SECURITY
BY BRYCE WALTON
If secrecy can be carried to the brink
of madness, what can happen when imprisonment
and time are added to super secrecy?
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Worlds of If Science Fiction, December 1957.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
We, Sam Lewis thought as he lay in the dark trying to sober up, are theliving dead.
It was a death without honor. It was a death of dusty, sterilestupidity. It was wretched, shameful, a human waste, and far tooridiculous a business to bear any longer.
The hell with the war. The hell with the government. The hell withSecret Project X, Y, Z, or D, or whatever infantile code letteridentified the legalized tomb in which Sam and the others had beenincarcerated too long.
He flung his hand around in the dark in a gesture of self-contempt. Andhis hand found the soft contours of a woman's breast. Her warm bodymoved, sighed beside him as he turned his head and stared at the dimoutline of Professor Betty Seton's oval face, soft and unharried insleep. Unharried, and unmarried, he thought.
Good God. He detached his hand, slipped out of bed and stood in themiddle of the floor, found his nylon coverall and sandals, dressedsilently, and opened the door to get out of Betty's apartment, but fast.
He glanced back, his face hot with bitterness and his mouth twistingwith disgust. She moved slightly, and he knew she was awake and lookingat him.
"Darling," she said thickly, "don't go."
She was awake but still drifting in the euphoria of Vat 69.
He felt both sad and very mean. Then he shut the door behind him, ranout into the desert night. The line of camouflaged barracks on oneside, the grounds including the lab buildings, all loomed up darklyunder the starlight. He took a deep breath.
Now, he asked himself, have you the guts to get out, tell them off,make the gesture? It won't do any good. Nobody else will care orunderstand. They're too numb and resigned. You'll never get past thefence. The Guards will haul you in to the Wards and work you over.They'll work over what's left until what's left won't be worth carryingover to the incinerator with the other garbage in the morning. You'llbe brainwashed and cleared until you're on mental rock bottom and won'teven know what direction up is, and you won't give a damn.
But don't you have the guts even to make the gesture, just for the sakeof what's left of your integrity, before they dim down your futilebrain cells to a faint glow of final and perpetual mediocrity?
Betty and he had clung to some integrity, had made a point of notgetting too intimate, a kind of challenge, a hold-out against thedecadence of the Project. What was left now of any self-respect?
A security Guard with his white helmet and his white leather harnessand his stungun, sauntered by and Lewis ducked into the shadows besidethe barracks. His heart skipped several thumps as the Guard paused,looked at the entrance to Betty's apartment. Maybe someone had reportedhis liaison with Betty.
Beautiful and desirable as she was, and as much as he wanted to marryher, he had not been able to marry Betty Seton. If the war ever ended,if the security curtain was ever lifted, if they were ever let out ofcompulsive Government employment, then they would get married. That waswhat they had kept telling one another during quick secret meetings.
If, if, if——
Somewhere along the tr