Harry Collins 2012

: The Crowded Earth

Harry crouched behind the boulders, propping the rifle up between the

rocks, and adjusted the telescopic sights. The distant doorway sprang

into sharp focus. Grunting with satisfaction, he settled down to his

vigil. The rifle-barrel had been dulled down against detection by

reflection, and Harry's dark glasses protected him against the glare

of the morning sun. He might have to wait several hours now, but he

didn't car . It had taken him twelve years to come this far, and he

was willing to wait a little while longer.



Twelve years. Was it really that long?



A mirror might have answered him; a mirror might have shown him the

harsh features of a man of forty-two. But Harry needed no mirror. He

could remember the past dozen years only too easily--though they had

not been easy years.



Surviving the river was only the beginning. Animal strength carried

him through that ordeal. But he emerged from the river as an animal; a

wounded animal, crawling through the brush and arroyo outside the

southern Colorado canyon.



And it was animal cunning which preserved him. He'd wandered several

days until he encountered Emil Grizek and his outfit. By that time he

was half-starved and completely delirious. It took a month until he

was up and around again.



But Emil and the boys had nursed him through. They took turns caring

for him in the bunkhouse; their methods were crude but efficient and

Harry was grateful. Best of all, they asked no questions. Harry's

status was that of a hunted fugitive, without a Vocational Apt record

or rating. The authorities or any prospective employers would inquire

into these things, but Emil Grizek never seemed curious. By the time

Harry was up and around again, he'd been accepted as one of the bunch.

He told them his name was Harry Sanders, and that was enough.



Two months after they found him, he'd signed on with Emil Grizek and

found a new role in life.



Harry Collins, advertising copywriter, had become Harry Sanders,

working cowhand.



There was surprisingly little difficulty. Grizek had absentee

employers who weren't interested in their foreman's methods, just as

long as he recruited his own wranglers for the Bar B Ranch. Nobody

demanded to see Apt cards or insisted on making out formal

work-reports, and the pay was in cash. Cowhands were hard to come by

these days, and it was an unspoken premise that the men taking on such

jobs would be vagrants, migratory workers, fugitives from justice and

injustice. A generation or so ago they might have become tramps--but

the last of the hoboes had vanished along with the last of the freight

trains. Once the derelicts haunted the canyons of the big cities;

today there was no place for them there, so they fled to the canyons

of the west. Harry had found himself a new niche, and no questions

asked.



Oddly enough, he fitted in. The outdoor life agreed with him, and in a

matter of months he was a passable cowpoke; within a year he was one

of Grizek's top hands.



He learned to ride a bucking jeep with the best of them, and he could

spot, single out, and stun a steer in forty seconds flat; then use his

electronic brander on it and have the critter back on its feet in just

under a minute.



Work was no problem, and neither was recreation. The bunkhouse offered

crude but adequate facilities for living; old-fashioned

air-conditioning and an antique infra-red broiler seemed good enough

for roughing it, and Cookie at least turned out real man-sized meals.

Eating genuine beef and honest-to-goodness baked bread was a treat,

and so was having the luxury of all that space in the sleeping

quarters. Harry thrived on it.



And some of the other hands were interesting companions. True, they

were renegades and mavericks, but they were each of them unique and

individual, and Harry enjoyed listening to them fan the breeze during

the long nights.



There was Big Phil, who was pushing sixty now. But you'd never know

it, not unless you got him to talking about the old days when he'd

been a boy in Detroit. His daddy had been one of the last of the Union

Men, back in the days of what they used to call the Organized Labor

Movement. He could tell you about wage-hour agreements and the

Railroad Brotherhood and contract negotiations almost as if he knew of

these things through personal experience. He even remembered the

Democratic Party. Phil got out when the government took over and set

up Vocational Apt and Industrial Supervision; that's when he drifted

west.



Tom Lowery's family had been military; he claimed to have been a

member of the last graduating class ever to leave West Point. When the

armament race ended, his prospects of a career vanished, and he

settled down as a guard at Canaveral. Finally, he'd headed for the

open country.



