The Best of Fritz Leiber

Sanity

“COME IN, Phy, and make yourself comfortable.”

The mellow voice—and the suddenly dilating doorway—caught the general secretary of the World playing with a blob of greenish gasoid, squeezing it in his fist and watching it ooze between his fingers in spatulate tendrils that did not dissipate. Slowly, crookedly, he turned his head. World Manager Carrsbury became aware of a gaze that was at once oafish, sly, vacuous. Abruptly the expression was replaced by a nervous smile. The thin man straightened himself, as much as his habitually drooping shoulders would permit, hastily entered, and sat down on the extreme edge of a pneumatically form- fitting chair.

He embarrassedly fumbled the blob of gasoid, looking around for a convenient disposal vent or a crevice in the upholstery. Finding none, he stuffed it hurriedly into his pocket. Then he repressed his fidgetings by clasping his hands resolutely together, and sat with downcast eyes.

“How are you feeling, old man?” Carrsbury asked in a voice that was warm with a benign friendliness. The general secretary did not look up.

“Anything bothering you, Phy?” Carrsbury continued solicitously. “Do you feel a bit unhappy, or dissatisfied, about your. er. transfer, now that the moment has arrived?”

Still the general secretary did not respond. Carrsbury leaned forward across the dully silver, semicircular desk and, in his most winning tones, urged, “Come on, old fellow, tell me all about it.”

The general secretary did not lift his head, but he rolled up his strange, distant eyes until they were fixed directly on Carrsbury. He shivered a little, his body seemed to contract, and his bloodless hands tightened their interlocking grip.

“I know,” he said in a low, effortful voice. “You think I’m insane.”

Carrsbury sat back, forcing his brows to assume a baffled frown under the mane of silvery hair.

“Oh, you needn’t pretend to be puzzled,” Phy continued, swiftly now that he had broken the ice. “You know what that word means as well as I do. Better—even though we both had to do historical research to find out.”

“Insane,” he repeated dreamily, his gaze wavering. “Significant departure from the norm. Inability to conform to basic conventions underlying all human conduct.”

“Nonsense!” said Carrsbury, rallying and putting on his warmest and most compelling smile. “I haven’t the slightest idea of what you’re talking about. That you’re a little tired, a little strained, a little distraught —that’s quite understandable, considering the burden you’ve been carrying, and a little rest will be just the thing to fix you up, a nice long vacation away from all this. But as for your being. why, ridiculous!”

“No,” said Phy, his gaze pinning Carrsbury. “You think I’m insane. You think all my colleagues hi the World Management Service are insane. That’s why you’re having us replaced with those men you’ve been training for ten years in your Institute of Political Leadership—ever since, with my help and connivance, you became World manager.”

Carrsbury retreated before the finality of the statement. For the first time his smile became a bit uncertain. He started to say something, then hesitated and looked at Phy, as if half hoping he would go on.

But that individual was once again staring rigidly at the floor.

Carrsbury leaned back, thinking. When he spoke it was in a more natural voice, much less consciously soothing and fatherly.

“Well, all right, Phy. But look here, tell me something, honestly. Won’t you—and the others—be a lot happier when you’ve been relieved of all your responsibilities?”

Phy nodded somberly. “Yes,” he said, “we will. but”—his face became strained—“you see—” “But—?” Carrsbury prompted.

Phy swallowed hard. He seemed unable to go on. He had gradually slumped toward one side of the chair, and the pressure had caused the green gasoid to ooze from his pocket. His long fingers crept over and kneaded it fretfully.

Carrsbury stood up and came around the desk. His sympathetic frown, from which perplexity had ebbed, was not quite genuine.

“I don’t see why I shouldn’t tell you all about it now, Phy,” he said simply. “In a queer sort of way I owe

it all to you. And there isn’t any point now in keeping it a secret. there isn’t any danger—”

“Yes,” Phy agreed with a quick bitter smile, “you haven’t been in any danger of a coup d’etat for some years now. If ever we should have revolted, there’d have been”—his gaze shifted to a point hi the opposite wall where a f aint vertical crease indicated the presence of a doorway—“your secret police.”

