The Troublemakers, George O. Smith [freenovel24 .TXT] 📗

probably to the point of complete physical and intellectual torpor. Place them both in the stimulating atmosphere and he becomes normal while she goes into transports of sensuous excitement. This explains it!"

"Explains what?" demanded Mr. Hanford.

"Her recent behavior. Or rather escapade."

None of them heard the gentle snick of the lock in the front door.

"Escapade?" exclaimed Mrs. Hanford.

"We didn't know that she was in any trouble," said Mr. Hanford.

"That's just the point," said Scholar Ross. "Your daughter has the infuriating habit of indulging in outrageous behavior under the name of brilliant intellectual accomplishment."

Gloria Hanford said, "Why, thank you, sir!"

She dropped the scholar a deep curtsey, displaying several inches of slender ankle.

"Gloria!" demanded her mother. "What have you been up to?"

Gloria Hanford smiled at her mother in an elfin, yet superior manner. "I am the affianced bride of Bertram Harrison," she said softly. "Therefore my behavior, whether good, bad, or indifferent, is no longer the problem of my parents."

Her father said, "Gloria, I happen to be big enough in both the physical and intellectual departments to overrule both you and your husband-to-be. So you'll answer your mother."

"Why," said Gloria quietly, "I've done nothing wrong."

Mr. Hanford said to Scholar Ross: "What's your side of this?"

Scholar Ross said, "Last week the Westchester Young People's Club gave a costume ball. The young ladies were to attend this affair adorned in the authentic fashion of some period in the past, and a prize was to be awarded to the most novel, yet completely authentic costume."

"And," said Gloria with a smile, "I won!"

"Your daughter won because she has a talent for performing the most shocking deeds under a cloak of intellectual achievement."

"Do go on, Scholar Ross. What did Gloria do?"

The scholar smiled wryly. "Style and fashion ceased to be logical when clothing was designed for sly provocation rather than as a protection against a harsh environment," he said. "We live in a mixed-up social world. We encourage communal swimming and sun bathing in the nude—and yet after five o'clock it is considered shocking to display more than the bare face and hands.

"So in order to combine the maximum shock-effect with the cloak of utter authenticity, Miss Hanford researched the styles and fashions until she located a brief period of a few scant months late in the Twentieth Century. Her costume consisted of a many-fold voluminous skirt of semi-transparent material that draped in graceful folds from waist to mid-calf. She was completely nude above the waist! To prove her point, she offered fashion stereos of the period from style magazines."

Gloria chuckled. "I might have researched back to the Old Testament," she said.

Scholar Ross shook his head. "As I say, her shocking behavior could not be criticized. She could justify it according to the rules."

Mr. Hanford shook his head and asked, "Gloria, what did Bertram think of all this?"

"Bertram carried the style stereos," said Gloria. "There wasn't any pocket in my costume."

Abruptly, Scholar Ross said, "Miss Hanford, how are you and Bertram getting along?"

"As well as could be expected."

"Meaning what?"

"Meaning that each of us lives our own life. Berty likes his sedentary, torpid existence. In fact, he'd like to be more of a vegetable than he is. It started with his taking my pills and that was all right, I guess. But when he started sleeping in my bedroom so that he could estivate under the tranquilizing music program you prescribed for me, that was too much!"

Scholar Ross looked unprecedentedly astonished. "So?" he demanded.

"What do you mean 'so'? What would any red blooded woman do? I moved out and into his bedroom, naturally."

"And then started taking his medication?" asked Scholar Ross curtly.

"Natch!"

"Oh, my God!" exploded Scholar Ross. He eyed Gloria intently. "How do you manage to get Bertram awake far enough to attend things like your costume ball?" he asked.

"Well," she said with a smile, "I am really strong enough to sling a hundred and eighty-five pounds of loosely-stuffed sausage over my shoulder in a fireman's carry and tote the inert mass back to its own bedroom so that its own music will rouse it enough to reach for its bedside bottles of medication. Nature then takes its course until the awakening. Then he goes along with my desires—because he knows that if he doesn't, I won't let him dive back into his complete inertia. It's very simple. Of course, it isn't much fun."

