The SF Hall of Fame Volume Two B (47 page)

When the woman came back, it was with the large man Morey
had encountered in the company of Sam, the counterfeiter, steerer and general
man about Old Town.

"A remarkably small world, isn't it?" boomed
Walter Bigelow, only slightly crushing Morey's hand in his. "Well, sir, my
wife has told me how interested you are in the basic philosophical drives
behind our movement, and I should like to discuss them further with you. To
begin with, sir, have you considered the principle of Twoness?"

Morey said, "Why-"

"Very good," said Bigelow courteously. He cleared
his throat and declaimed:

Han-headed Cathay saw it first, Bright as brightest solar
burst; Whipped it into boy and girl, The blinding spiral-sliced swirl: Yang And
Yin.

He shrugged deprecatingly. "Just the first
stanza," he said. "I don't know if you got much out of it."
"Well, no," Morey admitted. "Second stanza," Bigelow said
firmly:

Hegal saw it, saw it clear;

Jackal Marx drew near, drew near:

O'er his shoulder saw it plain,

Turned it upside down again:

Yang

And Yin.

There was an expectant pause. Morey said, "I—uh—"
"Wraps it all up, doesn't it?" Bigelow's wife demanded. "Oh, if
only others could see it as clearly as you do! The robot peril
and
the
robot savior. Starvation
and
surfeit. Always twoness, always!"

Bigelow patted Morey's shoulder. "The next stanza makes
it even clearer," he said. "It's really very clever—I shouldn't say
it, of course, but it's Howland's as much as it's mine. He helped me with the
verses." Morey darted a glance at Howland, but Howland was carefully
looking away. "Third stanza," said Bigelow. "This is a hard one,
because it's long, so pay attention."

Justice, tip your sightless scales; One pan rises, one
pan fails.

"Howland," he interrupted himself, "are you
sure
about that rhyme? I always trip over it. Well, anyway:

Add to A and B grows less;

A's B's partner, nonetheless.

Next, the Twoness that there be

In even electricity.

Chart the current as it's found:

Sine the hot lead, line the ground.

The wild sine dances, soars and falls,

But only to figures the zero calls.

Sine wave, scales, all things that be

Share a reciprocity.

Male and female, light and dark:

Name the numbers of Noah's Ark!

Yang

And Yinl

"Dearest!" shrieked Bigelow's wife. "You've
never done it better!" There was a spatter of applause, and Morey realized
for the first time that half the bar had stopped its noisy revel to listen to
them. Bigelow was evidently quite a well-known figure here.

Morey said weakly, "I've never heard anything like
it."

He turned hesitantly to Howland, who promptly said,
"Drink! What we all need right now is a drink."

They had a drink on Bigelow's book.

Morey got Howland aside and asked him, "Look, level
with me. Are these people nuts?"

Howland showed pique. "No. Certainly not."

"Does that poem mean anything? Does this whole business
of twoness mean anything?"

Howland shrugged. "If it means something to them, it
means something. They're philosophers, Morey. They see deep into things. You
don't know what a privilege it is for me to be allowed to associate with
them."

They had another drink. On Howland's book, of course.

Morey eased Walter Bigelow over to a quiet spot. He said,
"Leaving twoness out of it for the moment, what's this about the
robots?"

Bigelow looked at him round-eyed. "Didn't you
understand the poem?"

"Of course I did. But diagram it for me in simple terms
so I can tell my wife."

Bigelow beamed. "It's about the dichotomy of
robots," he explained. "Like the Utile salt mill that the boy wished
for: it ground out salt and ground out salt and ground out salt. He had to have
salt, but not
that
much salt. Whitehead explains it clearly—"

They had another drink on Bigelow's book.

Morey wavered over to Tanaquil Bigelow. He said fuzzily,
"Listen. Mrs. Walter Tanaquil Strongarm Bigelow. Listen."

She grinned smugly at him. "Brown hair," she said
dreamily.

Morey shook his head vigorously. "Never mind
hair," he ordered. "Never mind poem. Listen. In
pre-cise
and
el-e-men-ta-ry terms, explain to me what is wrong with the world today."

"Not enough brown hair," she said promptly.

"Never mind hair!"

