Element 79 (23 page)

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.

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.

There was no point this time in staying within close reach of the community. Joe headed for the interior country, moving steadily and confidently. On the fourth day he crossed the first of the mountain ranges. In the valley below he could see woods beside a shining river. He made his way downhill with a lighter heart than he ever remembered, the boy who was the best intellect his community had produced in a dozen generations, the boy with the courage to turn his back on ten thousand years of progress. Like another boy in distant antiquity, condemned to the wilderness, robbed of his girl, he would return one day to be a scourge to the whole world.

Fred Hoyle, later Sir Fred (1915-2001) at the time of publication was the Plumian Professor of Astronomy and Experimental Philosophy at Cambridge University, a staff member of Mount Wilson and Palomar Observatories, and Visiting Professor of Astronomy at the California Institute of Technology. His scientific studies included
Frontiers of Astronomy
and
The Nature of the Universe
(the book that introduced the [then famous but in the 21st century less so] steady state theory of creation). Among his works of science fiction are
The Black Cloud
and
Ossian's Ride
.

Although Fred Hoyle was an author of some renown as well as being a rather famous scientist, as of January 2014
Element 79
appears to have been out of print since about 1972 and was never published in electronic form. In those 40-odd years only two of the stories have been anthologised, none more recently than 1986.

The book on your screen is based on the text of a medium-quality conversion of a widely available PDF file containing images of the book’s pages. This version was created as an ePUB from the ground up and was fairly thoroughly proofread against a copy of the same (1967 New American Library hardback “Book Club”) edition.

The editor has endeavoured to provide the public with a copy that can pass as near-retail grade and, having no delusions regarding the legality of the enterprise, asserts no rights. The work’s copyright holders are encouraged to release the work into the public domain earlier than the year 2072 and/or to use this copy as the basis for an affordably priced electronic edition. Readers are encouraged to acquire such an affordably priced legal copy if and when one becomes available.

Copyright © 1967 by Fred Hoyle

Cover design by Stanislaw Zagorski

Zoomen
was previously published in the March 1967 edition of
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
.

Blackmail
was previously published in the February 1967 edition of
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
.

“Battered old box” refers to the leather-and-pine box used by most Chancellors of the Exchequer from 1860 until 2010 during the announcement of the government's budget plan. By the 1960s it had a famously well-worn appearance.