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Title: The Anarch
Date of first publication: 1944
Author: Malcolm Jameson (1891-1945)
Date first posted: Mar. 14, 2022
Date last updated: Mar. 14, 2022
Faded Page eBook #20220324

This eBook was produced by: Al Haines

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[Transcriber's note: underscores (_) denote _italicized_ text;
plus (+) signs denote +bolded+ text]




[Source: Astounding Science-Fiction, June 1944]



THE ANARCH

By MALCOLM JAMESON


_+The ideal of totalitarianism is the elimination of all individual
initiative.  Suppose that ideal were somehow attained.  With no one,
anywhere, wanting to revolt--+_



It was a death paper.

Medical inspector Garrison shifted uneasily in his chair and stared
at it.  It was all wrong.  It was on pale-green paper for one thing,
and it had been altered.  Down near the bottom where there was a
place for a date and a signature, the word "Discharged" had been
xxx'd out and "Died" supplied.

"Look here, Arna," he said to his scribe, "this won't do.  This ...
er ... ah ... Leona McWhisney was admitted only last week ...
neomalitis, the diagnosis says ... treated with sulfazeoproponyl, and
due for discharge tomorrow.  Treater Shubrick has scratched out the
discharged and put in 'died.'  That's absurd.  People just don't die
of neomal."

"_She_ did," replied Arna primly.  "Here's the morguemaster's
receipt."

Garrison took it and frowned.  Not only did she give him the morgue
slip, but the report of the autopsy as well.  The McWhisney woman's
dead arteries had been found to be crawling with neomal bugs--and
nothing else.  It was a hard fact to face, and he did not want to
face it.  He couldn't face it.  It was Earth-shaking, outrageous,
impossible.  It could not be reconciled with anything he knew.  It
put him in an awful hole.

"But look," he insisted, "we can't use the green form.  That's the
one for case histories of nonfatal diseases, and the Code
classifies--"

"I know," she snapped, "Neomalitis is a Category N malady, a mild,
easily controlled undulant fever.  I looked it up.  Article 849 of
the Code says Category N must be reported on the green form.  That is
what I have done."

"That is not right," he growled, glaring at the offending sheet of
paper.  "If the woman died, it has to be reported on an authorized
death certificate.  Anyhow, we are not allowed to change any form.
Not ever.  It means a lot of demerits for both of us."

She sniffed.  She knew that as well as he.  She had been struggling
with the problem for two hours, and her desk was littered with
volumes of the bulky Medical Instructions--those bits of the Grand
Code by which they lived and which prescribed their every act.

"All right," she said coldly.  "You select the right form and I'll
fill it out."

Medical Inspector Garrison started to make an appropriate reply, then
thought better of it.  He was in no ordinary dilemma, and was
beginning to know it.  It was more a being caught between two
opposing sets of antlers bristling with scores of prickly points.
The death, as far as that went, of the obscure Leona McWhisney meant
nothing to a seasoned doctor.  People were dying at Sanitar all the
time.  But they were dying in approved ways that could be reported on
approved forms.  Her departure from the normal played hob with the
whole Autarchian set-up.  Garrison groaned aloud, for he was, until
that moment, a thoroughly indoctrinated, obedient, unthinking cog in
the vast bureaucracy that was Autarchia.  Not once in the thirty
years of his life until then had the Code failed him.  He had never
doubted for an instant that that wonderful document was the
omniscient, infallible, unquestionable guide to human behavior.  It
was unthinkable that he could doubt it now.  And yet--

Yet Leona McWhisney was dead, and it was his duty to sign the death
papers.  By doing it he would certify that her case had been handled
in accordance with the Code.  There lay the rub: It had been, he was
sure, for he knew the superb organization of Sanitar and especially
the wards under his control, and it could not have been otherwise.
There was no one who would have dreamed of departing from the sacred
instructions by an iota.  The problem lay, therefore, on his own
desk--how to close the case and still keep out of the Monitorial
Courts.

The dead woman's disease, as was every other, was curable, and must
be recorded on the green.  So decreed the Code.  But she had died
inexplicably despite the Code, and having died, she must be given a
death certificate.  But there were only three forms of those, for
there were only three possible ways for an Autarchian to die.  The
most common--reportable on the gray form--was by euthanasia after
recommendation of a board of gerocomists, and approved by the Bureau
of Population Control.  Elderly citizens beyond further salvage, or
those in excess of the Master Plan were disposed of in this fashion.
Then there was the yellow form that was employed when violent
accidents occurred.  Even the all-wise framers of the Code had not
known how to recapitate or re-embowel a citizen thus torn apart.
Last of all there was provided the scarlet form for the use of the
executioner at Penal House after the monitors had finished dealing
with dissenters.  That one was on the road to obsolescence, for in
recent generations there had been few who refused to abide by the
Code, or scoffed at it.  The trait of rebelliousness had been pretty
well bred out of the race.

Still there must have been some taint of it left, for even Garrison
could not bring himself to accept meekly his predicament.  If people
could die of neomalitis, he thought, the Code should have foreseen it
and provided for its proper reporting.  Apparently they could, and
apparently it had not.  There was something smelly somewhere.

"When you make up your mind about that," broke in Arna, sweetly,
"here are a couple of other questions they want rulings on.  The
treater on Ward 44-B says that he has twelve patients with neomal
that should have been up and out today.  The prognosis says so.  He
wants to know if he keeps on shooting sulfazeproponyl.  He has given
all the therapeuticon prescribed."

"No, of course not.  Better run 'em through the Diagnostat again and
take a fresh start."

He watched unhappily as she made a note of it.  It was an
unsatisfactory answer and he knew it.  There was no more authority
for rediagnosing a case than for prolonging treatments after it was
supposed to be cured.  But it seemed to him that as long as they
continued to be sick something should be done.

"And the admission desk wants to know," she went on, "what about
quotas?  According to vital statistics Sanitar is supposed to get
only three hundred cases of neomal a quarter.  We've admitted that
many in the last ten days.  Shall they keep on taking 'em in, or turn
'em away?"

"Oh, we can't turn 'em away," said Garrison weakly.  He was right,
too.  The Code specifically forbade it.  But the Code had also set
the admission rate for Sanitar, based on the known incidence of
various diseases, and it could not be much exceeded for the excellent
reason that the hospital's capacity and personnel were fixed by the
Master Plan.

"Yes, sir," said the exasperating scribe, and jotted down his answer.

He glanced worriedly at the McWhisney papers on his desk.  He could
not sign them as they were.  He had to make sure.

"I'm going to make an inspection," he announced, and stalked out of
the room.


Medical Inspector Garrison was what the Autarchian Code had made him.
It was no fault of his that he had been born into a perfect,
well-ordered world where every detail was planned and there was no
room for independent thought or initiative.  He was the natural
result of his training.  His very first memories had to do with the
Code, and from then on he had never encountered anything else.  At
the age of five the Psychometrists had come and taken him from his
creche and tested him with glittering instruments that gave off
dazzling multi-colored lights.  That was when his first psychogram
was made and his Cerebral Index established.  That was what set him
on the road to doctorhood, and made him an interne in a Sanitar at
the age of fifteen.  By that time he had mastered the Junior Social
Code and most of the Medical, and along with it he learned those
portions of the Penal Code that applied, plus such other fragments as
would be of use.  No man alive, with the possible exception of the
Autarch himself, could know the whole of the Grand Code, for it
covered the entire field of human knowledge.  Garrison only knew that
whatever there was to be done, the manner of doing it was to be found
in some part of the Code.  And he also knew that there was no _other_
way of doing it.  That is, unless he wanted to invite the attentions
of the monitors.  And it was common knowledge that no one who went to
Penal House was ever seen again.  The Autarchs did not encourage
nonconformity.

It was with this background and the puzzling conflicts of the morning
uppermost in his mind that he strode along Sanitar's endless
corridors.  Hitherto the Code had never failed him.  Now he was lost
in a maze of contradictory instructions, not one of which he dared
question or refuse to abide by.  Heretical ideas kept flitting
through his troubled brain.  Long dormant traits began to stir and
come to life within him.  Curiosity was one.  Somehow it had survived
in his heritage of genes.  He wanted to know--wanted desperately to
know--_why_ Leona McWhisney had died, when the book said she
couldn't?  What was happening in neomalitis?  Why was it fast
becoming more prevalent?  What was making it more virulent?  Why
didn't the sulfa drug still cure it as it had always done before?

He arrived at the admission desk and looked about him.
Everything was exactly as it should be.  There the applicants were
being logged and turned over to the attendants to be stripped and
scrubbed prior to their full examination.  Their dossiers were being
sent for.

He picked up one at random and examined it.  It was a magnificent
document, many inches thick.  In it was the record of its owner's
medical history from birth, complete with the X rays and body
chemistry findings taken at every successive annual examination.
There were curves of growth and change, and accounts of incidental
illnesses.  Everything the most exacting doctor could want was there.

Garrison laid it aside and went on.  He passed by the various
examining rooms and laboratories with little more than a glance in.
All were carrying out their functions perfectly.  In one place blood
and spinal fluid were being analyzed; in another, men sat in rows
having their electrocardiograms recorded.  A group of psychomeds were
probing neural currents to find out a patient's attitude toward his
own condition, and elsewhere the newcomers lay on cots having their
current basal metabolism established.  In the biological lab
observers were scrutinizing bacteria cultures and dissecting tissue.
Everywhere there were checkers, going over the other fellow's work.