"All right," she said agreeably. "Too many
robots. Too many robots make too much of everything."

"Ha! Got it!" Morey exclaimed triumphantly.
"Get rid of robots!"

"Oh, no. No! No! No. We wouldn't eat. Everything is
mechanized. Can't get rid of them, can't slow down production—slowing down is
dying, stopping is quicker dying. Principle of twoness is the concept that
clarifies all these—"

"No!" Morey said violently. "What should we
do?"

"Do? I'll tell you what we should do, if that's what
you want. I can tell you."

"Then tell me."

"What we should do is—" Tanaquil hiccupped with a
look of refined consternation—"have another drink."

They had another drink. He gallantly let her pay, of course.
She ungallantly argued with the bartender about the ration points due her.

Though not a two-fisted drinker, Morey tried. He really
worked at it.

He paid the price, too. For some little time before his
limbs stopped moving, his mind stopped functioning. Blackout. Almost a
blackout, at any rate, for all he retained of the late evening was a
kaleidoscope of people and places and things. Howland was there, drunk as a
skunk, disgracefully drunk, Morey remembered thinking as he stared up at
Howland from the floor. The Bigelows were there. His wife, Cherry, solicitous
and amused, was there. And oddly enough, Henry was there.    .

It was very, very hard to reconstruct. Morey devoted a whole
morning's hangover to the effort. It was
important
to reconstruct it,
for some reason. But Morey couldn't even remember what the reason was; and
finally he dismissed it, guessing that he had either solved the secret of
twoness or whether Tanaquil Bigelow's remarkable figure was natural.

He did, however, know that the next morning he had waked in
his own bed, with no recollection of getting there. No recollection of anything
much, at least not of anything that fit into the proper chronological order or
seemed to mesh with anything else, after the dozenth drink when he and Howland,
arms around each other's shoulders, composed a new verse on twoness and,
plagiarizing an old marching tune, howled it across the boisterous bar-room:

A twoness on the scene much later Rests in your
refrigerator. Heat your house and insulate it. Next your food: Refrigerate it.
Frost will damp your Freon coils, So flux in nichrome till it boils.

See the picture? Heat in cold In heat in cold, the
story's told! Giant-writ the sacred scrawl: Oh, the twoness of it all! Yang And
Yin!

It had, at any rate, seemed to mean something at the time.

If alcohol opened Morey's eyes to the fact that there
was
a twoness, perhaps alcohol was what he needed. For there was.

Call it a dichotomy, if the word seems more couth. A kind of
two-pronged struggle, the struggle of two unwearying runners in an immortal race.
There is the refrigerator inside the house. The cold air, the bubble of heated
air that is the house, the bubble of cooled air that is the refrigerator, the
momentary bubble of heated air that defrosts it. Call the heat Yang, if you
will. Call the cold Yin. Yang overtakes Yin. Then Yin passes Yang. Then Yang
passes Yin. Then-Give them other names. Call Yin a mouth; call Yang a hand.

If the hand rests, the mouth will starve. If the mouth
stops, the hand will die. The hand, Yang, moves faster.

Yin may not lag behind.

Then call Yang a robot.

And remember that a pipeline has two ends.

Like any once-in-a-lifetime lush, Morey braced himself for
the consequences—and found startledly that there were none.

Cherry was a surprise to him. "You were so funny,"
she giggled. "And, honestly, so
romantic."

He shakily swallowed his breakfast coffee.

The office staff roared and slapped him on the back.
"Howland tells us you're living high, boy!" they bellowed more or
less in the same words. "Hey, listen to what Morey did—went on the town
for the night of a lifetime
and didn't even bring his ration book along to
cash in!"

They thought it was a wonderful joke.

But, then, everything was going well. Cherry, it seemed, had
reformed out of recognition. True, she still hated to go out in the evening and
Morey never saw her forcing herself to gorge on unwanted food or play undesired
games. But, moping into the pantry one afternoon, he found to his incredulous
delight that they were well ahead of their ration quotas. In some items, in
fact, they were
out—a.
month's supply and more was gone ahead of
schedule!

Nor was it the counterfeit stamps, for he had found them
tucked behind a bain-marie and quietly burned them. He cast about for ways of
complimenting her, but caution prevailed. She was sensitive on the subject;
leave it be.

