“Oh, Mama!”
Becky’s eyes were wide as she stopped suddenly at the sight of the playground. Lori, always a pragmatist, didn’t bother with exclamations of awe. With a shrill “Yippee!” she dropped her mother’s hand and shot across the grass, heading for the slippery slide that was spewing children out of its mouth even as she ran.
Becky tugged on Madeline’s hand. “Come on, Mother! Oh, this is neat!”
Madeline smiled, the first time in four days, and released her youngest daughter. “Go. Don’t wait for me.”
She walked to the low cement wall that separated the lawn from the sand of the playground and watched her two daughters in amusement. They would barely get started up the slide or on the swing when they’d spot a new attraction and off they’d dart, too excited to stay in one place for more than a few seconds.
They had come to the park after her visit to Eric, a visit that had left her greatly relieved and yet full of uneasiness and dismay. Why were they holding her son when everyone else was free? Why were they so adamant about not mentioning implantation?
She shrugged off the questions, still too confused by the events of the past week to sort it all out, and looked at her daughters.
Once again Madeline felt that curious intertwining of poignant longing and overwhelming revulsion. She knew the source of her longing. Shalev was all that they had lost—electric stoves, supermarkets, automatic washers, parks and slippery slides, ice cream sodas, movies, symphony orchestras, a university, clothes with a variety of styles, colors, and materials. Maybe the AFC didn’t have everything, but compared to the village it was a dazzling array of plenty.
Then, as her hand raised slowly to touch the bandage at the back of her neck, she knew with equal clarity the source of the revulsion. Even now, as it welled up in her, she felt a quick clutch of fear. The revulsion always brought anger, and anger brought the pain.
“Watch, Mama! Watch me!” Lori was at the top of the slide.
“I’m watching, honey,” she called, glad for the interruption in her thoughts. Lori squealed happily as she shot downward.
“Very good!” Madeline called. Then slowly she turned and walked over to a bench.
“Mr. Lloyd?”
Mastering the impulse to glance up at the mirror, Eric lay motionless on the cot.
“Mr. Lloyd!”
He noted with satisfaction the edge of exasperation in the cool voice.
“You have a visitor waiting outside.”
In spite of himself, Eric opened his eyes. “Who is it?”
“If you would step to the back of your cell, please.”
For nearly thirty seconds Eric lay there defiantly, irritated by the impersonal voice coming from the speaker, but then his desire to see who his visitor was overpowered his pride, and he swung his legs off the cot and stood up and moved to the far corner. The door opened and a tall figure stepped through. For a long moment Eric stared, completely dumbfounded. Then he exploded with joy. “Cliff!”
“Hello, Eric.” Cliff Cameron stepped forward and clapped his hands on Eric’s shoulders.
“Cliff! But I thought—I saw you—” He stopped, words failing him.
“I know.” His leathery face broke into a wide smile. “Sorry to disappoint you.”
“Why didn’t Mom tell me? She was here just a little while ago.”
“I’ve only seen her briefly. They’ve pretty much kept me away from the other villagers.”
Eric shook his head, still stunned by the sight of this man. He was the same old Cliff, a little more tired looking but relaxed, poised, and confident. And yet he was different. Then Eric realized it was his clothes. The buckskin and homespun were gone, and he was dressed in tan slacks and an open-necked shirt. Eric stepped back to look at him, still unable to believe his eyes. “I was sure you were dead, or I would never have left you. I saw you go down.”
“Well, I went down all right. These people have developed a weapon that uses ultrahigh-frequency sound waves. They call it a stun gun—an appropriate name. It focuses sound waves much as a laser beam does light waves, making it highly concentrated and powerful. It’s like getting hit with a giant, invisible fist. On full power it can kill a man, but fortunately they only had it on stun capacity. It knocked me out instantly. When I woke up, I was tied up in the back of a truck.”
Eric bit his lip. “You know about Dad?”
“Yes, and the others too. With nearly a hundred men, our few villagers didn’t stand a chance.”
“But at least you are alive. I can’t believe it. I was so sure that you were dead.”
Cliff motioned to the cot, then pulled up the stool so he could face Eric.
“Have you seen the rest of the family?” Eric asked.
“Yes. They seem fine.”
“Are they? Did Mom tell you about some kind of operation they have forced her and the others to go through?”
Cliffs mouth noticeably sagged. “She didn’t have to.” He bent his head over and gently pulled the hair back. The bright red, inch-long incision was still held together with black stitches. “I took my bandage off this morning.”
“What is it? What happened? Mom could only whisper a word or two when she kissed me goodbye after her visit.”
Eric watched anxiously as Cliff paled slightly, and a brief flicker of pain touched his face.
