Damon Knight - Orbit 18

*Crimestopper’s Notebook:

Time-out: Removing the client from the opportunity to get Positive Reinforcement.

Panel 2: The Skinner, Angry Agnes, and Happy Harry. The Skinner talks only to Harry, ignores Agnes.

Skinner: What a good boy you are being, Happy Harry! Look at your big smile! What a good, happy citizen Harry is. Look, everybody, look at how happy Happy Harry is. Here, Harry, have an M&M.

(Lookit #1: Reinforce behavior you want.)

Happy Harry: I love M&Ms.

Angry Agnes: Boo-hoo! Boo-hoo! (This is no fun at all. Always before when I cried they reinforced my behavior. What am I doing wrong?)

Panel 3: Same cast. Agnes has extinguished her undesirable behavior.

Skinner: (She has extinguished her bad behavior! I must reward her without delay. I must reinforce her noncrying behavior.) Now, that’s a good citizen, Agnes. Let’s do that all the time, shall we? You know we all love you. All the skinners love you. Here’s an M&M.

Agnes: I love M&Ms. I’m a good girl. Good girls get M&Ms.

Harry: Boo-hool Boo-hoo! Boo-hool

Skinner: (Oh, dam it! But I must not turn to him. I must not reward him.)

(Lookit #2: Ignore behavior you do not want.)

Time-out:

Remove the client from the opportunity to get positive reinforcement of bad behavior.

Client:

The clients are defined to be pre-delinquent children.

Pre-delinquent:

A child likely to become a delinquent. Most broadly, a child before he or she has committed any act which would be classified as delinquent. Or, a child before he or she has yet had time to think of delinquent acts to commit, before having had bad behavior reinforced. A child in an uncontrolled environment is well known to be capable of extreme delinquency; therefore all uncontrolled children are pre-delinquent.

Time-out:

The skinners come once a week to round up the pre-delinquent children. The doctors and nurses love them, with their merry yellow masks and their hearty handshakes for one and all. Smile at them, and by George they’ll pop a sweet right into your mouth. Sort of takes you back, doesn’t it, the mouth-watering tang of a lemon drop from the skinner’s own hands. Of course we’re beyond all that now, of course. We’re adults now, and we know how to behave, and we don’t need the little bribes for being good. We’re mature.

Still, it does make you feel good, you know? Makes you want to smile.

Grinning, the skinners troop along the quiet white corridors of the hospital with the grinning doctors and nurses. Down to the pink and blue sour-sweet smells of the maternity ward where the tiny children are with their mothers. Sucking on the candy nipples, tasting the last drop of milk they will ever get.

Some of the mommies shed a tear. The skinners—smiling, smiling—turn their funny faces around until the mommies are laughing at the antics, then pop them an M&M. All smiles from ear to ear, the mommies hand over the little bundles, which are put in glass boxes.

The babies struggle a bit. The skinners hold them to see if they’ll cry. If they do, pop they go into the boxes. The boxes are soundproof, so the mommies won’t be disturbed.

On this long-ago day there is a problem mommy. She went to a public school. She was only rounded up and discovered to be pre-delinquent at the age of fifteen. She loves M&Ms, but she loves her baby, too. It’s a real problem. Poor mommy. She cries, and all the capering of the skinners cannot console her. She wants to stop crying in order to have an M&M, but she can’t.

So Terrible Theresa is pulled from a pink-cloud lazy dream and the nipple, and the warm muzzly nipple, it’s gone! She howls at once.

And poor dumb confused mommy, she howls back. Theresa’s bad behavior is reinforced something awful. She doesn’t know what’s going on, but mommy’s crying!

She is popped into the box without an M&M, hungry and cross. She howls for the longest time.

She is going to be a problem.

DATE: 9/12

PROBLEM NUMBER: 13/3/2

TARGET: Leftism

OBJECTIVES: Observe clients in the six-month-to-one-year age group. Select those with a tendency to favor the left hand. Resident will decrease left-orientation to zero by 9/14.

PLAN: Client will be allowed to pick up objects at random, all placed on client’s right side. When client picks up the object with right hand, behavior will be reinforced with praise, M&Ms, and cuddling. When client picks up object with left hand, no reward will be forthcoming.

DATE: 5/27

PROBLEM NUMBER: 42/5/1

TARGET: Homosexual Tendencies

OBJECTIVES: Resident will select clients with observed prehomosexual behavior, such as: (male) non-participation in athletic activities, crying behavior, interest in girls’ toys such as dolls, interest in reading or music, tenderness; (girls) aggression, poor appearance, squirming, assertiveness, friendliness to other girls, lack of interest for boys.

PLAN: Client will be ignored when...

... hyperactivity, disruptiveness, nose-picking, thumb-sucking, laziness, inattentiveness, obscenity, disrespect, negativism, nonparticipation, solitarism, antisociality, excessive precociousness, “brown-nosing,” frowning behavior, showing-off, smart-assing, contradiction of the resident, anti-Americanism, disrespect for authority, hooliganism, antimilitarism, excessive originality, inventiveness, anti-Institutionality, curiosity, Non-Smiling Syndrome . . .

Waves of sympathetic excitement are shuddering down the ether, tingling and charging the atmosphere of Ward 47i, East Wing, National Behavioral Institute 3490, Hershey, Pennsylvania. Murray the skinner feels it. The children bathe in it. Even Terrible Theresa feels it.

B. T. the skinner is on his way, what goodies does he have for good little boys and girls today?

Murray is in command. He is gratified to see that the excitement is carefully restrained. Only a few squirmers here and there, and he carefully makes note of names and times. The flow charts are flowing, the lessons are going, and only the children’s salivary glands are out of control. There is sucking-in of breath, the sound of slurping.

Theresa has the itches. Down there in that bothersome itchy old pee-pee, darn it, and it just won’t stop. Keep your hands in your lap, Theresa, and you’ll get an M&M if only you’ll stop squirming. But that’s where the problem is, dam it!

Murray has conscientiously given her a second M&M when her snuffling crying behavior extinguished. But still she sits, staring at the wall, removed from the opportunity for positive reinforcement. Cry away, cry-baby, you won’t get any sympathy from us. We reward happy behaviors. Smile, Theresa! It’s a beautiful day.

(Count the thumb tack holes on the patch of white wall twenty-five twenty-six twenty-nine. That’s it. Think about B.T. the skinner. Count the holes again fifteen seventeen.) Squirm.

Darn it!

/ gotta scratch, I just gotta scratch!

Ooooooh, that’s much better. I wonder if Murray saw?

The door bursts open. It’s B.T., gibbering and jabbering, seven-foot-tall clown with a spinning face. The class is electrified, but sits stone-still. Some of them are drooling.

“Hi, B.T. . . .” Billy begins, and is shocked as he realizes that he is the only one on his feet, waving. He has forgotten himself. He only thought that since Murray had been yelling and he had yelled back and he did get his M&M . . .

“Billy, you shouldn’t speak out of turn,” says Murray. He is secretly pleased that this embarrassing thing has happened to this particular client, who did raise his voice earlier and Murray had forgotten to do anything because his face was hurting on account of Theresa. Now his head is hurting. He rubs the puckered white scar on his forehead.