I heard the two sharp echoing reports as Mesner shot them in the head. One of them beat his heels on the slab. Mesner pointed the smoking revolver. "Even dead, the blind brain records differently. See there?" I leaned against the wall. Through a crumbled hole down in the corner of damp concrete, I saw two red eyes and heard the rat squealing.
"Let's go, Fred. We've got some important field-trips on today's schedule. And you still have a lot to learn."
We went to Chicago. We set up some hidden electronic spy-eyes in a big apartment building. They were to be checked later for evidence of someone there who was hiding an IQ of over a hundred.
And that afternoon we ran down a renegade bio-chemist hiding in a tenement. He had disguised himself for a number of years as a plumber. Mesner bipped him, and an official Security heliocar came down from Washington to take him away.
When Mesner finished with the old man he was hopping around like a monkey, making grotesque faces, giggling and yelling. Tevee cameramen were on hand. A reporter was commenting on the capture of another, "... insane crackpot who has been living here under an assumed name while plotting and planning and building some diabolical machine with which to blow up the city. Our department of Internal Security excercising its eternal vigilance, captured him in time...."
Mesner and I took the heliocar back up into a clear blue sky and headed for Sauk City.
"Do you wonder, Fred, why we just don't kill them after they're bipped?"
"What could it matter?"
"It doesn't to them, but to us it matters. Public likes their scapegoats alive. More satisfying to hate live people. Public likes to see their dragons behind bars, humiliated, treated like crackpots. Makes a bottlehead feel good to see an Egghead dancing like a monkey. Also prevents martyrs. Living men are never martyrs."
"So why are we going to Sauk City?" I asked. I wanted to change the subject.
Mesner had information that an ex-professor from some long-extinct University had been concealing a high IQ after having supposedly purged himself of it years before. He was supposed to have been caught by a brain-probing spy-eye and was reported to have an IQ of over 160.
Mesner talked of such an IQ as though it was a living time-bomb that might go off any minute and blow Sauk City and the entire State to hell. He shot the heliocar along at 500 miles an hour. He held the T-Bar in one hand and lit cigarettes with the other.
"What upset you so much, Fred? I mean that morning when I interrupted you sorting cards?"
I felt a warning click in my head. I remembered it. The eyes are the windows of the soul.
Mesner, I thought, couldn't look into the windows of a blind man. Could I?
It hadn't been my own thought that had disrupted my idyllic, care-free life sorting cards. Mesner had said it to me.
"Just the unexpected break in the routine," I said. You've already explained it. My quiescent IQ is just too high to be a successful card-sorter."
"It wasn't what I said?"
"What did you say? I've forgotten."
"The eyes are the windows of the soul. But I was only quoting, Fred. Some crackpot said that long ago."
"Why probe me about blind people? I never knew any."
"Ninety percent of a human being's mental activity is underground, like most of an iceberg is under water. How much of your past can you remember, Fred?"
"Very little. The past is dead. Why should I remember it?"
"Because a good intelligence depends on the past. Memory is a part of it. Without a past, you don't have a brain. And we've got to release our brains, Fred, for awhile. Until we can catch saboteurs and Eggheads."
"I guess I've just been a patriot too long," I said.
"Remember attending Drake University ten years ago, Fred?"
"Sure," I said, fast, as though it was unimportant. I was really beginning to sweat. "I can remember if you keep prodding me. Sure, I can. So what? I purged myself. I forgot it. Schools weren't illegal then."
"But we've got to reawaken all those past memories, Fred. Make our brains work better, even if a lot of double-dome stuff comes up. You remember a psyche prof named O'Hara?"
I felt suddenly dizzy, sick. A wavering wheel started turning in my head. I managed to stop it from turning so fast. "I don't remember that at all," I said.
"Then of course you wouldn't remember that he was blind?"
In the darkness behind closed lids I could see patterns of light begin to flicker and threatening whispers dug at a fogging curtain.
"Don't push it, Fred. It'll come. I'm patient. If I weren't, then by this time I would be bipped myself and safely put away."
He would get it all right, I knew. Sooner or later he would tap it. First I would tap it, then Mesner would tap it. And after that I never would worry again. I'd never worry about remembering or forgetting anything. I wouldn't even be me. A body with a bipped brain would walk around doing routine work, and looking like me. But I'd be dead. I didn't want to die that way. Genuine physical death would be all right. But not that, not that bipping treatment.
Mesner turned quickly and caught me staring at the outline of the hand-gun under his coat. He smiled. "You want one of these, Fred?"
"Not yet," I said. "I don't remember enough yet. I'm not smart enough yet."
"Tell me when you're ready."