"We made sure the Watchers" basic motto was to watch, watch, watch, whatever we did, to save ourselves the trouble of getting the information back where it would do the most good, undistorted-and believe me, if we didn"t want you to see something, it wasn"t hard to hide it from you; you"re really quite simple and stupid animals-so when we had a new invention or concept, all we had to do was walk into a public square and demonstrate it for you. Pegulla, see-pegulla, do."

Themus mused aloud, interrupting the old man, "But what does, well, stacking juba-fruits in the square demonstrate?"

"We wouldn"t expect your simple-celled minds to grasp something like that immediately," answered Boolbak.

"But I happen to know Sheila, who did that, and I know what he was demonstrating. He was ill.u.s.trating a new system of library filing, twice as efficient as the old one.

"He knew it would be dictated, sent back to Kyben-Central and finally understood for what it was. We give you enough clues. If something seems strange, think about it a while, and a logical use and explanation will appear.

Unfortunately, that is the one faculty the Star-Flung Kyben are incapable of using. Their minds are patterned, their thoughts set in tracks." The laugh was a barb this time.

"But why are you all so-so-mad?" Themus asked, a quavering note in his voice.

"Beginning to crack, boy? I"ll tell you why we"re mad, as you put it. We"re not mad, we"re just doing what we want, when we want, the way we want. You rigid-thinkers can"t recognize the healthy sanity of that. You think everyone has to wear a standardized set of clothes, go to his dentist a specified number of times, worship in delineated forms, marry a specified type of mate. In other words, live his life in a mold.

"The only way to stimulate true creativeness is to allow it to grow unchained with restrictions. We"re not mad at all. We may put on a bit, just to cover from you b.o.o.bs, but we"re saner than you. Can you change the molecular structure of a piece of steel, just by touching it at a juncture of atom-chains?"

"Is that-that-how you did it?" Themus asked.

"Yes. How far could I have gotten on a thing of this kind if I"d grown up in a culture like the one you"ve always known?

"For every mad thing you see on this world, there is a logical, sane answer."

Themus felt his knees shaking. This was all too much to be taken at one sitting. The very fiber of his universe was being unwound and split down the grain.

He looked at Darfla for the first time in what seemed an eternity, and found it impossible to tell what she was thinking.

"Buy why haven"t you shown this steel-pinching to the Watchers, if you want them to know all the new concepts?" the incredulous Themus questioned.

Boolbak"s face suddenly went slack. The eyes became gla.s.sy and twinkly again. His face became flushed. He clapped his hands together childishly. "Oh, no! I don"t want that!"

"But why?" demanded Themus.

Again the old man"s face changed. This time abject terror shone out. He began to sweat. "They"re gonna chase me, and bend a bar of iron around my head."

He leaped up and ran in a flurry back to the coal pile, where he burrowed into the black dust and peered out, trembling.

"But that"s crazy! No one wants to bend a bar of iron around your head. Only a maniac would keep a secret like that because of a crazy reason like that!"

"Exactly," came Darfla"s voice from behind him, sadly, "that"s just it. Uncle is crazy."

They had wanted to see Themus after his talk with Uncle Boolbak, and though Darfla had taken pains to cover their tracks, a group of Crackpots were waiting outside the house when they emerged.

Themus was white and shaking, and made no movement of resistance as they were hustled into a low-slung bubble-roadster and whisked back to the Cave.

"Well, did he talk to that mad genius?" asked Deere.

Darfla nodded sullenly. "Just as you said. He knows."

Deere turned to Themus. "Not quite all however, Do you think you can take more, Watcher?"

Themus felt distinctly faint. One microscopic bit more added to the staggering burden of revelation he had had tossed on him, and he was prepared to sink through the floor.

However, Deere was not waiting for an answer. He motioned to a man in a toga and spiked belt, who came toward Themus. "See this man?" Deere asked.

Themus said yes. Deere tapped the man lightly on the chest, "Senior Watcher, First Grade, Norsim, lately disappeared from the barracks at KybaBase, Valasah. " He pointed to three others standing together near the front of the crowd. "Those three were top men in the Corps, over a period often years. Now they"re Crackpots."Themus" eyebrows and hands asked, "But how?"