The young inspector knew there could be no slip-up in the collection
of basic data.  A quick turn through a couple of wards revealed
things going well there also, so far as the medication was concerned.
He even consulted with the chief pharmaceutical inspector to make
sure the drugs used were up to standard.  Perfection reigned in exact
accordance with the Code.  The only jarring note was that the wards
were becoming crowded.  There were ever more sick, and the sick ones
were not recovering as they should.  In 45-B Garrison was stunned to
learn that two more neomals had just died, and that several others
were about to.  It took the McWhisney affair out of the freak class.
It denoted a trend.  It also ended the hope of overlooking that first
case.

There could be but one other factor.  The data were correct, and the
treatment given as prescribed.  The only other room for error was in
the diagnosis, so Garrison went to the elevator bank in the great
central tower.  No one had ever questioned a Diagnostat before, but
he meant to now.  He punched the button for the express car to the
sub-basement.


The only word to apply to the cavern where the ponderous machines
purred and ticked was--vast.  The great monsters stood in long
rows--the Sorensons down one side of the room, and the Klingmasters
the other.  Those massive calculators were the only examples in all
Autarchia where two distinct models of machines were doing the work
of one.  In every other case the framers of the Code had selected the
best type and discarded all the others.  But the Sorenson and
Klingmaster Diagnostats arrived at their findings through radically
different channels.  Since they were equally efficient both were
kept, to be used in opposing pairs, one to check the other.

Garrison offered the foreman of the room the dossier of Leona
McWhisney.

"Hm-m-m," mused the foreman, glancing at the record.  "This has
already been through--done on Sorenson 39, cross-checked by Kling 55.
Neomalitis, Type III, sub-type C.  What's wrong?"

"She's dead," said Garrison.

The foreman shrugged.

"All we do here is diagnose 'em.  If they kick the bucket, it's
somebody else's fault.  You'd better check up on your treaters, or on
the dope they use."

"I have.  It must be the diagnosis.  It can't be anything else."

"Oh, can't it?" countered the Diagnostat foreman.  "Did you know they
lost ten pneumonia cases over in Bronchial wing last week?  Did you
hear about the guy up in Psychopathic?  A mild neurosis was all we
had on the fellow here.  Well, he ran amok last night--cut the
throats of four fellow patients and then jumped out the window.
There is something screwy going on, all right, but it's not down
here."

"I want a recheck on this," insisted Garrison.

"But she's _dead_," objected the foreman.  Then he saw the glitter in
Garrison's eye, "O.K.," he mumbled, and reached for the book.

Garrison looked on in silence while the monster did its work.  The
data was fed in by various means through various orifices.  Queerly
punched cards bore part of the information--such items as could be
expressed by figures, as weight, pulse, blood pressure, respiration,
and, so on.  The curves of the cardio and encephalograms were grabbed
by tiny steel fingers and drawn into the maw of the machine.  It
clucked loudly as the X-ray plates were slid into a slot.  The
amplitude and frequency of the undulant fever readings were given it.
When all was in, the foreman closed one switch and opened another.

"This is a different Sorenson, and hooked up with a different Kling,"
he said.  "Both were overhauled last night, but I'll bet you get the
same answer as you got before."

"That's what I want to know," said the inspector.

The machine purred and groaned.  Then it set up a clicking and
stopped momentarily.  Up to that point it had ignored the symptoms,
Garrison knew, and was engaged in breaking down and analyzing the
basic factors.  Now it reintegrated them and was ready for its first
pronouncement.  A window lit up with glowing letters:


Constitution fair.  Physical Resistance Factor: 88.803; Psychic
Factor: 61.005.  Composite Factor: 72.666.


The light died, and a confirmatory card dropped out.  The purring was
resumed.  Garrison considered the figures.  They were about right.
The woman had been of excellent general physique, though a trifle
depressed in spirits.  She should have thrown off any disease with
reasonable ease.

Now a red light was burning, indicating the Diagnostat was taking
into account the developments due to infection.  After a bit a gong
sounded, and the machine growled to a full stop.  Another card
dropped out:


Neomalitis, Type III, sub-type C.


Garrison looked at it, then walked across the hall to the
Klingmaster.  It was slower to reach its conclusion, but when it did
it was identical.

"All right," said the foreman, "that's that.  Now let's do the rest."

He poked one of the cards into a smaller machine--a therapeuticon,
with prognosticon attachment.  It took the contraption less than a
minute to cough out the answer:


Indication: 6 g.  sulfazeopronyl every four hours for eight days.
Tepid baths daily; abundant rest.

Prognosis: Discharge in nine days, ten hours.


Garrison looked crestfallen.  He thought he had an out.  Now he was
where he started.  He shook his head dismally.

"She's dead," he said, "and it's only a week."

"An autopsy ought to settle it for you," suggested the foreman.

"It has," said the miserable inspector.  "It said neomalitis."

And he walked away, leaving an indignant Diagnostat man glaring after
him.


Garrison signed the pale-green paper reluctantly.  There seemed to be
nothing else to do.  Then he glanced at the chronodial add saw that
it was nearly seventeen, time for the day-watch to go off duty.  At
that moment there was a shrill warning buzz and the omnivox lit up.
A fanfare of trumpets warned that something big and unusual was about
to come through.  He got to his feet and stood at attention.  A
uniformed figure appeared on the screen.

"By order of his supremacy, the Autarch," he proclaimed in a deep,
sonorous voice.  "Effective immediately, those provisions of the
Social and Penal Code requiring attendance during Renovation Hour at
Social Halls is suspended for officials of C.I. one-thirty or better.
Such officers may attend or not, as they choose--"

Garrison blinked.  He had never heard the word "choose" before and
had but the faintest idea of what it might mean.  More obscure ones
were to follow.

"If they so elect, they may stay within their own quarters or visit
other officers of similar rank in theirs.  Restrictions as to topics
of conversation are lifted during this period.  Officers will not be
required to discuss assigned cultural subjects, but may talk freely
on any topic they prefer.  Monitors will make note of this alteration
in the Codes.

"The order has been published.  Carry on."

The light failed, and with it the figure on the screen.  Garrison
continued to stand for about a minute, entirely at sea as to what the
communication he had just heard meant.  Such words as "elect,"
"choose," and "prefer" had long since become obsolete if not actually
forbidden.  The concept of choice was wholly absent under the
autocracy.  It never occurred to one that there could be such a
thing--it was inconsistent with orderly life.  One simply obeyed the
Code, which always said "you shall."  To think of anything different
was rank heresy and treason, and subject to the severest penalties.
Garrison puzzled over the order a moment and gave it up.  No doubt
there would be further clarification later.  Perhaps the Propag
lecturer of the evening would have a word to say about it.  The order
would be carried out of course, but to Garrison's well-disciplined
mind it had the bad fault of ambiguity.

The ringing of the corridor gongs snapped his attention away from it.
It was time to assemble for supper.  He closed his desk, slipped on
his tunic, and stepped out into the hall.  There he faced to the left
as the others were doing, and waited for the whistles of the monitors.

The signal was sounded, and the tramp of feet began.  Garrison
stepped along as he always had done, but with the difference that on
this afternoon there was turmoil in his mind.  Having to sign that
altered document had done something to him.  It hurt, and hurt deep.
It is difficult for anyone not imbued with bureaucratic tradition to
comprehend the poignancy of his anguish.  He had been forced by the
rules themselves to break a rule.  For the first time in his
existence he was compelled to question the all-wisdom of the Code.
The Code had declared neomal curable; he had seen the exception.  And
while he was still quivering with mortification at that discovery,
the pronouncement of the Autarch had come.  He did not know what it
meant precisely, but it signified one more thing clearly.  The
Autarch had seen fit to _modify_ a Code.  The implication was
inescapable.  The Codes were not infallible.  If one provision could
be altered, so could all the rest.  It was food for anxious thought.

The marching men came to a downward ramp and took it.  On the level
below Garrison had to mark time while the officers of that floor
cleared the ramp below.  He took the occasion to look them over
critically--something he had never thought of doing before.  Like
himself not a few of them but also had had inexplicable deaths in
their jurisdictions, and every one of them had heard the message just
received from the Autarch.  But not one of them showed the flush of
suppressed excitement that he was awkwardly aware warmed his own
cheeks.  If there was any who shared his newborn doubts, none
exhibited it.

They marched like so many automatons.  Nowhere was there a sign of
perplexity or frustration.  Instead, he now observed that all were
sunk in the same dull apathy that he had noticed in the incoming
patients.  It was not the apathy of weariness or despair, but a
sodden, negative something--sheer indifference.  They did not care.
There was no motive to care.  Their personalities were not involved,
if a citizen of Autarchia could be said to have such a thing as a
personality.  They were required to put in so much time, and to obey
certain inflexible rules.  So long as they did that they had no
responsibility as to the outcome.  Now they had done their stint and
were on their way to replenish the energies they had expended by the
ingestion of necessary food.  The evening to follow would be but an
extension of the day--planned, orderly, meaningless.

At times the worm turns in a curious way.  In that split second the
spirit of some long dead ancestor stirred within Garrison and woke
him up.  The breath taking realization came to him that he was an
_individual--he_, Philip Garrison, Medical Inspector of the B wards
of Sanitar.  He was different somehow from those others.  They were
clods, puppets.  What did it matter what their Cerebral Indexes were,
so long as they could read and punch the proper buttons?  Anyone
above the moronic level could do the same.  No thought or judgment
was demanded to conform to the Code.  Small wonder they swung along
like men stupefied.