Bassett was the scholar of the outfit. He could sit around and quote

old-time book-authors by the hour--classic writers like Prather and

Spillane. In another age he might have been a college professor or

even a football coach; he had an aptitude for the arts.



And there was Lobo, the misogynist, who had fled a wife and eleven

children back in Monterey; and Januzki, who used to be mixed up with

one of those odd religious cults out on the Coast. He bragged he'd

been one of the Big Daddy-Os in the Beat Generationists, and he argued

with Bassett about some old-time evangelist named Kerouac.



* * * * *



Best of all, though, Harry liked talking to Nick Kendrick. Nick's

hobby was music, and he treasured his second-hand stereophonic unit

and collection of tapes. He too was a classicist in his way, and there

was many a long winter night when Harry sat there listening to ancient

folk songs. The quaint atonalities of progressive jazz and the

childishly frantic rhythms of "cool sounds" were somehow soothing and

reassuring in their reminder of a simple heritage from a simpler age.



But above all, these men were wranglers, and they took a peculiar

pride in the traditions of their own calling. There wasn't a one of

them who wouldn't spend hours mulling over the lore of the range and

the prairie. They knew the Great Names from the Great Days--Eugene

Autry, Wyatt Earp, the legendary Thomas Mix, Dale Robertson, Paladin,

and all the others; men who rode actual horses in the era when the

West was really an untamed frontier.



And like the cowboys they were, they maintained the customs of other

days. Every few months they rode a bucking helicopter into some raw

western town--Las Vegas, or Reno, or even over to Palm Springs--to

drink recklessly in the cocktail lounges, gamble wildly at the slots,

or "go down the line" with some telescreen model on location for

outdoor ad-backgrounds. There were still half a dozen such sin-cities

scattered throughout the west; even the government acknowledged the

need of lonely men to blow off steam. And though Ag Culture officially

disapproved of the whole cowhand system, and talked grimly of setting

up new and more efficient methods for training personnel and handling

the cattle ranges, nothing was ever done. Perhaps the authorities knew

that it was a hopeless task; only the outcasts and iconoclasts had the

temperament necessary to survive such loneliness under an open sky.

City-dwelling conformists just could not endure the monotony.



But even Emil Grizek's hands marvelled at the way Harry lived. He

never joined them in their disorderly descent upon the scarlet cities

of the plain, and most of the time he didn't even seem to watch the

telescreen. If anything, he deliberately avoided all possible contact

with civilization.



Since he never volunteered any information about his own past, they

privately concluded that he was just a psychopathic personality.



"Strong regressive and seclusive tendencies," Bassett explained,

solemnly.



"Sure," Nick Kendrick nodded, wisely. "You mean a Mouldy Fig, like."



"Creeping Meatball," muttered cultist Januzki. Not being religious

fanatics, the others didn't understand the reference. But gradually

they came to accept Harry's isolationist ways as the norm--at least,

for him. And since he never quarreled, never exhibited any signs of

dissatisfaction, he was left to his own pattern.



Thus it was all the more surprising when that pattern was rudely and

abruptly shattered.



Harry remembered the occasion well. It was the day the Leff Law was

officially upheld by the Supremist Courts. The whole business came

over the telescreens and there was no way of avoiding it--you couldn't

avoid it, because everybody was talking about it and everybody was

watching.



"Now what do you think?" Emil Grizek demanded. "Any woman wants a

baby, she's got to have those shots. They say kids shrink down into

nothing. Weigh less than two pounds when they're born, and never grow

up to be any bigger than midgets. You ask me, the whole thing's plumb

loco, to say nothing of psychotic."



"I dunno." This from Big Phil. "Reckon they just about have to do

something, the way cities are filling up and all. Tell me every spot

in the country, except for the plains states here, is busting at the

seams. Same in Europe, Africa, South America. Running out of space,

running out of food, all over the world. This man Leffingwell figures

on cutting down on size so's to keep the whole shebang going."



"But why couldn't it be done on a voluntary basis?" Bassett demanded.

"These arbitrary rulings are bound to result in frustrations. And can

you imagine what will happen to the individual family constellations?

