“The Mind-Screwers,” I said. “That’s the first title.”
Sadassa stared at me, and then, astonishingly, she laughed, a rich, hearty laugh. “No kidding. Well, leave it to a committee. Art in America. Like art in the USSR. How neat, how really neat. The Mind-Screwers. All right.”
There won’t be many books by me after that,” I said. “Not from the description Vivian Kaplan gave me of it. You should hear the plot. This blind worm, see, migrates from -”
*Clark Ash ton Smith,” Sadassa said instantly.
“Of course,” I said. “His kind of thing. Mixed up with Heinlein’s politics.”
We were both laughing, now. “A mixture of Clark Ash ton Smith and Robert Heinlein,” Sadassa said, gasping. Too much. What a winner! And the next one . . . let me see. I’ve got it, Phil; it’ll be called The Underground City of the Mind-Screwers, only this time it’ll be in the style of -”
“A series,” I broke in. “In the first one, the mind-screwers arrive from outer space; in the next one they bore up from below the surface of Earth; in the third one – “
“Return to the Underground City of the Mind-Screwers,” Sadassa said.
I continued. “They slip through from between dimensions, from another time period. In the fourth one the mind-screwers arrive from an alternate universe. And so forth.”
“Maybe there could be a fifth one where some archaeologist finds this ancient tomb and opens a great casket, and all these horrible mind-screwers tumble out and right away gang-bang all the native workmen and then fan out and screw every mind in Cairo, and from there the world.” She took off her glasses and wiped her eyes.
“You okay?” I said.
“No,” she said. “I’m scared, very scared. I hate the slammer. I was in the slammer for two days one time, because I didn’t show up for a traffic ticket. They put out an APB on me. I had mono then; I was just out of the hospital. This time I just went into remission from lymphoma. Oh, well; I’m not going into the slammer this time, evidently.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, not knowing what else to say or what to do.
“It’s okay,” Sadassa said. “We are immortal, all of us. Valis conferred that on us, and he will on everyone, someday; we just have it now . . . the firstfruits, as it’s said. So I don’t feel too bad. We put up a good fight; we did a good job. We were always doomed, Phil; we never had a chance, but that’s not our fault. All we had was some information that should have done it. But they had us before – you know. Before we could act. And without the satellite . . .” She shrugged, unhappily. “No one to protect us, as in the past.”
“Nicholas said – “ I began, and then I shut up, because of course the jail cell was bugged, and I didn’t want the authorities to know that another satellite, as Nicholas had told me, was on the way. But then I remembered that he had told me at the ball park, so they knew. Still, they might have missed it. So I said nothing.
A guard came to the door. “All right, Miss Aramchek. Time to go.”
She smiled at me. “Don’t tell them how lousy their books are,” she said. “Let them find out the hard way.”
I kissed her on the mouth, and she held onto me warmly and tightly for a moment. Then she was gone; the cell door rattled and clanged shut.
After that there is a lot I do not remember. I think Vivian Kaplan stopped by to inform me that Sadassa Aramchek had been shot, as Nicholas had been, but I’m not sure; if so, I repressed it and forgot it and did not know it had happened. But sometimes in the later nights I woke up and saw a FAPer standing pointing a pistol at a small figure, and in those lucid moments I knew she was dead, that I had been told and could not remember.
Why would I want to remember that? Why would I want to know it? Enough is enough, I sometimes say, as a sort of cry of misery, of having entered regions exceeding my capacity to endure, and this was one of them. I had withstood the death of my friend Nicholas Brady, whom I had known and loved most of my life, but I could not adjust to the death of a girl I didn’t even know.
The mind is strange, but it has its reasons. The mind sees in a single glimpse life unlived, hopes unrewarded, emptiness and silence where there should have been noise and love . . . Nicholas and I had lived a long time and done much, but Sadassa Aramchek had been sacrificed before any good luck came to her, any opportunity to live and become. They had taken away part of Nicholas’s life, and part of mine, but they had stolen all of hers. It was my job now to forget I had met her, to recall that I said no to Vivian Kaplan instead of yes when she asked if I’d talk with Sadassa; my mind had the solemn task of rearranging past reality in order that I could go on, and it was not doing a good job.
Sometime later in the month, I was taken from my cell, brought before a magistrate, and asked how I pled to fifteen charges of treason. I had a court-appointed attorney, who advised me to plead guilty.
I said, “Innocent.”
The trial lasted only two days. They had tape recordings in vast boxes, some of them genuine, most of them fake. I sat without protesting, thinking of spring and the slow growth of trees, as Spinoza had put it: the most beautiful thing on earth. At the conclusion of the trial I was found guilty and sentenced to fifty years in prison without possibility of parole. That would mean I would be released after I had been dead some good time.
I was given a choice between imprisonment in a solitary confinement situation or what they called “work therapy.” The work therapy consisted of joining a gang of other political prisoners to do manual labor. Our specific job lay in razing old buildings in the slums of Los Angeles. For this we were paid three cents a day. But at least we stayed out in the sun. I chose that; it was better than being cooped up like an animal.
As I worked clearing broken concrete away, I thought, Nicholas and Sadassa are dead and immortal; I am not dead and I would not be immortal. I am different from them. When I die or am killed, nothing eternal in me will live on. I was not granted the privilege of hearing the AI operator’s voice, that voice Nicholas spoke of so often, which meant so much to him.
“Phil,” a voice called to me suddenly, breaking my reverie. “Knock off work and have lunch; we got half an hour.” It was Leon, my buddy who worked beside me, a former plumber who’d been arrested for passing out some kind of mimeographed handbills he had created himself, a sort of one-man rebellion. In my opinion he was braver than any of us, a plumber working by himself in his basement at a mimeograph machine, with no divine voices to instruct or guide him, only his human heart.
Seated together, we shared sandwiches provided for us. They were not bad.
“You used to be a writer,” Leon said, his mouth full of bologna and bread and mustard.
“Yep,” I said.
“Did you belong to Aramchek?” Leon asked, leaning close to me.
“No,” I said.
“You know anything about it?”
Two friends of mine belonged to it.”
“They’re dead?”
“Yes,” I said.
“What’s Aramchek teach?”
“I don’t know if it teaches,” I said. “I know a little about what it believes.”
“Tell me,” Leon said, eating his sandwich.
“They believe,” I said, “that we shouldn’t give our loyalty to human rulers. That there is a supreme father in the sky, above the stars, who guides us. Our loyalty should be to him and him alone.”
“That’s not a political idea,” Leon said with disgust. “I thought Aramchek was a political organization, subversive.”
“It is.”
“But that’s a religious idea. That’s the basis of religion. They been talking about that for five thousand years.”
I had to admit he was right. “Well,” I said, “that’s Aramchek, an organization guided by the supreme heavenly father.”
“You think it’s true? You believe that?”
“Yes,” I said.
“What church do you belong to?”
“None,” I said.
“You’re a strange guy,” Leon said. “Do the Aramchek people hear this supreme father?”
They did,” I said. They will again, someday.”
“Did you ever hear him?”
“No,” I said. “I wish I had.”