"There is a gravitating factor among Kyben," he explained. "There are Crackpots who are brought up as Stuffs who realize when they get here that their thinking has been fettered. Eventually they come to us. They come to us for the simple reason that the intellect rises through the Watcher ranks, and for several reasons gets a.s.signed here.

We"ve made sure the smartest boys get final a.s.signment here.

"On the other side of the ledger there are non-cons who go psycho from the responsibility of being a freethinker when they want supervision, and their thinking directed. They eventually wind up as Kyben, after minor reconditioning so they don"t remember all this," he waved his hand to indicate the Cave. "Now they"re somewhere out there and probably quite happy."

"But how can you make a Watcher disappear so completely, when the whole garrison here is looking-"

"Simple," said a voice from behind Themus.

Supervisor Furth just stood smiling.

Themus just stood choking.

The elder Watcher grinned at the confusion swirling about Themus" face.

"How did-when were you-" Themus stuttered.

Furth raised a hand to stop him. "I was an unbending Stuff for a good many years, Themus, before I realized the Crackpot in me wanted out." He grinned widely. "Do you know what did it? I was kidnapped, put in a barrel with a bunch of chattering pegullas, and forced to think my way out. I finally made it, and when I crawled out, all covered with pegulla-dung, those grinning maniacs helped me up and said, "More fun than a barrel of pegullas!" "

Themus began to chuckle.

"That did it," said Furth.

"But why do you send men like Elix back to the Mines? You must know how horrible it is. That isn"t at all consistent."

Furth"s mouth drew down at the corner, "It is, when you consider that I"m supposed to be the iron hand of the Watcher garrison here on Kyba. We have to keep the Stuffs in line. They have to be maneuvered, while they think they"re maneuvering us. And Elix was getting too far out of line."

"Do you know how close to being killed you came when we brought you here the first time?" Deere said.

Themus turned back to the pock-faced little man, "No. I-I thought you"d just send me back and let the Corps deal with me."

"Hardly. We aren"t afraid of our blundering brothers with the armored hides, but we certainly don"t take wide chances to attract attention to ourselves. We like our freedom too much for that.

"You see, we aren"t play-acting at being odd. We actually enjoy and live the job of being individuals. But there is a logic to our madness. Nothing we do is folly."

"But," Themus objected, "what are the explanations for things like-" and he finger-listed several things that had been bothering him.

"The garbage is negatively polarized, so it touches nothing but its side of the sewer pipes," explained Furth.

"The beggar, who by the way is a professional numismatist, can sense the structural aura" of various metals, that"s how he knew how many and what type coins you had in your pocket. The Cave here is merely an adequate job of force-moving large areas of soil and rock, and atomic realignment He explained for a few more minutes, Themus" astonishment becoming deeper and deeper at each further revelation of what he had considered superhuman achievements. Finally, the young Watcher asked, "But why haven"t these discoveries been turned over to Kyben-Central?"

"There are some things our little categorizing brothers aren"t ready for, as yet," explained Deere. "Even you were not ready. Chance saved you, you know."

Themus looked startled. "Chance?"

"Well, chance, and your innate intelligence, boy. We had to see if there was enough non-con in you to allow you to live. The reconditioning in your case would have been-ah-something of a failure. The five mad acts you were to perform not only had to be mad-they had to be logically mad. They each had to ill.u.s.trate a point."

"Wait a minute," said Themus. I had no idea what I was going to do. I just did it, that"s all."

"Um-hm. Quite right, but if you didn"t know, at least your subconscious was able to put two and two together and come up with the proper four. The acts you did demonstrated you had courage enough to be a non-con, that you were smart enough to maneuver us Crackpots-so it would be easy enough for you to help us maneuver the Stuffs-that you could be a non-con thinker when you had to be, and even you knew you were too valuable to kill.

"Even if you weren"t in on it, your subconscious and the rest of us were."

