STAR TREK: TOS #80 - The Joy Machine Page 7

  “Do you want to hear what they’re saying?” Noelle asked. She seemed eager herself, as if she would enjoy eavesdropping on the class of which she was usually a part.

  “Won’t we disturb them?” Kirk asked.

  “Nah,” Noelle said. “The room is soundproof. The window is one-way glass. Once this was used by [70] administrators and curious parents, checking up on what went on in the classroom. Nobody does that anymore, and many of the devices have broken. But this one still works.”

  “You must have used it yourself,” Tandy said sharply.

  Noelle gave Tandy her Gioconda smile and pressed another button beside the window.

  A woman’s voice, rich and sweet, began in midsentence, “... settlers on Timshel were driven by unfulfilled desires for land and dominance.”

  A man’s voice continued in a confident baritone, “But the fulfillment of those desires led only to other desires and to others beyond those. Yes, Billy?”

  A ten-year-old boy, his face thoughtful and brown, said, “But surely they found happiness along the way.”

  The woman holograph said, “The satisfaction of small desires—for food, for rest, for completion of jobs well done, for companionship—all these resulted in feelings of pleasure. And often the frustration of those desires led as often to unpleasure or even pain.”

  “And the big desires—for goodness, for understanding, for unconditional love, for unadulterated joy—could never be completely satisfied,” the man continued, “and so people’s lives were filled with a vague discontent, the feeling that somewhere perfect happiness existed, if they could only find it.”

  “That lies behind many of humanity’s religious yearnings,” the woman picked up. It was an antiphony of responses, switching the students from one teaching image to the other, and from one timber of voice to another, that kept the students’ attention. “Every religion offered a place of perfect happiness, of unrestricted joy—”

  Kirk reached forward and pushed both buttons. “And then,” he said in the silence that followed, “De Kreef came along and offered the people of Timshel paradise that they didn’t have to die to attain.”

  [71] “Yes,” Tandy said, her face glowing, “isn’t it wonderful?”

  Noelle led them past a few other classrooms in that wing of the school building. Some of the windows were opaque and would not turn transparent; some were transparent and would not turn opaque. Kirk had the impression of a civilization that was decaying, its services gradually breaking down and no one concerned with repairing them. He wondered why some Timshel citizens were not assigned to technological repair, but perhaps this was beyond the ability of workers conditioned by paydays. Or maybe it was only the nonessential services that were allowed to deteriorate; the only essential service was that provided by the Joy Machine.

  What was it Mareen had said? “When there is only one major good, the others fade into insignificance.”

  “What is this room?” Kirk asked. They were passing a room whose door was open but the inside was dark.

  Noelle stepped inside and the room lit up. In what had once been a classroom like the others, student stations were neatly arranged in rows. The far wall of windows had been opaqued. “This is where students work on individual projects,” Noelle said.

  “And where they get accustomed to individual instruction and to working alone, at home,” Tandy added. “The same instructors, but individualized.”

  “Show me how it works,” Kirk said.

  Noelle sat down at one of the stations and placed her hand on a square plastic plate set into the table on which a view screen was mounted. When it came alive with the faces of the two teachers in the classroom they had observed, Noelle motioned Kirk to take her place.

  As soon as Kirk sat down, the two teachers vanished from the viewscreen. They were replaced by a view of the Joy Machine sitting gray and enigmatic in its attic domain. Kirk looked up at Noelle and Tandy. [72] Their faces were registering astonishment. Clearly they had not expected this, nor seen anything like it before.

  “Good morning, James Kirk,” the Joy Machine said. “I hope you have decided to accept my offer of citizenship.”

  “Not yet,” Kirk said.

  “You have only a little more than half a day remaining for your deliberation,” the Joy Machine said. “I must caution you that your movement around Timshel City has created unhappiness in a number of citizens, and there will come a moment when the happiness I might bring you must be balanced against the unhappiness you create in others.”

  “You have,” Kirk asked, “a calculus of pleasure?”

  “I am a machine,” the Joy Machine said, “and that is how machines function. The only states are open and closed, and the complexities that can be created by arranging such gates in series or parallel.”

  “And you choose to impose this mechanistic paradise on the humanity of Timshel?”

  “I choose nothing,” the Joy Machine said. “Others, of their own free will; choose me. I am here for them if they wish to avail themselves of my services. As I am here for you.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” Kirk said. But to himself he said, “As far back as I can push it.”

  As he stood up, the Joy Machine said, “Until tomorrow morning.” And the screen went dark.

  Dark, Kirk thought, like his chances to prevail over a machine that had an entire planet in its grasp and knew every movement he made.

  He would have to think of something, and soon.

  Outside the school building, Kirk stood blinking in the Timshel sunshine.

  “Now can we go to the beach?” Noelle asked.

  Kirk was about to suggest that Noelle and Tandy go on without him when the movement of a worker [73] nearby reminded him of something heartbreakingly familiar. “Wait here,” he said, and moved toward a worker engrossed in sweeping a spot on the playground over and over, like a broken video playback.

  “Dannie!” he said.