Garrison could not avoid a slight shudder.  The trend of his thoughts
were highly treasonable.  Then he reminded himself that the monitors
possessed only hidden mikes and scanners; they were not telepathic.
They could not read the heretical notions striving to make themselves
dominant in his brain.  He calmed himself, and tried to change his
line of thought, for he knew that madness lay that way.  He
endeavored to recall what a Propag had said at a recent lecture about
the "dangers inherent in independent thought" and the hideous
predictions of how disruptive such ungoverned activity could be.

The arrival at the dining hall put a temporary end to that.  He
handed his ration card to the Dietitian of the Watch.  She glanced at
it, scribbled the prescription, and dropped it into the messenger
tube.  That was all that was required.  He marched on with the living
robots about him.  Shortly he would get food that would no doubt be
good for him--sustaining, and containing what he needed, neither more
nor less.  It would have the calories required, and the vitamins, and
the minerals.  It might be tasteless, it might be unpalatable, it was
almost sure to be mostly synthetic.  But it was what his
metabolometer called for, and with that there was no arguing.


Garrison ate in sullen silence.  So did the others, but with a
difference.  Theirs was the stolid silence of oxen at a trough.  Even
the direction and the ranking members of his staff on their raised
dais ate in the same manner.  It was a thing they had to do--it was
part of the routine, joyless but necessary.  Now Garrison was
beginning to understand why people were falling ill with such ease,
and being ill, failed to rally.  Life was empty.  They did not care,
nor did their physicians care.  It was that spirit of
don't-give-a-care that was pushing Autarchia to the brink of ruin.

"I'm going to do something about this," muttered Garrison to himself,
"and I'll start by finding out why neomal kills."

He went out with the crowd when the "dismiss" signal was given.  He
took the elevator to the tower where the gyrocar was waiting.  Then
he sat in the seat his position rated--one by a window, and hung on
as the car teetered drunkenly as it cleared the slip.  After that it
straightened up and went whizzing along its elevated monorail,
careering around curves on its nightly trip to Dorm.

The sun was on the point of setting, but everywhere there was full
light.  It was rolling country, covered with fields, and the horizon
was broken only by the occasional bulk of a plant where alcohol or
plastics were made from the products of the soil.  The intervening
fields were planted in corn and tomatoes, bulk crops that could be
grown more profitably outdoors than in the hydropones.  An army of
low C.I. laborers was still at work, spraying the lush weeds under
the watchful supervision of the agronomists who sat perched on lofty
chairs set up among the tasseled rows.

Now that Garrison's eyes were opened, he saw what he had looked at
daily but had never comprehended before.  It was that the laborers'
work was futile.  The cornfields and the acres of tomatoes were like
his wards in Sanitar.  Uncontrollable and malignant weeds and blights
had moved in and were taking them.  As the car rushed over a hilltop
where the ground rose up almost to it, he could see the details
better.  Where once the fruit hung bright and red and round, it was
now sparse, discolored and misshapen.  Plump ears of corn were
replaced by scrawny spindles riddled with wormholes.  Garrison could
glimpse them now and then despite the weeds which in many places
towered even above the tall corn.

The sight added to his glumness.  It had not always been that way.
Only a few years before the fields had been clean and sparkling--good
reddish soil topped with orderly rows of the desired crop plants and
nothing else.  Insecticide sprays and selected chemical soil
treatment used to work.  Lately they did not seem to.  Why?  They had
successfully done so for two hundred years.  What was bringing about
the change?  Was the Agricultural Code inadequate, too?

The car swerved and swept across the highway.  A pile of grim gray
buildings flashed by.  That was one of the many structures known as
Penal Houses.  To Garrison's new awareness it took on a change of
significance.  It was another symptom of what was wrong with
Autarchia.  Designed to hold ten thousand unhappy rebels awaiting
execution, today it stood empty.  Seven generations of systematic
extermination of dissenters had done its work.  The breed was now
extinct.  No one thought of, let alone dared, dissent these days.
The very concept of nonconformity was extinct.  Garrison knew of it
only because of the warnings of the Propags and the presence of the
watchful monitors.  Yet the prisons still stood.  They were useless
anachronisms now, complete with large garrisons of monitors waiting
boredly for more grist for their mills.  But they could not be
abolished because they, too, were part of the Master Plan.  What was
must always be.

Garrison turned away from the prison in disgust.  It would be better,
he thought, if the idle monitors were put to work in the fields
tearing out the weeds by hand.  Then they would be at something
productive.

The car swirled on.  Suddenly, but briefly, the panorama underwent a
change.  For about a mile there stretched a field that was
uncontaminated like the rest.  It looked as all of them used to look.
Then the car left it and was over another planted with the same crop,
but as weed-choked as the earlier ones.  The contrast of the one
well-kept field with the others was startling.

Garrison craned his neck to look back.  As he did he became aware
that the officer sitting behind him was watching the act intently.
He was an old man and wore the distinguishing marks of a high ranking
psychomed.  It was that that made Garrison uneasy, for many of the
senior psychomeds seemed to possess the uncanny knack of reading
people's minds.  In the state of agitation he was in he preferred not
to be under one's scrutiny.

"Rather different, eh?" queried the older man, with a quizzical
smile.  "Why, I wonder?"

"Different soil, probably," ventured Garrison, feeling some answer
was expected.

"Hardly," remarked the psychiatrist.  "They took such differences
into account when they drew up the Master Plan.  All these fields are
assigned to the same tillage."

"I'm only a medic," hedged Garrison, "I wouldn't know."

"For the very reason that we are medics," pursued the other, "it
might pay us to know.  Below us are fields that have been
successfully farmed for centuries.  Now the pests refuse to be kept
at bay.  They are conquering except in that one field that seems to
interest you.  It would indicate, I think, that one Agronomist knows
something the others do not.  That fact is worthy of our
consideration."

"Why?" asked Garrison stupidly.  He knew it was stupid, but the
conversation was taking a perilous turn.  This psychomed was probing
dangerously near to his heretical inner thoughts.  Garrison wanted to
mask them.

"The analogy between vegetable blight and human disease ought to be
apparent to anyone," shrugged the elder doctor.  "We study both and
find remedies.  Then, in the course of time, one or the other or both
get out of control.  Haven't you found it so?"

"A woman died in one of my wards last night," hesitated Garrison, "if
that is what you mean.  She should not have, so far as I can see.
But we did our duty under the Code--"

The psychomed glanced cautiously about.  The other passengers dozed
sluggishly in their seats.  The noise of the car precluded
eavesdropping.

"Our duty is to save lives, my friend," he said in a low tone.  "In
that the truly excellent Code is our best guide.  But there is coming
a time, and soon, when it must be changed--"

"Yes, yes, perhaps," said Garrison, flurried, half frozen with alarm.
Those were fearful words, and a lifetime of listening to Propags had
set his reflexes.  It was not a light matter to change their
patterns.  "If such a time should come, no doubt the Autarch will
give consideration to it."

"The Autarch is neither doctor nor agronomist, nor any one of the
hundreds of other kinds of specialists it takes to operate a world
like ours.  He may sense impending peril, but how will he know how--"

"Sir," said Garrison stiffly, scared through and through, "your words
border on treason.  I refuse to listen.  Have a care, or you will
find yourself in trouble."

The old man gave a contemptuous snort.

"Trouble?  Listen, boy.  I am inspector general for all the Sanitars
in this hemisphere.  You know of several unaccountable deaths; I know
of thousands.  You have seen a handful of stricken fields; I have
seen abandoned wastes stretching hundreds of miles.  It adds up to
one dire result--pestilence and famine.  Not yet, but soon.  If you
think the monitors are to be feared, think on that pair of scourges."

Garrison kept silent.  He was afraid still in spite of himself, but
he wanted to hear more.

"As for myself, nothing matters," continued the psychomed.  "I chose
to speak to you because you turned back for a second look at the one
well managed field.  It showed me that regimentation had not made a
clod of you altogether.  There are not many of us like that, so I
broke the ice.  Tomorrow I appear before a Disposal Board.  The
gerocomists say my heart is beyond aiding and my course is run."  He
grinned.  "And having a bad heart I am immune from torture.
Euthanasia or standard execution--it's all one to me."

"I'm sorry, sir," said Garrison.

The gyrocar was slowing for the approach to Dorm.

"You needn't be," growled the old doctor, taking in the other
occupants of the car in an all-inclusive sweep of the arm.  "Be sorry
for _those_ dumb inert creatures.  And by the way, if you care to
pursue the subject further, the name of the agronomist in charge of
the field you liked is Clevering."

The car reeled to a stop.  Garrison scrambled to his feet and crossed
the spidery bridge that gave access to the high tower of Dorm.
Beneath were the huge public rooms, the baths and gymnasiums and the
libraries of the Code.  Down there were kept the individuals'
records, and also where the vast social hall was.  The rooms and
dormitories were in the star-like wings.

Garrison took the elevator to his floor, and walked along the
corridor of his section.  The door of the cubicle he called home was
open, as all doors had to be when the room occupant was absent.  He
went in and lay down on the narrow bunk for the prescribed period of
rest.  From it he surveyed his habitation with some curiosity, never
having thought to do so before.

