Fred Hoyle - Element 79

Joe looked across at the inner towers. It was from those towers that the monitoring signals issued, directing and controlling the brain of every “grown-up” in the community. By definition, a grown-up was simply someone who had experienced the operation. With the exception of Joe himself, all his group were grown-ups now.

One possibility would be to stop the signals going out from the towers. Yet even if there should be a natural interruption to the flow of signals, due to some unexpected defect, perhaps, Joe saw the grown-ups would be foolish enough to repair the defect. With the monitoring turned off, rivalries would soon develop, and out of those rivalries one group or other would carry through the repairs. Indeed, this was exactly the psychology of the way power had passed gradually to the inorganic instruments. Down the centuries, it turned out more and more that a group of humans could acquire power over other humans by itself yielding power to the inorganic instruments. The more you yielded yourself up to those instruments, the more you could impose your will on other humans. There was an inevitable natural selection in it. Paradoxically, ambition and the insistent desire to dominate contained within themselves the seeds of servitude.

The last step toward servitude came with the offer of immortality, or what seemed like immortality, to a number of renegades, whom Joe hated above all else. The thing in this grim, gray building was no longer purely inorganic. It had many actual human brains, or portions of brains, integrated into itself. This was why the controls were so delicate and why the special servants were needed. Joe had never been able to discover exactly what status the human brains occupied in the total functioning of the thing. His suspicion was that the brains were merely used as ancillary instruments, as “lower centers.” Yet they enabled the thing to understand human psychology, to understand human psychology through and through. It was only after brains had become a part of the thing that the monitoring system itself was gradually developed.

The bitterest aspect of the monitoring was the relentless way in which steps were taken to insure the full efficiency of the control, by means of highly compact storage devices placed inside the skull of every grown-up. It was just in order to have these devices checked and read that all grown-ups were required to pay regular visits to the cubicles. Because of these visits, imposed by the monitoring control, it was impossible for grown-ups to plan subversion. It was impossible for them to escape in a geographical sense, as Joe had done. They were prisoners, emotional toys in the hands of a pitiless master.

The time came when Joe’s group returned from convalescence. He’d expected to see far more in the way of ugly wheals on the upper part of the skull. It was only because the hair was still growing that the mark of the operation was at all obvious. It was easy to see why you had to look hard, once recovery was complete, to see the tiny telltale line in the hair growth. The operation produced essentially no departure from normal, so far as outward appearances were concerned. Even so, Joe had the feeling of something unclean about the whole lot of them. The strange thing was they all seemed to feel the same way about him. Only too obviously he was no longer their natural leader. They made him feel more and more the odd man out. Only Pat tried to treat him normally. She even wanted him to kiss her. There wasn’t anything in the kisses, but Joe was surprised the monitoring control didn’t stop it. The control could easily have made Pat freeze up completely. The situation must be completely known, because Pat was paying regular visits to the cubicles, just as all the other members of his group were.

The days slipped by. Joe played his hand very slowly, taking the steps he had to take one by one, often with a couple of weeks separating consecutive moves.

One morning, Joe came down to the usual communal breakfast to find the whole of his group gone. This was the day Joe had dreaded for so long, the day of the first Camp. He hadn’t told Pat anything of the real purpose of the Camps. This was one of the things he’d learned in the big library. The principal object of the Camps was to shatter the sexual drive of all young grown-ups. Joe could see enough of the point of view of “the other side” to understand how much of a nuisance sexual drive would be if it pervaded the community. It would destroy the crèche system, which permitted such careful conditioning of the young. Love would induce rivalries that might soon destroy the carefully knit communal life. Sexual drive might even cause men and women to become brave, even to resist the dominance of the thing in the building without windows. Sexual drive might cause ordinary men and women to attack and destroy the special servants of the thing, whatever the cost to their reason and sanity. Joe could understand why sexual drive had to be rigorously controlled. What appalled him was the calculated way in which it was destroyed.

Since the operation on his group, it was obvious nothing of sex had passed through the minds of the group. Joe could tell this, because there had been nothing of the smutty little jokes which had been a part of their daily life before. The sex had been quite turned off by the monitoring control. He knew this too from Pat’s kisses, they were the kisses of a little girl. The sex in his group had been canceled quite completely. Joe couldn’t understand why this wasn’t sufficient, why there was any real reason for the existence of the Camps. All he could think was, there might not be any reason, the thing might take a kind of pleasure in the Camps. Human brains were integrated into the thing. Joe more than suspected that human brains might be playing an important part in directing the control in this one activity, at least. Those brains, the brains of the renegades, might derive constant pleasure from this complete emotional dominance of their own kind.

What would happen to his group, once they were comfortably installed in the Camp, would be quite horrible. The Camp itself was a spacious prison from which escape was impossible once you were inside it. Everybody would be made to leave, the cooks, the drivers, maintenance men, everybody except his group. Signals would be made to radiate throughout the Camp. The signals, against which you were utterly defenseless once the operation was performed, would have the effect of sharply reversing the sexual inhibitions which had been imposed on the whole group over the past weeks. Everybody would think it tremendous fun the first day, even the first two or three days. But hardly on the fourth or fifth day, and certainly not by the tenth day. At that stage the whole group would be in a temporarily shattered condition.

In a group as young as Joe’s, the return to normal would be fairly quick, perhaps two or three weeks. Memories of the first Camp would become distorted, in the sense of pleasure remembered and exhaustion forgotten. The group would even begin to look forward to its next Camp. This would take place after an interval of about two months. The same pattern would be repeated. It would be repeated again and again for a space of about five years.

At a certain stage, however, usually about eighteen, a general dread of the next Camp would begin to cloud the whole of a young person’s mind. The dread would become stronger and stronger as one Camp followed the next. Yet still there would be no intermission, no mercy from the thing in the building without windows. In these last years, usually nineteen or twenty, it would be necessary for the signals in the Camp to become much stronger, to produce an equivalent response. In fact, over the whole five or six years the driving signals would be steadily increased. The process ended only when visits to the cubicles at last showed the individual’s sexual responses to have been finally burned out. So at the age of twenty or so, the exact age differing a little with the individual, every grown-up in the community became quite sexless. The matron of Joe’s crèche and the two bronzed medical orderlies had all been completely burned out, nothing of the normal responses was left.