The Santaroga Barrier (32 page)

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Authors: Frank Herbert

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“Why …”
“Why weren't you told? We wanted to imbue you with caution, but we saw no need to terrify you.”
“But you thought they were murdered here … by Santarogans?”
“It was all exceedingly mysterious, Gilbert. We were not at all sure.” He studied Dasein, eyes open wide and probing. “That's it, eh? Murder. Are we in peril right now? Do you have the weapon I …”
“If it were only that simple,” Dasein said.
“In heaven's name, Gilbert, what is it? You must have found something. I had such high hopes for you.”
High hopes for me,
Dasein thought. Again, it was a phrase that opened a door on secret conversations. How could Selador be that transparent? Dasein found himself shocked by the shallowness of the man. Where was the omnipotent psychoanalyst? How could he have changed so profoundly?
“You … you people were just using me,” Dasein said. As he spoke, he recalled Al Marden's accusation. Marden had seen this … yes.
“Now, Gilbert, that's no attitude to take. Why, just before I left to come here, Meyer Davidson was inquiring after you. You recall Davidson, the agent for the investment corporation behind the chain stores? He was very much taken with you, Gilbert. He told me he was thinking of making a place for you on his staff.”
Dasein stared at Selador. The man couldn't be serious.
“That would be quite a step up in the world for you, Gilbert.”
Dasein suppressed an urge to laugh. He had the odd sensation
of being detached from his past and able to study a pseudoperson, a might-have-been creature who was himself. The other Dasein would have leaped at this offer. The new Dasein saw through the offer to the true opinion Selador and his cronies held for
“that useful, but not very bright person, Gilbert Dasein.”
“Have you had a look at Santaroga?” Dasein asked. He wondered if Selador had seen Clara Scheler's used car lot or the advertisements in the store windows.
“This morning, while I was waiting for visiting hours with you, I drove around a bit,” Selador said.
“What did you think of the place?”
“My candid opinion? An odd sort of village. When I inquired directions of a native—their language is so brusque and … odd. Not at all like … well, it's not English, of course, full of Americanisms, but …”
“They have a language like their cheese,” Dasein said. “Sharp and full of tang.”
“Sharp! A very good choice of word.”
“A community of individuals, wouldn't you say?” Dasein asked.
“Perhaps … but with a certain sameness to them. Tell me, Gilbert, does this have something to do with why you were sent here?”
“This?”
“These questions. I must say, you're talking like … well, damned if you don't sound like a native.” A forced laugh escaped his dark lips. “Have you gone native?”
The question, coming from that darkly eastern face, couched in that Oxford accent, struck Dasein as supremely amusing. Selador, of all people! To ask such a question.
Laughter bubbled from Dasein.
Selador misinterpreted the response. “Well,” he said, “I should hope you hadn't.”
“Humanity ought to be the first order of interest for humans,” Dasein said.
Again, Selador misinterpreted. “Ah, and you studied the Santarogans like the excellent psychologist you are. Good. Well, then—tell it in your own way.”
“I'll put it another way,” Dasein said. “To have freedom,
you must know how to use it. There's a distinct possibility some people hunt freedom in such a way they become the slaves of freedom.”
“That's all very philosophical, I'm sure,” Selador said. “How does it apply to finding justice for our sponsors?”
“Justice?”
“Certainly, justice. They were lured into this valley and cheated. They spent large sums of money here and got no return on it whatsoever. They're not people to take such treatment lightly.”
“Lured?” Dasein said. “No one would sell to them, that I'm sure. How were they lured? For that matter, how did they acquire a lease on …”
“This isn't pertinent, Gilbert.”
“Yes, it is. How'd they get a lease on Santaroga land?”
Selador sighed. “Very well. If you insist. They forced a competetive bid on some excess State property and put in a bid …”
“One they were sure no one else would match,” Dasein said. He chuckled. “Did they have a market survey?”
“They had a good idea how many people live here.”
“But what kind of people?”
“What're you trying to say, Gilbert?”
“Santaroga's very like a Greek
polis
,” Dasein said. “This is a community of individuals, not a collectivity. Santarogans are not anthill slaves to grubs and grubbing. This is a
polis,
small enough to meet human needs. Their first interest is in human beings. Now, as to justice for …”
“Gilbert, you're talking very strangely.”
“Hear me, please, doctor.”