And virtue had its reward.

Wainwright called him in, all smiles. "Morey, great
news! We've all appreciated your work here and we've been able to show it in
some more tangible way than compliments. I didn't want to say anything till it
was definite, but—your status has been reviewed by Classification and the
Ration Board. You're out of Class Four Minor, Morey!"

Morey said tremulously, hardly daring to hope, "I'm a
full Class Four?"

"Class Five, Morey.
Class Five!
When we do
something, we do it right. We asked for a special waiver and got it—you've
skipped a whole class." He added honestly, "Not that it was just our
backing that did it, of course. Your own recent splendid record of consumption
helped a lot. I told you you could do it!"

Morey had to sit down. He missed the rest of what Wainwright
had to say, but it couldn't have mattered. He escaped from the office,
side-stepped the knot of fellow-employees waiting to congratulate him, and got
to a phone.

Cherry was as ecstatic and inarticulate as he. "Oh,
darling!" was all she could say.

"And I couldn't have done it without you," he
babbled. "Wainwright as much as said so himself. Said if it wasn't for the
way we— well,
you
have been keeping up with the rations, it never would
have got by the Board. I've been meaning to say something to you about that,
dear, but I just haven't known how. But I do appreciate it. I— Hello?"
There was a curious silence at the other end of the phone. "Hello?"
he repeated worriedly.

Cherry's voice was intense and low. "Morey Fry, I think
you're mean. I wish you hadn't spoiled the good news." And she hung up.

Morey stared slack-jawed at the phone.

Howland appeared behind him, chuckling. "Women,"
he said. "Never try to figure them. Anyway, congratulations, Morey."

"Thanks," Morey mumbled.

Howland coughed and said, "Uh—by the way, Morey, now
that you're one of the big shots, so to speak, you won't—uh—feel obliged
to—well, say anything to Wainwright, for instance, about anything I may have
said while we—"

"Excuse me," Morey said, unhearing, and pushed
past him. He thought wildly of calling Cherry back, of racing home to see just
what he'd said that was wrong. Not that there was much doubt, of course. He'd
touched her on her sore point.

Anyhow, his wristwatch was chiming a reminder of the fact
that his psychiatric appointment for the week was coming up.

Morey sighed. The day gives and the day takes away. Blessed
is the day that gives only good things.

If any.

The session went badly. Many of the sessions had been going
badly, Morey decided; there had been more and more whispering in knots of
doctors from which he was excluded, poking and probing in the dark instead of
the precise psychic surgery he was used to. Something was wrong, he thought.

Something was. Semmelweiss confirmed it when he adjourned
the group session. After the other doctor had left, he sat Morey down for a
private talk. On his own time, too—he didn't ask for his usual ration fee. That
told Morey how important the problem was.

"Morey," said Semmelweiss, "you're holding
back."

"I don't mean to, Doctor," Morey said earnestly.

"Who knows what you 'mean' to do? Part of you 'means'
to. We've dug pretty deep and we've found some important things. Now there's
something I can't put my finger on. Exploring the mind, Morey, is like sending
scouts through cannibal territory. You can't see the cannibals—until it's too
late. But if you send a scout through the jungle and he doesn't show up on the
other side, it's a fair assumption that something obstructed his way. In that
case, we would label the obstruction 'cannibals.' In the case of the human
mind, we label the obstruction a 'trauma.' What the trauma is, or what its
effects on behavior will be, we have to find out, once we know that it's
there."

Morey nodded. All of this was familiar; he couldn't see what
Semmelweiss was driving at.

Semmelweiss sighed. "The trouble with healing traumas
and penetrating psychic blocks and releasing inhibitions—the trouble with
everything we psychiatrists do, in fact, is that we can't afford to do it too
well. An inhibited man is under a strain. We try to relieve the strain. But if
we succeed completely, leaving him with no inhibitions at all, we have an
outlaw, Morey. Inhibitions are often socially necessary. Suppose, for instance,
that an average man were not inhibited against blatant waste. It could happen,
you know. Suppose that instead of consuming his ration quota in an orderly and
responsible way, he did such things as set fire to his house and everything in
it or dumped his food allotment in the river.