Galactic Dreams

Numen sprang to his feet and began to pace agitatedly up and down the room. “If that wasn’t true, wasn’t the heart of the problem, I would never consider being involved. There would be no problem if Barre suffered a heart attack and fell dead tomorrow.”

The three older men were all looking at David now, though he didn’t know why, and he felt they were waiting for him to say something.

“Well, yes — I agree. A little coronary embolism right now would be the best thing for the world that I can think of. Barre dead would be of far greater service to mankind than Barre alive has ever been.”

The silence lengthened, became embarrassing, and it was finally Eigg who broke it with his dry mechanical tones.

“We are all then in agreement that Barre’s death would be of immense benefit. In that case, David, you must also agree that it would be fine if he could be … killed….”

“Not a bad idea,” David said, wondering where all this talk was going. “Though of course that is a physical impossibility. It must be centuries since the last … what’s the word, `murder’ took place. The developmental psychology work took care of that a long time ago. As the twig is bent and all that sort of thing. Wasn’t that supposed to be the discovery that finally separated man from the lower orders, the proof that we could entertain the thought of killing and discuss it, yet still be trained in our early childhood so that we would not be capable of the act. Surely, if you can believe the textbooks, the human race has progressed immeasurably since the curse of killing has been removed. Look-do you mind if I ask you what this is all about…?”

“Barre can be killed,” Eigg said in an almost inaudible voice. “There is one man in the world who can kill him.”

“Who?” David asked and in some terrible way he knew the answer even before the words came from his father’s trembling lips.

“You, David … you….” He sat, unmoving, and his thoughts went back through the years, and a number of things that had been bothering him were now made clear. His attitudes so subtly different from his friends’, and that time with the airship when one of the rotors had killed a squirrel. Little puzzling things — and sometimes worrying ones that had kept him awake long after the rest of the house was asleep. It was true, he knew it without a shadow of a doubt, and wondered why he had never realized it before. But, like a hideous statue buried in the ground beneath one’s feet, it had always been there but had never been visible until he had dug down and reached it. It was visible now with all the earth scraped from its vile face, all the lineaments of evil clearly revealed.

“You want me to kill Barre?” he asked.

“You’re the only one who can … Davy … and it must be done. For all these years I have hoped against hope that it would not be needed. That the … ability you have would not be used. But Barre lives. For all our sakes, he must die.”

“There is one thing I don’t understand,” David said, rising and looking out the window at the familiar view of the trees and the glass canopied highway. “How was this change made? How could I miss the conditioning that is a normal part of existence in this world?”

“It was your teddy bear,” Eigg explained. “It is not publicized, but the reaction to killing is established by the tapes in the machine that every child has. Later education is just reinforcement, valueless without the earlier indoctrination.”

“Then my teddy…?”

“I altered its tapes, in just that one way, so this part of your education would be missed. Nothing else was changed.”

“It was enough, Doctor.”

There was a coldness to his voice that had never existed before. “How is Barre supposed to be killed?”

“With this.” Eigg removed a package from the table drawer and opened it.

“This is a primitive weapon removed from a museum. I have repaired it, then charged it with the projectile devices called shells.”

He held the sleek, ugly, black thing in his hand. “It is fully automatic in operation. When this device, the trigger, is depressed a chemical reaction propels a copper and lead weight named a bullet directly from the front orifice. The line of flight of the bullet is along an imaginary path extended from these two niches on the top of the device. The bullet of course falls by gravity. But in a minimum distance, say a meter, this fall is negligible.”

He put it down suddenly on the table. “It is called a gun.”

David reached over slowly and picked it up. How well it fitted into his hand, sitting with such precise balance. He raised it slowly, sighted across the niches and pulled the trigger. It exploded with an immense roar and jumped in his hand. The bullet plunged into Eigg’s chest just over his heart with such a great impact that the man and the chair he had been sitting in were hurled backwards to the floor. The bullet also tore a great hole in his flesh and Eigg’s throat choked with blood and he died.

“David! What are you doing?” His father’s voice cracked with uncomprehending horror.