Part 2

* * * * *

Bronson said, "You were curious, but you would never have gotten THE CALL. You were curious and you helped me and the world, Morrow, so I'm going to explain it to you. You want to hear about it?"

"What?" Morrow said hoarsely. His eyes were sharp with fear. "Three hours--back in three hours. You look--different, so different--your eyes and--"

"I found out things, Morrow. About the War, about the Plan. Some scientists calling themselves Freedom Unlimited, bio-chemists, physicists and geneticists, organized and said they were going to bring about the realization of man's unlimited potentialities. Create a Paradise on Earth. An old dream. Those who get THE CALL haven't been so far wrong, basically. But the Psychologists reconditioned them so the real nature of THE CALL was distorted."

Morrow shook his head.

"No, and you probably won't understand after I tell you," Bronson said. "But so what? I promised to tell you. Freedom Unlimited took hold, wiped out national barriers, started to sweep the world. They had found the secret of the human mind and nervous system, adopting the methods of atomic physicists. X-rays tear an electron from an atom. They did the same thing with genes, with the cells of the nervous system. Genes and cells, the roots of life. The rock-bottom of life. The problem of the gene and that of the atom were the same. Anyway, they learned the secret of the human brain, that it was a perfect calculating machine."

Morrow was struggling with himself, not moving.

Bronson went on. "I'm controlling you some now, Morrow. You can't move. We're in a hurry so I'll make it brief; there's a job to do. A perfect calculating machine, maybe the most perfect one in the Universe, limitless, inexhaustible. Secretly, Freedom Unlimited started releasing people, clearing them of aberrations, clearing their nervous systems of sludge, fusing emotion with analytical power, so the perfect calculating machine could operate. The movement spread so fast, it threatened various governments, including those in power. The status quo would rather maintain power and be ignorant and blind than to give up their power to the final step of progress. There was a pogrom. The real reason couldn't be revealed of course, so the big powers cooked up a war to cover up the purge. It got out of hand. The result was that civilization was about wiped out. The world burned. Freedom Unlimited had learned the power of the human brain, but they were too few, and the Psychologists managed to fight them long enough to carry through the war. Freedom Unlimited fled to Mars. They couldn't engage in wholesale slaughter. But they had to survive."

It was so clear now in Bronson's mind, as though he were experiencing it.

"Many of the scientists had been killed, only a few reached Mars. But they had launched a Plan. They planted basic undying commands, responses, in the reactive primitive cells of individuals whom they knew would reproduce in kind. They knew how to treat genes like chemical formulae. They knew the genes and cells would carry these commands from generation to generation. The commands led to THE CALL. A call to come to Mars, that's all. Once they got to Mars, they would be free."

Bronson leaned forward. "But Freedom Unlimited didn't anticipate the utter nihilism, the complete inhuman attitude of those who had defeated them. There were variables. Freedom Unlimited couldn't anticipate the utter power and suppression put into effect by the Psychologists, the reflex boys. That they would condition every bit of imaginative, creative, original thought and action out of everyone but a small elite who, because of their own destructive nihilistic attitudes, were never human in the first place, but only aberrated monsters. And all the rest of humanity became little more than robots, zombies, mechanicals, their analytical power chopped off, short-circuited completely. They can only have fun like well-trained moronic children. With bells ringing everywhere, the Pavlovians turned humans into dogs."

Morrow didn't say anything. His face was pinched and afraid, confused and helpless.

"The Psychologists suspected the basis of the Plan. They converted it by conditioning into a kind of religion. Then it wasn't dangerous anymore. Meanwhile, they had also learned they could never reach Mars. There's a final step to releasing the pure analytical power of the human mind. Synthesis. Similarization. There's a dome down there shaped like the skull of a giant. Inside that metal skull is a synthesis of human intellect and machinery, pure analytical power. The brain, at its optimum, is a perfect thinking machine. No five perfect thinking machines would solve a problem differently. The result is synthesis. With synthesis came an ultimate thinking machine because it gives off energy, electrical let us say for convenience, in the form of thought.

"And that master brain down there has the will to radiate and control this great energy. It's a kind of final perfection of the unguessed power of the brain. It goes beyond the human, for them at least. They can send out beams, or rather it, sends out beams of sheer power, solid thought, by dipping into nine million brain cells plus a hundred. That brain can stop any enemy's approach to Mars, but it couldn't reach Earth. Yet.

"You follow me, Morrow?"

Morrow nodded slowly. He slumped a little. His face was shabby now and old. "Some of it," he whispered. "I don't understand. But I believe. I have to believe. You--power--"

* * * * *

"I have a lot of power," Bronson said. "I'll have more of it. You see, the Plan really did work in a sense. Variables work both ways. Over a period of time, circumstances meshed in such a way that a Disciplinary Corpsman named Bronson got THE CALL. The sight of the planet Mars was the key-in stimulant. I happened to be alone in my apartment so that no one knew I'd been hit. I happened to be a Corpsman which meant I knew what happened to those who got THE CALL. I couldn't accept that, so I had to look for other reasons. I also happened to never have undergone brain surgery, any prefrontal lobotomies, for example. Those things destroy the analytical mind so even Freedom Unlimited is not certain of a cure. I couldn't doubt my own sanity. So I came to Mars, I answered THE CALL. It happened to me by accident, but I had the command in my cells ready for re-stimulation."

"What now?" Morrow said. "What do you do now? What about me--and--"

"I'll go back to Earth, and start to work. With each clearing of a human being from his Pavlovian prison, I'll gain greater strength, allies. No one will know. This time there'll be no disaster because the destructive elements of war aren't there. The Psychologists are too sure of themselves. We'll win the world and free men's minds."

"And what about me?"

Bronson looked at Morrow's face. A thoroughly conditioned face really. Hardly human at all if one knew what a human face could really express. Strange, that spark of curiosity in a man whose brain had obviously undergone deadly probing with steel picks under the eyeballs, tearing apart the cells of the greatest thinking device ever developed.

"You're going to Mars," Bronson said softly. "Maybe they can clear you. I had THE CALL planted in an ancestor. You didn't. It missed you, Morrow. With the command carried forward always in the cells went also resistance to conditioning. You didn't have it, Morrow. It may be too bad and it may not. They've learned a lot in a hundred years."

Bronson got up and put a hand gently on Morrow's shoulder. "I don't know," he said. "I'm sorry. Maybe you'll be with me later. If you're not back here in a short time, that'll mean good-bye. I'll wait for you...."

Morrow got up. He nodded once to Bronson, and went out. Bronson heard the sled blast out of the rocket.

Morrow didn't come back.

Bronson took the rocket up, headed toward Venus. He would pick up the cargo; the story Morrow had arranged about an accident on Venus could work just as well to explain Bronson's single return as Morrow's.

He had some advantage in his command of the human mind. But it wasn't omnipotent by any means. He would be operating alone against murderers who had turned human beings into cattle. He would have to play it slow and with the utmost care.

And though he might fail, there would be others. He could forget about Morrow and Orlan. So much of them had been destroyed by surgery that in a comparative sense, they hadn't been really human anymore.

He wasn't troubled by the tremendous challenge ahead of him. It exalted him.

Some day, we'll win, he thought. Freedom Unlimited. The freedom of the free human mind. He might fail. But THE CALL would go on. There would always be deviants from the norm. He could fail. The Plan could not.

Bronson smiled at the twilight expanse before the rocket, wide and frosty and marvelously clear.

As long as there were people, there would always be a few who would get THE CALL.