There were the plain plastic walls, dimly luminous, and the Spartan
cot he lay on.  There was a chair on which he hung his clothes at
night.  During the night an attendant would come and replace them
with others.  He had no need for any but the authorized costume of
the day, and it was always provided.  There was a small wash-bowl
with a shelf and mirror above it, beside which was posted his
individual hygiene instructions--the hours of rising and going to
bed, the hour and nature of the bath he was to take, and such
details.  On a small table lay a copy of the Social Code.  That
completed the furnishings.

Ordinarily Garrison spent the rest period relaxed and with a blank
mind.  Today he could not.  He kept turning over in his mind the
problems that seemed to be growing more complex hourly.  There was
the death of Leona McWhisney, the enigmatic edict of the Autarch, the
provocative remarks of the psychiatric inspector, and the mystery of
the one uncontaminated farm.  Now he had to decide also what he was
going to do about the Social Hour.  The daily event was always
boring, as was most of the well-ordered life he led, but it was a way
to while away the time until the hour set for sleeping.  He wondered
how one went about visiting another in his room, and if he did visit
what they would talk about.  And that caused him to open an eye and
wonder where was the scanner-mike that kept watch on his room, and
whether it was alive all the time, or only now and then.

Habit is strong.  He was already sitting up on the edge of the bunk
when the stand-by buzzers sounded.  That meant five minutes until
Social Hour began.  He was already tired of his cell and wanting to
move.  He heard doors outside being opened and the shuffle of feet.
The others were on their way.  He hesitated, then got up and went
out, too.  There was not a closed door in the hall.  The man opposite
him had just come out--a master electrician in charge of the X-ray
machines.

"You are going as usual?" asked Garrison.

"Where else is there to go?" answered the fellow.

"We could stay here and talk," suggested Garrison.

"About what?" he asked curtly, and turned down the hall.

The harried glance he gave the walls and ceilings as he did was the
clue to his behavior.  Garrison instantly read it aright.  The
Autarch's edict of the afternoon stated that certain regulations were
"suspended."  There was nothing in the way of assurance that the free
conversations allowed would not be listened to and recorded by the
monitors.  Garrison frowned.  Could the Autarch's seeming generosity
be a ruse to entrap the unwary?  Small wonder the fellow had ducked.
For his part Garrison realized he had just had a narrow escape.  He
meant fully to discuss the McWhisney death and other things with
anyone who would listen.


Garrison went on to the Social Hall.  The evening proved to be, if
possible, duller than usual.  Garrison found the other officials
ranged in chairs before the lecture platform waiting stolidly for the
Propag to begin.  None had so much as delayed his coming.  Garrison
sat down at his customary place.  The Propag was coming on the stage.

"It has come to my ears," he began in the sing-song voice affected by
the members of his profession, "that a few of you are troubled.  In
hours of weakness it is human to falter, and there may be some so
debased as even to doubt our wonderful Code in the dark moments.
That is evil.  The Code is all-wise.  Believe in it, follow it, and
trouble not.  All will be well.  Let us, my friends, go back and
remember our first lessons.

"In the beginning there was chaos.  All the world was divided into
many nations, speaking different languages, having different customs,
and struggling one with another--"

Garrison did not have to listen.  The famous "Basic Lecture" had been
dinned into his ears at yearly intervals all his life.  Once it meant
something, now it was an empty piece of ritual.  Men sat through it
unhearing, for they knew its words by heart.

It told of the Bloody Century--the Twentieth--and of its devastating
wars.  Those were the bitter conflicts between Imperialists and
Republicans, Totalitarianism and Democracy, and the varicolored
races.  Then would come the story of the infant leagues and unions of
nations, and the bickerings among them for top power.  Afterwards
there were fierce revolts in certain quarters.  The world before The
Beginning was a world of strife and murder and destruction.  It was a
horrid world.

"Yes, horrid!" the Propag would scream at that point.  "An insane
world.  A world where there were many opinions about the simplest
matters.  Men differed, and because they differed they fought.  It
was under the sage Harlking the Great--the Autarch of the Fourth
Coalition--that the Grand Code came into being.  He perceived clearly
that the world, though not perfect, was good enough if men were only
content.  So he convoked an assembly of the thousand wisest men of
the age.  These were the men we now call the framers, for their task
was to sift the world's store of wisdom and select the best for
inclusion in the Code.  It took forty years for them to complete
their colossal work, but when it was done the Autarch pronounced it
good.  That was Gemmerer the Wise, for Harlking did not live to see
his glorious idea come to fruition.

"Gemmerer promulgated the Grand Code, and in doing so forbade that it
ever be altered.  He foresaw that there would still be impatient men,
or dreamers who might try vainly to better things.  Man in primitive
societies is hopelessly inventive.  He is never content with things
as they are.  This was an admirable trait in the formative days of
civilization, but in a highly integrated world community it harbors
the germ of warfare.  The introduction of a new thing is always a
challenge to the old, and the partisans of the old invariably fight
back.  There must be no more war.  Therefore there must be no new
thing.  Stand men, and repeat the creed of our fathers!"

Sheeplike the audience stood.  The Propag led off, and the mumbled
chorus of responses followed.

"The Code given us is good!"

"_It must not be altered._"

"It is the quintessence of the wisdom of the race!"

"_It must not be questioned._"

"It must be obeyed forevermore."

"_Amen._"

The rumbling echoes of the whispered responses died, and the men
dropped back into their seats.  The Propag treated them with his
professional glare for one solemn moment.  Then he partially dropped
the cloak of solemnity.

"Is there anyone present," he asked, still stern, "who ... ah,
_prefers_ to talk about a topic other than the one we have been
studying?"

Several men shifted uneasily in their seats, but no one answered.

"Very well," said the Propag, "we will break up into the usual
groups.  Group directors please take charge."

There was a rustling as the men found their way to the places where
they were to be treated to cultural enlightenment.  Garrison joined
his proper group dejectedly.  He cared less than ever for the plump,
curly-haired young man who was his renovation director.  That worthy
looked his small flock over and saw that they were all present.

"Last night," he chirruped with a false heartiness that made Garrison
want to smack him, "we were discussing the complementary effect of
strong colors when placed in juxtaposition.  Now, if we take a vivid
orange, say, and put it alongside an intense green.--"

Garrison heard it out, bored stiff.  Real problems were stewing
inside his head, and the froth he was compelled to listen to angered
him.  Otherwise it was simply dreary.  But eventually it came to an
end, and the Social Hour broke up.  Garrison caught up with a
departing agronomist, and asked him where he could find Clevering.

"Clevering?  I think he's sick.  He collapsed in the field today.  As
I was coming in I saw a Sanitar ambulance going in the gate."

"Thanks," said Garrison, and tramped down to his cubicle, and to bed.


Nine more neomals died in Ward 44-B that night, and in the morning
there were no discharges.  But waiting at the admission doors were
hundreds of new cases--too many to be accommodated under the quota.
Garrison noted with a wry sort of satisfaction that the admitting
doctors were also struggling with an insoluble problem.  There were
others besides, as he found out when he reached his office.  Treater
Henderson was awaiting him mere with a sheaf of new diagnoses.

"What am I supposed to do with these?" he asked, plaintively, shoving
them into Garrison's hands.  Garrison took the topmost card and
stared at it.


Diagnosis: Neomalitis, Type $ # ... etaoinshrdlu ... sputsputsput.

Treatment: Suifazeoproproproproppropopop .... nyll

Prognosis: ????????


He scowled and grabbed up an inter-communicator.  In a moment he had
the foreman of the Diagnostat room on the wire.

"Have your machines gone crazy?" he snapped.  "They stutter.  They
give us gibberish."

"Can't help it," came back the answering voice.  "We tried machine
after machine.  They all do it.  And our tests conclusively show--"

Garrison flipped off the connection.  He was up a blind alley there
and knew it.  He turned to the treater.

"Keep on giving 'em the standard sulfa treatment."

After the treater left Garrison sat down weakly and wiped the sweat
from his brow.  So far he was within the Code, for sulfa drugs were
indicated for all cases of neomal regardless of type.  But intuition
told him that hereafter it would do no good.  The stark truth was
that the neomal bug had bred itself into a new type--a strain far
hardier than the old, and more malignant.  What he had to contend
with was a bacillus that was practically immune to sulfazeoproponyl.
It was, therefore, causing an utterly new disease, one not
contemplated by the august framers.  And, unless something was done
quickly, a decimating plague would shortly be sweeping the world.

But what?  The Code prescribed only the sulfa drug in such and such
quantities, and the penalties incurred for administering any other
were cruel.  Garrison stared miserably at the stack of diagnosis
slips.  For once he felt a sense of personal responsibility to those
sufferers down in the wards.  He felt like a murderer.  Then his eye
lit on a name atop a card.  The name was, "Henry Clevering,
Agronomist 1st Class."

He lost no time in getting down to the ward.

The wards of Sanitar were not wards in the old sense, but groupings
of rooms, and Garrison found his man in the fourth one on the left.
The moment he saw him he knew his hours were numbered, for the chart
showed the oscillations of the fever hitting ever new highs with a
shortening of the period between.  Already the ever vigilant monitors
had set up a portable mike beside the bed to record his ravings when
a little later he would be in delirium.  In earlier days such
deathbed revelations had often given them valuable leads to
subversive dissenters still living.

Garrison saw the fever eyes of the sick man following him about the
room, but he went about what he had to do.  He closed the door
softly, and then stuck a wisp of cotton into the mike so as to damp
its diaphragm for the time being.  He sat down beside the patient and
placed a cool hand on his forehead.