“I’ve been implanted. I believe that is the correct terminology.”
“Implanted? What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means I have a microminiaturized computer chip planted at the base of my skull. From it four microelectrodes protrude into the hypothalamus.”
The woman next to her on the bench glanced quickly at the white bandage on the back of Madeline’s head. Then she looked away again quickly, obviously embarrassed. She was silent for a moment, then said, “Are you new?”
Madeline nodded.
“And those must be your children.”
To keep their hair off the bandages, Madeline had pulled it up into ponytails, and the patches of white were clearly visible.
“Yes, those are my girls.”
“Do you have others?”
“A daughter, twenty-one, and a son—” She took a quick breath. “A son, twenty-four.”
“Four children! Even without the bandages, that would give you away.”
“Oh?”
“Yes. Most people here have one, sometimes two. I have six.”
That won her a surprised look, for she looked young. She laughed at Madeline’s expression. “I’m an outsider too. We were part of a small group of about fifty in eastern Oregon. They brought us in four years ago.”
“Against your will?”
“Oh, we came willingly enough, wide-eyed to think we had found civilization. Then we woke up with bandages on our necks. But, of course, it was all for our own good.”
Again Madeline nodded, warming to this woman who understood the bitterness and revulsion. “Which are yours?”
“The two boys there on the merry-go-round. The one in the blue shirt is nine; the one in yellow is eleven. I have two younger girls and two teen-aged boys.”
“What does your husband do?” The instant she asked, Madeline regretted the question.
“He’s an accountant for a chain of clothing stores. How about yours? Have they told him what they’ll have him do yet?”
Madeline bit her lip. “He was killed trying to defend our village.”
The woman touched Madeline’s arm. “I’m terribly sorry.”
“It’s all right. I’m gradually getting used to the reality of it now.” She looked away quickly. Why do you lie? Tell her you cry yourself to sleep every night, that never in your life, not even the first time you lost your husband, have you ever felt so terribly alone. But when she turned back she said only, “At least Shalev is a pretty place.”
“Yes, and you adjust to—” The woman’s eyes flicked up to the bandage again. “You adjust quickly. Even the children.”
“How quickly?”
The woman looked away. “It was especially hard on my boys. They were never mean or malicious, it was just that they could never pass one another without one poking or shoving at the other. It was terrible for them at first.” Her voice caught, and she had to finish in a whisper. “I used to get so angry with them for it. Now I’d give anything to have those days back again.”
Eric stared at Cliff, his face blank, uncomprehending. “Hypothalamus? Microelectrodes? What are you talking about?”
Suddenly Cliff’s eyes widened. “You mean, you haven’t been implanted?”
“Of course not.” Then Eric shot to his feet. “Wait a minute. I was drugged for several days.” His hands went up to the back of his neck.
“Let me see.” Cliff stood up and probed carefully at the base of Eric’s skull. “No.” He peered more closely. “No,” he repeated in surprise, “you haven’t been.” He stepped back and gave Eric a long, searching look.
Eric returned his gaze as he rubbed the back of his head thoughtfully. “So that’s what Mother meant?”
“Yes,” Cliff said. “Every one of us from the village have been implanted except for infants under a year old.” Again that searching look probed Eric. “Except you. Why not you?”
Eric sat back down on the cot heavily, and Cliff joined him. “Don’t ask me. I’ve been sitting in this stupid cell slowly going mad trying to find out what’s going on. Until Mom came, I didn’t even know if anyone else from the village was here, or even alive.”
“That’s another puzzling thing. Why are you being held here? The rest of us are free.”
“I don’t know! Don’t ask me what’s going on. Tell me more about this thing. What does it mean to be implanted?”
Cliff opened his hands, his eyes defeated. “It is, very simply, the perfect human-control device.”
“Control device?”
Cliff sighed wearily. “Let me back up and start at the first.” The frustration pulled down the corners of his mouth. “I don’t know the whole story yet. The man in charge is someone they call the Major. Evidently locating settlements like ours and hauling in people from all kinds of places is standard procedure, but newcomers aren’t the only ones implanted. Every person in Shalev and the Alliance gets one of these little numbers.”
“You mean everyone—” He left the sentence unfinished as the enormity of the thought hit him.
“Everyone, as near as I can find out. Over two hundred thousand in this so-called Alliance of Four Cities and every one of us penned up like sheep—only the fences are invisible, electronic ones.”
He stopped suddenly, breathing deeply.
Cliff nodded, but he continued to take deep gulps of air until his color started to return. “Okay,” he sighed, “it’s going now.”
“What? What is it?”