"But-but-what I don"t get is, why did you try to stop me from seeing Boolbak and then let me go, and why does Boolbak hide from you and the Watchers both?"

"One at a time, " replied Deere. "Boolbak hides because he is mad. There are some like that in every group. He happens to be a genius, but he"s also a total madman. We don"t try to keep tabs on him, because we already have the inventions he"s come up with, but we don"t put him out of the way because he might get something new one of these days we don"t have, and then too, he was a great man once, long before-" He stopped suddenly, realizing he had stepped over the line from explanation to maudlinity. "We"re not barbarians. Nor are we a secret underground movement. We don"t want to overthrow anything, we just want to do as we please. If our brothers feel like foaming up and ruling star-systems, all well and good, it makes it easier for us to obtain the things we want, so we help them in a quiet way. Boolbak isn"t doing anyone any harm, but we didn"t think you were ready to be exposed to too muchnon-con thinking all at once, as we knew Boolbak would do. He always does.

"But Darfla was so concerned, and she seemed to like you, so we took a chance. It seemed to work out, luckily for you."

Themus looked at the girl. She was staring at him as though a layer of ice covered her. He smiled to himself.

Any amount of ice can be thawed by the proper application of intensive heat.

"We didn"t want you to see him at first," Deere went on, "because we knew he would dump the cart. But when you showed us you were flexible enough to do the five mad acts, we knew you could take what Boolbak had to say.

"And we let him explain it, instead of us, because he"s one d.a.m.ned fine story-teller. He can hold the interest.

He"s a born minstrel and you"d believe him before us."

"But why did he tell me all that? I thought you wanted it all kept quiet? He hardly knew me and he explained the whole situation, the way it really is. Why?" Themus inquired.

"Why? Because he"s completely out of his mind-and he"s a big-mouth to boot," Deere stated, "We tolerate Boolbak, but we make sure he keeps away from the Watchers, for the most part. If he does get through, though, it eventually shuttles to Furth and we snap a lid on it. I suppose he was ready to tell you because Darfla brought you to him. He has a soft spot for her.

"What I want to know is, why did Darfla take you off your rounds in the first place?"

Darfla looked up. She had been idly running her toe through the mud near the pool. "I went through his dossier. He was too brilliant for the Corps. His record indicated any number of checkpoints of upper-level intelligence.

So I went and found him. He didn"t react as most Stuffs would have, when I applied a few stimuli, such as ruining his dicto-box."

Themus winced at the memory of the dicto-box.

"But what made you look up his dossier?" demanded Furth.

Darfla hesitated, and a gold blush crept up her cheeks. "I saw him get off the ship from Penares-Base. I-well-I rather liked his appearance. You know." She looked down again, embarra.s.sed.

Deere made a gun with thumb and forefinger, pointed it at her, "If you don"t stop taking these things into your own hands! There"s a group who looks into things like that. We"d have gotten to him in time."

Themus rubbed his nose in amazement. "I-I just can"t believe all this. It"s so fantastic. So unreal."

"No more unreal to believe every man is a single brain with individual thoughts than to believe he"s a member of a group mind with the same thoughts for all."

He clapped the Watcher on the back.

"Are you prepared to drop your life as a Watcher and become one of us? I think you"ll be quite a find. Your five acts were the maddest we"ve seen in a long time."

"But I"m not a Crackpot. I"m a Stuffed-Shirt. I"ve always been one."

"Bosh! You were brought up to think you were one. We"ve shown you there are other ways to think, now use them."

Themus considered. He"d never really had anything, as a member of the Kyben race-the rulers of the universe-but a constant unease and a fear of the Mines. These people all seemed so free, so clever, so-so-He was at a loss for words.

"Can you take me out of sight of the Corps ?" he asked.

"Easiest thing in the world," said Furth, "to make you drop out of sight as Themus, the Watcher, and make you reappear as-let"s say-Gugglefish, the Crackpot Mountebank."

Themus" face broke into the first full, unreserved smile he could recall. "It"s a deal, I suppose. I"ve always wanted to live in a madhouse. The only thing that bothers me is Uncle Boolhak. You fool the Stuffs by pretending madness, and well-you consider Boolbak mad, so perhaps-"

He stopped when he saw the perplexed looks that came over the Crackpots" faces. It was a germ of thought.

