The Past Through Tomorrow (91 page)

He had had two main bad effects on his son: the boy’s natural independence, crushed at home, rebelled blindly at every sort of discipline, authority, or criticism which he encountered elsewhere and subconsciously identified with the not-to-be-criticized paternal authority. Secondly, through years of association Dave imitated his father’s most dangerous social vice—that of passing unself-critical moral judgments on the actions of others.

When Dave was arrested for breaking a basic custom; to wit, atavistic violence; his father washed his hands of him with the statement that he had tried his best to “make a man of him,” and could not be blamed for his son’s failure to profit by his instruction.

A faint knock caused them to put away the checker board in a hurry. Mother Johnston paused before answering. “That’s not our knock,” she considered, “but it’s not loud enough to be the noises. Be ready to hide.”

MacKinnon waited by the fox hole where he had hidden the night before, while Mother Johnston went to investigate. He heard her unbar and unlock the upper door, then she called out to him in a low but urgent voice, “Dave! Come here, Dave—hurry!”

It was Fader, unconscious, with his own bloody trail behind him.

Mother Johnston was attempting to pick up the limp form. MacKinnon crowded in, and between the two of them they managed to get him downstairs and to lay him on the long table. He came to for a moment as they straightened his limbs. “Hi, Dave,” he whispered, managing to achieve the ghost of his debonair grin. “Somebody trumped my ace.”

“You keep quiet!” Mother Johnston snapped at him, then in a lower voice to Dave, “Oh, the poor darling—Dave, we must get him to the Doctor.”

“Can’t…do…that,” muttered the Fader. “Got…to get to the… Gate—” His voice trailed off. Mother Johnston’s fingers had been busy all the while, as if activated by some separate intelligence. A small pair of scissors, drawn from some hiding place about her large person, clipped away at his clothing, exposing the superficial extent of the damage. She examined the trauma critically.

“This is no job for me,” she decided, “and he must sleep while we move him. Dave, get that hypodermic kit out of the medicine chest in the ’fresher.”

“No, Mother!” It was Magee, his voice strong and vibrant.

“Get me a pepper pill,” he went on. “There’s—”

“But Fader—”

He cut her short. “I’ve got to get to the Doctor all right, but how the devil will I get there if I don’t walk?”

“We would carry you.”

“Thanks, Mother,” he told her, his voice softened, “I know you would—but the police would be curious. Get me that pill.”

Dave followed her into the ‘fresher, and questioned her while she rummaged through the medicine chest. “Why don’t we just send for a doctor?”

“There is only one doctor we can trust, and that’s
the
Doctor. Besides, none of the others are worth the powder to blast them.”

Magee was out again when they came back into the room. Mother Johnston slapped hi* face until he came around, blinking and cursing. Then she fed him the pill.

The powerful stimulant, improbable offspring of common coal tar, took hold almost at once. To all surface appearance Magee was a well man. He sat up and tried his own pulse, searching it out in his left wrist with steady, sensitive fingers. “Regular as a metronome,” he announced, “the old ticker can stand that dosage all right.”

He waited while Mother Johnston applied sterile packs to his wounds, then said goodbye. MacKinnon looked at Mother Johnston. She nodded.

“I’m going with you,” he told the Fader.

“What for? It will just double the risk.”

“You’re in no fit shape to travel alone—stimulant, or no stimulant.”

“Nuts.
I’d
have to look after
you
.”

“I’m going with you.”

Magee shrugged his shoulders and capitulated.

Mother Johnston wiped her perspiring face, kissed both of them.

Until they were well out of town their progress reminded MacKinnon of their nightmare flight of the previous evening. Thereafter they continued to the north-northwest by a highway which ran toward the foothills, and they left the highway only when necessary to avoid the sparse traffic. Once they were almost surprised by a police patrol car, equipped with blacklight and almost invisible, but the Fader sensed it in time and they crouched behind a low wall which separated the adjacent field from the road.

Dave inquired how he had known the patrol was near. Magee chuckled. “Damned if I know,” he said, “but I believe I could smell a cop staked out in a herd of goats.”