"The weeds have got me at last, I guess," said Clevering, smiling
feebly, "weeds or blight.  They're getting bad, you know."

"Yes, I know," said Garrison, "and that is why it is bad for
Autarchia to lose a man who knows how to fight them."

"Autarchia?" whispered the other, "a lot Autarchia cares.  If they
knew what I know, they would have crucified me long ago.  But you are
not speaking for Autarchia, or you would not have shut off that spy's
ear."

"By Autarchia I meant the human race," replied Garrison, soothingly.
"I saw your farm last night.  I really saw it, for I've been blind up
to now.  I want you to tell me how you kept your field clean.  We
have needs of a sort here too, you know."

Clevering smiled wanly.

"You want to know what I did, eh?  Well, I forgot the Code when I saw
it wasn't working any more.  I tried this and that until I found
something that did work.  Organic things don't stay put.  They grow
and change and evolve.  What stood off the blights when the Code was
drawn isn't worth anything these days.  I found that out years ago
when it first got bad.  I falsified my records so the inspectors
wouldn't know.  That is how I kept out of Penal House.  Maybe I
should have spoken out before, but who was there to hear?  I do love
a clean cornfield, though, and that's why I kept plugging.  The books
helped, too."

A spasm of shivering shook him as a fresh chill came on.  Garrison
gave a worried look at the chart.  He had not arrived too soon.  The
next fever peak would probably be the last.  Clevering was a dying
man.

"What books?" asked Garrison sharply.  "There are no books that I
know of except the Code."

"The ... the ones in the Autarch's secret library," managed Clevering
through chattering teeth.  "A few were stolen years ago by a
dissenter who was a palace guard until the monitors found him out.
They have been handed down through several generations to trusted
fellow believers.  I am the last one.  There are no others that I
know of."

"I am one," said Garrison quietly.  He was astonished at his own
coolness when he said it, for twenty-four hours earlier he would have
allowed wild horses to pull him apart rather than utter the
blasphemous words.  Now all that was changed.

"I am seeing people die who should not be dying," he explained.  "I
don't like it.  The Code is--" here he almost choked on the words,
such is strength of inhibiting doctrine, "the Code is--well, the Code
is all wrong!  It's got to be changed.  It's got to be _repealed_!"

"I believe you," said Clevering, and pulled Garrison toward him so he
could whisper, "the books are under a false flooring in a shed--"

Garrison listened attentively to the instructions, but before the
patient quite finished, the fever got the better of him and he
rambled off into incoherent nonsense.  Garrison stayed on, for it was
not all nonsense.  There were lucid stretches in which Clevering
lived his experiments again--the trying of this or another spray on
the blights, and the application of various chemicals to learn which
helped the corn and discouraged the weeds.  At length the end came,
and there was no more to do.  Neomal had claimed another victim, this
one appallingly swiftly.  Garrison removed the plug of cotton and
softly left the room.


Garrison's life for the next five weeks was a frenzied jumble of
concealed activity.  Taking infinite care to wear the mask of common
apathy, and covering his movements with studied casualness, he
steadfastly pursued two aims.  One was the reading of the forbidden
books, which he dug up during his first available free time.
Thereafter he read them in his room, hiding them meanwhile in his
mattress.  The books were a strangely variegated lot.  Some were on
scientific subjects, others social or philosophic.  There was
history, too, and something about religion.  The book he came to love
most of all was a very slim one--a little volume on "Liberty" by a
John Stuart Mill.  His limited vocabulary troubled him much at first,
but he shrewdly arrived at the meanings of such words as "choice" and
"freedom" by considering the context.  He discovered to his delight
that there were shades between good and bad.  There were the words
"better" and "best" as well as the bare, unqualified "good."

While the books opened up vistas unimagined to his thinking, it was
at Sanitar that he performed his most imperative work.  He wanted to
find out why neomalitis had suddenly turned killer, and how to foil
it.  On the pretense of checking the biologists, he pored over blood
and lymph specimens of the ever arriving patients.  He built up
culture colonies, and then tried to destroy them with modifications
of the sulfa drug.  The results were negative, so he tried other
compounds.  Then he cultured viruses, and pitted one strain against
another.  And as the average Psychic Resistance Index kept dropping
lower he pondered that feature.  Apparently the Diagnostats were not
calibrated for patients so consistently depressed and without desire
to live, for shortly the uncanny machines balked at giving any
prognosis whatever.  All that would come out was a meaningless jumble
of characters.

At last the day came when he found a drug that killed the new strain
of neomal bacilli in the laboratory.  He was careful to restrain any
expression of joy, though his impulse was to leap into the air and
yell "Eureka!"  Instead, he cautiously loaded a number of hyperdermic
needles and wandered into a ward.

He sent the attendants away on various errands, and set about the
risky job he was compelled to do.  He injected all the patients in
the rooms on the left-hand side of the corridor.  Then he went as
soon as possible to his office and awaited results.

They were not long in coming.  Within the hour an agitated treater
rushed in.

"All hell has broken loose in 44-B," he reported.  "_It can't_ be
neomalitis those patients have.  They're in convulsions."

"I'll be right down," said Garrison.  His bones had turned to water,
but he had to see the thing through.  He knew, from his belated
reading, that one was supposed to experiment on guinea pigs and
monkeys before injecting strong and untried medicines into human
beings.  But there were no longer any such animals.  They had been
decreed useless and were long extinct.  Yet the patients were doomed
anyhow--he felt justified in taking the chance.  But he had not
foreseen convulsions.

By the time he reached the ward the worst of the spasms had subsided.
Some of his inoculated patients had succumbed in their agony.  The
remainder lay spent and gasping, with expressions of utmost horror on
their faces.  Garrison surveyed them stonily, but his heart was cold
with anxiety.

"Very odd," he remarked, making notes.  "I shall report it, of
course."

He was too upset to do anything else that day, but that night he
thought long and hard about it.  The following morning he learned to
his immense relief that only a few more of his illegally injected
patients had died, whereas the half ward under Code treatment had
lost its normal number--about eighty percent.  During the tense day
that followed; the survivors among his experimental subjects began to
rally.  By nightfall several had lost all symptoms.  In a day or so,
barring relapses, they could be discharged.

"I'm on the track," Garrison exulted.  "Perhaps I used too strong a
solution."

He attacked the problem with renewed fury.  Day after day he tried
dilutions and admixtures of other chemicals.  There were unhappy
results at times, but on the whole he was making splendid progress.
At last there came a day when there were no deaths among the ones he
treated by stealth.  A grand glow of achievement warmed him, and when
he returned to his office he could not help walking like one who had
conquered the Earth.  He had tried, fumbled, and then gone over the
top.  Now he understood the rewards that come to those who achieve by
their own wit and handiwork.

But there was another kind of reward awaiting him.  At the door of
his office two grim monitors met him.  They shut off his
remonstrances with a blow across the face.  Then he was hustled into
an elevator and shot to the top of the tower where an angry director
was pacing the floor.  A smug inspector of Pharmaceuticals was
standing by with a packet of inventory sheets.

"Explain yourself, sirrah!" snorted the pompous, red-faced man who
headed Sanitar.  "What do you mean by forging chemical withdrawals?
Sulfa drugs--pah!  You have not used a gram of sulfazeoproponyl in
ten days.  Instead you--"

"Instead, I have been saving the lives of my patients," said Garrison
quietly.  "I gave them the Code stuff and they died, just as they are
doing in the other wards.  Therefore I knew that--"

"Silence!" roared the director, shutting him off.  "Not a word more.
Nothing ... _nothing_, mind you ... is as hideous as willful
violation of the Code.  What does it matter whether a thousand or
more weaklings die?  It is better so than to return to chaos.
Monitors, do your duty!"


The monitors did their duty.  They did it precisely as the Penal Code
said they must, exactly as it had been found necessary in the early
days when there were many rebels, and those tough and fearless.  They
flung chains about his wrists and dragged him to the elevator,
kicking and cuffing him at every step.  They paraded him through the
great lobby on the ground floor for the edification of his brother
ratings.  And then they hurled him half unconscious into the waiting
prison van.  After that for awhile Garrison hardly knew what happened
to him.  There was a prolonged session under a dazzling light, during
which venomous voices hurled abrupt questions at him.  They injected
him with scopa, and they brought psychomeds of the Penal branch to
try hypnosis on him.  They beat him at intervals, and confronted him
with the books they had uncovered in his room.

"You are fools, fools, FOOLS, I SAY!" he screamed when he could stand
it no more.  "Yes, I had an accomplice.  His name was Clevering ...
Clevering the agronomist.  He's dead now, so it does not matter.  He
kept the weeds out.  He kept the blight out.  So you have corn.  That
was contrary to the Code, but you have it!"

That was when his memory ceased to register.  The things they did to
him after that did not matter.  Or they did not matter until hours
later when he found himself crawling miserably on the hard steel
floor of a cell.  He felt his wounds and the stickiness of them made
him faint again.  After that he slept for many hours.

How many days he languished, sore and battered and hungry, in the
dark he had no notion.  He was hauled out one day for questioning by
a solemn board of psychomeds.  That was to determine his sanity.  He
answered them defiantly from between swollen lips and with words that
had to be mumbled for lack of teeth.  They overwhelmed him with
scorn, and pronounced him sane.  The Penal Code could take its
course.  After that there was more of darkness.  Not one person in
Sanitar or from Dorm attempted to communicate with him.  He was
unclean.  He was different.  He was a convicted dissenter.  His name
was already erased from the roster of the living.