Scholar Ross said, "Gloria, do you intend to continue this sort of self-centered, artificial life after you and Bertram are married?"

"I've given the future very little thought."

"You always have," said Scholar Ross unhappily. "That's been a lot of your trouble."

"So what am I supposed to do? Do you really expect me to marry that vegetable? I've got a life to lead too, you know. It may suit your overall program of genetics to breed a batch of normal children, but the same Book of Laws grants me the right to seek my own level of happiness."

"Granted—"

"Well, scholar, I can tell you that my idea of happiness is not a husband who comes into my bedroom walking like a somnambulist just barely able to cross the room before collapsing like a loosely-packed sandbag."

"What you need," said Scholar Ross firmly, "is a man who is strong enough to tell you what you're going to do."

"And where are you going to find one?"

Scholar Ross turned from Gloria to her parents. "Obviously," he said regretfully, "this proposed marriage between your daughter and Bertram Harrison is not going to culminate in a happy union."

"Did you expect it to?" asked Gloria.

"I had hopes. I can only propose a course of action. Were you willing to embark upon your prescribed program of corrective therapy, and so become a normally active and emotionally stable woman, then the marriage might work out very well indeed."

"It's all my fault, of course?"

"Yes. Of course. The decision was yours to make."

"And how about that lump of lard you've foisted off on me?"

"Bertram Harrison's willing retreat into total lethargy is, of course, his own decision. But it, too, is only another aspect of the usual case. The strong-willed personality makes its own way. The weak one follows."

"I see," sneered Gloria. "It's all my fault!"

"Of course it is," snapped Scholar Ross. "Were you willing to correct yourself, you'd also have been willing to correct Bertram since yours is the stronger personality."

"So what's the next move? Do I get to try another dolt?"

"Hardly. You'd do the same with any of them."

"So what is it? Am I going to be exported to Eden, Tau Ceti as an incorrigible?"

Scholar Ross was silent.

Mr. Hanford said, "Certainly there must be another way?"

Mrs. Hanford said, "Must I lose my daughter?"

Scholar Ross said regretfully, "There is another way, of course, but either way is essentially a loss of your daughter, Mrs. Hanford."

Mr. Hanford said, "And what is this other course, Scholar Ross?"

"It's called re-orientation."

"Brain-washing!" exclaimed Gloria.

"That's a harsh, colloquial term."

Mrs. Hanford said, "How does this re-orientation work?"

Coldly, as if he were discussing the repair of some inanimate engine, Scholar Ross said, "It starts with corrective surgery on the pituitary and thyroid glands. Next comes some very complicated neuro-cerebral surgery, somewhat resembling the crude, primitive process once called 'Prefrontal Lobotomy'. Nowadays it produces the desired effect without all of the deleterious side-effects. Then, once the patient is completely disoriented, the process of re-education takes place. The patient is extremely docile and highly impressionable. All decisions carry the same weight—"

"How do you mean that?" asked Mr. Hanford.

"Why, the decision to use blue or black ink in your fountain pen becomes as important as the decision of whether to cling or jump from a damaged aircar."

"Oh. And then?"

"Why, since the patient is docile and impressionable, we can mold the patient's appreciation of people, places, and events into conformity. Events of the former life are not erased, but they are viewed as if the patient had seen a trivideo drama instead of having been that person. The entire list of friends and acquaintances is changed because the patient's personality is so different that the former friends no longer have anything in common with the patient. It will be," said Scholar Ross, "exactly as if your daughter left you, never to return, and then next year you are introduced to a strange woman who bears a complete resemblance to your daughter. To whom," he added, "you eventually become emotionally attached because of your daughter's memory."

"It sounds pretty drastic."

"I shall not fool you. It is drastic, indeed."