The Fader talked less and less as the night progressed. His usually untroubled countenance became lined and old as the effect of the drug wore off. It seemed to Dave as if this unaccustomed expression gave him a clearer insight into the man’s character—that the mask of pain was his true face rather than the unworried features Magee habitually showed the world. He wondered for the ninth time what the Fader had done to cause a court to adjudge him socially insane.

This question was uppermost in his mind with respect to every person he met in Coventry. The answer was obvious in most cases; their types of instability were gross and showed up at once. Mother Johnston had been an enigma until she had explained it herself. She had followed her husband into Coventry. Now that she was a widow, she preferred to remain with the friends she knew and the customs and conditions she was adjusted to, rather than change for another and possibly less pleasing environment.

Magee sat down beside the road. “It’s no use, kid,” he admitted, “I can’t make it.”

“The hell we can’t. I’ll carry you.”

Magee grinned faintly. “No, I mean it.” Dave persisted. “How much farther is it?”

“Matter of two or three miles, maybe.”

“Climb aboard.” He took Magee pickaback and started on. The first few hundred yards were not too difficult; Magee was forty pounds lighter than Dave. After that the strain of the additional load began to tell. His arms cramped from supporting Magee’s knees; his arches complained at the weight and the unnatural load distribution; and his breathing was made difficult by the clasp of Magee’s arms around his neck.

Two miles to go—maybe more. Let your weight fall forward, and your foot must follow it, else you fall to the ground. It’s automatic—as automatic as pulling teeth. How long is a mile? Nothing in a rocket ship, thirty seconds in a pleasure car, a ten minute crawl in a steel snail, fifteen minutes to trained troops in good condition. How far is it with a man on your back, on a rough road, when you are tired to start with?

Five thousand, two hundred, and eighty feet—a meaningless figure. But every step takes twenty-four inches off the total. The remainder is still incomprehensible—an infinity. Count them. Count them till you go crazy—till the figures speak themselves outside your head, and the jar!…jarl…jar!…of your enormous, benumbed feet beats in your brain. Count them backwards, subtracting two each time—no, that’s worse; each remainder is still an unattainable, inconceivable figure.

His world closed in, lost its history and held no future. There was nothing, nothing at all, but the torturing necessity of picking up his foot again and placing it forward. No feeling but the heartbreaking expenditure of will necessary to achieve that meaningless act.

He was brought suddenly to awareness when Magee’s arms relaxed from around his neck. He leaned forward, and dropped to one knee to keep from spilling his burden, then eased it slowly to the ground. He thought for a moment that the Fader was dead—he could not locate his pulse, and the slack face and limp body were sufficiently corpse-like, but he pressed an ear to Magee’s chest, and heard with relief the steady
flub-dub
of his heart.

He tied Magee’s wrists together with his handkerchief, and forced his own head through the encircled arms. But he was unable, in his exhausted condition, to wrestle the slack weight into position on his back. Fader regained consciousness while MacKinnon was struggling. His first words were, “Take it easy, Dave. What’s the trouble?”

Dave explained. “Better untie my wrists,” advised the Fader, “I think I can walk for a while.”

And walk he did, for nearly three hundred yards, before he was forced to give up again. “Look, Dave,” he said, after he had partially recovered, “did you bring along any more of those pepper pills?”

“Yes—but you can’t take any more dosage. It would kill you.”

“Yeah, I know—so they say. But that isn’t the idea—yet. I was going to suggest that you might take one.”

“Why, of course! Good grief, Fader, but I’m dumb.”

Magee seemed no heavier than a light coat, the morning star shone brighter, and his strength seemed inexhaustible. Even when they left the highway and started up the cart trail that led to the Doctor’s home in the foothills, the going was tolerable and the burden not too great. MacKinnon knew that the drugs burned the working tissue of his body long after his proper reserves were gone, and that it would take him days to recover from the reckless expenditure, but he did not mind. No price was too high to pay for the moment when he at last arrived at the gate of the Doctor’s home—on his own two feet, his charge alive and conscious.

