Turning Point Part 2

Four hours later they were in Merrick's office. The preliminary stage of his plan had failed, just as he had known it would. He was almost glad. It had been a vacillating expediency, an attempt to hide the facts and avoid the necessity of facing the challenge squarely. Stage two was about to begin, and this time there would be no temporizing.

The Prophet glared angrily across the desk-top. "Do you take me for a child? You have shown me nothing. Where are the protoplasm vats? The brain machines? Where are the bodies a.s.sembled? I warned you against trickery, Han Merrick!"

Merrick glanced across the room at his wife. She sat rigid in her chair, her face a pale mask. He would get no help from her.

"You must realize, Erikson," he said, "That you are forcing me to jeopardize five centuries of work for the chimera of Human Supremacy.

Let me warn you now that your life is of no importance to me when balanced against that. When the Board of Psychotechnicians appointed my family custodians of the Creche centuries ago, they did so because they knew we would keep faith--"

"The last member of the founding Board died more than two hundred years ago," snapped the Prophet.

"But the Creche is here, and I am here to guard it as my forefathers did," Merrick said. Once again he was conscious of a strange ambivalence in his att.i.tude. He must guard something he considered wrong against the intrusion of a danger even more wrong. His hand sought the scored grip of the old automatic in his pocket. Could he actually kill?

"You speak of Human Supremacy as a chimera," Sweyn Erikson said, "It is no such thing. It is the only vital force left in the world.

Robotism is a menace more deadly, a blasphemy more foul than any Black Ma.s.s of history. You are making Man into an anachronism on the face of his own planet. This cannot be! _I_ will not let it be...."

Merrick stared. Could it be that the man actually believed that the poison he peddled was the food of the G.o.ds?

"I will try one last attempt at reason, Erikson," Merrick said deliberately. "Look back with an unprejudiced mind, if you can, over the centuries since the Atom War. What do you see?"

"I see Man emasculated by the robot!"

"No! You see atomic power harnessed and in use for the first time after almost a millenium of muddling. You see Man standing on the Moon and the habitable planets--and soon to reach out for the stars! A new Golden Age is dawning, Prophet! And why? Whence have come the techniques?" Even as he spoke, Merrick knew he was ignoring the obvious, the all-too-apparent cracks in the social structure that no scientific miracles could cure. But were those cracks the fault of robotism or were they in fact a failing inherent in Man himself? He was not prepared to answer that. "From where are the techniques drawn?" he asked again.

Erikson met his glance squarely. "Not from the mindless horrors you sp.a.w.n here!"

"Emotionless, Prophet," corrected Merrick pointedly, "Not mindless."

"Soulless! Soulless and mindless, too. Never have these zombies been able to think as men!"

"They are not men."

"Nor are they the architects of the future!"

"I think you are wrong, Prophet," Merrick said softly.

"Man is the ultimate," Erikson said.

"You talk like a fool," snapped Merrick.

"_Han!_" There was naked terror in his wife's voice, but he rushed on, ignoring it.

"How dare you say that Man is the ultimate? What right have you to a.s.sume that nature has stopped experimenting?"

Sweyn Erikson's lip curled scornfully. "Can you be implying that the robots--"

Merrick leaned across the desk to shout full in the Prophet's face: "_You fool! They're not robots!_"

The robed man was suddenly on his feet, face livid.

"Han!" cried Virginia Merrick, "Not that way!"

"This is my affair now, Virginia. I'll handle it in my own way!" the Director said.

"Remember the mob outside!"

Merrick turned agate-hard eyes on his wife. Presently he looked away and said to the Prophet. "Now I will show you the real Creche!"

There were robots everywhere--blank-eyed, like sleep walkers. They reacted to commands. They moved and breathed and fed themselves. Under rigid control they performed miracles of intuitive calculation. But artificiality was stamped upon them like a brand. They were _not_ human.

In the lowest vaults of the Creche, Merrick showed the Prophet the infants. He withheld nothing. He showed him the growing creatures. He explained to him the tests and signs that were looked for in the hospitals maintained by the World State and the Council of Ten. He let him watch the young ones taking their Primary Conditioning. Courses of hypnotic instruction. Rest, narcosynthesis. Semantics. Drugs and words and more words pounding on young brains like sledgehammer blows, shaping them into something acceptable in a sapient world.

In other chambers, other age groups. Emotion and memory being moulded into something else by hypnopedia. Faces becoming blank and expressionless.

"Their minds are conditioned--enslaved," Merrick said bitterly. "Then they are primed with scientific facts. Those techniques we discussed.

_This_ is where they come from, Prophet. From the minds of your despised androids. Only will is suppressed, and emotion. They are shaped for the sociography of a sapient culture. They mature very slowly. We keep them here for from ten to fifteen years. No human brain could stand it--but _theirs_ can."

Truth dangled before his eyes, but Erikson's mind savagely rejected it. The pillars upon which he had built his life were crumbling....

The two men stood in a vast hall filled with an insidious, whispering voice. On low pallets, fully a score of physically mature androids lay staring vacuously at a spinning crystal high in the apex of the domed ceiling.

"--you had no life before you where created here to serve Man the master you had no life before you were created here to serve Man the master you had--" the voice whispered into the hypnotized brains.

"Don't look up," Merrick warned. "The crystal can catch a human being faster than it can _them_. This is hypnotic engineering. The rhythm of the syllables and their proportion to the length of word and sentence are computed to correspond to typed encephalographic curves. Nothing is left to chance. When they have reached this stage of conditioning they are almost ready for release and purchase by human beings. Only a severe stimulation of the brain can break down the walls we have built in their minds."

Erikson made a gesture as though darkness were streaking his vision.

He was shaken badly. "But where do they--where do they come from?"

"The State maternity hospitals, of course," Merrick said, "Where else?

The parents are then sterilized by the Health and Welfare Authority as an added safeguard. Births occur at a ratio of about one for every six million normals." He smiled mirthlessly at the Prophet of Human Supremacy. "Well? Little man, what now?"

Honest realization still refused to come. It needed to be put into words, and Sweyn Erikson had no such words. "I see only that you are taking children of men and disfiguring--"

"For the last time," gritted Merrick, "These are _not_ human beings.

Genus h.o.m.o, yes. _h.o.m.o chaos_, if you choose. But not h.o.m.o sapiens. I think of them," he said with sudden calm, "As _h.o.m.o Supremus_. The next step on the evolutionary ladder...."

At last the words had been spoken and the flood gates were down in the tortured brain of the Prophet. Like a sudden conflagration, realization came--and with it, blind terror.

"No! Nonono! You cannot continue this devil's work! Think what it would mean if these things should ever be loosed on the world of Man!"

the Prophet's voice was a steadily rising shrill of fear.

Han Merrick looked out across the rows of pallets, each with its burden of a superman, bound like Prometheus to the rock, helpless in hypnotic chains. It struck him again that his life had not been well spent. He looked from his charges to the ranting fear-crazed rabble-rouser. The contrast was too shocking, too complete. For the "androids" were, in fact, worthy of a dignity even in slavery that h.o.m.o sapiens had never attained in overlords.h.i.+p. Merrick knew at last what he must do.

Racial loyalty stirred, but was quickly smothered in the humiliation of man's omnipresent thievery. For it _was_ thievery, Merrick thought.

Man was keeping for himself the heritage that was the rightful property of a newer, better race.