Carrsbury started. He hadn’t thought Phy had known. Disturbingly, there loomed in his mind a phrase The cunning of the insane. But only for a moment. Friendly complacency flooded back. He went behind Phy’s chair and rested his hands on the sloping shoulders.

“You know, I’ve always had a special feeling toward you, Phy,” he said, “and not only because your whims made it a lot easier for me to become World manager. I’ve always felt that you were different from the others, that there were times when—” He hesitated.

Phy squirmed a little under the friendly hands. “When I had my moments of sanity?” he finished flatly.

“like now,” said Carrsbury softly, after a nod the other could not see. “I’ve always felt that sometimes, in a kind of twisted, unrealistic way, you understood. And that has meant a lot to me. I’ve been alone, Phy, dreadfully alone, for ten whole years. No companionship anywhere, not even among the men I’ve been training in the Institute of Political Leadership—for I’ve had to play a part with them too, keep them in ignorance of certain facts, for fear they would try to seize power over my head before they were sufficiently prepared. No companionship anywhere, except for my hopes—and for occasional moments with you. Now that it’s over and a new regime is beginning for us both, I can tell you that. And I’m glad.”

There was a silence. Then—Phy did not look around, but one lean hand crept up and touched Carrsbury’s. Carrsbury cleared his throat. Strange, he thought, that there could be even a momentary rapport like this between the sane and the insane. But it was so.

He disengaged his hands, strode rapidly back to his desk, turned.

“I’m a throwback, Phy,” he began in a new, unused, eager voice. “A throwback to a time when human mentality was far sounder. Whether my case was due chiefly to heredity, or to certain unusual accidents of environment, or to both, is unimportant. The point is that a person had been born who was in a position to criticize the present state of mankind in the light of the past, to diagnose its condition, and to begin its cure. For a long time I refused to face the facts, but finally my researches—especially those in the literature of the twentieth century—left me no alternative. The mentality of mankind had become— aberrant. Only certain technological advances, which had resulted in making the business of living infinitely easier and simpler, and the fact that war had been ended with the creation of the present world state, were staving off the inevitable breakdown of civilization. But only staving it off—delaying it. The great masses of mankind had become what would once have been called hopelessly neurotic. Their leaders had become. you said it first, Phy. insane. Incidentally, this latter phenomenon—the drift of psychological aberrants toward leadership—has been noted in all ages.”

He paused. Was he mistaken, or was Phy following his words with indications of a greater mental clarity than he had ever noted before, even in the relatively non-violent World secretary? Perhaps—he had often dreamed wistfully of the possibility—there was still a chance of saving Phy. Perhaps, if he just explained to him clearly and calmly—

“In my historical studies,” he continued, “I soon came to the conclusion that the crucial period was that of the Final Amnesty, concurrent with the founding of the present world state. We are taught that at that time there were released from confinement millions of political prisoners—and millions of others. Just who were those others? To this question, our present histories gave only vague and platitudinous answers. The semantic difficulties I encountered were exceedingly obstinate. But I kept hammering away. Why, I asked myself, have such words as insanity, lunacy, madness, psychosis, disappeared from our vocabulary—and the concepts behind them from our thought? Why has the subject ‘abnormal psychology’ disappeared from the curricula of our schools? Of greater significance, why is our modern psychology strikingly similar to the field of abnormal psychology as taught in the twentieth century, and to that field alone? Why are there no longer, as there were in the twentieth century, any institutions for the confinement and care of the psychologically aberrant?”

Phy’s head jerked up. He smiled twistedly. “Because,” he whispered slyly, “everyone’s insane now.”

The cunning of the insane. Again that phrase loomed warningly in Carrsbury’s mind. But only for a moment. He nodded.

“At first I refused to make that deduction. But gradually I reasoned out the why and wherefore of what had happened. It wasn’t only that a highly technological civilization had subjected mankind to a wider and more swiftly-tempoed range of stimulations, conflicting suggestions, mental strains, emotional wrenchings. In the literature of twentieth century psychiatry there are observations on a land of psychosis that results from success. An unbalanced individual keeps going so long as he is fighting something, struggling toward a goal. He reaches his goal—and goes to pieces. His repressed confusions come to the surface, he realizes that he doesn’t know what he wants at all, his energies hitherto engaged hi combatting something outside himself are turned against himself, he is destroyed. Well, when war was finally outlawed, when the whole world became one unified state, when social inequality was abolished. you see what I’m driving at?”