“Very well, but I hope you'll make some sense out of this … this …”
“Justice,” Dasein said. “These sponsors you mention, and the government they control, are less interested in justice than they are in public order. They have stunted imaginations from too-long and too-intimate association with an ingrown system of self-perpetuating precedents. Do you want to know how they and their machinations appear to a Santarogan?”
“Let me remind you, Gilbert, this is one of the reasons you were sent here.”
Dasein smiled. Selador's accusatory tone brought not a twinge of guilt.
“Raw power,” Dasein said. “That's how the
outside
appears to a Santarogan. “A place of raw power. Money and raw power have taken over there.”
“Outside,” Selador said. “What an interesting emphasis you give to that interesting word.”
“Raw power is movement without a governor,” Dasein said. “It'll run wild and destroy itself with all about it. That's a civilization of battlefields out there. They have special names: market area, trade area, court, election, senate, auction, strike—but they're still battlefields. There's no denying it because every one can invoke the full gamut of weaponry from words to guns.”
“I do believe you're defending these Santaroga rascals,” Selador said.
“Of course I'm defending them! I've had my eyes opened here, I tell you. I lasted much longer, did I? You had such high hopes for me! How can you be so damn' transparent?”
“Now you see here, Gilbert!” Selador stood up, glared down at Dasein.
“You know what gets to me, really gets to me?” Dasein asked. “Justice! You're all so damned interested in putting a cloak of justice and legality on your frauds! You give me a …”
“Doctor Gil?”
It was Burdeaux's voice calling from the doorway behind him. Dasein yanked back on his chair's left wheel, pushed on the right wheel. The chair whirled. All in the same instant, Dasein saw Burdeaux standing in the French doors, felt his chair hit something. He turned his head toward Selador in time to see a pair of feet disappear over the edge of the roof. There was a long, despairing cry terminated by the most sickening, wet thud Dasein had ever heard.
Burdeaux was suddenly beside him, leaning on the parapet to peer down at the parking area.
“Oh my goodness,” Burdeaux said. “Oh, my goodness, what a terrible accident.”
Dasein lifted his hands, looked at them—
his
hands.
I'm not strong enough to've done that,
he thought.
I've been ill. I'm not strong enough.
“
A
major contributing factor to the accident,” Piaget said, “ways the victim's own foolishness in standing that close to the edge of the roof.”
The inquest had been convened in Dasein's hospital room—“Because it is at the scene of the accident and as a convenience to Doctor Dasein, who is not fully recovered from injuries and shock.”
A special investigator had been sent from the State Attorney General's office, arriving just before the inquest convened at ten a.m. The investigator, a William Garrity, obviously was known to Piaget. They had greeted each other “Bill” and “Larry” at the foot of Dasein's bed. Garrity was a small man with an appearance of fragility about him, sandy hair, a narrow face immersed in a mask of diffidence.
Presiding was Santaroga's Coroner, a Negro Dasein had not seen before this morning—Leroy Cos: kinky gray hair and a square, blocky face of remote dignity. He wore a black suit, had held himself apart from the preinquest bustle until the tick of ten o'clock when he had seated himself at a table provided for him, rapped once with a pencil and said: “We will now come to order.”
Spectators and witnesses had seated themselves in folding chairs brought in for the occasion. Garrity shared a table with an Assistant District Attorney who, it developed, was a Nis,
Swarthout Nis, a man with the family's heavy eyelids, wide mouth and sandy hair, but without the deeply cleft chin.
In the two days since the tragedy, Dasein had found his emotions embroiled with a growing anger against Selador—
the fool, the damned fool, getting himself killed that way.
Piaget, seated in the witness chair, summed it up for Dasein.
“In the first place,” Piaget said, a look of stern indignation on his round face, “he had no business taking Doctor Dasein outside. I had explained Doctor Dasein's physical condition quite clearly.”
Garrity, the State's investigator, was permitted a question: “You saw the accident, Doctor Piaget?”
“Yes. Mr. Burdeaux, having noted Doctor Selador wheel my patient onto the sundeck and knowing I considered this a physical strain on my patient, had summoned me. I arrived just in time to see Doctor Selador stumble and fall.”
“You saw him stumble?” Swarthout Nis asked.
“Definitely. He appeared to be reaching for the back of Doctor Dasein's wheelchair. I consider it fortunate he did not manage to grab the chair. He could have taken both of them over the edge.”
Selador stumbled?
