Fred Hoyle - Element 79

Although the girls were as much affected as the boys, they were not in any way incapacitated so far as child-bearing was concerned. From twenty to twenty-five was the usual period for child-bearing. The children were artificially induced, and were sent at birth to one or other of the several crèches, where they would spend their entire lives until the time of the first Camp. Some few young men were required to deliver the sperms for the artificial induction. The young men were selected on the criteria of intelligence, submissiveness, and physique. Joe qualified on the first and last of these. An intense display of submissiveness in the months preceding the operation would almost certainly have singled him out as a breeder. He himself would have been given no choice, of course. This was exactly why Joe had made his stern decision. His refusal to submit made it certain that, even if the operation were forced on him, he would never be “awarded the status” of a breeder, he would never be obliged to father thousands of children into a life of helpless bondage.

Joe knew his group would be moved out of the crèche immediately following the first Camp. He wanted to see Pat once again, in spite of what must have happened to her at the Camp. He found her quite easily, almost as if she had been deliberately put in his way. Nor was it difficult for him to get her to himself for a while. When they were alone, out-of-doors, she looked at him with big, haunted eyes. He expected her to cry, as she had done when she was a little girl. Instinctively, he put his arm around her, just as he had done when they were both small. The mere effect of his touch was to produce intense shock. Poor Pat, his Pat, her face went utterly vacant. The mouth opened and slobbered. He laid her on the ground, patted her cheeks, and shouted her name. Within less than a minute she recovered, the vacancy was gone, and there was the same dumb look in the eyes. Joe took care not to touch her again, allowing her to get to her feet without help. He didn’t know what to say, so he simply turned away, walking as fast as he could, his eyes blinded by tears.

Joe made his preparations quickly. He knew now what they were doing, he knew why they had let him come back. For weeks past, nobody had spoken to him properly, only the occasional monosyllable. He was utterly without friends, without anybody to consult, ostracized by his own human community. The one person he really cared for they were destroying quite deliberately under his very eyes.

There was just one thing more he wanted to know. Joe found the old man at last, the one who had brought him the food. The man was still wearing the same hat well pulled down. Joe asked him, “Why did you let them do it?”

“For the same reason you will, because there is no other life for you. Suicide or this, that’s the only choice.”

The man took off the hat and Joe could just barely see the division in the hair. “How did you go about getting them to do it? Nobody’s been near me. You were right about that.”

“Nobody will come near you, my boy. There’ll be no offers to you. It’s you who’ll have to go and beg them now, young fellow-me-lad.”

“Is that what you had to do?”

“That’s what it came to in the end. Mind you, I stuck it out longer than you’ve done. But there’s no other way. If you play your cards right, they’ll take you back and forget the whole thing.”

“How do I go about it?”

“Just tell the matron at your crèche. That’ll be enough to start the ball rolling. They’ll interrogate you a bit, and you’ll have to go down on your knees a bit, of course, but it’ll come out all right in the end.”

Joe thanked the old fellow and said he’d think about it. Since their last talk he’d learned a lot more about animals. With animals called elephants, tame ones, he knew, were used to catch wild ones in the old days. He knew it really wasn’t necessary to tell the matron, the old man would do all the necessary telling. It was so obvious. His case was being carefully documented. The idea was to make him into a tame elephant, to show younger wild ones what might happen to them if they too were to resist. It was to be an exercise in ultimate submission.

He went to see the matron and told her he was thinking of changing his mind. Instantly she became quite friendly and said he was making a wise decision. Joe said he would let her know finally within a week. Then he stole the last of the things he needed.

A vehicle was on its way out to one of the Camps. Inside was a chattering throng of youngsters of about his own age, not his group. He waved at them and they waved in return. He followed the vehicle for a couple of miles or so, as if he were only out on one of his usual walks. Then he cut away into the woods, as he had done before.

This time it would be quite different. This time he had the right sort of weapons, taken from museums, knives and simple firearms, sufficient to pick off any dogs they might send after him. There would be no more trying to fish with bare hands. This time he had hooks, and he knew how to make more hooks should he lose the ones he’d got.

Joe had done everything possible, read everything possible about the old lore. He must learn to survive, at first with the help of the tools he had brought with him, then gradually without them. This was his one and only problem, to survive. Everything else would follow. He would let it be known in the crèches that he had survived, all the young would know, in the years before the operation. The operation couldn’t be performed much before fourteen, not while the skull was still growing. Up to fourteen the youngsters could still think for themselves if they wanted to do so. Because of the incessant conditioning, because of the breeding for submissiveness, there wouldn’t be too many at first. But there would be some. If only in ones and twos, there would be some who would join him, sufficient for a little band to become firmly established.

Joe had now fully understood the inner weakness of the system he had to deal with. It was utterly efficient, utterly ruthless, in meeting any threat from within. It was very nearly helpless against any threat from outside. Appalling weapons could of course be made, but who should operate them? The thing in the grim, gray building was static, it must have its human servants. It must have submissive servants, not aggressive ones. How could submissive humans fight? Under attack the grown-ups would simply grovel, exactly as the matron of his crèche had groveled. Joe had no doubt that submission could be changed to aggression by the monitoring control. He had no doubt the monitoring control could reverse things, just as easily as it reversed things sexually. It would be possible to change every grown-up into a wild, ravaging, murderous monster. Weapons in the hand of such monsters would eventually be turned against the master, however—this was where the weakness, the instability, lay. It might not happen the first time, but it would happen sooner or later, so long as constant pressure from outside could be maintained.

Joe also understood why there were many communities on the Earth, all well separated from each other. Comparatively small communities were much easier to keep under rigorous control than a single very large community would be. Granted no rivalries between the things in the different communities, this was the logical way to do it. The big areas of wild country between the communities supplied natural protective belts. The wild country made it hard for the very young to escape. But Joe had escaped. Now he must survive. Then he must build his band, small at first, bigger as time went on. They would lay siege to the communities, destroy water supplies, capture the young, terrorize the old. Joe had once read of the sacking of an ancient city. The description of a palace running with blood, slippery to the foot, caught his imagination. If ever he and his men captured a community, then indeed the building without windows would be made to run with blood, the blood of the special servants, the blood supplying the biological components of the thing.