MacKinnon was not allowed to see Magee for four days. In the mean-time, he was encouraged to keep the routine of a semi-invalid himself in order to recover the twenty-five pounds he had lost in two days and two nights, and to make up for the heavy strain on his heart during the last night. A high-caloric diet, sun baths, rest, and peaceful surroundings plus his natural good health caused him to regain weight and strength rapidly, but he “enjoyed ill health” exceedingly because of the companionship of the Doctor himself—and Persephone.

Persephone’s calendar age was fifteen. Dave never knew whether to think of her as much older, or much younger. She had been born in Coventry, and had lived her short life in the house of the Doctor, her mother having died in childbirth in that same house. She was completely childlike in many respects, being without experience in the civilized world Outside, and having had very little contact with the inhabitants of Coventry, except when she saw them as patients of the Doctor. But she had been allowed to read unchecked from the library of a sophisticated and protean-minded man of science. MacKinnon was continually being surprised at the extent of her academic and scientific knowledge—much greater than his own. She made him feel as if he were conversing with some aged and omniscient matriarch, then she would come out with some naive concept of the outer world, and he would be brought up sharply with the realization that she was, in fact, an inexperienced child.

He was mildly romantic about her. Not seriously, of course, in view of her barely nubile age, but she was pleasant to see, and he was hungry for feminine companionship. He was quite young enough himself to feel continual interest in the delightful differences, mental and physical, between male and female.

Consequently, it was a blow to his pride as sharp as had been the sentence to Coventry to discover that she classed him with the other inhabitants of Coventry as a poor unfortunate who needed help and sympathy because he was not quite right in his head.

He was furious and for one whole day he sulked alone, but the human necessity for self-justification and approval forced him to seek her out and attempt to reason with her. He explained carefully and with emotional candor the circumstances leading up to his trial and conviction, and embellished the account with his own philosophy and evaluations, then confidently awaited her approval.

It was not forthcoming. “I don’t understand your viewpoint,” she said. “You broke his nose, yet he had done you no harm of any sort. You expect me to approve that?”

“But Persephone,” he protested, “you ignore the fact that he called me a most insulting name.”

“I don’t see the connection,” she said. “He made a noise with his mouth—a verbal label. If the label does not fit you, the noise is meaningless. If the label is true in your case—if you
are
the thing that the noise refers to, you are neither more, nor less, that thing by reason of some one uttering the verbal label. In short, he did not damage you.

“But what you did to him was another matter entirely. You broke his nose. That is damage. In self-protection the rest of society must seek you out, and determine whether or not you are so unstable as to be likely to damage some one else in the future. If you are, you must be quarantined for treatment, or leave society—whichever you prefer.”

“You think I’m crazy, don’t you?” he accused.

“Crazy? Not the way you mean it. You haven’t paresis, or a brain tumor, or any other lesion that the Doctor could find. But from the viewpoint of your semantic reactions you are as socially
unsane
as any fanatic witch-burner.”

“Come now—that’s not just!”

“What is justice?” She picked up the kitten she had been playing with. “I’m going in—it’s getting chilly.” Off she went into the house, her bare feet noiseless in the grass.

Had the science of semantics developed as rapidly as psycho-dynamics and its implementing arts of propaganda and mob psychology, the United States might never have fallen into dictatorship, then been forced to undergo the Second Revolution. All of the scientific principles embodied in the Covenant which marked the end of the revolution were formulated as far back as the first quarter of the twentieth century.

But the work of the pioneer semanticists, C. K. Ogden, Alfred Korzybski, and others, were known to but a handful of students, whereas psycho-dynamics, under the impetus of repeated wars and the frenzy of high-pressure merchandising, progressed by leaps and bounds.

Semantics, “the meaning of meaning,” gave a method for the first time of applying the scientific method to every act of everyday life. Because semantics dealt with spoken and written words as a determining aspect of human behavior it was at first mistakenly thought by many to be concerned
only
with words and of interest only to professional word manipulators, such as advertising copy writers and professors of etymology. A handful of unorthodox psychiatrists attempted to apply it to personal human problems, but their work was swept away by the epidemic mass psychoses that destroyed Europe and returned the United States to the Dark Ages.