Take a couple that already has two youngsters, as of now. Suppose the

wife submits to the inoculations for her next child and it's born with

a size-mutation. How in the world will that child survive as a midget

in a family of giants? There'll be untold damage to the personality--"



"We've heard all those arguments," Tom Lowery cut in. "The Naturalists

have been handing out that line for years. What happens to the new

generation of kids, how do we know they won't be mentally defective,

how can they adjust, by what right does the government interfere with

private lives, personal religious beliefs; all that sort of thing. For

over ten years now the debate's been going on. And meanwhile, time is

running out. Space is running out. Food is running out. It isn't a

question of individual choice any longer--it's a question of group

survival. I say the Courts are right. We have to go according to law.

And back the law up with force of arms if necessary."



"We get the message," Januzki agreed. "But something tells me there'll

be trouble. Most folks need a midget like they need a monkey on their

backs."



"It's a gasser, pardners," said Nick Kendrick. "Naturalists don't dig

this. They'll fight it all along the line. Everybody's gonna be all

shook up."



"It is still a good idea," Lobo insisted. "This Dr. Leffingwell, he

has made the tests. For years he has given injections and no harm has

come. The children are healthy, they survive. They learn in special

schools--"



"How do you know?" Bassett demanded. "Maybe it's all a lot of

motivationalist propaganda."



"We have seen them on the telescreens, no?"



"They could be faking the whole thing."



"But Leffingwell, he has offered the shots to other governments beside

our own. The whole world will adopt them--"



"What if some countries don't? What if our kids become midgets and the

Asiatics refuse the inoculations?"



"They won't. They need room even more than we do."



"No sense arguing," Emil Grizek concluded. "It's the law. You know

that. And if you don't like it, join the Naturalists." He chuckled.

"But better hurry. Something tells me there won't be any Naturalists

around after a couple of years. Now that there's a Leff Law, the

government isn't likely to stand for too much criticism." He turned to

Harry. "What do you think?" he asked.



Harry shrugged. "No comment," he said.



But the next day he went to Grizek and demanded his pay in full.



"Leaving?" Grizek muttered. "I don't understand. You've been with us

almost five years. Where you going, what you intend to do? What's got

into you all of a sudden?"



"Time for a change," Harry told him. "I've been saving my money."



"Don't I know it? Never touched a penny in all this time." Grizek ran

a hand across his chin. "Say, if it's a raise you're looking for, I

can--"



"No, thanks. It's not that. I've money enough."



"So you have. Around eighteen, twenty thousand, I reckon, what with

the bonuses." Emil Grizek sighed. "Well, if you insist, that's the way

it's got to be, I suppose. When you plan on taking off?"



"Just as soon as there's a 'copter available."



"Got one going up to Colorado Springs tomorrow morning for the mail. I

can get you aboard, give you a check--"



"I'll want my money in cash."



"Well, now, that isn't so easy. Have to send up for a special draft.

Take a week or so."



"I can wait."



"All right. And think it over. Maybe you'll decide to change your

mind."



But Harry didn't change his mind. And ten days later he rode a 'copter

into town, his money-belt strapped beneath his safety-belt.



From Colorado Springs he jetted to Kancity, and from Kancity to

Memphisee. As long as he had money, nobody asked any questions. He

holed up in cheap airtels and waited for developments.



It wasn't easy to accustom himself to urbanization again. He had been

away from cities for over seven years now, and it might well have been

seven centuries. The overpopulation problem was appalling. The

outlawing of private automotive vehicles had helped, and the clearing

of the airlanes served a purpose; the widespread increase in the use

of atomic power cut the smog somewhat. But the synthetic food was

frightful, the crowding intolerable, and the welter of rules and

regulations attending the performance of even the simplest human

activity past all his comprehension. Ration cards were in universal

use for almost everything; fortunately for Harry, the black market

accepted cash with no embarrassing inquiries. He found that he could

survive.



But Harry's interest was not in survival; he was bent upon

destruction. Surely the Naturalists would be organized and planning a

way!