Phy nodded slowly. “That,” he said hi a curious, distant voice, “is a very interesting deduction.”

“Having reluctantly accepted my main premise,” Carrsbury went on, “everything became clear. The cyclic six-months’ fluctuations in world credit—I realized at once that Morganstern of Finance must be a manic-depressive with a six-months’ phase, or else a dual personality with one aspect a spendthrift, the other a miser. It turned out to be the former. Why was the Department of Cultural Advancement stagnating? Because Manager Hobart was markedly catatonic. Why the boom in Extraterrestrial

Research? Because McElvy was a euphoric.”

Phy looked at him wonderingly. “But naturally,” he said, spreading his lean hands, from one of which the gasoid dropped like a curl of green smoke.

Carrsbury glanced at him sharply. He replied. “Yes, I know that you and several of the others have a certain warped awareness of the differences between your. personalities, though none whatsoever of the basic aberration involved in them all. But to get on. As soon as I realized the situation, my course was marked out. As a sane man, capable of entertaining fixed realistic purposes, and surrounded by individuals of whose inconsistencies and delusions it was easy to make use, I was in a position to attain, with time and tact, any goal at which I might aim. I was already in the Managerial Service. In three years I became World manager. Once there, my range of influence was vastly enhanced. Like the man in Archimedes’ epigram, I had a place to stand from which I could move the world. I was able, in various guises and on various pretexts, to promulgate regulations the actual purpose of which was to soothe the great neurotic masses by curtailing upsetting stimulations and introducing a more regimented and orderly program of living. I was able, by humoring my fellow executives and making the fullest use of my greater capacity for work, to keep world affairs staggering along fairly safely—at least stave off the worst. At the same time I was able to begin my Ten Years’ Plan—the training, in comparative isolation, first in small numbers, then in larger, as those instructed could in turn become instructors, of a group of prospective leaders carefully selected on the basis of their relative freedom from neurotic tendencies.”

“But that—” Phy began rather excitedly, starting up.

“But what?” Carrsbury inquired quickly.

“Nothing,” muttered Phy dejectedly, sinking back.

“That about covers it,” Carrsbury concluded, his voice suddenly grown a little duller. “Except for one secondary matter. I couldn’t afford to let myself go ahead without any protection. Too much depended on me. There was always the risk of being wiped out by some ill-co-ordinated but none the less effective spasm of violence, momentarily uncontrollable by tact, on the part of my fellow executives. So, only because I could see no alternative, I took a dangerous step.

I created“—his glance strayed toward the faint crease in the side wall—”my secret police. There is a type of insanity known as paranoia, an exaggerated suspiciousness involving delusions of persecution. By means of the late twentieth century Rand technique of hypnotism, I inculcated a number of these unfortunate individuals with the fixed idea that their lives depended on me and that I was threatened from all sides and must be protected at all costs. A distasteful expedient, even though it served its purpose. I shall be glad, very glad to see it discontinued. You can understand, can’t you, why I had to take that step?“

He looked questioningly at Phy—and became aware with a shock that that individual was grinning at him vacuously and holding up the gasoid between two fingers.

“I cut a hole in my couch and a lot of this stuff came out,” Phy explained in a thick naive voice. “Ropes of it got all over my office. I kept tripping.” His fingers patted at it deftly, sculpturing it into the form of a hideous transparent green head, which he proceeded to squeeze out of existence. “Queer stuff,” he rambled on. “Rarefied liquid. Gas of fixed volume. And all over my office floor, tangled up with the furniture.”

Carrsbury leaned back and shut his eyes. His shoulders slumped. He felt suddenly a little weary, a little eager for his day of triumph to be done. He knew he shouldn’t be despondent because he had failed with Phy. After all, the main victory was won. Phy was the merest of side issues. He had always known that, except for flashes, Phy was hopeless as the rest. Still—

“You don’t need to worry about your office floor, Phy,” he said with a listless kindliness. “Never any more. Your successor will have to see about cleaning it up. Already, you know, to all intents and purposes, you have been replaced.”

