‘No.’
‘Neither do I. We don’t need to know so we weren’t told. However,’ he went on, ‘1 don’t mind telling you, in a general way, what you were carrying-just routine reports, confirming stuff we already had by sensitive circuits mostly. You were coming this way, so they dumped a lot of such stuff into you. I took three spools from you.’
‘Just routine stuff? Why, the Lodge Master told me I was carrying a message of vital importance. That fat old joker!’
The technician grudged a smile. ‘I’m afraid he was pulling-Oh!’
‘Eh?’
‘I know what he meant. You were carrying a message of vital importance-to you. You carried your own credentials hypnotically. If you had not been, you would never have been allowed to wake up.’
I had nothing to say. I left quietly.
My rounds of the medical office, psych office, quartermaster, and so forth had begun to give me a notion of the size of the place. The ‘toy village’ I had first seen was merely the administrative group. The power plant, a packaged pile, was in a separate cavern with many yards of rock wall as secondary shielding. Married couples were quartered where they pleased-about a third of us were female-and usually chose to set up their houses (or pens) well away from the central grouping. The armory and ammo dump were located in a side passage, a safe distance from offices and quarters.
There was fresh water in abundance, though quite hard, and the same passages that carried the underground streams appeared to supply ventilation-at least the air was never stale. It stayed at a temperature of 69.6 Fahrenheit and a relative humidity of 32%, winter and summer, night and day.
By lunchtime I was hooked into the organization, and found myself already hard at work at a temporary job immediately after lunch-in the armory, repairing and adjusting blasters, pistols, squad guns, and assault guns. I could have been annoyed at being asked, or ordered, to do what was really gunnery sergeant work, but the whole place seemed to be run with a minimum of protocol-we cleared our own dishes away at mess, for example. And truthfully it felt good to sit at a bench in the armory, safe and snug, and handle calipers and feather gauges and drifts again-good, useful work.
Just before dinner that first day I wandered into the B.O.Q. lounge and looked around for an unoccupied chair. I heard a familiar baritone voice behind me: ‘Johnnie! John Lyle!’ I whirled around and there, hurrying toward me, was Zebadiah Jones-good old Zeb, large as life and his ugly face split with a grin.
We pounded each other on the back and swapped insults. ‘When did you get here?’ I finally asked him.
‘Oh, about two weeks ago.’
‘You did? You were still at New Jerusalem when I left. How did you do it?’
‘Nothing to it. I was shipped as a corpse-in a deep trance. Sealed up in a coffin and marked “contagious”.’
I told him about my own mixed-up trip and Zeb seemed impressed, which helped my morale. Then I asked him what he was doing.
‘I’m in the Psych & Propaganda Bureau,’ he told me, ‘under Colonel Novak. Just now I’m writing a series of oh-so-respectful articles about the private life of the Prophet and his acolytes and attending priests, how many servants they have, how much it costs to run the Palace, all about the fancy ceremonies and rituals, and such junk. All of it perfectly true, of course, and told with unctuous approval. But I lay it on a shade too thick. The emphasis is on the jewels and the solid gold trappings and how much it all costs, and keep telling the yokels what a privilege it is for them to be permitted to pay for such frippery and how flattered they should feel that God’s representative on earth lets them take care of him.’
‘I guess I don’t get it,’ I said, frowning. ‘People like that circusy stuff. Look at the way the tourists to New Jerusalem scramble for tickets to a Temple ceremony.’
‘Sure, sure-but we don’t peddle this stuff to people on a holiday to New Jerusalem; we syndicate it to little local papers in poor farming communities in the Mississippi Valley, and in the Deep South, and in the back country of New England. That is to say, we spread it among some of the poorest and most puritanical elements of the population, people who are emotionally convinced that poverty and virtue are the same thing. It grates on their nerves; in time it should soften them up and make doubters of them.’