Burton guessed that what he was in the dreams was too horrible to remember.
Danton sat in the chair before the control bank and stared at his hands until they seemed to stop shaking. It had been a long, long way to Mars. A long, long time in which to think.
Of, for example, who had he been for the last hundred years? He had been someone, someone with a name, a job, a ritual, a wife, kids, everything. A valuable worker, a nice round peg in one of countless millions of nice round holes. Who and what you had been for the past hundred years was certainly a question that could bother you, he thought.
He glanced at Keith and Van Ness. It wasn't bothering them now. They had been two other people for a century also—but they weren't bothered now. They had passed out cold on pre-New World bourbon.
They had better snap out of it, Danton thought a little desperately. The ship had about reached Mars. They had better get up from there.
His hands started shaking again. He got a cigarette lighted and the opiate stuff crawling in his throat. He closed his eyes. For an instant it felt better, hiding in there behind the darkness of his closed lids. But then the thoughts came faster, like schools of irritated fish.
A final war like the last one, destructive beyond memory anyway, was one most of the survivors had been more than happy to forget. They had welcomed reconditioning, the moving into the PLAN, into the New World system of non-violence. People became, largely, depending on the amount of reconditioning necessary, someone else. You can't change solidly laid foundations of thought and still be the same person.
So it was a New World. In it the people were New. Everything starting over again from scratch. A small decentralized population. Beneficent leaders, masters of psychology. No weapons, not even in museums, no conception of war, no fears of tomorrow. There were no enemies on Earth. In fact, the mind was conditioned so that the concept of an enemy was impossible. Outer space was merely a region of lovely stars on clear nights.
Of the few New System soldiers left, most were willing to be reconditioned. Three of them hadn't been willing. Richard Danton, Don Keith, Dwight Van Ness. They had degenerated into drunken pariahs, people without a group with which to identify themselves, lonely, lost, aging and ailing. Finally they did accept reconditioning. Not because they wanted to. But because they had to or go completely insane. Seers, Secretary of Social Security, said this was bad, but that they might be able to bring about an adjustment. It would be difficult, he said, because of involuntary conditioning, but he would see what he could do.