The Servant Problem Read online

  Spontaneous applause broke out in the room, applause in which even Garomma joined. Then he leaned forward and placed his hand paternally, possessively on Moddo’s head of unruly brown hair. At this unusual honor to their chief, the officials in the room cheered.

  Under the noise, Garomma took the opportunity to ask Moddo, “What does the population in general know about this? What exactly are you telling them?”

  Moddo turned his nervous, large-jawed face around. “Mostly just that it’s a holiday. A lot of obscure stuff about you achieving complete control of the human environment all to the end of human betterment. Barely enough so that they can know it’s something you like and can rejoice with you.”

  “In their own slavery. I like that.” Garomma tasted the sweet flavor of unlimited rulership for a long moment. Then the taste went sour and he remembered. “Moddo, I want to take care of the Servant of Security matter this afternoon. We’ll go over it as soon as we start back.”

  The Servant of Education nodded. “I have a few thoughts. It’s not so simple, you know. There’s the problem of the successor.”

  “Yes. There’s always that. Well, maybe in a few more years, if we can sustain this sampling and spread the techniques to the maladjusted elements in the older adult population, we’ll be able to start dispensing with Security altogether.”

  “Maybe. Strongly set attitudes are much harder to adjust, though. And you’ll always need a security system in the top ranks of officialdom. But I’ll do the best—I’ll do the best I can.”

  Garomma nodded and sat back, satisfied. Moddo would always do his best. And on a purely routine level, that was pretty good. He raised a hand negligently. The cheering and the applause stopped. Another Education executive came forward to describe the sampling method in detail. The ceremony went on.

  This was the day of complete control…

  Moddo, the Servant of Education, the Ragged Teacher of Mankind, rubbed his aching forehead with huge, well-manicured fingers and allowed himself to luxuriate in the sensation of ultimate power, absolute power, power such as no human being had even dared to dream of before this day.

  Complete control. Complete…

  There was the one remaining problem of the successor to the Servant of Security. Garomma would want a decision from him as soon as they started back to the Hovel of Service; and he was nowhere near a decision. Either one of the two Assistant Servants of Security would be able to fill the job admirably, but that wasn’t the question.

  The question was which one of the two men would be most likely to maintain at high pitch in Garomma the fears that Moddo had conditioned him to feel over a period of thirty years?

  That, so far as Moddo was concerned, was the whole function of the Servant of Security; to serve as primary punching bag for the Servant of All’s fear-ridden subconscious until such time as the mental conflicts reached a periodic crisis. Then, by removing the man around whom they had been trained to revolve, the pressure would be temporarily eased.

  It was a little like fishing, Moddo decided. You fed the fish extra line by killing off the Servant of Security, and then you reeled it in quietly, steadily, in the next few years by surreptitiously dropping hints about the manifest ambitions of his successor. Only you never wanted to land the fish. You merely wanted to keep it hooked and constantly under your control.

  The Servant of Education smiled an inch or two behind his face, as he had trained himself to smile since early boyhood. Landing the fish? That would be the equivalent of becoming Servant of All himself. And what intelligent man could satisfy his lust for power with such an idiotic goal?

  No, leave that to his colleagues, the ragged high officials in the Hovel of Service, forever scheming and plotting, making alliances and counter-alliances. The Servant of Industry, the Servant of Agriculture, the Servant of Science and the rest of those highly important fools.

  To be the Servant of All meant being the target of plots, the very bull’s eye of attention. An able man in this society must inevitably recognize that power—me matter how veiled or disguised—was the only valid aim in life. And the Servant of All—veiled and disguised though he might be in a hundred humbling ways—was power incarnate.

  No. Far better to be known as the nervous, uncertain underling whose knees shook beneath the weight of responsibilities far beyond his abilities. Hadn’t he heard their contemptuous voices behind his back?

  “…Garomma’s administrative toy…”

  “…Garomma’s fool of a spiritual valet…”

  “…nothing but a footstool, a very ubiquitous footstool, mind you, but a footstool nonetheless on which rests Garomma’s mighty heel…”

  “…poor, colorless, jittery slob …”

  “…when Garomma sneezes, Moddo sniffles…”

  But from that menial, despised position, to be the real source of all policy, the maker and breaker of men, the de facto dictator of the human race…

  He brought his hand up once more and smoothed at his forehead. The headache was getting worse. And the official celebration of complete control was likely to take another hour yet. He should be able to steal away for twenty or thirty minutes with Loob the Healer, without getting Garomma too upset. The Servant of All had to be handled with especial care at these crisis points. The jitters that had been induced in him were likely to become so overpowering that he might try to make a frantic decision for himself. And that possibility, while fantastically dim, must not be given a chance to develop. It was too dangerous.

  For a moment, Moddo listened to the young man in front of them rattle on about modes and means, skew curves and correlation coefficients, all the statistical jargon that concealed the brilliance of the psychological revolution that he, Moddo, had wrought. Yes, they would be there another hour yet.