"Welcome home, maniac," said Deere.The pain in this one is the pain of a mind blocked from all joy and satisfaction by an outworn idea, an idee fixe, a monomaniacal hangup that tunnels the vision. Think of someone you know, even someone you love, trapped into a corrupt or self-destructive or anti-social behavior pattern by an inability to get around the roadblock of erroneous thinking. Pathetic.

The story is about a man and a woman. The woman is the good guy, the man is the dummy. When it appeared last year in a.n.a.log, Kelly Freas did a drawing that showed the man as the stronger of the two, his body positioned in such a way that it looked as if he was protecting the lesser female. Wrong. I tried to get Ben Bova, the editor of a.n.a.log, to get Kelly to alter the drawing, but it was too close to the publication deadline, so it went in that way.

But, much as I admire and respect Kelly, I took it not so much as a s.e.xist att.i.tude on his part-Polly wouldn"t permit such an evil to exist-as an unconscious understanding of the ma.s.smind of the general a.n.a.log readership, which is at core and primarily engineers, technicians, scientists, men of the drawing board and the spanner.

So I wasn"t perplexed or saddened when the story came in at the bottom of a.n.a.log"s a.n.a.lytical Laboratory ratings. Where else would a story that says machismo is bulls.h.i.t and a woman thinks more reasonably than a man come in? Diana King at the magazine a.s.sures me the short stories always come in last, but I think she"s just trying to help me over a bad time; I handle rejection, I just don"t handle it well.

Nonetheless, I"m including it in this collection, an addition to the stories that appeared in previous editions of this book, not only to give you a little extra for your money, but because it"s the latest in my Earth-Kyba War stories. And what with "The Crackpots" here, the first of the series, it makes a nice little package.

There"s not much else to say about it. This isn"t the most soul-sundering tale I"ve ever tried to write, it"s just an attempt to do an actual, honest-to-G.o.d science fiction story for a.n.a.log. To see if I could do it on my own terms.

And to see if I could gig the a.n.a.log readers of thirty-and-more years" good standing, who would have coronary arrest at seeing Ellison in the hallowed pages of their favorite magazine. You can imagine my joy when I saw the issue on the newsstands, with my name on the front cover with Isaac Asimov"s, knowing that a.n.a.log"s faithful would be gagging, and knowing the little jibe I had waiting for them inside with

Sleeping Dogs

THE ONLY "POSITIVE" THING Lynn Ferraro could say about the destruction of the cities of Globar and Schall was that their burning made esthetically-pleasing smears of light against the night sky of Epsilon Indi IV.

"The stiffness of your back tells me you don"t approve, Friend Ferraro." She didn"t turn at his words, but she could feel her vertebrae cracking as she tensed. She kept her face turned to the screens, watching the twin cities shrink as the flames consumed them, a wild colossus whose pillared legs rose to meet a hundred meters above the debacle.

"A lot of good my disapproval does, Commander."

He made a sighing sound at her response. "Well, you have the satisfaction of knowing your report will more than likely terminate my career."

She turned on him, her facial muscles tight as sun-dried leather. " And a h.e.l.l of a lot of good that does the people down there I"

She was an Amicus Hostis, a Friend of the Enemy, placed on board the Terran dreadnought Descartes, Solar Force registry, number SFD/199-660, in this the forty-first year of the Earth-Kyba War, to prevent atrocities, to attempt any kind of rapprochment with the Kyben, should a situation present itself in which the Kyben would do other than kill or be killed. And when it had become clear that this lunatic, this butcher, this Commander Julian Drabix was determined to take the planet-at any cost-no matter how horrifyingly high-scorched earth if nothing short of that monstrousness would suffice-when it had become clear her command powers would be ignored by him, she had filed a light-wave report with Terran Central. But it would take time for the report to reach Central, time for it to be studied, time for a report-judgment and time for instructions to be light-fired back to the Descartes. And Drabix had not waited.