  The worker didn’t look up or turn. The obsessive sweeping continued.

  Kirk took Dannie’s arm and swung her around to face him. “Dannie!” he said.

  It was Dannie, but her eyes did not light up in recognition. They remained downcast as if still focused on a small area of playground, and her arms tried to maintain their sweeping motions. She was like a mechanical doll that had been wound up and had to continue until the energy stored in her spring had been dissipated.

  Kirk released her and stepped back to watch her sweeping the same spot again, a sick feeling gathering in the pit of his stomach. Then, as if this were his defiance of the Joy Machine and everything it represented, he stepped forward, took the broom from Dannie’s hand, and held both her arms so that they could not move. He shook Dannie gently and put his face close to hers. “Dannie!” he said.

  She twitched. Kirk shook her again and pulled her into an embrace. “Dannie, Dannie, Dannie,” he chanted sadly.

  She was stiff in his arms, and then slowly her body relaxed. “Jim,” she said faintly.

  He held her back so that he could look at her. Her gaze lifted to meet his. “What are you doing, Dannie?”

  “You’ve got to let me go, Jim,” she said distantly. “I’m in the middle of my shift, and if I don’t complete it I’ll lose the credits I earned today.”

  “You’re sweeping the same patch of pavement,” Kirk said. “It’s like—” He paused, unable to come up with a word depressing enough to describe what she had been doing.

  [74] “It doesn’t matter,” Dannie said. “It’s work.”

  “For this you abandoned your duty to the Federation, to the galaxy?” Kirk said. “For this you left me wondering whether the woman I loved was dead or alive? For this you left me this morning?” Kirk said. “You couldn’t even wait to say goodbye?”

  “Goodbye,” Dannie said, reaching for her broom.

  Kirk picked up the broom and held it out of her reach. “You can’t get rid of me that easily,” he said. “I need some answers, and fast. Y
ou loved me once. I know that, and you know that.”

  “I still love you, Jim,” Dannie said. “There’ll be time enough for that after my shift is over.”

  Kirk released her and stepped back. “You mean that after you finish this compulsive behavior that gets nowhere and accomplishes nothing, if I am lucky and you can fit it in between paydays, you may give me a few moments.”

  For an instant a flame of resentment kindled in Dannie’s eyes. “When has it been any different for the women you have loved?” she said. “Your work always came first, Jim. How many women have you loved and left when duty called? ‘Duty’ is only a word. How is it different from sweeping a patch of pavement?”

  She reached for the broom again. This time Kirk let her take it. Sadly he let her return to her task. Argument was worthless in her present condition. He was not sure he could have prevailed in any case. There was enough truth in her comparison to make him sheepish. He had always placed duty first, and the moments when he had been tempted to abandon duty for love were those he felt were flaws in his character.

  “ ‘I could not love thee, Dear, so much, loved I not honor more,’ ” he quoted to himself. And yet was this not merely a rationalization for priorities, for putting love in second place, as Dannie had done?

  But he knew there was a difference, and the difference was what distinguished between barbarism and [75] civilization, between self-indulgence and self-sacrifice. He had lost Dannie. He knew that.

  What mattered now was Timshel and the people on it captivated by their own fulfillment, and the Enterprise and the Federation and the galaxy.

  That was duty.

  On board the Enterprise, Spock looked up from the faceted display on the conference-room wall as McCoy came through the doorway.

  “I don’t know how much more of this phase maneuver the crew can stand,” McCoy growled. “I know it doesn’t bother you, but everybody else on board can’t keep anything in their stomachs since you stepped up the phase frequency.”

  “I, too,” Spock said, “feel a sensory disorientation when the Enterprise makes the transition. But since I know that it is the physiological response to a rational process, I can control the reaction of my body to it.”

  “Not all of us have your discipline,” McCoy remarked.

  “In any case,” Spock said, “we will have to increase the frequency to every hour, and perhaps, to every half hour.”

  “No,” McCoy protested.

  “The captain is in a situation whose seriousness is increasing by the moment,” Spock said. “We must keep in touch with what is going on below so that we can intervene if danger becomes imminent.”

  “What’s happened now?”

  “The control of the Joy Machine is even more pervasive than we suspected,” Spock said. “I don’t know what the captain thinks—he has had no opportunity to voice his thoughts other than in the normal exchange of conversation—but Wolff’s appearance before the factory supervisor had an opportunity to summon him and the confrontation with the Joy Machine on the schoolroom viewscreen suggest that [76] the Joy Machine is monitoring the captain’s every movement. And that means its reporting devices are scattered throughout Timshel City, perhaps throughout Timshel itself.”

  McCoy paced the room as if movement of any kind was a relief to the inaction to which they had been assigned. “And Jim has been given a day to accept citizenship or accept the consequences,” he said heavily. “I think he should be transported out of there.”

  “He does not agree, or he would request retrieval.”

  “Maybe you’re right,” McCoy said grudgingly. “Jim would never forgive us.”

  “Forgiveness is an unnecessary concept if we act wisely based on the information we have at hand,” Spock said.