  Thirty-five years ago, while doing his thesis in the Central Service of Education Post-Graduate Training School, he had found a magnificent nugget in the accumulated slag of several centuries of mass-conditioning statistics; the concept of individual application.

  For a long while, he had found the concept incredibly difficult to close with: when all your training has been directed toward the efficient handling of human attitudes in terms of millions, the consideration of one man’s attitudes and emotions is as slippery a proposition as an eel, freshly caught and moribundly energetic.

  But after his thesis had been completed and accepted—the thesis on suggested techniques for the achievement of complete control which the previous administration had duly filed and forgotten—he had turned once more to the problem of individual conditioning.

  And in the next few years, while working at his dull job in the Applied Statistics Bureau of the Service of Education, he had addressed himself to the task of refining the individual from the group, of reducing the major to the minor.

  One thing became apparent. The younger your material, the easier your task--exactly as in mass-conditioning. But if you started with a child, it would be years before he would be able to operate effectively in the world on your behalf. And with a child you were faced with the constant counter-barrage of political conditioning which filled the early school years.

  What was needed was a young man who already had a place of sorts in the government, but who, for some reason or other, had a good deal of unrealized—and unconditioned—potential. Preferably, also, somebody whose background had created a personality with fears and desires of a type which could serve as adequate steering handles.

  Moddo began to work nights, going over the records of his office in search of that man. He had found two or three who looked good. That brilliant fellow in the Service of Transport, he reminisced, had seemed awfully interesting for a time. Then he had come across Garomma’s papers.

  And Garomma had been perfect. From the first. He was a directorial type, he was likable, he was clever—and he was very receptive.

  “I could learn an awful lot from you,” he had told Moddo shyly at their first meeting. “This is such a big, c
omplicated place—Capital Island. So much going on all the time. I get confused just thinking about it. But you were born here. You really seem to know your way around all the swamps and bogs and snakepits.”

  Due to sloppy work on the part of the Sixth District Conditioning Commissioner, Garomma’s home neighborhood had developed a surprising number of quasi-independent minds on all levels of intelligence. Most of them tended to revolution, especially after a decade of near-famine crops and exorbitant taxation. But Garomma had been ambitious; he had turned against his peasant background and entered the lower echelons of the Service of Security.

  This meant that when the Sixth District Peasant Uprising occurred, his usefulness in its immediate suppression had earned him a much higher place. More important, it had given him freedom from the surveillance and extra adult conditioning which a man of his suspicious family associations might normally have expected.

  It also meant that, once Moddo had maneuvered an introduction and created a friendship, he had at his disposal not only a rising star but a personality that was superb in its plasticity.

  A personality upon which he could laboriously create the impress of his own image.

  First, there had been that wonderful business of Garomma’s guilt about disobeying his father that had eventually led to his leaving the farm altogether—and later to his becoming an informer against his own family and neighbors. This guilt, which had resulted in fear and therefore hatred for everything associated with its original objects, was easy to redirect to the person of his superior, the Servant of Security, and make that the new father-image.

  Later, when Garomma had become Servant of All, he still retained—under Moddo’s tireless ministrations—the same guilt and the same omnipresent fear of punishment toward whoever was the reigning Head of Security. Which was necessary if he was not to realize that his real master was the large man who sat at his right hand, constantly looking nervous and uncertain…

  Then there had been education. And re-education. From the beginning, Moddo had realized the necessity of feeding Garomma’s petty peasant arrogance and had abased himself before it. He gave the other man the impression that the subversive thoughts he was now acquiring were of his own creation, even leading him to believe that he was domesticating Moddo—curious how the fellow never escaped from his agricultural origins even in his metaphors!—instead of the other way around.

  Because Moddo was now laying plans for a tremendous future, and he didn’t want them upset some day by the cumulative resentment one may develop toward a master and teacher; on the contrary, he wanted the plans reinforced by the affection one feels toward a pet dog whose nuzzling dependence constantly feeds the ego and creates a more ferocious counter-dependence than the owner ever suspects.

  The shock that Garomma had exhibited when he began to realize that the Servant of All was actually the Dictator of All! Moddo almost smiled with his lips at the memory. Well, after all, when his own parents had suggested the idea years ago in the course of a private sailing trip they took together pursuant to his father’s duties as a minor official in the Service of Fisheries and Marine—hadn’t he been so upset that he’d let go of the tiller and vomited over the side? Losing your religion is a hard thing at any age, but it gets much harder as you get older.

  On the other hand, Moddo had lost not only his religion at the age of six, but also his parents. They had done too much loose talking to too many people under the incorrect assumption that the then Servant of Security was going to be lax forever.

  He rubbed his knuckles into the side of his head. This headache was one of the worst he’d had in days! He needed fifteen minutes at least—surely he could get away for fifteen minutes—with Loob. The Healer would set him up for the rest of the day, which, on all appearances, was going to be a tiring one. And he had to get away from Garomma, anyway, long enough to come to a clear-headed, personal decision on who was to be the next Servant of Security.

