that day was worse than the night. mesner had said to wait until i heard from him, but there was no word from him that day. i tried more tranquitabs. the hell with tomorrow's supply. they didn't help me. a blinding headache hit me at regular intervals.
what was mesner using me for? what did he want from me? what was i supposed to know?
the educational tevee came on also at regular intervals.
"... so if you might think, citizens, that a machine could do your simple work better, just remember what a terrible thing the machines did to us during the cataclysmic age of reason. as you know, the machines were invented to replace human labor by eggheads who have always tried to destroy normal, comfortable and simple ways of life. the disease of free-thought was only possible after the machines replaced human beings, gave us the time to develop excessive and self-destructive thinking...."
i watched the light outside my window turn a duller gray then black, and after that an edge of white moon slid partly across the pane.
why should i care what mesner was trying to get out of me? if it was subversive then i should be glad to get rid of it. if i was clear and clean, then i had nothing to worry about. why wasn't i simply bipped like donnicker and dirkson had been? why should a true patriot care?
i shivered and stared into the darkness. something horrible had happened to me. for the first time i realized i was entertaining unpatriotic thoughts. i didn't want to be bipped. and i knew that when mesner finished with me, i would be bipped. when he found out whatever i was supposed to know, i'd join dirkson and the rest of them. it had been all right, going along with the routines, as long as i actually hadn't seen what happened to a man if he didn't.
i didn't want to be erased. whatever i was, i suddenly wanted to stay me, guilty or not. maybe this attitude was all that mesner wanted to be sure of. but i doubted it. because a simple bipping would have determined that.
i didn't think i could stomach any more of mesner's field-trips. on the other hand i had to go along. it all seemed to boil down to whether i wanted to get bipped now or later.
"bipping isn't bad at all," mesner had said yesterday. "after you're bipped, you can do routine work like everyone else, never worry again about worrying. that guy who replaced you, for example. he was bipped. he's never made a mistake for 20 years. he never will."
i closed my eyes. i thought of all the happy bottleheads walking the streets, out on the farms, doing their routine work, happy and care-free as long as they didn't worry. human vegetables, the erased ones, and the terrified ones who didn't know they were even scared. cities full of dull-eyed ciphers, and now that i was outside it a little, i could see them with an awful clarity.
and i thought—how many are as dumb as they appear to be? how many were just too frightened and numbed to think? how many would stay frightened and numb so long that they would never be able to think even if they sometime decided to try?
it was easy enough to assume that too much intelligence was an evil, a virus to be burned out. was it better to have too little and become like the hillbilly?
oh, mesner had set my so-called quiescent iq going all right. but how far would it go before it had gone far enough for his purpose?
