Security

If, if, if----

Somewhere along the trail of this last alcoholic binge, one or both of them had abandoned what they had both considered an important tradition. It wasn't much, but they had clung to it against temptation, knowing that once they gave in, it wasn't much further to the bottom of skidhill.

Betty Seton had been a world famous physicist. Sam Lewis had been a top-rate atomics engineer. And what are we now, he thought, watching the Guard, except just a couple of alky bums looking for a few extra kicks to keep us from admitting we're dead?

A request for a marriage license had never been answered. Betty Seton did not have "Q" clearance for some reason. Sam had full clearance and worked in The Pit, the highest "Q" security section in the Project. And never the twain could meet. If their little tryst was discovered, Betty Seton would be taken to the mental wards and 'cleared', a polite term for having any security info you might have picked up cleaned out of your brain along with a great many other characteristics that made you a distinct personality. It was just one of those necessary evils. It had to be done. For security. Psychological murder in the name of Security.

The Guard walked on and disappeared around the corner of the end barracks building.

Lewis started walking aimlessly in the dark, up and down in front of the barracks, past the blacked out windows and doors and the shadowy hulks of the lab buildings, and beyond that the camouflaged entrances to other subterranean labs, the synthetic food plants, the stores, and supplies. The Project was self-sustaining; in complete, secure and sterile isolation from the world, from all of humanity.

He headed for Professor Melvin Lanier's apartment. Tonight the big party was at Lanier's. There was a drunken brawl going on all the time at someone's apartment. There was nothing else to do.

Liquor, tranquillizing drugs, wife-swapping, dope addiction, dream-pills, sleeping tablets, and that was it. That was what the Project had come to. Experimental work at the Project had wobbled to a dead end.

Only the pathetic and meaningless motions remained.

Still, he thought, as he walked in through the open door of Lanier's apartment, there is a war on. H-bombs and A-bombs outlawed, but anything less than that was sporting.

He wanted to do what he could, but he was squelched; just as everyone else here was smothered and rendered useless by regulations and a Government of complete and absolute secrecy carried to its ultimate stupid denominator in the hands of political and military incompetents.

Still, there is a war on, he thought again as he walked into the big living room filled with artificial light and even more artificial laughter. Was it possible to do something, just some little thing, to shake loose this caged brain?

A few more drinks, he thought, will help me reach another completely indecisive decision.

In another two hours he would have to report back to the Pit. No reason for it now. It was just his job, his patriotic duty. Progress in nuclear developments and reactor technology in the Pit had ground to a dismal halt for him over seven months ago.

Yes, no doubt about it, he needed a few more shots to make palatable for a while longer his standing membership in the walking dead.

Through shadows in the garden, shapes wavered about drunkenly to the throb of hi-fi. Lewis went to the robotic barkeep and started drinking. This time, however, he didn't feel any effects. He stood looking around, ashamed, made sicker by what he saw: some of the world's finest minds, top scientists, reduced to shallow burbling buffoons.

Dave Nemerov, Nobel Prize Winner in physics, weaved up to Sam and looked at him out of bleary eyes. "Hi, Sammy. All full of gloom again, boy?"

Nemerov, a chubby little man dressed in shorts and nothing else, frowned with drunken exaggeration. "Easy does it, Sammy. You might find the security boys giving you a lobotomy rap."

A drop of sweat ran down the side of Lewis' high-boned cheek.

"Well, what's the great physicist been doing for his country?" Lewis asked. He knew that Nemerov hadn't even been in his lab for over a month. He even remembered when Nemerov had griped about the shortage of technically trained personnel, the policy of secrecy that clouded, divided and obstructed his work, hampered his research until it finally was no longer worth the struggle. His story was the story of everyone in the Project. He couldn't get information from other departments and projects, because of secrecy. They were all cut off from one another. No information was ever released from the restricted list. Most important documents were secret, and had remained out of reach.

The only declassified documents available in the project were grade-school stuff that everybody had known twenty years ago.

For an instant, Nemerov appeared almost sober, and completely saddened.

"I've forgotten what I was working on," Nemerov said.

"Have another drink then," Lewis said, "and you'll forget that you've forgotten."

They clinked glasses. "Smile, Sammy," Nemerov said. "It can't last forever. We'll soon get the word. The war will be over."