Damon Knight - Orbit 18

In the back seat the children, bundled to the eyes, were sullen with hunger and the pent energies of indoor confinement, so she felt less guilty than glad when she found that the train had already come and he was there, waiting in the parking lot.

She stopped the Rover and opened the door.

“Welcome home, darling,” she said.

Making someone good is just a matter of operant conditioning— and if that doesn’t work, there’s always Lobey the Needle.

B.T. the skinner is coming to the ward. B.T. is no ordinary skinner; he’s the Big Gingerbread Man, the All-day Sucker. Just look, look at how all the other skinners get out of his way.

His face is round, a perfect compass tracery. Yellow he is, with a smiling countenance. You’ve seen it. Two little raisins for eyes and an upturned mouth with a sketched dimple at each end, and a . . . nose ... it has to be a nose, it’s right there in the middle of his face, isn’t it, but it looks like nothing so much as a Phillips-head screw.

You know why that is. It’s so he can turn his face around. Watch him, when the behaviors get undesirable. He’ll put his hands to his face and rotate it magically and he is ... pensive? thoughtful? worried? His little antsy eyes are now low on his face, his crescent mouth now a wrinkle on his brow. It’s hard to make out, but it’s worrisome. You’d never get the impression that he was actually pleased, but it’s hard to tell what it means. Bad behavior.

He crunches and crackles as he walks. The pockets of his white lab coat are bulging out from the goodies he has brought for the boys and girls whose behaviors have been so desirable all week long. Jelly babies and jujubes, chocolate raisins and malted milk balls and kisses, and sweet-tart lemon drops, orange candy com, caramel popcorn crackerjacks and chewy delights with nougat centers and dripping maraschino cherries. Crunchies and goo-shies and scraped-coconut snowballs. Taffy, butterscotch hard candy wrapped in yellow twists of cellophane sticky and crinkly. M&Ms like red and green and yellow and brown hand grenades that melt in your mind, not in your hand, and candy-cane tactical peppermint nukes, and golf-ball jawbreakers rated at fifty megatons. Zowie! Here comes B.T. the skinner!

In his penguin coat beneath the lab smock there are rolled and tattered pulp comics. He shakes his sleeve and pigeons flutter out. They scamper jerkily around the floor, eying the happy children, until they fall under the influence of B.T. They begin to execute perfect school-figure 8s for the morsels of grain he offers them.

The children are delighted.

We are at the National Behavioral Institute for the Study of Non-Smiling Syndrome in Pre-Delinquent Children, Number 3490, Hershey, Pennsylvania. B.T. the skinner is making his weekly rounds.

DATE: 8/4

PROBLEM NUMBER: 1/1/1

TARGET: Tantrums.

OBJECTIVES: To decrease crying behavior from one hour per day to fifteen minutes per day by 9/4.

PLAN: Client will be ignored when crying behavior occurs. The moment crying behavior shuts off, behavior will be reinforced by praise, M&Ms, and physical attention. Flow sheets will be completed daily.

RESULT: by 9/4, crying behavior had extinguished. Flow sheets attached.

DATE: 9/4.

PROBLEM NUMBER: 2/1/1

TARGET: Speaking out of turn.

OBJECTIVES: Resident will decrease speaking-out-of-turn behavior in hyperactive clients. Starting from an observed base number counted on 9/4, residents will decrease frequency of speaking-out-of-turn behavior by 50% by 9/11.

PLAN: Client will be ignored . . .

Murray the skinner enters Ward 476 of the East Wing of the Institute. In another part of the building B.T. is cavorting and spreading happiness and tooth decay like nitrous oxide. He will not arrive in this part of the building for several hours yet.

“Hey, kids, guess who’s going to be here today?” Murray yells. Twenty-five scrubbed hands go into the air, flutter over twenty-five scrubbed and smiling faces split wide to flash thousands of properly scrubbed teeth. Call on me, Murray, call on me. But no one speaks out of turn.

“Billy, who’s coming?”

“B. T. the skinner’s coming!” Billy yells, and stands in smiling, trembling anticipation, wondering if he’s overstepped the bounds of good behavior. Murray has never yelled at them like this before. Was he supposed to yell back? His salivary glands open and close uncertainly.

Oh, wonderful. He’s reaching into his baggy pocket and coming out with the M&M, which he pops into Billy’s mouth.

“Good boy, Billy. We love you.” Murray pats the child on the head, thinking what a good client he is. Not like Terrible Theresa. He gets a twinge in the facial muscles when he thinks of her. There she is, sullen, perpetually confused, picking her nose and trying to hide it.

Ignore it.

He goes down the line of desks, smiling at each client.

“Let’s see that smile, Beatrice. Let’s see that smile, Jeremy. Let’s see that smile, Christopher.” The faces split even wider, and open to accept the M&Ms. Down the line, down the line, at last coming to number twenty-six, the class dingdong, the girl with the permanent dunce cap, Terrible Theresa.

Quit squirming, Theresa. Can’t you sit still? What’s the matter with you? Are you going to start that crying behavior again? Oh, no, Theresa, don’t do it, don’t, that’s it, bite down on that snotty lip, don’t snuffle like that, you sound like a pig, what’s a pretty girl like you doing with an expression like that, it’s almost a frown —excuse me—and here he comes, here he comes, oh dam he’s passed me up again . . . what did I do . . .

Oh god, how I do love that chocolate.

Ignore it. She just wants the attention.

Theresa’s bad behavior is now causing water to leak from her eyes. What a device. So simple, yet so effective. Fight it, fight it, ignore that tightening in your facial muscles, Murray, and turn her chair to the wall. That’s better.

Hello, wall. There you are again. Not quite as dirty as you were yesterday. They’ve cleaned off the heart-shaped brown mark. Too bad, not much to look at. Just shifting shadows of the people behind her back, having fun.

Theresa puts her thumb in her mouth to stifle the gasping sobs she feels inside; remembers, takes it out and wipes it on her dress. A hand comes around her and pops an M&M into her mouth.

I remembered, I remembered. Oh, I love that chocolate.

Sugar, chocolate, com starch and syrup, cocoa butter, peanuts, emulsifier, salt, dextrin, artificial colors, artificial flavors, deuterium oxide. Fissionable core contains enriched uranium and plutonium with a hard candy coating. Net wt., .03 oz.

Light fuse, place in client’s mouth, get away.

From Basic Behavior Mod: Semester One, Episode Five, “The Skinner versus the Non-Smiling Syndrome,” published by the Pennsylvania Institute for the Pre-Delinquent Child. Pulp, three-color process, third printing, 45 pages. Approved by the Comics Committee.

Panel 1: Angry Agnes is up to her old tricks. She is exhibiting undesirable behavior.

ANGRY AGNES: Boo-hoo! Boo-hoo! Boo-hoo!

SKINNER: Darn it! There goes Angry Agnes again! When will she learn to be a happy citizen? I’m going to isolate her and “time-out”* this crying behavior without delay!