Fred Hoyle - Element 79

Joe expected to be quickly pursued. They couldn’t monitor him, of course, but they could order a general aerial search. He saw the more frenzied his flight the more obvious would his path be, and the more easily might they trace him from above. So he stayed quite close to the community. Once he had found good shelter, there was really little point in pushing on any further. Besides, the nearer he stayed to the community the better could he judge what actions were being taken. It soon turned out that no actions were being taken, for a reason Joe came quickly to appreciate.

In the books he’d always read that other animals were markedly inferior to man. Yet in their own world, Joe found this not to be so. His uninstructed efforts to trap and to fish met with negligible success. He found some edible fungi, clumps of wild berries, and this was about all. It was enough to keep him alive, but it was not encouraging for the future. The only aid Joe had managed to bring with him was a source of fire. Even this would become exhausted after a while. He saw he had badly misjudged the wild country. Only with risk now could things be retrieved. If he could find one, he’d simply have to try raiding an unoccupied Camp.

After a lot of weary slogging, he did manage to find a Camp that seemed to be unoccupied, but the buildings were solid, impenetrable to bare hands, even to sticks and stones. He was trying one of the smaller buildings when he was horrified to hear a voice behind him. “Ah, I thought you’d turn up sooner or later, young fellow-me-lad.”

In panic and anger Joe swung round to find it was only an old man. Joe had seen him often enough in the community, out had never spoken to him.

“Hee-hee, gave you quite a start, didn’t I? Suppose you take a look at this, eh!”

“This” was a basket, quite large, crammed with food. The starving boy grabbed it without comment and began to wolf its contents. He’d never eaten so fast in his life, or even conceived it was possible to eat so fast. Not until he was completely stuffed did the boy give any attention to the old man. Then he said, “How did you know I’d turn up?”

“Because I knew you’d be hungry. You see, I did the same myself once.”

“You mean you refused the operation?”

“Yes, I did the same as you, made the same break into the country. But I had to come back in the end.”

“So then, they made you have it?”

“No, they didn’t.”

Joe glanced quickly at the old man. but he couldn’t tell anything, because the old fellow had a good-sized hat well pulled down. The train of thought must have been obvious, for the old man chuckled and said, “I’m not going to take it off, just to gratify your curiosity. You believe what I tell you. They didn’t force me to have it.”

“Then what did they do to you?”

“Nothing, nothing at all, and they’ll do nothing to you. It’s no good, you going off again into the country. There’s no way there. The only way is for you to come back with me.”

Joe thought he saw what the idea was. “So that’s why they didn’t bother coming after me. They got you to do it instead.”

The old man looked a long time at the boy and then shook his head gravely. “Listen, my young friend, do you really think they, they, have need of me to do their work for them? D’you know what they’d have done if they’d really wanted to bring you back?”

“An air search.”

“Nonsense, not with you unmonitored. You could hide for a million years out there. For a bright lad you show a surprising ignorance.”

“So there’s nothing they could do except send you.”

“Don’t you know there’s a kind of animal with special gifts for tracking? You give it the smell of somebody. The clothes you left behind had your smell, my boy. Those animals would have followed wherever you went, through the woods, over the hills, down the valleys. When they came at last upon you they’d simply have held you there—until an aerial vehicle arrived.”

Joe did remember reading something like this somewhere. He had a feeling the old man was exaggerating and he wondered why. The old fellow got up from a sitting posture and added, “Now I think it’s time we stopped all this nonsense and started back home.”

Naturally, Joe had no intention of going with the old man. Saying he would think about it, he seized the remainder of the food and made off at a run into the forest.

During the next two days Joe did in fact do a lot of thinking. From his earliest years he’d been taught that it was quite impossible to live in the wild country. All the children in his crèche, all the children in every crèche, were impregnated with the dangers and horrors of the wild country. All his experience seemed to show this was right. Yet, was it really right, or was it just a clever illusion? The information about animals, about their simplicity, perhaps even that was part of the deception? Joe saw the beginnings of a plan now. It meant returning to the community. There was no help for it but to return, unfortunately, because he hadn’t done his preparatory work properly. In fact, he hadn’t done his preparatory work at all. Which was where he’d been deceived. Joe knew he’d have to go very slowly and with the utmost caution.

The matron received him back at the crèche as if nothing had happened. Nobody attempted to molest him, just as the old man had told him would be so. It meant they were playing a game, just as he himself was beginning to play a game.

In the next few weeks there was a good deal of spare time, because his group were still away convalescing. Joe read mostly the things he was supposed to read. The illicit things he did only in tiny fragments. He also walked about quite a bit. He’d become used to the feel of his legs while he’d been out in the wild country. It made him horribly restless now, being cooped up in the crèche.

One afternoon his wanderings took him to the thing he hated most. It was a building, massive and strong, entirely without windows. It was built in a circle about a mile in diameter. In the center he could see the cluster of high towers from which all the monitoring was done. There were two entrances, Joe knew, but only one could he see. The other was concealed from all but the special servants. Only they knew the manner of its opening. The entrance Joe could see was as plain as it could be, a wide-open entrance. It led nowhere, of course, except to the cubicles, the cubicles which every grown-up member of the community visited every two weeks. Joe watched people coming out and going in. They were paying their compulsory visits to the cubicles as if it was the most natural and normal thing to do.

This building, so forbidding to Joe, but taken so much for granted by the others around him, was the home—or rather, the housing—of they. People always referred to the thing as they, but how did anybody know it really wasn’t it? Perhaps there was only one. Then there’d have to be just one of the things in each of the other communities. Perhaps somewhere there was a completely dominant one, perhaps even the thing in this building. Joe allowed himself to toy with the wonderful airy dream of destroying it, just as he’d done hundreds of times before. For years he’d lain in bed at night building fantasies around this idea. But now he saw it couldn’t possibly work that way. Even if this one could be destroyed, there would still be all the others, hundreds of them. Even if he destroyed the dominant one, the others might again be able to make another dominant one, like bees can always make a new queen.

Joe turned over in his mind some of the forbidden things he’d read in the history books. The worst thing of all, really, was the incredible complacency, the incredible selfishness, of the generations which had brought this situation to pass. The foremost scientific authorities of bygone ages had solemnly declared that inorganic instruments could never be dangerous, because it would always be necessary for them to be programed by man. Idiots. Even while such statements were being made, the facts were already pointing in exactly the opposite direction. Surgeons, human surgeons, had already discovered simple forms of behavior which could be induced, whether the subject willed it or no, by electrical potentials imposed on the brain. This discovery had come during brain operations—with the brain exposed, the electrical fields could be imposed quite simply from outside. The next stage had been to insert electrodes in the brains of animals. Fierce animals could be rendered tame through such devices. Still nobody saw the obvious implication, even though electronics had reached the stage of micro-miniaturization. The implication which everybody, except imbeciles, perhaps, should have noticed was that the interior of the bony structure of the skull could be permanently impregnated with a complex mass of ultra-sensitive miniature electronics. With the skull replaced, there would be no need for crude electrodes sticking out from the head. Signals from outside could be rectified within the head to produce a highly configurated electric field. The principle was already there in the dim, distant reaches of history. Superlative technical skill was needed to convert the principle to a reality. The intervening centuries had supplied the skill, and now it was humankind itself that was being programed, exactly the opposite from what the wise men of history had asserted.