had depth psychologists to find all this out. Don’t ask me how they work. That’s their job and they know how to do it.

“Then they tried to find out
why.
Why do these people, raised in a crippling depression, trained from childhood to believe that a penny saved is a penny earned, suddenly spend money they don’t have and feel virtuous about it?

“Do you know what answer they got out of it?”

“What?”

“None. There are certain rules of human behavior. Latitudinous rules, I grant you, but rules beyond which we have to classify a person as insane. Either all these people were so untrue to their own personalities as to be insane, or someone was wabbling with their minds. Someone or something.

“Some outside force was motivating them. How?

“We all know about the power of advertising. We also know that advertising does not create anything in the mind. It can only pull out what’s already there. People can turn advertising on or off at will.

“Something was at work which could not be turned on and off at will. It was with this realization that we really began to look for subliminal motivation, a picture in a color or an angle just below conscious perception. Rather like camouflage, where you consciously accept the deceit but something you are not conscious of in your mind may not.

“We’ve got scientists working on chromato-sensitive instruments. It’s not just a matter of detecting color. It’s a matter of detecting a certain kind of color and perhaps alien matter in almost infinitesimal quantities. Only enough to be barely invisible, if you see what I mean. And perhaps set at an angle oblique to normal vision.”

“So they couldn’t find it.”

“Oh, yes, they found it. Minute variations in wave patterns. On the side of a house. But we couldn’t
see
it, even with the instruments we had. We’re still working on it.

“But I don’t need to tell you now how glad to see you we are.”

“You don’t need to tell me,” I said. “You’ve told me all I need to know about how you investigate the subliminal motivation. But there’s something else that’s even more important.

“I don’t sleep nights any more.”

He sighed and held on to his pipe as though it was the last sure thing in the universe. “I know,” he said. “It’s so monstrous we hardly ever talk about it here. Where do the messages come from?”

“Where?”

“I don’t know. But I do think this. Given time and money, we may find out. First we investigate the messages. Find out what they mean. Find out what sort of material or force they’re made of. Then we can experiment. Rub them out, when we know how. See what happens. Write some ourselves. Write a question and see if it’s answered. All we need is time and money. And there’s no reason why we shouldn’t have plenty of both.

“Maybe whoever or whatever put the messages there is dead or gone now. Then all we have to do is erase the messages and see what the human race can do with a few centuries of real free will.”

“And suppose whoever or whatever is not gone?”

“How can I answer that?” Dr. Thane answered almost irritably. “I can’t make your mind comfortable. My own mind isn’t comfortable. We just have to face it and fight it our own way. We can’t even run. There’s no place to run to. And you might as well understand right now that you’re top secret, high priority security and all the other mumbo jumbo.”

“Because of what you told me?”

“Because of what you already knew. We’re keeping you here. In the project building.”

“Look,” I said. “I don’t mind helping. I’ll do everything humanly possible to help you. Die, if necessary. But I don’t want to be stuck in a prison. I’ve got my own life, too.”

“You want to keep it, don’t you?”

I stood up. The room was stale and a little chilly. “Is that a threat?”

“Oh, sit down,” Dr. Thane said. “Do you think I carry a space gun? You need to stay here for your own protection. Didn’t it occur to you that who or what is behind the messages might have some interest in not having its little game interfered with? That you might furnish some clue we might otherwise
never
find? Here we have guards.”

I was sitting down. Hot on the outside and getting colder within, down to a little point of ice somewhere deep inside. “I have a feeling guards wouldn’t do much good.”

“Maybe not. Maybe this is all cloak and dagger for nothing. Still, I think you’d better stay.”

“I will,” I said stiffly.

“Tomorrow we’ll dig in,” Dr. Thane said. “Get to sleep early and prepare to be busier than you’ve ever been in your life. We’ll be at it every minute.”

I don’t know how you prepare to be busy. I had a reasonably comfortable little room, with a single bed and a wash stand against one wall. The walls were that “soothing” shade of green that you come to associate with the impersonal desolation of public places.

I’m used to sleeping in strange places. But I’m not used to having guards pacing discreetly outside my door. It made me feel silly.

I opened the door. “You boys like a-drink?” I called, for I had found the wherewithal in a cabinet under the washstand.

“No, thank you, sir,” the tall one said.

“Not allowed to,” the short one said. “Try us after six o’clock in the morning.”

“I’m afraid that would try
me
…”
I confessed.

I got in bed and tried to sleep. Finally I got up and opened the door again.

“If you’re hungry,” I offered, “you can go get a sandwich or something and say I sent you for one.”

“Thanks, anyway,” the tall one said.

“I can’t eat when I’m on a top security job like this,” the short one said. “Nervous.”

“It’s worth our necks to take our eyes off your door,” the tall one said.

“Well, I guess you’re used to it,” I said, wondering if
I’d
ever get used to it.

I closed the door and dug my head into the pillow to dull the soft, regular tread of their feet on the rubber tile. The late traffic noises of the night came dimly and sporadically through the walls. I finally gave myself up to the dark comfort of my blankets and a vast silence.

A vast silence!

I sat up and switched on the light. I don’t know how much time had passed. The room was cold as a vault and the forgotten alienness of a strange room in the night came back to me from some distant memory.

“Guard!” I called, hearing my word fall blank on the wall. There was no sound of their feet on the tile.

I leapt out of bed and swung the door open, half afraid it would be locked.

There were no guards. Just beyond the door, on the dark tiles, was the ultimate message.

“Dr. Thane!” I called, running down the hall, to his office.

A light penciled under the door. He opened it, rumpled and looking almost childlike in a pair of over-sized white pajamas.

“Dr. Thane, I…” I wasn’t sure I could tell him, “You’ve gotten a new message,” he guessed.

I nodded. “I don’t know that there’s any use telling you. Now there won’t be time.”

“Tell me anyhow.”

I told him.

He was silent for a moment, calculating the movements of the future.

“No,” he said, “not time. And soon, perhaps, not even world enough.”

The message grins up at me from every street corner.

SAVE FOR THE FUTURE.

I
STIRRED
in my colloidal suspension. I could feel the transverse waves I had created bound through my little universe and rebound against me again. I was waking up. I was nearing the planet, then. Algol II, was it? My thinking would be fuzzy for a while.

I began the exercises, slowly and carefully, uncoiling from the foetal position you assume naturally in suspension. I wondered if the child
in utero
had any such premonition of the bright, violent world to come.

First one leg. Then the other. Slowly, but still the colloid shook. I did not want to wake up too fast. It is easy to panic. To thrash about wildly and be buffeted by your own struggling waves. It is too much like a nightmare of suffocation. Or claustrophobia. And if you fight too hard, your metabolism rises to normal before it’s time to get out and then you just die. Nobody wants to die.

I lay still again until I felt the waves subside and the slight nausea recede. I would be well within sight of Algol. It would be blazing along one hemisphere of my windowless monad.

At least, that’s what I call it. Ever since I read Leibnitz the phrase has stuck in my mind like a label for which there was no carton. When I saw the one-man spacers, I pasted my label on them immediately.

What I should have done was read more Leibnitz. Or less. Or refrained from mixing his ideas up with Bishop Berkeley’s and my own.

Because when I saw the one-man spacers they were so perfect a symbol that I had an irresistible impulse to get in one. If anyone asks me why I travel about the galaxy, I say it is because I am an anthropologist and explorer. If anyone should say, No,
really
why do you do it? I would say, Because it is a quick way to be Somebody in the eyes of my fellow man and to make money. But if God should ask me, I would have to say, There was just something about those windowless monads that fascinated me.