Back in '98, of course, they'd been merely an articulate minority

without formal unity--an abstract, amorphous group akin to the

"Liberals" of previous generations. A Naturalist could be a Catholic

priest, a Unitarian layman, an atheist factory hand, a government

employee, a housewife with strong prejudices against governmental

controls, a wealthy man who deplored the dangers of growing

industrialization, an Ag Culture worker who dreaded the dwindling of

individual rights, an educator who feared widespread employment of

social psychology, or almost anyone who opposed the concept of Mass

Man, Mass-Motivated. Naturalists had never formed a single class, a

single political party.



Surely, however, the enactment of the Leffingwell Law would have

united them! Harry knew there was strong opposition, not only on the

higher levels but amongst the general population. People would be

afraid of the inoculations; theologians would condemn the process;

economic interests, real-estate owners and transportation magnates and

manufacturers would sense the threat here. They'd sponsor and they'd

subsidize their spokesmen and the Naturalists would evolve into an

efficient body of opposition.



So Harry hoped, and so he thought, until he came out into the cities;

came out into the cities and realized that the very magnitude of Mass

Man mitigated against any attempt to organize him, except as a

creature who labored and consumed. Organization springs from

discussion, and discussion from thought--but who can think in chaos,

discuss in delirium, organize in a vacuum? And the common citizen,

Harry realized, had seemingly lost the capacity for group action. He

remembered his own existence years ago--either he was lost in a crowd

or he was alone, at home. Firm friendships were rare, and family units

survived on the flimsiest of foundations. It took too much time and

effort just to follow the rules, follow the traffic, follow the

incessant routines governing even the simplest life-pattern in the

teeming cities. For leisure there was the telescreen and the

yellowjackets, and serious problems could be referred to the psych in

routine check-ups. Everybody seemed lost in the crowd these days.



Harry discovered that Dr. Manschoff had indeed lied to him; mental

disorders were on the increase. He remembered an old, old book--one of

the very first treatises on sociological psychology. The Lonely

Crowd, wasn't it? Full of mumbo-jumbo about "inner-directed" and

"outer-directed" personalities. Well, there was a grain of truth in it

all. The crowd, and its individual members, lived in loneliness. And

since you didn't know very many people well enough to talk to,

intimately, you talked to yourself. Since you couldn't get away from

physical contact with others whenever you ventured abroad, you stayed

inside--except when you had to go to work, had to line up for

food-rations or supplies, had to wait for hours for your check-ups on

off-days. And staying inside meant being confined to the equivalent of

an old-fashioned prison cell. If you weren't married, you lived in

"solitary"; if you were married, you suffered the presence of

fellow-inmates whose habits became intolerable, in time. So you

watched the screen more and more, or you increased your quota of

sedation, and when that didn't help you looked for a real escape. It

was always available to you if you searched long enough; waiting at

the tip of a knife, in the coil of a rope, the muzzle of a gun. You

could find it at the very bottom of a bottle of pills or at the very

bottom of the courtyard outside your window. Harry recalled looking

for it there himself, so many years ago.



But now he was looking for something else. He was looking for others

who shared not only his viewpoint but his purposefulness.



Where were the Naturalists?



Harry searched for several years.



The press?



But there were no Naturalists visible on the telescreens. The news and

the newsmakers reflected a national philosophy adopted many

generations ago by the Founding Fathers of mass-communication in their

infinite wisdom--"What's good for General Motors is good for the

country." And according to them, everything happening was good for

the country; that was the cardinal precept in the science of

autobuyology. There were no Arnold Ritchies left any more, and the

printed newzine seemed to have vanished.



The clergy?



Individual churches with congregations in physical attendance, seemed

difficult to find. Telepreachers still appeared regularly every

Sunday, but their scripts--like everyone else's--had been processed in

advance. Denominationalism and sectarianism had waned, too; all of

these performers seemed very much alike, in that they were vigorous,

forthright, inspiring champions of the status quo.



The scientists?