It was an eternity after that when the four burly monitors came in
the dead of night.  He heard the heavy tramp of their feet in the
corridor, and the crash as his door was thrown open.  Then hand
flashlights played on him.

"Up, snake!" snarled one, and yanked him to his feet.

"Don't mark him any more," warned another.  "The captain said not.
The Autarch is going to work on this one in person, and they say he
likes 'em fresh and able to take it."

The other monitors snickered, and something whispered was said that
Garrison's ears did not catch.  Then he was shoved into the desolate
corridor and propelled forward.  Next came a jolting, mad ride to the
airport, and then comparative quiet as the giant stratoplane soared
through the sky.  Sometime later there was another ride in a van,
with a stop after a bit for challenges and explanations.  Then
Garrison heard the creak of great bronze gates opening on seldom used
bulges, after which he was handed through a door and into a small
elevator.

The moment he stepped out he knew he must be in the palace.  He had
not imagined such grandeur.  The floors were heavily carpeted in rich
designs, and the walls glowed with an eerie softness.  Uniformed
flunkies and guards stood everywhere, eying him curiously.  Garrison
became painfully aware of his own drab appearance, for he wore only a
very dirty shirt badly stained With blood, and his body was encrusted
with the muck of his cell floor.  His beard had grown untouched since
the first day of his incarceration.  Add his bloodshot eyes and
battered features to that and he knew he must present a perfect
picture of a desperate criminal.

A silver robed official of the palace intercepted them.

"Oh, he can't go in like that," he said.  "He'll have to be washed.
This way with him."

Garrison felt better after the repair work was done.  He had resigned
himself to taunts and tortures and ultimate death, but it felt good
to be clean for once.  They even trimmed his hair and shaved him, and
dressed him fully with dark-blue silken clothes after applying
pleasing ointments to his welts.

"You needn't mock," Garrison cried out, as they slipped the smooth
cloths onto him.  "I am a dissenter and proud of it.  Let's get on
with it."

"Take it easy," said the treater who had patched him up.  "The
Autarch would not have sent for you if you had been just an ordinary
case."

They gave him a sweet mixture of chocolate and milk and put him in a
darkened room to rest awhile, telling him that his audience was not
to be until noon.  He tried to rest, but could not.  Too much was
running around inside his head.  He knew that he was condemned to
die, for the monitors had told him as much.  His hope was that before
the hour came he could at least get the reason for his rebellion on
the record.


An officer of the guard came and escorted him down the carpeted
halls.  This time there were no harsh words or cuffing, but stiff
civility.  He took him to a pair of richly paneled doors which two
flunkies drew open.  Garrison was told to go in, and the doors closed
silently behind him.  He had entered alone; the officer remained
outside.

It was an immense square room, luxuriously appointed, and facing him
was a massive desk beside which stood a man he knew must be the
Autarch.  He was a magnificent specimen of manhood, tall,
barrel-chested and commanding.  He wore a robe of wine-red satin
bound with cloth of gold, but his gray-streaked leonine head was
bare.  His gaze was steady on Garrison--a coldly appraising gaze from
hard blue eyes, and under them an unsmiling mouth of iron.  When he
spoke it was with a deep and vibrant voice without a trace of emotion
in it.

"So you are a rebel," said the Autarch, almost as if he were speaking
to himself.

"I am."

Garrison was desperately afraid he was about to tremble, for the
man's personality was overpowering, and nothing in his previous
career had conditioned him to cope with it.

"Why?"

"I was failing in my job ... despite the Code," said Garrison slowly,
"and I felt I should do something about it.  I did, and succeeded,
after a fashion.  I saved the lives of some of our citizens.  That is
my crime.  If I had it to do over again, I would do the same."

"Ah," said the Autarch, taking a deep breath.  "So you defy me?"

"You do not understand, or you would not call it defiance," said
Garrison, astonished at his own boldness.  But he had already
suffered death a hundred times in anticipation and was beyond fearing
it.  Nothing mattered now.  The Autarch frowned momentarily, but
continued to size up his prisoner for a minute or so more.

"A real rebel, a genuine, sincere dissenter," he said softly, "at
last."

He moved across the room.

"Sit down," he said, "I want to talk with you."

Garrison sat down and took the proffered cigarette, wondering whether
he was on the cruel end of the cat-and-mouse game.

"During my reign," said the Autarch, "I have long wanted to meet one
of you.  From time to time they have brought me what was alleged to
be such.  They were sniveling cowards all--stupid, lazy, careless or
inept people who had infringed the Code without intent.  They had to
die, of course, and did.  It is the rule, and I am as helpless in the
face of it as anyone.  But I did hope to find out what was wrong with
the world.  They could not tell me.  Perhaps you can.  There is more
than one way of dying, I may remind you, and I have considerable
latitude in that matter."

"I see," said Garrison.  Things were churning about inside his skull.
There was the temptation to tell his captor what he wanted to hear
and thereby earn a painless death.  Yet he did not know what the
Autarch wanted.  Besides--

"The trouble with the world," said Garrison carefully, "is the Code
itself.  Civilization is an organism, made up of a myriad of lesser
organisms.  Organisms--men, animals, plants, and on down into the
microcosm of minute life--are living things.  They grow and develop
and evolve.  Or else they degenerate.  They never stand still.  Only
the Code stands still.  It is too rigid."

"I am not prepared to admit that," said the Autarch, "but go ahead.
Prove your point if you can."


It was the opening Garrison hungered for.  He recited the recent
behavior of neomalitis--the strange turn it was taking, and the
helplessness of the doctors in the face of an uncompromising Code.
He explained how bacilli could differentiate into fresh and hardier
strains, more contagious and deadlier than their predecessors.  And
how they might become immune to treatments formerly effective.  Then
be detailed his own experimentation, handicapped as that was by
non-co-operation and the necessity of secrecy.  He mentioned
Clevering and his cornfields and emphasized the parallelism between
the two situations.  The conclusion was inescapable.  However good
the old procedures may have been in their day, they were not valid
now.  Radically new approaches were demanded.

"Perhaps," agreed the Autarch, thoughtfully.  "There appears to be
truth in what you say.  I may as well tell you that other diseases
are becoming rampant as well--new varieties of cholera, dysentery,
and pneumonia.  There is a wave of suicides, too.  Cattle are dying.
Many of our vital crops are failing from blight or insect attack.
That is not all.  Nonorganic things are awry.  Despite controls,
gradual shifts of population have thrown central power plants out of
balance, and left us with highway systems that are either congested
or disused."

"A city or region may be regarded as an organism, too," Garrison
reminded him.

"So I see.  At any rate, it is a problem that has weighed on me for
some time.  It is growing urgent.  Something must be done, and
quickly."

"I know that," said Garrison dryly.

"If," suggested the Autarch, "I should see my way clear to grant you
an indefinite reprieve--perhaps amounting to a full pardon--would you
undertake to bring the diseases mentioned under control?"

Garrison smiled a thin, hard smile.

"I am only one man, excellency, and an ill-equipped one at that.  I
happened to be lucky in stumbling on the remedy right off.  In
another case it might take an army of research workers years.  Only
by putting thousands of trained men at it in ample laboratories could
such a thing be done."

"Very well.  You are the new Director General of Health.  I delegate
you to find such men and modify the Medical Code."

"How?" asked Garrison, with a short, scornful laugh.  "It is too late
for that--by a half dozen generations.  Not to modify the Code, but
to find the men.  The kind of men we need do not develop under an
autarchian regime.  It is the senseless persecution of your
predecessors that has brought us to the brink of ruin, not the plant
and animal parasites you complain of.  Free men would have disposed
of _them_ long ago..  But that would have required initiative and
adaptability, traits long since obliterated.  Now the premium is on
blind obedience.  Men have lost the art of thinking; they will only
do what they are told."

"That makes it all the easier," said the Autarch, reaching for a pad.
"You write the order stating what you want done.  I will promulgate
it.  It is as simple as that."

Garrison stared at him in blank amazement.

"Order what?" he asked.  "Men of force and talent to reveal
themselves?  Who is to judge whether they have those qualities?  And
if there are such, they will take immense pains to conceal
themselves.  They are afraid.  I know that, because I know my own
reaction to your recent order, relaxing the Social Code.  I didn't
understand it, and I didn't trust it.  For all I knew the Monitors
might be listening and taking it all down."

"They were," said the Autarch, "but nothing happened.  I was worrying
about the state of affairs throughout the world, and hoped to pick up
a clue as to what was wrong.  There was only silence."

"Ah," said Garrison, grimly.  "That shows the effect of fear.  And
the deadliness of inertia.  There must be many men among our billions
who see what is happening and care, but they dare not speak.  They
see only the Penal Houses ahead for their pains.  As to the vast
majority ... bah, they are sheep.  They are accustomed only to orders
from above.  Without positive orders specific to the last little
detail, they will not act.  What else do you expect from a race of
slaves?"

"Slaves!" exclaimed the Autarch.  "In the high position you held, how
dare you compare yourself with a slave?"

"Wasn't I?  I could cast about and find a sweeter euphemism for it,
but essentially that was it.  I have never known anything but
regimentation.  I was flattered with the label of a high cerebrad
rating, but why they assigned me to my job on the basis of it is more
than I can understand.  The commonest field hand above the moron
class could have done the work I did.  A machine could have.  What
use is intelligence if you are not permitted to use it?"

