The Carnelian Cube

Eighteen:

The wardrobe to which Finch addressed himself was scanty but there was an air of worn familiar comfort about the baggy trousers and the coat in pin-stripe serge that had scraps of tobacco in one side pocket and a well-smoked pipe in the other. He decided this one would be more comfortable than either of the slightly dirty interne-like cotton jackets, and putting it on, followed his impulse to the elevator, where two or three other people in similarly comfortable informal garb nodded to him.

Thera was waiting at the bottom of the shaft; tucked her hand under his arm and steered him through the side door of a cheerful-looking combined restaurant and bar. Cigarettes were burning; there was a buzz of amiable, energetic conversation, out of which phrases floated: "... simply can't do that in vector analysis ..." "... trying to relate the proprioceptors to the pattern ..." Something at the back of Finch's memory rose and shouted with delight. If he were not back at the dig this was at least the atmosphere he had always wanted, academic but uninfested with undergraduates and the piddling details of classes, a meeting place where mind and mind disagreed happily over the details of matters whose fundamental importance was unquestioned.

"... better order our cocktails at the bar and take them to the table if we don't want to have a lot of arguments about drinking at eophagy with the dietetics department," Thera was saying. "There's Viola Renault, now."

She twiddled her fingers and steered him toward a bar that looked more like a chemist's laboratory table than a genuine fountain of joy—no mirror, square reagent bottles with labels of standard size and plain block lettering instead of polychrome pictures of flowers, fruit or Kentucky colonels, and a modest brass plate announcing that Jonathan Bohm, B. M., was the "Methymiscologist on duty."

"Two stingers," said Finch. The methymiscologist looked at them absently, measured quantities in a c.c. graduate, dumped them into a shiny metallic machine, and squeezed the starting button of a wrist stop-watch. The procedure was unusual, but the cocktail flowed pleasantly enough around the tongue as Thera, finishing her first sip, set the glass down and began:

"Listen, dear. I'm really worried. I know you're so terribly absorbed in this Shalmanesar project that you don't want to be bothered and our Egyptian branch of oneiromancy is so junior that we can't begin to have your accuracy, but we really are right quite often, like the time Peg Hewitt dreamed of a penguin and the next day met that man she married."

Finch took another sip, the cockles of his heart warming no little to the fluid. "But what do you want me to do?" he asked.

"I don't know. It's so complicated." The line of frown had set again between her brows. "I can't help but feel that whatever is threatening us has something to do with the project. If we only could have got the rest of your dream before you got too far awake to give it in the original form!"

"I could go to sleep again for you."

She patted his hand. "No. Even for me I won't have you getting in trouble by breaking the repeated experiment rule. Besides, I don't think it would help. It isn't really so much a question of more information as deciding what to do on the basis of things we know. The data are always adequate if one knows how to interpret them.

We'll have to change the pattern of our lives and turn the peril—oh, bother! He would interrupt."

Finch looked up to see bearing down on them a shirt-sleeved man with crisp white hair and a craggy jaw whom he knew he ought to recognize. The girl solved the problem for him. "Hello, Dr. Chase. Care to join us in a homeopathic dose of alcohol? Move around, Arthur."

"Thank you," said Chase, taking the offered chair. "As a matter of fact I was looking for you, Dr. Finch. I'm dreadfully sorry, but I've trouble getting enough sod—" He broke off, glanced at Thera, and then went on: "— enough you-know-whats for your Assyrian army ... Hey, pastiferist!"

The waiter paused in mid-flight and came to take the order. "Have the methymiscologist fix me up a baccardi with plain sucrose instead of grenadine, will you?" He turned back to Finch, who was waiting for something that might give a closer clue to the subject of conversation. "And I was wondering whether you wouldn't accept subjects whose psychological pattern is otherwise correct, even if they lack that one feature? If you're as pressed for time as you were over those Samarians, something like that will have to be done, I'm afraid."

Finch opened his mouth to frame some question that would lead him deeper into the mystery of the central subject, but to his inner surprise, found an apparently reasonable answer flowing from some source in his subconscious:

"As a matter of fact, we are. I hadn't intended the climax to come so soon but yesterday the messenger arrived to say General Zilidu had beaten the Egyptians in a battle and was marching up the Syrian corridor to join us in the siege of Samaria."

"To your great surprise," Dr. Chase laughed. "What I admire about you research historians is your ability to remain naive. You spend a million dollars of government money, six months and twenty thousand people in reproducing the battle of Waterloo, and then come out with the startling conclusion that Napoleon lost it!"

"Yes," Thera chimed in, "and then we in the Psychological Division have to spend another six months reconditioning your Napoleonic soldiers so they can live a normal life in the modern world. You should have seen the trouble we had with that capillarist who played Marshal Ney; even after the re-conditioning, he kept dreaming of being shot."

Once more, to Finch's surprise, the words came to his lips without any process of conscious thought. "Not my project. You know I think that doing reconstructions on anything since the beginning of the scientific age is like mixing fire and gunpowder to prove you'll get an explosion. The way I conceive historical reconstruction is that it should be used only to throw light on key episodes whose records have been lost, or were set down by people hopelessly without any standards of observation or scientific accuracy."

Dr. Chase said: "Far be it from me to criticize the senor science, but I would say that the historical value of reproducing in all its details a palace intrigue of nearly twenty-seven hundred years ago is something that requires proof ... I'll have the poached egg with spinach, and none of that damnable vinegar sauce."