But the scientists were a part of the government, and the government

was a one-party system, and the system supported the nation and the

nation supported the scientists. Of course, there were still private

laboratories subsidized for industrial purposes, but the men who

worked in them seemed singularly disinterested in social problems. In

a way, Harry could understand their position. It isn't likely that a

dedicated scientist, a man whose specialized research has won him a

Nobel Prize for creating a new detergent, will be worldly enough to

face unpleasant realities beyond the walls of his antiseptic sanctum.

After all, there was precedent for such isolationism--did the sainted

Betty Crocker ever enlist in any crusades? As for physicians,

psychiatrists and mass-psychologists, they were the very ones who

formed the hard core of Leffingwell's support.



The educators, then?



Vocational Apt was a part of the government. And the poor pedagogues,

who had spent generations hacking their way out of the blackboard

jungles, were only too happy to welcome the notion of a coming

millennium when their small charges would be still smaller. Even

though formal schooling, for most youngsters, terminated at fourteen,

there was still the problem of overcrowding. Telescreening and

teletesting techniques were a help, but the problem was essentially a

physical one. And Leffingwell was providing a physical solution.

Besides, the educators had been themselves educated, through

Vocational Apt. And while they, and the government, fervently upheld

the principle of freedom of speech, they had to draw the line

somewhere. As everyone knows, freedom of speech does not mean freedom

to criticize.



Business men?



Perhaps there were some disgruntled souls in the commercial community,

whose secret heroes were the oil tycoons of a bygone era or the

old-time Stock Exchange clan united under the totems of the bull or

the bear. But the day of the rugged individualist was long departed;

only the flabby individualist remained. And he had the forms to fill

out and the inspectors to contend with, and the rationing to worry

about and the taxes to meet and the quotas to fulfill. But in the long

run, he managed. The business man worked for the government, but the

government also worked for him. His position was protected. And if the

government said the Leff Shots would solve the overpopulation

problem--without cutting down the number of consumers--well, was

that really so bad? Why, in a generation or so there'd be even more

customers! That meant increased property values, too.



It took Harry several years to realize he'd never find Naturalists

organized for group action. The capacity for group action had vanished

as the size of the group increased. All interests were interdependent;

the old civic, fraternal, social and anti-social societies had no

present purpose any more. And the once-familiar rallying-points--whether

they represented idealistic humanitarianism or crass self-interest--had

vanished in the crowd. Patriotism, racialism, unionism, had all been

lost in a moiling megalopolitanism.



There were protests, of course. The mothers objected, some of them. Ag

Culture, in particular, ran into difficulties with women who revived

the quaint custom of "going on strike" against the Leff Law and

refused to take their shots. But it was all on the individual level,

and quickly coped with. Government medical authorities met the women

at checkup time and demonstrated that the Leff Law had teeth in it.

Teeth, and scalpels. The rebellious women were not subdued, slain, or

segregated--they were merely sterilized. Perhaps more would have come

of this if their men had backed them up; but the men, by and large,

were realists. Having a kid was a headache these days. This new

business of injections wasn't so bad, when you came right down to it.

There'd still be youngsters around, and you'd get the same allotment

for extra living space--only the way it worked out, there'd be more

room and the kids would eat less. Pretty good deal. And it wasn't as

if the young ones were harmed. Some of them seemed to be a lot smarter

than ordinary--like on some of the big quizshows, youngsters of eight

and nine were winning all those big prizes. Bright little ones. Of

course, these must be the ones raised in the first special school the

government had set up. They said old Leffingwell, the guy who invented

the shots, was running it himself. Sort of experimenting to see how

this new crop of kids would make out....



It was when Harry learned about the school that he knew what he must

do.



And if nobody else would help him, he'd act on his own. There might

not be any help from organized society, but he still had disorganized

society to turn to.



* * * * *



He spent the next two years and the last of his money finding a way.

The pattern of criminality had changed, too, and it was no easy matter

to find the assistance he needed. About the only group crime still

flourishing was hijacking; it took him a long while to locate a small

under-cover outfit which operated around St. Louie and arrange to

obtain a helicopter and pilot. Getting hold of the rifle was still

more difficult, but he managed. And by the time everything was

assembled, he'd found out what he needed to know about Dr. Leffingwell

and his school.