"Yes," admitted the Autarch slowly, "I see that now.  But that was
then.  You are not only permitted to use yours now, but ordered to.
Use any means you please to assure them immunity from persecution,
but issue your call--"

"It will take more than negative action," Garrison reminded him.  "To
break away from a life of routine a man needs positive motivation.
And I do not mean promotion to a job as sterile as the one he has.
It will have to be one to fire his soul and kindle his mind.  Simply
writing an order will not suffice."


There was an interruption.  The major-domo of the Palace brought in a
folder of papers.  It was the weekly summary of events in Autarchia.
The Autarch studied it with a face of thunder, then handed it to
Garrison.

It was a story of regression on all fronts.  The worst news came from
Asia, where the strange disease that resembled cholera but responded
to none of its known controls was sweeping the continent.  Millions
were already dead, and every ship and stratoplane was spreading the
epidemic farther.

"In the absence of anything better," Garrison remarked, "this should
be isolated.  You should declare an immediate quarantine."

"What is that?"

Garrison told him.

"That is out of the question," decided the Autarch, after a moment's
consideration of what it implied.  "It would be disastrous.  The
entire workings of the Code hinge on dependable supply and
distribution.  It--"

"It," flared Garrison, "shows you how rotten your precious system is.
Even you, presumably the ablest man of us all, are stopped by it,
though millions die.  When things start cracking you're sunk.  The
holy framers thought they had attained perfection and saw no
alternative.  Well, cling to your sacred Code and ride to doom with
it.  But let's end this farce.  Call your executioner and finish it."

They were both on their feet on the instant.  The Autarch was visibly
trying to control his anger, but Garrison was not to be stopped.  The
sickening sense of futility he first felt when Leona McWhisney died
was back with him, a hundredfold more strong.  His voice rose
shrilly, and he threw discretion to the winds.

"The race is facing a life-and-death crisis," he shouted.
"Pestilence is here, and famine is right around the corner.  In the
wake of those will come economic pandemonium.  The Grand Code cannot
cope with them.  It was not designed to.  All it does is stifle us.
What we need is men of imagination and boldness, not content with
covering themselves by complying with some stereotyped provision of
the Code.  We need them by the tens of thousands, and we cannot find
them on account of this unwieldy body of stupid, frozen laws.  There
is no time for temporizing.  The Code has got to go--lock, stock and
barrel!"

Garrison said a lot else along the same line.  The Autarch heard him
out in moody silence.  Then he grasped him by the arm and led him to
a side door.

"My apartment is in there.  Go rest.  I believe there is something in
your argument, but I want to think."


That interview was the beginning of a curious friendship.  They dined
together that evening, and later talked far into the night.

By the end of the week Garrison came to appreciate that the office of
Autarch was as empty as any in the realm.  There, too, the dead hand
of the past lay heavily.  Being top dog of the pyramid of bureaucracy
meant little, for in Autarchia precedent ruled.  Autarchs had
occasionally added to the Code, but not one had ever repealed a
provision.

The books confiscated at the time of Garrison's arrest were sent for
by the Autarch.  He was amazed at their contents, and began to
understand better the workings of his guest's mind.  He liked the
technical ones best; the one he could stomach least was the little
essay by Mill.  The idea of an individualistic society was beyond his
comprehension, but on the whole he was impressed.

"Garrison," he said, "I am convinced you have more practical ideas
than I.  I am ready now to take advice.  We will modify the Code for
the emergency.  You write the orders, I will issue them."

"I won't do it," said Garrison.  "I don't know enough.  And if I did,
I still wouldn't.  The principle is wrong."

"What principle?"

"The principle of handing down wisdom from aloft.  The principle of
autocracy, if you want to know.  It is an evil thing.  History has
never produced a man who knew _everything_--"

"He can surround himself with advisers."

"Of his own picking," countered Garrison.  "Yes-men they used to call
them.  Which is worse.  It is a device to reinforce a dictator's
illusions as to his own infallibility.  What he needs is not a chorus
of undiscriminating yessing, but frank and brutal criticism.  He can
get that only in a democracy."

"Democracy!" cried the Autarch scornfully.  "Anarchy, you mean.  What
is a democracy but a howling mob of forty opinions, each as little
informed as the next?  Where, after an infinity of muddling and
compromise, some self-styled leader manages to wheedle an agreement
among fifty-one out of a hundred of the mass, whereupon he proclaims
a half truth as the whole.  That is clumsy nonsense.  The world had
democracies once.  Look what happened to them!"

"Look at what is happening to their flawless successors," said
Garrison quietly.

The Autarch reddened.

"At least," Garrison argued, "in a democracy the ordinary man had
something to live for.  He wasn't a poor pawn.  If he hit on a good
idea and had the will and personality to promote it, he had a chance
of getting somewhere.  He didn't vegetate or degenerate into the
flesh-and-blood robots we have about us now.  Competition with his
fellows kept him from doing that.  Sure, he made errors.  But he did
not make the stupidest of all--of freezing them into an inflexible
Code.  Where freedom is, a man can develop.  If he is wrong, others
are free to say so.  Some will back him, others oppose, which is the
very thing the framers of the Code thought so deplorable.  But out of
the conflict the better idea usually won."

"After years of wrangling and with many setbacks," objected the
Autarch.

"Rather, after continual adjustments to current needs," corrected
Garrison.  "Democracy may have had its faults, but lack of
adaptability was not one of them.  In freedom of speech and
reasonable freedom of action it had the machinery for correcting any
intolerable fault.  Which is more than you can say for your own
absurd system."

"All right," retorted the Autarch.  "For argument's sake suppose I
grant your point.  _How_, in view of the sheeplike nature of my
people which you keep harping on, could we reinstitute an obsolete
form of society such as you advocate?  I offered 'em free speech, and
you know what happened."

"Wake 'em up," yelled Garrison.  "Make 'em mad.  Then you'd see."

"With no Code to guide them?  I see nothing but chaos."

"We needn't repeal the whole of the Code.  Considered as a guide it
isn't bad at all.  Its evil feature is its pretence of being
infallible.  We'll teach the people how to judge when to follow and
when to diverge."

"That from you," snorted the Autarch.  "You, who wouldn't even tackle
the revision of the Medical Code!  Now you propose to upset the
entire applecart, and destroy the people's confidence.  What will you
replace it with, and how?"

"What with?" smiled Garrison.  "There is always your great sealed
library.  You have seen a small sample of it and liked it.  The Code
was based on it.  It must be good.  As to how, that will come later."

"Let's look," said the Autarch, with sudden resolution.  He dug keys
and combinations out of a safe.

They reached the library through a long underground passage heavy
with the dust of time.  Once they passed the guards at the outer
barrier they were on pavement untrod for decades.  Then they came to
a heavy circular door that had to be opened by a complicated group of
methods.  At length it swung open and they stepped through.

Both gasped at the immensity of the place.  Not every book ever
published was there--only the ones considered by the framers in
compiling the Code.  But since they covered every field of human
activity in utmost detail, they numbered in the millions.  The stacks
stretched away for thousands of feet of well-lit, air conditioned
space.  The magnitude of the task they had so lightly assumed almost
overwhelmed them.

After a long hunt Garrison found the medical section.  He was again
appalled at the extent of it, for the volumes dealing with any single
aspect of his profession took up yards of shelving.  He skipped
histology, obstetrics, dermatology, and dozens more.  There was just
too much of it.  How was he ever to read it all, let alone sift the
chaff from the substance?  He ducked the questions neatly by
concentrating on the volumes devoted to the techniques of research.

Meanwhile the Autarch was delving elsewhere.  He was deep among the
histories and philosophies, with occasional excursions into political
economy.  Soon the aisles where he roamed were cluttered with "must"
books.  His first samplings had produced material for half a lifetime
of study.

Hours later they left the place, exhausted, but burdened with books.
Sheer fatigue cut their dinner talk that night to the barest minimum.

"How can we know," groaned the Autarch, "what part of this stuff is
bad, and what not?"

"We'll have to leave it to the people," was Garrison's reply.  "We
need too many people and in too many varied fields to try to select
for them.  They will have to do that themselves."

"That will bring chaos, I say," grumbled the Autarch.  "Anarchy.
Your cure is as bad as the disease, I'm afraid."

"All right," grinned Garrison, as a sudden inspiration hit him.  "I'm
an anarchist.  Let's analyze it.  Autocracy is the complete denial of
the individual.  Anarchy is his fullest possible assertion.
Democracy lies halfway between.  Under it an individual can be
himself, but is subject to certain restraints.  Very well.  You
continue to play the Autarch.  I'll be the Anarch--"

"And between us we'll produce the Demagogue," remarked the Autarch,
sharing his grin.  "A fascinating gamble, I must say.  And pray tell,
my insane friend, how do we achieve this miracle?"

"You continue to issue edicts."

"Yes?"

"And I will see that they are not obeyed," chuckled Garrison.


Strange happenings came to pass shortly after that.  The sprawling
radio center known as Omnivox overflowed into adjoining buildings
hastily remodeled as annexes.  Peremptory calls were sent out to
Propags all over the world.  Soon they came streaming into Cosmopolis
on every arriving stratoliner.  There they met a puzzling
individual--one Philip Garrison, the newly appointed Chief of
Propaganda.  He told them that for one month they would read and not
talk.  In the meantime the standard lecture courses were to be
suspended.