Dasein thought. A sense of opening relief pervaded him.
Selador stumbled! I didn't bump him. I knew I wasn't strong enough. But what did I bump? A loose board on the deck, perhaps?
For an instant, Dasein recalled his hands on the wheels of the chair, the firm, sure grip, the soft bump.
A board could feel soft,
he told himself.
Burdeaux was in the witness chair now corroborating Piaget's testimony.
It must be true then.
Dasein felt strength flow through his body. He began to see his Santaroga experience as a series of plunges down precipitous rapids. Each plunge had left him weaker until the final plunge had, through a mystic fusion, put him in contact with a source of infinite strength. It was that strength he felt now.
His life before Santaroga took on the aspects of a delicate myth held fleetingly in the mind. It was a tree in a Chinese landscape seen dimly through pastel mists. He sensed he had fallen somehow into a sequel, which by its existence had changed the past. But the present, here-and-now, surrounded
him like the trunk of a sturdy redwood, firmly rooted, supporting strong branches of sanity and reason.
Garrity with his sleepy questions was a futile incompetent. “You ran immediately to Dr. Dasein's side?”
“Yes, sir. He was quite ill and weak. I was afraid he might try to get out of the wheelchair and fall himself.”
“And Dr. Piaget?”
“He ran downstairs, sir, to see what he could do for the man who fell.”
Only the Santarogans in this room were fully conscious, Dasein thought. It occurred to him then that the more consciousness he acquired, the greater must be his unconscious content—a natural matter of balance. That would be the source of Santaroga's mutual strength, of course—a shared foundation into which each part must fit.
“Doctor Dasein,” the Coroner said.
They swore Dasein in then. The eyes in the room turned toward him. Only Garrity's eyes bothered Dasein—hooded, remote, concealing,
outsider eyes.
“Did you see Dr. Selador fall?”
“I … Mr. Burdeaux called me. I turned toward him and I heard a cry. When I turned back … Doctor Selador's feet were going over the edge.”
“His feet?”
“That's all I saw.”
Dasein closed his eyes, remembering that moment of electric terror. He felt he was using a tunnel-vision effect in his memory, focusing just on those feet. An accident—a terrible accident. He opened his eyes, shut off the vision before memory reproduced that descending wail, the final punctuating thud.
“Had you known Dr. Selador for a long time?”
“He was … yes.” What was Garrity driving at from behind those hooded eyes?
Garrity produced a sheet of paper from a briefcase on his table, glanced at it, said: “I have here a page from Dr. Selador's journal. It was forwarded to me by his wife. One passage interests me. I'll read it to …”
“Is this pertinent?” Coroner Cos asked.
“Perhaps not, sir,” Garrity said. “Again, perhaps it is. I
would like Dr. Dasein's views. We are, after all, merely trying to arrive at the truth in a terrible tragedy.”
“May I see the passage?” That was Swarthout Nis, the Assistant District Attorney, his voice suavely questioning.
“Certainly.”
Nis took the paper, read it.
What is it?
Dasein asked himself.
What did Selador write that his wife would send to a State investigator? Is this why Garrity came?
Nis returned the paper to Garrity. “Keeping in mind that Dr. Selador was a psychiatrist, this passage could have many interpretations. I see no reason why Dr. Dasein shouldn't have the opportunity to throw light upon it, however—if he can.”
“May I see this?” the Coroner asked.
Garrity stood, took the paper to Cos, waited while the Coroner read it.
“Very well,” Cos said, returning the paper to Garrity. “The passage you've marked in red pencil presumably is what concerns you. You may question the witness about that passage if you wish.”
Garrity turned, the paper held stiffly before him, faced Dasein. With occasional glances at the page, he read: “Dasein—a dangerous instrument for this project. They should be warned.”
He lowered the paper. “What project, Dr. Dasein?”
There was a hush in the room as thick as fog.
“I … when did he write this?”
“According to his wife, it's dated approximately a month ago. I repeat: what project?”
Dasein groped in his memory.
Project … dangerous?
“The … only project …” He shook his head. The passage made no sense.
“Why did you come to Santaroga, Dr. Dasein?”
“Why? My fiancée lives here.”
“Your fiancée …”
“My niece, Jenny Sorge,” Piaget interposed.
Garrity glanced at Piaget, who sat now in the front row of chairs, looked back to Dasein. “Didn't you come here to make a market survey?”