"I don't like it," Gloria snapped.

"Yes," pleaded Mrs. Hanford. "What is the alternative?"

"Eden, Tau Ceti. I'll arrange transportation under the migration act, and she'll be permitted two hundred pounds of gross." Scholar Ross smiled thinly. "You can diet a few pounds off and thus increase the net weight of your allowable possessions," he said. "But, on the other hand, if you diet down to rail-skinny no one will take a chance on you."

Gloria demanded belligerently, "What am I, a raffle prize?"

"Why, that's no better than white slavery!" cried her mother.

"Oh, come now!" said Scholar Ross. "Miss Hanford will receive a home and a hard-working husband on a fine new world with unlimited opportunities."

Gloria Hanford snorted. "The term, 'unlimited opportunity' is just the optimist's way of describing a situation that the pessimist would call, 'lack of modern conveniences.'"

"Well, Miss Hanford, you have your choice. One of three. Corrective therapy and marriage with Bertram Harrison; total re-orientation; or migration to Eden, Tau Ceti. I'll not ask for your decision now. Give me your answer within thirty days."

"You can't force me!"

"No. I can't. All I can do is to point out your three avenues of future travel—and then point out that I do have the means of making your life so very inconvenient that you'll have no recourse but to make your choice from among the three desirable possibilities. Desirable, I must admit, means that which is most favorable to the furtherance of domestic tranquility!"

VII

Lalande 25372 is a Spectral Class M star, a faint red dwarf not visible to the naked eye from Earth, Sol. Lalande 25372 lies fifteen point nine light years from Sol, about fifteen degrees north of the celestial equator and not quite opposite the vernal equinox. It has planets, but this does not make Lalande 25372 unique. Like most of the planets found in space, neither mad dogs nor Englishmen would have anything to do with them—willingly. They are suitable only for the hapless wight whose erring foot has unhappily landed on the tender official toe.

The planet Flatbush, Lalande 25372, received its name from an obscure medieval reference to a form of punishment known as "Walking a beat in Flatbush," if we are to believe MacClelland's authoritative volume The Origin of Place Names.

Observed through the multipane window of the Station, Flatbush, Lalande 25372, was a pleasant enough planet, provided one could ignore the fact that there was not a sign nor trace of vegetation from the Installation Building to the horizon. A couple of hundred yards from the building there was a pleasant looking lake. The lake was indeed water, but it contained dissolved substances that would have poisoned a boojum snark. The warm wind of Flatbush rippled the surface of the lake, but no square yard of sail would be hoisted until someone first built a gas mask that would filter out the colorless gases that turned silver black. Fluffy clouds floated across the sky, but they rained down a mess that etched stainless steel.

Out There, near the perimeter of Man's five-parsec range of operations, subelectromagnetic detector beams scoured the sky. Taking the most pessimistic standpoint—the least possible combinations of Nature's infinite variety of environment—Nature's own profligacy with life-forms still demanded that somewhere, Out There, another race was plying the spaceways.

Someday this hypothetical race was certain to touch wings with mankind.

When that took place it was the duty of the Bureau of Operations to detect them, to intercept them, and to warn the men of Earth, Sol, that Mankind was no longer alone. The fact that the subelectromagnetic detecting beams had been sweeping space for a couple of hundred years without detecting anything had no bearing on the future. The beams must be maintained so long as a human man remained alive in space.

In addition to the detector beams, the outlying planets carried astrogation beacons. They were subelectromagnetic lighthouses, so to speak, that rang across space with known direction and ranging telemetered signals. Someday, Man hoped to fill the space lanes with spacecraft and the planets with interstellar commerce.

Someday there might be another Marie Celeste plying its course with its crew inexplicably missing. But if this ever happened, it was not going to happen without the Space Service knowing precisely how many and which spacecraft were operating through that volume of space before, during, and after D-for-Disaster Day and M-for-Mysterious Minute.

The equipment, of course, was automated to modern perfection, with multi-lateral