The Year's Best Science Fiction 11

. . . brainwashing is so old-hat as almost to have passed into folklore, Alex Kirs wrote, commenting on his story . . . yet scientists jubilantly announce successful use of physio-psychological conditioning as a curative tool. People nowadays seem, whatever the real, tragic depth of incident and event in their lives, to be frighteningly prone to dismiss it all as meaningless and unfulfilling unless they can align with some party or movement...

Parties and movements, or the need for them, are hardly unique to our limes. But perhaps there is a clue here to the curious counterpoint of conformity and rebellion, constrictions and relaxations, that are specific to the (upbeat tempo) movements of mores and moralities in the sixties.

Do you remember what “civil rights” and “civil liberties” used to mean? We have accepted, one by one, the practices of peacetime military conscription, secret diplomacy, guilt by association, political imprisonment, and political debarment from employment (all unthinkably un-American in the days before the Un-American Affairs Committee). But we are no longer willing to tolerate any denial of what rights of citizenship we do retain, on the primitive and ludicrous grounds of color prejudice.

“Freedom of speech” used to be illustrated by Voltaire’s epigram: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” But most “intelligent liberals” accepted without question the necessity for some degree of censorship about sex, and the “seamy side of life.” (“Sex education” was a crusade as much as fifty years ago—but it was to be conducted in sanitary “scientific” language, in a pure—nay, chapel-like—atmosphere.)

Now, Madalyn Murray is mobbed by her neighbors, and public meeting places will not accept rental money from known Communists. But students picket for the right to use obscenity, and the common euphemisms concerning personal functions are fast joining the outstretched pinkie in the gallery of outworn respectabilities. “Dirty words” have become the subject of a sort of holy crusade, while “atheist” is once again a dirty word.

Even the once sacrosanct freedom of the press has given way before the demands of “security” and “classified” information. It hardly shocks us to hear of a magazine issue impounded for security reasons. But Henry Miller and de Sade are on sale at the corner drugstore. Authors have won the right to use ordinary household language in print. We can read and view contemporary works of literature, drama, and art with as much freedom (at least) as that previously reserved for properly aged classics.

Is it possible that antibiotics and the Pill have given us new “faith” in young people’s “sane” attitudes about sex—while the bomb and chemical warfare have awakened grave doubts about the ability of the same youths to think “realistically” about politics, religion, ethics, and philosophy? Is it in the laboratories, rather than the schools, homes, and churches, that our moralities are manufactured?

Kirs spoke of “physio-psychological conditioning” ...

I was ten and I still had not seen them! You didn’t expect to see a woman’s unless you were lucky, which a very few boys at my school professed to be. But nearly everyone my age knew what a man’s looked like.

But you got some funny answers.

“You’re too young,” said a squit about half my size, and another very big boy nodded agreement.

“We don’t want to do any harm,” the big one said, wisely as it turned out. His voice was already breaking, and I think he was on the change.

“We’re not going to tell you.” There were a number of small knots in the playground that took a secretive line, and whispered with their backs to everybody. I belonged to a loose group of boys who, looking back, I would say were intelligent and sensitive and from better homes. Their interests were academic, or real hobbies. But I was a little contemptuous of their ignorance and softness. And I ended up hanging about behind a group led by a capable boy, or breaking roughly into a fighting gang, having a punch-up and then going to skip with the girls. I tried everything. I was nobody’s buddy. But a few groups could expect to rely on me if they needed an extra hand to defend themselves against a rough bunch or to try a good game. “Go and get Rich Andrews,” someone would say: “he’ll play.”

They got me one day after school for a very secret meeting on the waste plot between the churchyard and the playing fields. Guards were out at the edge of the bushes. We had to enter over the churchyard wall. And we had to crouch to approach the spot, crawling along the bottoms of craters left between bulldozed heaps and tips of earth.

It was a good hide-out behind a solid screen of leaves, deep in the bushes. Churchill was there; so was Edwards and my friend Pete Loss. They had started something, and

I saw it was a bit dubious, because Churchill and Gimble were in a little arbour away from the others, and though I could not see much, they had their trousers down.

“What’s up?” I asked Pete.

“Oh, they’re playing sexy-lovers,” said Pete.

“Why? What’s the idea?”

“D’you know all about it?” he asked. “I don’t s’pose you do. Oh, I did it once. It’s not much. Old Churchill thinks he’s got a better way. It gives him a thrill.”

“I don’t like it,” I said. I was curious and afraid, but hoped I sounded like you should when someone’s trying to get one up on you and you’re not having any.

“Come on,” I urged Pete. “Let’s go.”

“They want to show you,” he said.

“Oh, I know all about that,” I lied. ‘I’m not going to play pansy for that dirty beast Churchill.”

It took more urging, but when I made a move Pete came too. The guards tried to stop us, as though they had designs on me. I shouted, “Stop it! I shall shout! Aw, come on; play the game,” and they let me go. But they persuaded Pete to stay.

I got away and of course kept quiet. And lost another chance to know all about sex. It was the time for sex education, of course, and this gave me a fair technical knowhow, but I didn’t have the practical experience. I hesitated to muck about and the teachers didn’t exactly encourage it: also, my parents were a bit strict. So I left it.

It was after that party in the bushes that controversy arose. Someone said to Churchill:

“You nit. You don’t just play about with it. And you don’t just get hairy all round. You get something put there at the right age. It’s the operation!”

“I don’t care about the operation,” he said. “You can do this—” and he described masturbation openly enough to make me feel hot. Miss Darlington was getting close and I was afraid she’d overhear. She had an A-l pot on her front.

They silenced as she approached, but I heard Elkes say under his breath to Churchill, “Look at their pots! That’s where they keep their sex organs. You get outside ones put on your inside ones. Darlie’s got a big male thing on hers, it sticks out a mile.”

Quite frankly, this horrified me. I had always wondered whether all the hairiness of men came up from the private place and how large the organs grew. But separate adult bathing had come a few years before my first swim, and if they did wear these things on the beach, you couldn’t tell them from pot bellies. It sounded like a book I had read which said how pot bellies grew on adolescents now whereas it used to be only old men and middle-aged women. I wondered what lay behind that expression “pot belly.” It made me feel funny even to think of it. But it also made me feel sad, just as a fuller sexual awareness did later. You never know which gives more satisfaction—the relief of the sexual act, or the retention of that inner virile feeling when you have refrained for a good while. And there is a sort of dimension that is all power and mind and strength, that the physical conditions don’t seem to improve or improve upon.