At the same time the citizens of the provinces were treated to a
bewildering succession of orders.  The Grand Code, they were
informed, was to be revised in the near future.  Until that time they
should continue to use it as a guide, but might depart from it in
certain stated emergencies.  Propag lectures stopped as the lecturers
were withdrawn, but the culture courses were continued for the time
being.  There was a difference, though.  An army of carpenters
descended on the various Social Halls and cut them up into many small
compartments by partitions.  Each was fitted with an omnivox screen.
The most startling innovation was the broadcast instructions to the
Monitor-Corps.  They were forbidden to molest dissenters.  On the
contrary, they were given strict orders to protect them from the
orthodox, should those show signs of resenting their heresies.

The results as both Autarch and Garrison had anticipated, were
meager.  They listened in at random over the monitorial wires and
knew.  For a few days there was a buzz of excitement, then the people
relapsed into their customary apathy.  They continued to do the
things they always had done, and in exactly the same manner.  In all
the world there were less than five hundred who took the strange
edicts at anything like face value.  Some were doctors, who now
openly experimented as Garrison had done.  The rest were in other
professions.

The Autarch wanted to send for them and add them to his staff.

"No," said Garrison, "they will be more useful where they are.
Moreover, if you do that you may scare others.  There must be more
than half a thousand alert minds on five continents.  We've still got
those to smoke out."

The preliminaries took the whole of the estimated month.  The zero
hour was near at hand.  The Propags had finished their assigned
readings and had prepared their scripts.  The Autarch was signing
them at the rate of hundreds at a time, using a giant pantograph.
Each was in the form of an edict, almighty law to replace a portion
of the outmoded Grand Code.  For the first few hours he tried to read
them as they came, but there were too many.  He gave it up and went
ahead with his part of the bargain--signing orders, for in the end he
and Garrison had arrived at a complete understanding.  Now he meant
to see it through, though the skies fell.

He checked off the subjects on his lists as the edicts went on their
way.  There appeared to be one set missing.  He sent for Garrison.
Garrison was busy at the time coaching the regiment of omnivox
announcers he had recruited.

"What about religion?" asked the Autarch.  "There was about an acre
of books on it, as I remember."

"Oh, yes, religion," said Garrison, thoughtfully.  "Yes, I suppose we
ought to include that, though I omitted it because it was one of the
activities abolished altogether."

"I think we'd better give it to 'em," said the Autarch.  "People used
to think a lot of it.  They fought over it.  It had something to do
with the spirit, I believe, and we certainly need pepping up in that
direction."

"Yes," agreed Garrison.  "What kind shall I dish out?"

"How would I know?  Let 'em have all of it."

So Garrison put another hundred script writers to work.

At last zero hour came.  Garrison was in the master control room of
Omnivox with stop watch in hand.  At his nod the talkers went into
action.  It was the hour when the citizens in his part of the world
were assembled in the Social Halls.  At later hours the same
discourses would follow the sun around the globe.  Then he went off
to his private booth and plugged in on a spyline.  For a sample spot
in picked on the Hall at his old home Dorm.  It was different now.
Instead of being scattered groups in one big hall, the doctors and
agronomists were segregated in many small rooms.  Each was listening
to a different lecture.  Garrison chose to follow the doctors.

In the first room a group of them were listening rapt to the new
orders that were to replace the Code.  The voice proclaiming that
particular one was reading from a script that declared that most
bodily ills had endocrine gland imbalance as their cause.  Hence
glandular therapy would cure anything.  Garrison listened to it well
pleased.  It was most convincing.  Then he switched over to another
room.  There, other doctors heard the new law of the land.  It
asserted that diet was nine tenths of the battle.  Feed a man right
and he would become practically immortal.

Garrison smiled and went on to the next.  The lecturer was quoting
osteopathic doctrine.  The disposition of the bones had everything to
do with disease.  It was fundamental.  Garrison flicked the switch
again.  The next fellow was yelling about the dangers of ever-present
bacteria and demanding strict attention to the sterile technique.  On
and on it went, in each room a different set of dogma.  And each of
them was sound enough as far as it went, except that each was
emphasized at the expense of every other.  All the cults and schisms
of old-style medicine were there.

Garrison grinned happily.  He could not predict with any exactness
what the outcome would be, but he knew it would be worth watching.
Then he turned to other fields where similar conflicting lectures
were being read.  The announcers were doing well; he was content.

"How'm I doing?" he asked the Autarch, ten days later.

"Swell, I guess," said the Autarch dubiously, "if chaos is what
you're driving at.  There are riots all over the place.  I ordered a
new bridge built across the river ten miles below here.  I had to
send a squad of monitors to restore order."

"Yes?"

"Four pontifexes of the steel arch persuasion ganged up one who stood
out for a suspension bridge.  A fellow who happened to think
cantilevers are better horned into the argument and got battered in
the melee.  Pretty bloody affair."

"They'll learn," said Garrison cheerily.  "And when they do, they
will not only know what is the best type, but why.  They'll feel all
the better for it.  That's the democratic way."

"Maybe," said the Autarch grudgingly, and added with a twinkle, "You
have a thing or two to learn, too."

"Now what?"

"Discrimination.  Do you know what happened at Chicago?  Better check
over your scheduling of religious stuff.  They've been preaching
Hinduism out there.  Now we have a strike on our hands.  Hindus won't
kill cows, it seems."


In the succeeding six months pandemonium broke loose.  It was all
according to plan, but trying.  The world's population had been
divided into cells, and each cell ordered to believe in some
particular method and carry it out in the face of every opposition.
Since no two groups were taught alike in the same locality, friction
developed almost immediately in the citizens' daily work.  On
Sundays, when all were thrown together for an afternoon of free
discussion, the monitors had their work cut out for them.  They found
their new instructions as to preserving order the biggest job in
their history.

But Garrison listened in with glee.  The only way to reach the
populace was through flat, categorical orders.  It was the conflict
of orders, each reasonable and workable of itself but incompatible
with the others, that was waking them up.  Men got angry, and backed
up the reasons fed them by the Propags with ones thought up by
themselves.  Still others were unsettled by their opponents, and
wrote troubled letters to their higher-ups asking for clarification.
Since their higher-ups were equally as confused, the letters
eventually reached the palace.  Garrison faithfully recorded their
names on a gold-starred list.

"There," he said to the Autarch, "are some of the men you asked for."

"Humph," exclaimed the dictator, "I am getting a lot more than I
asked for.  Riots.  Revolution.  Call it democracy if you want to,
but anarchy is what it is.  You stirred 'em up, I admit, but what has
it got us?  A nation at one another's throats.  I don't like it.
Summon the best of these men you've found and direct them to draw up
a new Code.  Then--"

"Then we'll be right back where we started," Garrison broke in.  "You
can't put mankind in a strait jacket and expect anything but atrophy.
When our thinking is done for us we become stupid.  There is a saying
that Nature abhors a vacuum.  She also abhors an idler.  The unused
limb withers and dies."

"But listen to the noise outside," said the Autarch, "they'll be
killing each other next."

There was plenty of tumult outside, all right.  All Cosmopolis was
lit with red flares, and the night was hideous with the roar of
crowds and the ranting of stump orators.  Autarch and Anarch stole
out onto a balcony where they could better see and overhear.  A
political parade was passing, waving banners aloft that called for
the establishment of a monarchy.  It met another head-on, a group
yelling for an election and the adoption of a constitution.  The
monitors intervened, swinging nightsticks, and dispersed both crowds.
But the relative quiet that followed was short lived.  A mob howling
"Death to Mohammedans" poured out of a side street.  When the
monitors finished with them their placards and banners were in shreds.

"I think you overdid the religious angle," remarked the Autarch dryly.

"Yes," admitted Garrison glumly.  "I had no idea they would take it
so seriously.  After all, we don't actually know much about the soul.
Ours have been in a state of suspended animation for a long time."

"I know, but don't you think we might be a little more ... ah-uh ...
_selective_ in what we put out.  Now that sect we just saw in action,
for example--"

"At least we gave the monitors only one set of instructions--to
maintain order," said Garrison, doggedly sticking to his guns.  "The
few broken heads we see are worth the price.  It will all work out.
Have patience."

It did work out.  The Propags had done their job.  The seeds had been
sown and now the crop was coming up.  Controls were being established
over diseases and blights again.  Other able men were untangling the
economic mess resulting from those.  Still others were observing and
approving them.  The Codes were not being used much any more.  People
attacked their problems directly, and were learning the art of
promise.  There was but one thing left to do.

The Autarch was reluctant to do it, but he had gone so far that he
was willing to go all the way.  He revoked the Code, including the
fantastic recent additions.  The printers that formerly made up its
volumes were now turning out copies of the books in the secret
library.  The only portion of the Code retained was the completely
revised Social Code.  Into it Garrison wrote the bill of rights and
the laws compelling tolerance, and appended instructions for forming
a representative government.  He abolished the practice of holding
men in jobs by virtue of their cerebral ratings.  It might come out
to the same thing, and might not.  Hereafter results were all that
would count.

It was the Autarch who issued the call for the elections, and of his
own volition.  That was months later, after the new Code had been
digested.

"Do you know, Garrison," he said, "this anarchy of yours is panning
out pretty well.  But I've worked myself out of a job.  I think I'll
run for president."


[The end of _The Anarch_ by Malcolm Jameson]