“That’s just it!” Carrsbury started at Phy’s explosive loudness. The World secretary jumped up and strode toward him, pointing an excited hand. “That’s what I came to see you about! That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you! I can’t be replaced like that! None of the others can, either! It won’t work! You can’t do it!”

With a swiftness born of long practice, Carrsbury slipped behind his desk. He forced his features into that expression of calm, smiling benevolence of which he had grown unutterably weary.

“Now, now, Phy,” he said brightly, soothingly, “if I can’t do it, of course I can’t do it. But don’t you think you ought to tell me why? Don’t you think it would be very nice to sit down and talk it all over and you tell me why?”

Phy halted and hung his head, abashed.

“Yes, I guess it would,” he said slowly, abruptly falling back into the low, effortful tones. “I guess I’ll have to. I guess there just isn’t any other way. I had hoped, though, not to have to tell you everything.” The last sentence was half question. He looked up wheedlingly at Carrsbury. The latter shook his head, continuing to smile. Phy went back and sat down.

“Well,” he finally began, gloomily kneading the gasoid, “it all began when you first wanted to be World manager. You weren’t the usual type, but I thought it would be kind of fun—yes, and kind of helpful.” He looked up at Carrsbury. “You’ve really done the world a lot of good in quite a lot of ways, always remember that,” he assured him. “Of course,” he added, again focusing the tortured gasoid, “they weren’t exactly the ways you thought.” “No?” Carrsbury prompted automatically. Humor him. Humor him. The wornout refrain droned in his mind.

Phy sadly shook his head. “Take those regulations you promulgated to soothe people—”

“Yes?”

“—they kind of got changed on the way. For instance, your prohibition, regarding reading tapes, of all exciting literature. oh, we tried a little of the soothing stuff you suggested at first. Everyone got a great kick out of it. They laughed and laughed. But afterwards, well, as I said, it kind of got changed—in this case to a prohibition of all unexciting literature.”

Carrsbury’s smile broadened. For a moment the edge of his mind had toyed with a fear, but Phy’s last remark had banished it.

“Every day I coast past several reading stands,” Carrsbury said gently. “The fiction tapes offered for sale are always hi the most chastely and simply colored containers. None of those wild and lurid pictures that one used to see everywhere.”

“But did you ever buy one and listen to it? Or project the visual text?” Phy questioned apologetically.

“For ten years I’ve been a very busy man,” Carrsbury answered. “Of course I’ve read the official reports regarding such matters, and at times glanced through sample resumes of taped fiction.”

“Oh, sure, that sort of official stuff,” agreed Phy, glancing up at the wall of tape files beyond the desk. “What we did, you see, was to keep the monochrome containers but go back to the old kind of contents. The contrast kind of tickled people. Remember, as I said before, a lot of your regulations have done good. Cut out a lot of unnecessary noise and inefficient foolishness, for one thing.”

That sort of official stuff. The phrase lingered unpleasantly in Carrsbury’s ears. There was a trace of irrepressible suspicion in his quick over-the-shoulder glance at the tiered tape files.

“Oh, yes,” Phy went on, “and that prohibition against yielding to unusual or indecent impulses, with a long listing of specific categories. It went into effect all right, but with a little rider attached: ‘unless you really want to.’ That seemed absolutely necessary, you know.” His fingers worked furiously with the gasoid. “As for the prohibition of various stimulating beverages—well, in this locality they’re still served under other names, and an interesting custom has grown up of behaving very soberly while imbibing them. Now when we come to that matter of the eight-hour working day—”

Almost involuntarily, Carrsbury had got up and walked over to the outer wall. With a flip of his hand through an invisible U-shaped beam, he switched on the window. It was as if the outer wall had disappeared. Through its near-perfect transparency, he peered down with fierce curiosity past the sleekly gleaming facades to the terraces and parkways below.

The modest throngs seemed quiet and orderly enough. But then there was a scurry of confusion—a band of people, at this angle all tiny heads with arms and legs, came out from a shop far below and began to pelt another group with what looked like foodstuffs. While, on a side parkway, two small ovoid vehicles, seamless drops of silver because their vision panels were invisible from the outside, butted each other playfully. Someone started to run.