  Moddo, the Servant of Education, the Ragged Teacher of Mankind, took advantage of a pause between speakers to lean back and say to Garomma: “I have a few administrative matters to check here before we start back. May I be excused? It — it won’t take more than about twenty or twenty-five minutes.”

  Garomma scowled imperiously straight ahead. “Can’t they wait? This is your day as much as mine. I’d like to have you near me.”

  “I know that, Garomma, and I’m grateful for the need. But”—and now he touched the Servant of All’s knee in supplication—“I beg of you to let me attend to them. They are very pressing. One of them has to do—it has to do indirectly with the Servant of Security and may help you decide whether you want to dispense with him at this particular time.”

  Garomma’s face immediately lost its bleakness. “In that case, by all means. But get back before the ceremony is over. I want us to leave together.”

  The tall man nodded and rose. He turned to face his leader. “Serve us, Garomma,” he said with outstretched arms. “Serve us, serve us, serve us.” He backed out of the room, always facing the Servant of All.

  Out in the corridor, he strode rapidly through the saluting Center of Education guards and into his private elevator. He pressed the third-floor button. And then, as the door swept shut and the car began to rise, he permitted himself a single, gentle, mouth-curling smile.

  The trouble he had taken to pound that one concept into Garomma’s thick head: the basic principle in modern scientific government is to keep the government so unobtrusive as to appear nonexistent, to use the illusion of freedom as a kind of lubricant for slipping on invisible shackles—above all, to rule in the name of anything but rulership!

  Garomma himself had phrased it in his own laborious fashion one day when, shortly after their great coup, they stood together—both still uncomfortable in the rags of greatness—and watched the construction of the new Hovel of Service in the charred place where the old one had stood for almost half a century. A huge, colorful, revolving sign on top of the unfinished building told the populace that FROM HERE WILL YOUR EVERY WANT AND NEED BE ATTENDED TO, FROM HERE WILL YOU BE SERVED MORE EFFICIENTLY AND PLEASANTLY THAN EVER BEFORE.

  Garomma had stared at the sign which was being flashed on the video receivers of the world—in the homes as well as in factories, offices, schools and compulsory communal gatherings—every hour on the hour.

  “It’s like my father used to say,” he told Moddo at last with the peculiar heavy chuckle he used to identify a thought he felt was entirely original; “the right kind of salesman, if he talks long enough and hard enough, can convince a man that the thickest thorns feel as soft as roses. All he has to do is keep calling them roses, hey, Moddo?”

  Moddo had nodded slowly, pretending to be overcome by the brilliance of the analysis and savoring its complexities for a few moments. Then, as always, merely appearing to be conducting an examination of the various latent possibilities in Garomma’s ideas, he had proceeded to give the new Servant of All a further lesson.

  He had underlined the necessity of avoiding all outward show of pomp and luxury, something the so-recently dead officials of the previous administration had tended to forget in the years before their fall. He had pointed out that the Servants of Mankind must constantly appear to be just that—the humble instruments of the larger mass will. Then anyone who acted contrary to Garomma’s whim would be punished, not for disobeying his ruler, but for acting against the overwhelming majority of the human race.

  And he had suggested an innovation that had been in his mind for a long time; the occasional creation of disasters in regions that had been uninterruptedly loyal and obedient. This would accentuate the fact that the Servant of All was very human indeed, that his tasks were overwhelming and that he occasionally grew tired.

  This would intensify the impression that the job of co-ordinating the world’s goods and services had almost grown too complex to be handled successfully. It would spur the various Districts on to uncalled-for prodigies of frantic loyalt
y and self-regimentation, so that they at least would have the Servant of All’s maximum attention.

  “Of course,” Garomma had agreed. “That’s what I said. The whole point is not to let them know that you’re running their lives and that they’re helping you do it. You’re getting the idea.”

  He was getting the idea! He, Moddo, who ever since his adolescence had been studying a concept that had originated centuries ago when mankind had begun to emerge from the primitive chaos of self-rule and personal decision into the organized social universe of modern times… he was getting the idea!

  He had smirked gratefully. But he had continued applying to Garomma himself the techniques that he was teaching Garomma to apply to the mass of men as a whole. Year in, year out, seemingly absorbed in the immensities of the project he had undertaken on behalf of the Service of Education, he had actually left its planning in the hands of subordinates while he concentrated on Garomma.

  And today, while superficially acquiring complete control over the minds of an entire generation of human beings, he had tasted for the first time complete control over Garomma. For the past five years, he had been attempting to crystallize his ascendancy in a form that was simpler to use than complicated need-mechanisms and statement-patterns.

  Today, for the first time, the weary hours of delicate, stealthy conditioning had begun to work out perfectly. The hand-signal, the touch-stimulus that he had organized Garomma’s mind to respond to, had resulted in the desired responses every single time!

  As he walked down the third-floor corridor to Loob’s modest office, he searched for an adequate expression. It was like, he decided, being able to turn a whole vast liner by one touch on the wheel. The wheel activated the steering engine, the steering engine pushed against the enormous weight of rudder, and the rudder’s movements eventually forced the great ship to swing about and change its course.