shallow draughts"The campaign to sweep the world clean of mankind's oldest enemy, stupidity, verges upon total success." The President of the World's teeth were big and square, his hair dyed jet-black and slicked to his skull with not a frond out of place. He nodded at the conclusion of the respectful applause, read on. "Thanks to the falling costs associated with testing, as well as the public's inspiring cooperation, we can say with some certainty that as few as 400,000 cases remain worldwide."A little Learning is a dang'rous Thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian Spring:
There shallow Draughts intoxicate the Brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again.-- Alexander Pope
Tim whistled between his teeth, then stopped and smiled at the President's face on TV. He whistled again, tunelessly through his lips, used the blast to gust the steam off the surface of his coffee. With his other hand he shuffled a pan with spitting oil and a burger in it, back and forth on the element. He wiped his hand across his bare chest and straightened his briefs, then spun the propeller on his beanie cap and, putting down his coffee, pirouetted in sock feet on his kitchen linoleum.
Televised applause died away. "Thank you. These are impressive statistics, I know. Yet I wish to remind all the esteemed members of this house, and all our viewers, that the struggle is not over yet. Let us not forget the story of Bob Wilsonson." Here Tim visualized the representatives settling into their seats for the obligatory retelling of the defining event.
The President's expression became stern. "In 2011, he was a Captain serving at ICBM Silo Bertha-Thirty, under the auspices of the Eastern Defence Group. His fateful misjudgement on Hallowe'en night, when a large spider climbed atop his launch button, should be a reminder to all of us, of the danger embodied by even one idiot."
See, this was why he couldn't be trusted to act, Tim told himself. He was moronic, gormless, anencephalic. How many close shaves had he had, tying his shoelaces together, making incorrect change, closing his finger in a door? And since the cells or whatever in the government had taken over, variously buying out and eliminating intellectuals, the medical community was in the bag. Nothing a real doctor could do about it. There was a defective gene causing stupidity and it was being weeded out, exterminated, Tim was sure. He had that gene because he made mistakes. Or rather, made mistakes because of the gene.
Although, Tim's kitchen was a convincing show in every way that Tim himself wasn't, away from official eyes. It was modest and dull and tidy. Soft jazz music, deftly sophisticated, played at near-subliminal level behind the TV, which now played some kind of march. Beyond in the dining nook a poster on the wall said in faux-embossed text: "SILLY FILLIES MAKE FOR SORRY FOLLIES." The artist's illustration showed a couple fallen asleep in bed, inferredly post-coitus. The woman's side of the bed was beginning to be consumed by fire, which spread from her forgotten cigarette. She slept on with a big smile. Tim chose the poster for the curve of her hips.
He lit a cigarette and turned on the range hood fan. Thank God he could smoke inside now -- especially on a night that looked like rain. Or worse: it was cooling off. Snow in October wasn't unheard of, and wouldn't that be just his luck tonight. Or to forget and wear the beanie out of doors.
More talk from the TV as he continued to cook. Again, the President of the World appeared and gave a speech.
Tim snorted and spun his prop. "Witness the supreme idiot of the world!! The thickest dumbass in all creation!"
He was pouring himself a pineapple juice when something broke loose and started whanging around inside the range hood. "Aw, shit." He spilled juice on the counter, then reached up and turned off the fan. The whanging slowed, stopped with a rattle.
Sticky sweet juice was dripping on the floor. It was all down the front of his legs. Tim took a deep breath and piledrived his cigarette into the puddle on the countertop. "Great." He squatted and started sopping up juice with a dish towel.
When that was done, he shook the burger onto a plate and started the fan again to see if the rattling would persist. It was loud and irritating, impossible to tolerate. Well, he'd see if he couldn't figure out what was loose or whatever. You never knew how closely a repairman would look at your things.
Tim found a screwdriver and carefully unfastened the filter assembly. As he removed it, a tiny gnarled chunk of plastic fell out. It bounced off the cooktop and lodged under one of the coils. Tim ripped the coil out and then sighed, setting it down very gently. He dabbed the bit of plastic with a sticky finger and brought it to face level.
It was a chip, with a tiny mic and aerial damaged by the fan blades. Tim started to shake and with his other hand, he removed his propeller cap and held it to his chest.Tim's head emerged from his doorway. The carpeted hall of the apartment building was empty. No jack-booted cops were coming to Disappear him. He walked out into the chilly stale air. He had to get to the store before closing, get laundry change. That was it. That was a decent excuse for fleeing his apartment, should anyone ask.
He walked across a breezy parking lot, saw the lengthening shadows and grafitti on the great stucco flank of Rains' Convenience. No spelling errors in the stock obscenities. He opened the door and a little bell rang him hello to Mrs. Rains, who smiled and said, "Hello Timothy."
"Hi Lettie. You look well. Did Joey enjoy his out-trip?" She was nuts about her grandkid. He put his bill on the counter and was about to ask for his change, but saw that she looked strangely at him. "Is everything all right?" he said.
A fluorescent bulb above them winked out and they both glanced up at it. When Tim looked back, Lettie was her usual self. "Little Joseph skied like a madman and tired himself right out." She smiled and pointed to Tim's money. "And this?"