“You have just witnessed the little black box in full operation. I’ve got to learn to be more careful. Whenever I start thinking about what this whole thing means, I start seething inside. That’s all it takes.”
Eric shook his head. “I don’t understand.”
“It’s really very simple. I got angry and the little black box slapped me down for it.”
“But how? How can it do that?”
Cliff took a deep breath. “Do you remember when you were in high school and I gave a lecture on operant conditioning to your social studies class? Pavlov and his dog and all that?”
Eric nodded. “Ring the bell when you bring the dog dinner, and he salivates. Pretty soon all you have to do is ring the bell to make him salivate.”
“Right. That’s conditioning in its simplest form. Well, I won’t bore you with all the technical details, but this Major, whoever he is, has developed the ultimate conditioning device. Compared to this, Pavlov is a piece of academic trivia. These guys are light years ahead of him.”
Eric shook his head. “You’ve lost me.”
Cliff took a deep breath. “Early in this century, brain research was crude and very experimental. But then with the development of space-age technology—computers, electronic probes with tips a thousand times smaller than a needle’s, electronic devices that measure the tiniest impulses from the brain—our knowledge was catapulted forward. In the fifties, they proved that all emotions—joy, anger, fear, ecstasy—all emotions begin as electrical impulses in the brain. They trigger physiological reactions such as rapid heartbeat, sweaty palms, and so on, but to begin with, they are only electrical impulses in the hypothalamus.”
Eric nodded, beginning to understand. “And you said it was the hypothalamus where this implantation is put.”
“Yes. In addition to the hypothalamus being the seat of emotions, scientists found a thin stream of cells in that part of the brain, the source of all sensations of pain. They also found that if you stimulate those pain cells with an electrical impulse—a few hundred thousandths of a volt—it will ‘tell’ the body it is experiencing pain—even though there is no outside pain.”
He stopped again, raising his hands for emphasis. “Do you understand that, Eric? Pain may be artificially induced by electrically stimulating the brain. However, it is not artificial pain. It’s as real, as trauma producing, as terrible as a blow to the body or a bad burn.”
He stood up, moved to the washbasin, filled Eric’s cup, and drained it swiftly. “Next came the development of what is called a stimoceiver.”
“A what?”
“A stimoceiver, from the words stimulus and receiver. It’s a tiny miniaturized radio receiver with microelectrodes attached to it that can read, or better receive, the impulses of the brain. An electrical impulse can also be sent down those electrodes to stimulate certain areas of the brain. Thus it both stimulates and receives, and thus its name—stimoceiver.”
Eric stopped his pacing. “And that’s what they mean by implantation?”
Cliff hesitated, then took a quick breath and sat down again. “Yes. The concept is brilliantly—no, hellishly simple. What they’ve done is to combine a stimoceiver with a miniature computer, or better, a computer chip. The electrodes are planted in the hypothalamus, and impulses, thousands of them every minute, are sent to the miniature computer, which sorts through them all. When a pattern associated with unacceptable behavior shows up—guilt, violence, anger, dishonesty, hatred—the computer reacts by sending a mild electrical charge down another electrode into the pain center.”
His eyes were like dark pools in a muddy river as he turned and stared at Eric. “The result? A fiendishly effective teaching device. The perfect conditioning machine. You either salivate properly or you get burned. One step out of line and whammo!”
“Faster, Becky!” Lori shouted joyfully. “Let’s go faster.” She pushed up hard on the teeter-totter and shot up to the apex of the board’s path.
But as Becky came down to the bottom, she spied the nearby jungle gym. “Oh, that looks fun!” In one swing of her short little legs, she was off the teeter-totter and darting away. Lori plummeted like a boulder dropped over a precipice. The teeter-totter slammed to the ground with a bone-jarring thud, bouncing her off and sending her sprawling on her face into the sand.
For one or two seconds she was too startled to react; then tears of pain sprang to her eyes, and she burst out crying.
Madeline was off the bench and to her side in a moment, the other woman close behind. “What happened?” she said as she helped Lori up and put her arm around her.
“Becky made me fall!” She rubbed at her backside.
As her mother soothed her, Lori looked up and saw that the other children had gathered around her, wide-eyed and curious. One of the boys shook his head in disgust. “Girls!” he muttered. With an effort Lori bit back the tears, deeply shamed to be viewed with such contempt. Then she spied Becky, approaching slowly, head ducked in shame.
“Becky, you dummy!” she cried angrily. “Why did you—”
A sharp cry cut off her words, and she doubled over as though hit in the stomach with a huge fist. She stumbled forward, pulling out of her mother’s grasp, and fell to her face. One long, agonizing scream rent the air as she rolled back and forth, clutching at her stomach.