Mars (Planet) -- Fiction; Psychological fiction; Science fiction; Short stories
Bronson looked at Morrow's face. A thoroughly conditioned face really.
Hardly human at all if one knew what a human face could really express.
Strange, that spark of curiosity in a man whose brain had obviously
undergone deadly probing with steel picks under the eyeballs, tearing
apart the cells of the greatest thinking device ever developed.
"You're going to Mars," Bronson said softly. "Maybe they can clear
you. I had THE CALL planted in an ancestor. You didn't. It missed you,
Morrow. With the command carried forward always in the cells went also
resistance to conditioning. You didn't have it, Morrow. It may be too
bad and it may not. They've learned a lot in a hundred years."
Bronson got up and put a hand gently on Morrow's shoulder. "I don't
know," he said. "I'm sorry. Maybe you'll be with me later. If you're
not back here in a short time, that'll mean good-bye. I'll wait for
you...."
Morrow got up. He nodded once to Bronson, and went out. Bronson heard
the sled blast out of the rocket.
Morrow didn't come back.
Bronson took the rocket up, headed toward Venus. He would pick up the
cargo; the story Morrow had arranged about an accident on Venus could
work just as well to explain Bronson's single return as Morrow's.
He had some advantage in his command of the human mind. But it wasn't
omnipotent by any means. He would be operating alone against murderers
who had turned human beings into cattle. He would have to play it slow
and with the utmost care.
And though he might fail, there would be others. He could forget about
Morrow and Orlan. So much of them had been destroyed by surgery that in
a comparative sense, they hadn't been really human anymore.
He wasn't troubled by the tremendous challenge ahead of him. It exalted
him.
Some day, we'll win, he thought. Freedom Unlimited. The freedom of the
free human mind. He might fail. But THE CALL would go on. There would
always be deviants from the norm. He could fail. The Plan could not.
Bronson smiled at the twilight expanse before the rocket, wide and
frosty and marvelously clear.
As long as there were people, there would always be a few who would get
THE CALL.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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