"Could I get change? Laundry day."Back inside the apartment, no QUAASH officers rappelled through the window glass like in that action film, Deadly Simplicity. The deactivation of the device had not been noticed, or not yet. Tim went to his workbench, brushing aside blueprints of gates and cyclone fence, block houses. He spread a clean piece of tissue and set the bug down, trained the lamp on it. Who had planted this? The hood installer, it was obvious, or someone he acted as a diversion for.
Tim picked the bug up with finger and thumb and turned it over. It looked like audio only, so potentially his dumbest foibles and moments might have passed unregistered... just that dig against the President, and that was hardly illegal. There was a small red circular dot on the back of the device that looked seductively soft to touch. Tim squinted at it, shuffled the bug into his palm. With his other finger he pressed the button. His finger, seeming big and stumpy obscured the bug completely.
Nothing happened. He brought it close to his face to examine it.
Like heat rays, something hissed out, gas, a tiny quantity rippling his view in the harsh desk light. Tim sniffed once, twice, and passed out on his hand, squishing the bug into the flesh of his temple. He smiled in his sleep.The first words he heard were "This man is not an idiot."
"Pardon me, Doctor... not stupid?"
Tim's head was fastened down and he couldn't see anything. He felt weird, like maybe drugged. It was dark, to him anyway. His lips were dry, and his throat.
"Not by every QUAASH-lifier on the test, look here." Maybe it was light and he was just blindfolded. "And my gut tells me this also. Which is better than any test," the 'doctor' added.
Tim's genitals and feet hurt awfully, but whatever they'd given him post-testing took the worst of the edge off it. Thank God.
"Oh. Goodness, what an odd reading for the critical CC's."
"Yes. My theory is that he is a subversive agent attempting to feign idiocy, fool our LogiChecks and infiltrate an Idiot Prison. Although undertaking such a thing may seem idiotic in itself."
"Ha ha!"
"Ha ha!"
"Ha ha ha!!"
"Ha ha, yes, it's not that funny."
"Sorry sir. Shall I bed him down now?"
"Well we can't exactly dump him at an Idiot Prison Admissions! You boob."
"Sorry sir. Of course, sir."Tim squinted, then opened his eyes. He blinked.
He was not in a cell, but a room like a private hospital room; there was a nightstand and curtains and a TV hanging from the ceiling, broadcasting snow. Tim was curled in the corner opposite the door. He thought that the bed resting along the wall looked much more comfortable. He was beginning to reach for it when the door swung open and a white-coated man walked in, walked right up to him. Tim noticed the man's shoes were very shiny and black. "Wakey wakey, eh? I'm your doctor. You're going to be just fine. Get up."
"What the fuck did you do to me?" Tim rolled up and looked at the soles of his feet. They showed no sign of injury, nor even of scarring. "Huh." He also found he was wearing a hospital bracelet with some coded letters and numbers on it. "Where's your little bitch? Did he piss you off and you sent him to IPA?"
"Idiot prison? Ha ha, there, there young man." The doctor chuckled merrily. Tim looked up at his face and saw that he wore a hokey old doctor's mirror on a headband, and a red foam clown nose. "You are in the hands of the resistance! Part of our function is to revoke such... inhumane social strictures."
"So... you're not the doctor from before?"
"What doctor before? You were tortured by Neolog barbarians." Tim had a brief and confusing mental image of himself being tied up and clubbed by lowbrowed cavemen. "No, we're here to see that you make a full recovery... with your silliness intact!... and take up our cause, if you feel the calling. Otherwise you will, unfortunately, have to be evacuated from the planet, but out in one of the space colonies..."
"In space?"
"...you can live as you please."
"Oh, this is such a crock of shit. I know what's happening. You guys are trying to break me by pulling the old switcheroo. You're probably that doctor from before, and you-all are trying to get me to ask for help for my friends or something. My collaborators."
"Pish posh, son. Smarten up." The doctor strode over to the door, pushed it ajar and spoke into the hallway. "I'm afraid it's more stress leave for Sonny Jim. He's still a bit muddled."
"Yessir."
"Now you, young man, get into that bed. I legislate bed rest for you until you know your hawk from your handsaw. Yes, yes. Now let's tuck you in, sweet dreams!"The first words he heard were "This man is not an idiot."
"Excuse me, Doctor... not stupid?"
Tim's head was fastened down and he couldn't see anything. His sinuses felt clogged and he wanted to sneeze but felt sure he would shoot something across the room. Something was spinning the room. He could feel the smooth tape of the bracelet, ridden up on his wrist to allow the examiners to fasten his restraints.
"No. He has a quite curable mental disorder, I suspect, which I detected some indication of in the dossier. Wherefrom patients..."
Tim opened his eyes. He saw a dully lit room, and a man in a white coat sitting before a desk with a blazing reading lamp trained on the desk blotter. He steepled his hands on the blotter. Tim tried to look at the man's face but he was turned too far away. He kept talking. "Patients are afflicted with a social condition causing them to manifest, of their own will, idiot behaviour, in the mind's deluded hope that it will draw attention. It's still a very fresh new disorder."
