Fred Hoyle - Element 79

There was a girl at the crèche. He and Pat had grown up together. Joe had always liked the girl, ever since they were tiny kids. Now, as they were growing older, he liked her a whole lot more. She let him kiss her, of course, she’d always done that. Joe was more than a bit mystified why things hadn’t gone much further. It wasn’t Pat who was stopping it. Nor could it be the grown-ups, Joe could run rings round the grown-ups. It could only mean the monitoring control was aware of Pat and him, and was arranging it so they could never get alone together in the right sort of place.

One day Joe did have a success, not with Pat. He managed to get himself locked overnight in the big library. During the long hours, he found a way into the room containing the forbidden books, the books which were still kept as a matter of record but which nobody, except some occasional old scholar, was permitted to read. He found most of the things he wanted to know. The picture which had formed so far only in a shadowy outline in his mind jumped now into sharp focus. With clarity came decision. A fierce determination swept through the boy. Come what may, he would not submit to the operation.

The date of the operation, scheduled for all Joe’s group at the crèche, was still a little more than two months away. Each day seemed neither longer nor shorter than it had been before. Yet taken together, one day following another, the months melted away like butter in the sun. All arrangements were made, times settled, his was to be about halfway through the morning. The youngsters were told the things they might pack for their convenience, amusement, and occupation at the medical center, later, when they were recovering. They were even given special traveling cases in which to do the packing.

The matron came to Joe’s room on the morning. She came with an injection “to make it easier for him.” It would take about one hour before it would put him really “out.” That would be roughly the time when he would come before the “surgeons,” not human, of course, for no human could achieve the dexterity of those mechanical hands, working both with extreme precision and at lightning speed. There was much to be done in the fifteen or twenty minutes allotted to Joe and to each of his group.

Joe had said nothing of his intention, not even to Pat. He would have liked to have persuaded Pat not to submit, too, but then there would have been serious trouble for her as well. If Pat had been as worried as he was, it would have been different, of course.

The strange thing to Joe was that none of his group, himself excepted, had any real worries. They all accepted the operation as completely natural. Long, careful conditioning in the crèche explained it. The only thing worrying the others was the pain, the few days of exquisite agony which inevitably followed the operation, the pain which no killer had entirely succeeded in suppressing.

The matron’s attitude toward the injection was a part of the conditioning. She behaved in a pleasant manner, as if the injection were of no more consequence than swallowing a vitamin pill. Joe was known to be a “difficult case,” but there had been nothing in his behavior to suggest he might balk at this last stage. From time to time, the matron had dealt with youngsters who had become difficult or even obstreperous. This had always been a few weeks beforehand, so there had been plenty of time to soothe away any doubts by appropriate additives to the youngster’s food. Joe had known this. Why permit them to drug him into stupidity weeks ahead of the critical moment?

This was the critical moment. Brusquely, he instructed the matron to go to hell. She told him not to be a silly boy, so he repeated himself still more forcefully. The woman was now at a loss. Already that morning she had injected a score of other members of the group. She took a large capsule. All she need do was to press it against the boy’s arm, almost anywhere, then touch the release button and one of the battery of fine needles would be sure to penetrate a sensitive spot.

Joe saw the matron’s hand reaching toward him. In a frenzy, he gripped the wrist and twisted hard. The capsule came free and dropped to the floor. Then Joe did something he’d wanted to do for a year or more, he slapped the matron just as hard as he could. He would have liked to have gone on and on slapping her, but once was enough. This wasn’t the time to lose control of himself, once would be quite sufficient. The woman was well-proportioned. She could have returned the blow. Instead she groveled to him, as a beaten dog will grovel.

The matron was distinctly good-looking, in her early thirties. The desire to assault her nearly overwhelmed the boy. Then he remembered she was quite burned out. In a flash the desire was gone, to be replaced by a deep sadness for the woman. He let her go and waited. He tried to sit, but all he could do was to sit a bit, then shuffle a bit, then look out of the window. Alter half an hour they came for him, two medical orderlies. They were strapping, bronzed fellows. There was no point at all in resisting them, nor had Joe planned to do so. Probably they had orders to bring him by restrained force if necessary. So he went along with them quietly and without comment. He was gambling that if he went placidly they wouldn’t force an injection on him at this stage. He thought they’d now wish to interrogate him, and the injections they’d need for the interrogation wouldn’t be the same as the one they needed for the operation.

Joe had also gambled on the direction in which the orderlies would take him, past a certain bush in the gardens surrounding the crèche. Earlier that morning, he’d stuck a good stout stick vertically in the ground, so it looked for all the world like a part of the bush itself. The young fellows didn’t march him aggressively now they saw he was so calm, for they were not conditioned themselves to be aggressive, or swift-moving. No grown-up was conditioned to be aggressive, for that matter. When they came abreast of the right spot, Joe darted with the agility of the young to the bush and pulled up his stick. Before the first man had recovered from his intense surprise at the lightning change in Joe’s disposition, the boy hit him hard across the kneecap. The second man he hit furiously across the shoulders. Then, like the wind he was running toward the vehicle the men had brought, the vehicle in which he planned to escape into the wild country.

There were lots of communities like the one Joe lived in scattered over the Earth, maybe a hundred of them. Nothing of a material kind ever passed between them, except sperms for breeding purposes. Uninterrupted electromagnetic communication passed between the different centers, but the content of that communication had nothing to do with humans. The only thing electromagnetic to do with humans was the light entering their eyes and, of course, the general monitoring itself. The nearest other community was something like three hundred miles away. Joe wasn’t exactly sure, because there hadn’t been anybody who could tell him. Such information wasn’t thought useful in any way. Nor had he been able to find much on this topic during his nocturnal prowl through the big library. At any rate, he knew there was something like three hundred miles of wild country, country without roads, without tracks even, except where tracks had been made by wild animals. It was a country of mountains, lakes, and forest.

His first problem was the vehicle. Although he’d never driven one before, he knew every detail about how a vehicle should be driven. But knowing how to drive and actually driving are two different things, as Joe speedily discovered. Still, he did manage to get the machine working. He did manage to make it move in a crazy sort of way. The drivers of other vehicles saw something was wrong and quickly got themselves out of his path. It didn’t take long to clear the few miles to the outer boundary of the community. Here he ditched the vehicle and set off into the woods.