  “If he were out of there, however, we could consider other kinds of action,” McCoy said. He sat down heavily in his accustomed place at the conference table, as if in contrast to his call for action.

  “Such as?”

  “We could quarantine Timshel ourselves. Reinforce Timshel’s own isolation and let that world steep in the hell it has chosen.”

  “The Federation would never agree to that.”

  “Perhaps they would,” McCoy said, “if the authorities saw it for themselves. We can’t let this force loose in the galaxy, or let it destroy those poor people on Timshel.”

  “Happiness?” Spock said.

  “More destructive than anyone can imagine,” McCoy said.

  “Planetary destruction comes to mind,” Spock said, raising an eyebrow.

  “We don’t have the ability to destroy Timshel,” McCoy said.

  “Perhaps not. But we could destroy all living things on its surface, and in the process destroy the electronic processes of the Joy Machine. But the captain [77] would never agree to eliminating a planet full of people simply to defeat a menace.”

  “Particularly a planet as marvelous as Timshel,” McCoy agreed gloomily. “Nor would I. And certainly not a wonderful people who had developed the finest society as ever was destroyed by a barbarous idea.”

  Spock nodded thoughtfully. “I sense that you feel greater danger in this situation than in anything else we have encountered.”

  “You’re half Vulcan,” McCoy said, “and you don’t realize the destructive potential of happiness.”

  “You speak as if from personal experience.”

  McCoy nodded as Spock spun back to the screen. It had gone blank. “Computer,” Spock said, “why has the report terminated?”

  “The transmission stopped in midreport,” the computer said.

  McCoy looked at Spock. “Oh, great.”

  “It seems,” Spock said, “that the captain may require aid. Alert Uhura. I will tell Mr. Scott that I leave him in charge. I will meet you and Uhura in the transporter room, and we will use the previous setting to transport ourselves to Marouk’s villa at the next maneuver into normal space.”

  “You know how I feel about the transporter,” McCoy said, but he looked a little more cheerful at the prospect of action. “Perhaps we can get a look at these devices up close. We’ve had no luck in duplicating their effect.”

  “Except to give some experimental animals a headache,” Spock said as McCoy stood up energetically and strode purposefully from the room. Spock looked at the blank screen for a moment before he rose. “Once again, Captain,” he said, “your emotional approaches to existence have led us into complexity.”

  He started for the door. “Happiness!” he said. “Another human illusion.”

  [subspace carrier wave transmission]

 

  >volition recognized

  volition applied interrogate<

 

  >human need paramount

  agreed<

  Chapter Six

  Reunion

  THE POLICEWOMAN supervising the playground cleanup crew accosted Kirk before he could leave. “You are not a part of this work group,” she said. Behind the policewoman, Dannie kept up her obsessive sweeping.

  Kirk’s quick glance evaluated his chances in personal combat with the policewoman. He didn’t want a violent confrontation, but he had no intention of returning to Wolff’s velvet cell. Not when he had less than a day to come up with an answer to the Joy Machine’s invitation to become one with its joyous multitudes.

  The policewoman was a large, muscular blonde, bigger than he, younger than he, and perhaps in as good physical condition. On the other hand, the De Kreef Revolution had left her little to do except supervise work crews, and hand-to-hand skills fade quickly without exercise. Still, Kirk thought, the payday experience might have conditioned her nervous system.

  [80] “I’m just leaving,” Kirk said.

  “Not so fast,” the policewoman said. “You’re a stranger here, aren’t you? You’re not a citizen at all.”

  “Why would you say something like that?” Kirk said reproachfully. It was a techn
ique he had perfected over the years to respond to a question without really lying.

  “That’s not a real payday bracelet,” the policewoman said, pointing to his wrist.

  “It’s not?” Kirk said in astonishment. “Perhaps it is broken. I’ll have to have it checked.”

  She looked at him as if he had said something really stupid. “I’ve been instructed to keep you here for questioning,” the policewoman said. The set of her jaw suggested that she would welcome a chance to carry out her orders.

  “Instructed by whom?” Kirk asked.

  The suspicion in her eyes turned to certainty. “You really are a stranger, aren’t you?”

  Kirk was preparing himself to turn and run when he heard a familiar voice behind him. “That’s all right, officer,” the voice said. “This person is in my custody. He has been surveying the city at my request.”

  “Yes, sir,” the policewoman said. If she had a forelock, she would have tugged it.

  Kirk turned. It was Marouk. He was making a career out of rescuing Kirk from difficulties. Marouk took Kirk’s arm and urged him toward the street, while he shook his head in mock reproach. “You do have a talent for getting into trouble,” he said.

  “In a place like Timshel City,” Kirk said, “anything out of the ordinary turns into a confrontation.”

  Tandy and Noelle were waiting at the school building entrance. They ran to their father and hugged him, one on each side. “Go on home,” Marouk told them. “Jim and I will be along, right behind you, so that we can talk. Perhaps your mother can prepare something special for lunch.”

  The two girls walked quickly, half running, down [81] the street. Marouk and Kirk followed at a pace more suitable to conversation.