Carrsbury hurriedly switched off the window and turned around.

Those were just off-chance occurrences, he told himself angrily. Of no real statistical significance whatever. For ten years mankind had steadily been trending toward sanity despite occasional relapses. He’d seen it with his own eyes, seen the day-by-day progress—at least enough to know. He’d been a fool to let Phy’s ramblings effect him —only tired nerves had made that possible.

He glanced at his timepiece.

“Excuse me,” he said curtly, striding past Phy’s chair, “I’d like to continue this conversation, but I have to get along to the first meeting of the new Central Managerial Staff.”

“Oh but you can’t!” Instantly Phy was up and dragging at his arm. “You just can’t do it, you know! It’s impossible!”

The pleading voice rose toward a scream. Impatiently Carrsbury tried to shake loose. The seam in the side wall widened, became a doorway. Instantly both of them stopped struggling.

In the doorway stood a cadaverous giant of a man with a stubby dark weapon hi his hand. Straggly black beard shaded into gaunt cheeks. His face was a cruel blend of suspicion and fanatical devotion, the first directed along with the weapon at Phy, the second— and the somnambulistic eyes—at Carrsbury.

“He was threatening you?” the bearded man asked hi a harsh voice, moving the weapon suggestively.

For a moment an angry, vindictive light glinted in Carrsbury’s eyes. Then it flicked out. What could he have been thinking, he asked himself. This poor lunatic World secretary was no one to hate.

“Not at all, Hartman,” he remarked calmly. “We were discussing something and we became excited and allowed our voices to rise. Everything is quite all right.”

“Very well,” said the bearded man doubtfully, after a pause. Reluctantly he returned his weapon to its holster, but he kept his hand on it and remained standing in the doorway.

“And now,” said Carrsbury, disengaging himself, “I must go.”

He had stepped on to the corridor slidewalk and had coasted halfway to the elevator before he realized that Phy had followed him and was plucking timidly at his sleeve.

“You can’t go off like this,” Phy pleaded urgently, with an apprehensive backward glance. Carrsbury noted that Hartman had also followed—an ominous pylon two paces to the rear. “You must give me a chance to explain, to tell you why, just like you asked me.”

Humor him. Carrsbury’s mind was deadly tired of the drone, but mere weariness prompted him to dance to it a little longer. “You can talk to me in the elevator,” he conceded, stepping off the slidewalk. His finger flipped through a U-beam and a serpentine movement of light across the wall traced the elevator’s obedient rise.

“You see, it wasn’t just that matter of prohibitory regulations,” Phy launched out hurriedly. “There were lots of other things that never did work out like your official reports indicated. Departmental budgets for instance. The reports showed, I know, that appropriations for Extraterrestrial Research were being regularly slashed. Actually, in your ten years of office, they increased tenfold. Of course, there was no way for you to know that. You couldn’t be all over the world at once and see each separate launching of supra-stratospheric rockets.”

The moving light became stationary. A seam dilated. Carrsbury stepped into the elevator. He debated sending Hartman back. Poor babbling Phy was no menace. Still—the cunning of the insane. He decided against it, reached out and flipped the control beam at the sector which would bring them to the hundredth and top floor. The door snipped softly shut. The cage became a surging darkness hi which floor numerals winked softly. Twenty-one. Twenty-two. Twenty-three.

“And then there was the Military Service. You had it sharply curtailed.”

“Of course I did.” Sheer weariness stung Carrsbury into talk. “There’s only one country in the world. Obviously, the only military requirement is an adequate police force. To say nothing of the risks involved in putting weapons into the hands of the present world population.”

“I know,” Phy’s answer came guiltily from the darkness. “Still, what’s happened is that, unknown to you, the Military Service has been increased in size, and recently four rocket squadrons have been added.”

Fifty-seven. Fifty-eight. Humor him. “Why?”

“Well, you see we’ve found out that Earth is being reconnoitered.