As he'd suspected, the school was located in the old canyon, right in

the same buildings which had once served as experimental units. How

many youngsters were there, Harry didn't know. Maybe Manschoff was

still on the staff, and maybe they'd brought in a whole new staff.

These things didn't matter. What mattered was that Leffingwell was on

the premises. And a man who knew his way about, a man who worked alone

and to a single purpose, could reach him.



Thus it was that Harry Collins crouched behind the boulder that bright

May morning and waited for Dr. Leffingwell to appear. The helicopter

had dropped him at the upper end of the canyon the day before, giving

him a chance to reconnoitre and familiarize himself with the terrain

once again. He'd located Leffingwell's quarters, even seen the man

through one of the lower windows. Harry had no trouble recognizing

him; the face was only too familiar from a thousand 'casts viewed on a

thousand screens. Inevitably, some time today, he'd emerge from the

building. And when he did, Harry would be waiting.



He shifted behind the rocks and stretched his legs. Twelve years had

passed, and now he'd come full circle. The whole business had started

here, and here it must end. That was simple justice.



And it is justice, Harry told himself. It's not revenge. Because

there'd be no point to revenge; that was only melodramatic nonsense.

He was no Monte Cristo, come to wreak vengeance on his cruel

oppressors. And he was no madman, no victim of a monomaniacal

obsession. What he was doing was the result of lengthy and logical

consideration.



If Harry Collins, longtime fugitive from a government treatment

center, tried to take his story to the people, he'd be silenced

without a hearing. But his story must be heard. There was only one way

to arrest the attention of a nation--with the report of a rifle.



A bullet in Leffingwell's brain; that was the solution of the problem.

Overnight the assassin would become a national figure. They'd

undoubtedly try him and undoubtedly condemn him, but first he'd have

his day in court. He'd get a chance to speak out. He'd give all the

voiceless, unorganized victims of the Leff Law a reason for

rebellion--and offer them an example. If Leffingwell had to die, it

would be in a good cause. Moreover, he deserved to die. Hadn't he

killed men, women, infants, without mercy?



But it's not revenge, Harry repeated. And I know what I'm doing.

Maybe I was disturbed before, but I'm sane now. Perfectly logical.

Perfectly calm. Perfectly controlled.



Yes, and now his sane, logical, calm, controlled eyes noted that the

distant door was opening, and he sighted through the 'scope and

brought his sane, logical, calm, controlled hand up along the barrel

to the trigger. He could see the two men emerging, and the shorter,

plumper of the two was Leffingwell. He squinted at the high forehead

with its receding hairline; it was a perfect target. A little squeeze

now and he knew what would happen. In his sane, logical, calm,

controlled mind he could visualize the way the black hole would appear

in the center of that forehead, while behind it would be the torn and

dripping redness flecked with gray--



"What are you doing?"



Harry whirled, staring; staring down at the infant who stood smiling

beside him. It was an infant, that was obvious enough, and implicit

in the diminutive stature, the delicate limbs and the oversized head.

But infants do not wear the clothing of pre-adolescent boys, they do

not enunciate with clarity, they do not stare coolly and knowingly at

their elders. They do not say, "Why do you want to harm Dr.

Leffingwell?"



Harry gazed into the wide eyes. He couldn't speak.



"You're sick, aren't you?" the child persisted. "Let me call the

doctor. He can help you."



Harry swung the rifle around. "I'll give you just ten seconds to clear

out of here before I shoot."



The child shook his head. Then he took a step forward. "You wouldn't

hurt me," he said, gravely. "You're just sick. That's why you talk

this way."



Harry leveled the rifle. "I'm not sick," he muttered. "I know what I'm

doing. And I know all about you, too. You're one of them, aren't you?

One of the first of Leffingwell's brood of illegitimates."



The child took another step forward. "I'm not illegitimate," he said.

"I know who I am. I've seen the records. My name is Harry Collins."



Somewhere the rifle exploded, the bullet hurtling harmlessly overhead.

But Harry didn't hear it. All he could hear, exploding in his own

brain as he went down into darkness, was the sane, logical, calm,

controlled voice of his son.