“Oh, that—yes. But I don't see how I could be dangerous
to that …” Dasein hesitated, weighing the time nicely. “ … unless he was afraid I'd have my mind too much on other things.”
A soft rustle of laughter whispered through the room. The Coroner rapped his pencil, said: “I remind you this is a serious occasion. A man has died.”
Silence.
Garrity looked once more to the page in his hand. The paper seemed to have gained weight, pulling down.
“What else is on that page from his journal?” Dasein asked. “Doesn't it explain what …”
“Who are the
they
who should be warned?” Garrity asked.
Dasein shook his head. “I don't know—unless it could be the people who hired us for the market study.”
“You have prepared such a study?”
“I'll complete it as soon as I'm well enough to be released from the hospital.”
“Your injuries,” Garrity said, a note of anger in his voice. “Something was said about burns. I'm not at all clear about …”
“Just a moment, please,” the Coroner said. “Dr. Dasein's injuries are not at issue here in any way other than now they bear on his being in a particular place at a particular time. We have had testimony that he was very weak and that Dr. Selador had wheeled Dr. Dasein's wheelchair out onto the sundeck.”
“How weak?” Garrity asked. “And how dangerous?”
The Coroner sighed, glanced at Piaget, at Dasein, back to Garrity. “The facts surrounding Dr. Dasein's injuries are common knowledge in Santaroga, Mr. Garrity. There were more than a dozen witnesses. He was severely burned while saving a man's life. Dr. Dasein is somewhat of a hero in Santaroga.”
“Oh.” Garrity returned to his seat at the table, put the page from Selador's journal on the briefcase. He obviously was angry, confused.
“I permit a considerable degree of informality in an inquiry such as this,” Cos said. “Dr. Dasein has asked a question about the surrounding contents of that page. I confess the entries make no sense to me, but perhaps …” The Coroner left his question hanging there, his attention on Garrity.
“My office can add little,” Garrity said. “There's an entry
which obviously is a population figure; it's so labeled. There's a line …” He lifted the page. “‘Oil company checked out. Negative.' There's a rather cryptic: ‘No mental illness.' Except for the one entry referring to Dr. Dasein …”
“What about the rest of the journal?” the Coroner asked. “Has your office investigated it?”
“Unfortunately, Mrs. Selador says she obeyed her husband's testamentary wishes and burned his journal. It contained, she said, confidential data on medical cases. This one entry she preserved and sent to us …” Garrity shrugged.
“I'm afraid the only man who could explain it is no longer living,” the Coroner said. “If this was, however, a journal of medical data with reference to Dr. Selador's psychiatric practice, then it would seem the entry in question might be explained easily in rather harmless terms. The word
dangerous
can have many interpretations in a psychiatric context. It may even be that Dr. Dasein's interpretation is the correct one.”
Garrity nodded.
“Do you have any more questions?” the Coroner asked.
“Yes. One more.” Garrity looked at Dasein, a veiled, uncertain look. “Were you and Dr. Selador on friendly terms?”
Dasein swallowed. “He was … my teacher … my friend. Ask anyone at Berkeley.”
A blank look of frustration came over Garrity's face.
He knows,
Dasein thought. And immediately he wondered what it was Garrity
could
know. There was nothing to know. An accident. Perhaps he knew Selador's suspicions about Santaroga. But that was foolishness … unless Garrity were another of the investigators looking into things that were none of his business.
Dasein felt his vision blur and, staring at Garrity, saw the man's face become a death's-head skull. The illusion vanished as Garrity shook his head, jammed Selador's journal page into the briefcase. A rueful smile appeared on his face. He glanced at the Coroner, shrugged.
“Something amuses you, Mr. Garrity?” the Coroner asked.
The smile vanished.
“No, sir. Well … my own thought processes sometimes. I've obviously allowed an unhappy woman, Mrs. Selador, to send me on a wild goose chase.”
The investigator sat down, said: “I've no more questions, sir.”
Abruptly, Dasein experienced a moment of insight; Garrity's thoughts had frightened the man! He'd suspected a vast conspiracy here in Santaroga. But that was too fantastic; thus, the smile.
The Coroner was closing his inquiry now—a brief summation: all the facts were in … an allusion to the pathologist's gory details—“massive head injuries, death instantaneous”—a notation that a formal inquest would be held at a date to be announced. Would Mr. Garrity wish to return for it? Mr. Garrity thought not.

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