Maybe from Mars. Maybe hostile. Have to be prepared. We didn’t tell you. well, because we were

afraid it might excite you.“

The voice trailed off. Carrsbury shut his eyes. How long, he asked himself, how long? He realized with dull surprise that in the last hour people like Phy, endured for ten years, had become unutterably weary to him. For the moment even the thought of the conference over which he would soon be presiding, the conference that was to usher in a sane world, failed to stir him. Reaction to success? To the end of a ten years’ tension?

“Do you know how many floors there are hi this building?”

Carrsbury was not immediately conscious of the new note in Phy’s voice, but he reacted to it.

“One hundred,” he replied promptly.

“Then,” asked Phy, “just where are we?”

Carrsbury opened his eyes to the darkness. One hundred twenty-seven, blinked the floor numeral. One hundred twenty-eight. One hundred twenty-nine.

Something cold dragged at Carrsbury’s stomach, pulled at his brain. He felt as if his mind were being slowly and irresistibly twisted. He thought of hidden dimensions, of unsuspected holes in space. Something remembered from elementary physics danced through his thoughts: If it were possible for an elevator to keep moving upward with uniform acceleration, no one inside an elevator could determine whether the effects they were experiencing were due to acceleration or to gravity—whether the elevator were standing motionless on some planet or shooting up at everincreasing velocity through free space.

One hundred forty-one. One hundred forty-two.

“Or as if you were rising through consciousness into an unsuspected realm of mentality lying above,” suggested Phy in his new voice, with its hint of gentle laughter.

One hundred forty-six. One hundred forty-seven. It was slowing now. One hundred forty-nine. One hundred fifty. It had stopped.

This was some trick. The thought was like cold water in Carrsbury’s face. Some cunning childish trick of Phy’s. An easy thing to hocus the numerals. Carrsbury groped irascibly about in the darkness, encountered the slick surface of a holster, Hartman’s gaunt frame.

“Get ready for a surprise,” Phy warned from close at his elbow.

As Carrsbury turned and grabbed, bright sunlight drenched him, followed by a griping, heartstopping spasm of vertigo.

He, Hartman, and Phy, along with a few insubstantial bits of furnishings and controls, were standing in the air fifty stories above the hundred-story summit of World Managerial Center.

For a moment he grabbed frantically at nothing. Then he realized they were not falling and his eyes began to trace the hint of walls and ceiling and floor and, immediately below them, the ghost of a shaft.

Phy nodded. “That’s all there is to it,” he assured Carrsbury casually. “Just another of those charmingly odd modem notions against which you have legislated so persistently—like our incomplete staircases and roads to nowhere. The Buildings and Grounds Committee decided to extend the range of the elevator for sightseeing purposes. The shaft was made air-transparent to avoid spoiling the form of the original building and to improve the view. This was achieved so satisfactorily that an electronic warning system had to be installed for the safety of passing airjets and other craft. Treating the surfaces of the cage like windows was an obvious detail.”

He paused and looked quizzically at Carrsbury. “All very simple,” he observed, “but don’t you find a kind of symbolism in it? For ten years now you’ve been spending most of your life in that building below. Every day you’ve used this elevator. But not once have you dreamed of these fifty extra stories. Don’t you think that something of the same sort may be true of your observations of other aspects of contemporary social life?”

Carrsbury gaped at him stupidly.

Phy turned to watch the growing speck of an approaching aircraft. “You might look at it too,” he remarked to Carrsbury, “for it’s going to transport you to a far happier, more restful life.”

Carrsbury parted his lips, wet them. “But—” he said, unsteadily. “But-”

Phy smiled. “That’s right, I didn’t finish my explanation. Well, you might have gone on being World manager all your life, in the isolation of your office and your miles of taped official reports and your occasional confabs with me and the others. Except for your Institute of Political Leadership and your Ten-Year-Plan. That upset things. Of course, we were as much interested in it as we were in you. It had definite possibilities. We hoped it would work out. We would have been glad to retire from office if it had. But, most fortunately, it didn’t. And that sort of ended the whole experiment.”

He caught the downward direction of Carrsbury’s gaze.

“No,” he said, “I’m afraid your pupils aren’t waiting for you in the conference chamber on the hundredth story. I’m afraid they’re still in the Institute.” His voice became gently sympathetic. “And I’m afraid that it’s become. well. a somewhat different sort of institute.”