Tim looked for the other speaker, but saw nothing beyond the fringes of the light.
"'Hysterical idiocy?'"
"Or else it could be simply an external, self-destructive manifestation of a fairly common brain pathology. Like unto a suicide, from dumbness."
"Is there literature on this?"
"Well, Hilton did a paper a few weeks ago about the correlation with abnormal CC..."
"The CC thing! Right!""Now... what's the last thing you remember?"
Subsequent to his waking up, Tim had been released from his bonds and reassuringly provided with a nice terry robe and slippers and a cup of coffee. He was in the doctor's office.
Tim whistled and blew on his coffee. "Oh, sorry. Am I not supposed to do that?"
"No, no, carry on, go right ahead. We'll understand it gradually and treat it when we know more. We can talk about that later. Right now I'd like you to answer my question, in your own time. What is your last memory?"
Tim pursed his lips and looked at the poster behind the doctor's chair. A GOOF? ALOOF! It had a picture of a man with a beanie and a manic expression, and a little girl shying away from him into her mother's skirts.
"That's a good question," he said at length. Where was his beanie? He missed it. "I remember kind of a lot of weird stuff, and I'm not entirely certain yet that it happened as such." Something was wrong. They'd stolen his beanie! Er, no.
"What about before you were picked u-."
"I wasn't picked up, I got gassed by a little turd of a bug I found in my range hood."
"Alright..." The doctor wrote something. "What came next?"
"I think I was... tortured."
The doctor stopped writing and laid down his pen across the pad. "Tim, no-one tortured you. It may be difficult and confusing to accept, but it was most likely an hallucination of phantasy persecution brought upon you by a hyperbaric critical Chelsea-Cambric ocutional haematoma."
"CC?"
The doctor smiled warmly. "Yes, Tim, CC! You must have read that article that was in the paper. What a clever, inquisitive boy."The first words he heard came from the mouth of the President of the World. Was the 'World' really all the world? Or just as much as 'they' let you see? "Son... Son! Wake up please, nice and easy, there you go. Don't try to sit up." Tim lay in a soft hospital bed, out of place in what looked more like a ritzy hotel room. The door stood open relaxedly, and there was a merry fire in the grate. It felt like evening.
The President stood at his feet, vivid as on TV. He seemed a few inches shorter, more compact, more solid and fleshly.
A scant few feet separated them, and Tim could watch as the President's chest rose and fell with calm breaths as he waited. The famous man beamed as Tim met his eyes, and then walked slowly around to Tim's bedside. His footfalls were hushed in the thick burgundy carpet.
"Son, do you know why I'm here? Why you're here?"
"Fucking search me. Sir. Sorry."
"Not at all. I'm sure the citizens of the world will willingly chalk that up to the..." His face clouded over and he closed his eyes momentarily. "...unconscionable cruelty visited upon you by those unscrupulous enemies of freedom and reason." His hair was glossy and healthy; he possessed an almost animal intensity in that steady, energized expression.
For a moment, Tim was sure he'd seen a diminutive grey-haired woman trot past in the hallway. The President followed his gaze and slapped the edge of the bed. "Aw, shit. Just a moment, son." He stuck his head out into the hallway and addressed someone out of sight. Then he closed the door. "Just seeing that you're not disturbed. And making positively sure that was a hallucination. Don't let 'em scare you, the doctors told me to reassure you they'll stop soon."
The room seemed to Tim to be zooming in and out, compressing and sucking his perceptions. The feeling got worse as the President loomed up beside him. He hadn't been hallucinating, he was positive.
"Tim," the President said and pulled up a Louis XIV chair, sat. "The world needs reason, and idiocy is everywhere the enemy of what would otherwise be a smooth exercise of will on the part of humankind, to improve, to better, to perfect the nobler instincts and the furtherance of nobler causes."
"It would seem so."
"It would seem so! Ah, a smart one. Do you or do you not hold to the belief, along the lines that stupidity is as natural as entropy, that everybody has a certain amount? That it is inalienable?"
Tim had to think about this. "No."
"And why is that?"
"Because of the me- medical evidence. The gene."
The President drew himself upright with a smile, put on a faraway look. "So glad you know about that. Education saves so much time, and explaining."
"But you're special." Tim pointed at the President's nose, or tried to, then discovered he was tied down again. He frowned.
"And why is that, Tim?"
"B'cause... you're the world's biggest f-f-fuckin' idiot."
The President clapped his hands together as in an attitude of prayer, and touched his fingers to his smiling lips. "Yes! Yes, Tim. Go on."
Tim carried on haughtily, determined to show his intelligence. "B'cause the only... person dumb enough... to try and eth- ethnically cleanse all th' idiots..."
"Yes, yes?"
"Th'only person who could see it through an' give the orders... would have to be sssstupid."
"Wonderful! Wonderful, Tim, we're so proud of you." The room was spinning now, spinning rapidly and not slowing down. "You're such a bright young man, you'll go far in this administration. You can rest now, of course."