"That merely shows you waste your time splitting psychological hairs instead of reading the journals of the true sciences," said Finch. "But I'll try to explain. You are, I take it, aware that the Assyria Empire is the classic case of national downfall as the result of unknown but evidently internal forces?"

"I am not. How do we know it was ever up to fall down?" said Chase.

"Oh, Dr. Chase!" said Thera. "You're just being argumentative. You know very well the Assyrians were very advanced in dream interpretation, and in astrology, too.

They taught us that much in Basic Science in grade school."

"All right, all right. I beg your pardon, Finch; just part of our technique to keep the opponent off balance. Go on.

"Well, it's of considerable interest to discover the reasons before our own civilization starts caving in as the result of something no one can diagnose. So our division started work on it, beginning with Dr. Gohi Gobar of Bombay. He chose the reign of the actual decline —Ashurbanipal's—and did a very elaborate reconstruction, actually in the Assyrian country and lasting for two or three years. But all he found out was that the process of downfall was already pretty well advanced at that time, and that the Song of Solomon was the only truly non-Babylonian book in the Bible."

"Mph," said Chase, with his mouth full of food. "I'd say that probably his psychologists let him down on supplying the right kind of people for the re-enactment. Our civilization's toO damned healthy; it's very difficult to find aberrant types. I mentioned my trouble with the perverts."

"Yes, but the whole point is—why the decadence?" Finch went on. "That's why I'm going back a couple of reigns to Shalmanesar IV, the last of the old royal line, and reconstructing the events leading up to his assassination while besieging Samaria. You really should be delighted, by the way. I think the reasons for the decline lie in national and personal psychology, but Hilprecht, who's working with me, is a geopolitician and considers it's all due to an extension of the active heartland—"

"We know," said Chase. "Alas we know. You lecture on it and next one will be in half an hour, but meanwhile I have to get back to the office and want the matter of those Assyrian soldiers settled. Do you authorize the variation?"

"Have any of them been trained?"

"We have about four hundred in the conditioning camp now, finished with their injections and getting the psychiatric treatment. You know how it is—in a couple of days about three hundred of them will have forgotten they ever were anything but Assyrian soldiers, and will have to be re-conditioned if you don't take them."

"May I remind you that this is a scientific project from which such considerations as wastage should be excluded? Nothing spent in real research is lost. But I'll authorize, provided you'll guarantee the psychological pattern."

Dr. Chase pushed away his empty plate. "All right. Now there's another and much more difficult matter. You remember requisitioning for a girl of B minus CQ 31 pattern?"

"Yes, to play Sherah, the daughter of Zakhabunash, the Samaritan bronze merchant."

"I wouldn't know. Well, I settled on Arlene Vollmer, who is one of Dr. Rosenzweig's assistants, over in economics. Well, she's got a reading absolutely forbidding her to do it from the central board of Astrologers."

Finch was jarred from contact with the smooth flow of- words from his subconscious, from which he had been learning so much. "Good God, astrologers!" he cried.

"Ssh," said Thera, and Chase: "Yes, I know you don't like them, but you have to admit that they're as much scientists as we are—using the same methods of statistical induction, analysis of frequency distribution, linear correlation, and—"

"But," cried Thera,' "the whole re-enactment will fail if he doesn't have a Sherah! She was so important."

The psychologist" shrugged. "You could go to Washington and get an authority from the Historical Central Board. They're senior."

"But there isn't time," said Thera. "Don't you see the climax of the whole thing would take place before he got back. Oh, Arthur, I warned you, this is the boat on muddy water, portending disgrace, and on your first big reconstruction, too."

Finch said: "But is this—uh—Vollmer girl the only one in the world who would fit?"

"Of course not. B minus CQ 31 is not exactly a common pattern, but it's certainly not unheard-of. The difficulty is finding one in time to condition her for the work; with high types like that the process is very elaborate."

Thera's eyes widened suddenly and she laid her hand on Finch's. "Arthur!" she said. "I have it. And it will change our lives radically, just what we needed. I'll be your Sherah; B minus CQ 31 is my type."

Chase threw back his head and laughed. "By Jove, so it is! I'd forgotten; and your rating in linguistics is high, too, I remember. It had better be; Assyro-Babylonian is as bad as Basque, on which it's said the devil spent seven years only learning two words, and—"

"Look here," Finch cut in. "This won't do at all. I don't want—"

"You don't want what?" Chase said suddenly serious. "May I remind you, in your own words, that this is a scientific project, from which personal considerations must be excluded? You requisitioned for a B minus CQ 31, and it's my duty to find one wherever I can."

"But isn't it—dangerous?" Finch experienced a surge of longing and fear for the dark girl by his side, her eyes moving restlessly at the prospect of the adventure.

"Oh, yes I know—" She gripped his hand again. "I might be raped and I might be killed, you're going to say. But Arthur—we all have to take chances like that in research. Think of Walter Reed. And besides, we do have to do something. The dreams never lie, and they say we're bound to suffer a disappointment if we go on as we have been. I'll come back to you, dear, after the reconditioning, and make it all up to you."

Chase's lip took a slight but good-humored curl. "You two better not let anyone from the Eugenics Department hear you talking like this, or you'll be up for inquiry on grounds of transmissable sentimentality," he said, and stood up. "Want to come along, Thera, and take your type check?"

"All right," said the girl. "Don't worry, Arthur. I'll see you before I go in for conditioning."