Carrsbury stood very still, swaying a little. Gradually his thoughts and his will power were emerging from the waking nightmare that had paralyzed them. The cunning of the insane—he had neglected that trenchant warning. In the very moment of victory-No! He had forgotten Hartman! This was the very emergency for which that counterstroke had been prepared.

He glanced sideways at the chief member of his secret police. The black giant, unconcerned by their strange position, was glaring fixedly at Phy as if at some evil magician from whom any malign impossibility could be expected.

Now Hartman became aware of Carrsbury’s gaze. He divined his thought.

He drew his dark weapon from its holster, pointed it unwaveringly at Phy.

His black-bearded lips curled. From them came a hissing sound. Then, hi a loud voice, he cried, “You’re dead, Phy! I disintegrated you.”

Phy reached over and took the weapon from his hand.

“That’s another respect in which you completely miscalculated the modern temperament,” he remarked to Carrsbury, a shade argumentatively. “All of us have certain subjects on which we’re a trifle unrealistic. That’s only human nature. Hartman’s was his suspiciousness—a weakness for ideas involving plots and persecutions. You gave him the worst sort of job—one that catered to and encouraged his weaknesses. In a very short time he became hopelessly unrealistic. Why for years he’s never realized that he’s been carrying a dummy pistol.”

He passed it to Carrsbury for inspection.

“But,” he added, “give him the proper job and he’d function well enough—say something in creation or exploration. Fitting the man to the job is an art with infinite possibilities. That’s why we had Morgenstern in Finance—to keep credit fluctuating in a safe, predictable rhythm. That’s why a euphoric is made manager of Extraterrestial Research—to keep it booming. Why a catatonic is given Cultural Advancement—to keep it from tripping on its face in its haste to get ahead.”

He turned away. Dully, Carrsbury observed that the aircraft was hovering close to the cage and sidling slowly in.

“But in that case why—” he began stupidly.

“Why were you made World manager?” Phy finished easily. “Isn’t that fairly obvious? Haven’t I told you several tunes that you did a lot of good, indirectly? You interested us, don’t you see? In fact, you were practically unique. As you know, it’s our cardinal principle to let every individual express himself as he wants to. In your case, that involved letting you become World manager. Taken all in all it worked out very well. Everyone had a good time, a number of constructive regulations were promulgated, we learned a lot—oh, we didn’t get everything we hoped for, but one never does. Unfortunately, in the end, we were forced to discontinue the experiment.”

The aircraft had made contact.

“You understand, of course, why that was necessary?” Phy continued hurriedly, as he urged Carrsbury toward the opening port. “I’m sure you must. It all comes down to a question of sanity. What is sanity— now, hi the twentieth century, any time? Adherence to a norm. Conformity to certain basic conventions underlying all human conduct. In our age, departure from the norm has become the norm. Inability to conform has become the standard of conformity. That’s quite clear, isn’t it? And it enables you to understand, doesn’t it, your own case and that of your proteges? Over a long period of years you persisted in adhering to a norm, in conforming to certain basic conventions. You were completely unable to adapt yourself to the society around you. You could only pretend—and your proteges wouldn’t have been able to do even that. Despite your many engaging personal characteristics, there was obviously only one course of action open to us.”

In the port Carrsbury turned. He had found his voice at last. It was hoarse, ragged. “You mean that all these years you’ve just been humoring me?”

The port was closing. Phy did not answer the question.

As the aircraft edged out, he waved farewell with the blob of green gasoid.

“It’ll be very pleasant where you’re going,” he shouted encouragingly. “Comfortable quarters, adequate facilities for exercise, and a complete library of twentieth century literature to while away your time.”

He watched Carrsbury’s rigid face, staring whitely from the vision port, until the aircraft had diminished to a speck.

Then he turned away, looked at his hands, noticed the gasoid, tossed it out the open door of the cage, studied its flight for a few moments, then flicked the downbeam.

“I’m glad to see the last of that fellow,” he muttered, more to himself than to Hartman, as they plummeted toward the roof. “He was beginning to have a very disturbing influence on me. In fact, I was beginning to fear for my”—his expression became suddenly vacuous —“sanity.”