Element 79

The Operation

From his earliest years, young Joe was a bright lad. He was the best of his group at everything, a good worker if need be, but mostly he managed things so easily he hardly needed to work very seriously. He mixed with the other members of his group, appearing socially well-adjusted, until they were past puberty and were all reaching the right age for the operation. Then he began seeking after knowledge he wasn’t supposed to have, particularly history, the history of long ago.

There was a girl at the crèche. He and Pat had grown up together. Joe had always liked the girl, ever since they were tiny kids. Now, as they were growing older, he liked her a whole lot more. She let him kiss her, of course, she’d always done that. Joe was more than a bit mystified why things hadn’t gone much further. It wasn’t Pat who was stopping it. Nor could it be the grown-ups, Joe could run rings round the grown-ups. It could only mean the monitoring control was aware of Pat and him, and was arranging it so they could never get alone together in the right sort of place.

One day Joe did have a success, not with Pat. He managed to get himself locked overnight in the big library. During the long hours, he found a way into the room containing the forbidden books, the books which were still kept as a matter of record but which nobody, except some occasional old scholar, was permitted to read. He found most of the things he wanted to know. The picture which had formed so far only in a shadowy outline in his mind jumped now into sharp focus. With clarity came decision. A fierce determination swept through the boy. Come what may, he would not submit to the operation.

The date of the operation, scheduled for all Joe’s group at the crèche, was still a little more than two months away. Each day seemed neither longer nor shorter than it had been before. Yet taken together, one day following another, the months melted away like butter in the sun. All arrangements were made, times settled, his was to be about halfway through the morning. The youngsters were told the things they might pack for their convenience, amusement, and occupation at the medical center, later, when they were recovering. They were even given special traveling cases in which to do the packing.

The matron came to Joe’s room on the morning. She came with an injection “to make it easier for him.” It would take about one hour before it would put him really “out.” That would be roughly the time when he would come before the “surgeons,” not human, of course, for no human could achieve the dexterity of those mechanical hands, working both with extreme precision and at lightning speed. There was much to be done in the fifteen or twenty minutes allotted to Joe and to each of his group.

Joe had said nothing of his intention, not even to Pat. He would have liked to have persuaded Pat not to submit, too, but then there would have been serious trouble for her as well. If Pat had been as worried as he was, it would have been different, of course.

The strange thing to Joe was that none of his group, himself excepted, had any real worries. They all accepted the operation as completely natural. Long, careful conditioning in the crèche explained it. The only thing worrying the others was the pain, the few days of exquisite agony which inevitably followed the operation, the pain which no killer had entirely succeeded in suppressing.

The matron’s attitude toward the injection was a part of the conditioning. She behaved in a pleasant manner, as if the injection were of no more consequence than swallowing a vitamin pill. Joe was known to be a “difficult case,” but there had been nothing in his behavior to suggest he might balk at this last stage. From time to time, the matron had dealt with youngsters who had become difficult or even obstreperous. This had always been a few weeks beforehand, so there had been plenty of time to soothe away any doubts by appropriate additives to the youngster’s food. Joe had known this. Why permit them to drug him into stupidity weeks ahead of the critical moment?

This was the critical moment. Brusquely, he instructed the matron to go to hell. She told him not to be a silly boy, so he repeated himself still more forcefully. The woman was now at a loss. Already that morning she had injected a score of other members of the group. She took a large capsule. All she need do was to press it against the boy’s arm, almost anywhere, then touch the release button and one of the battery of fine needles would be sure to penetrate a sensitive spot.

Joe saw the matron’s hand reaching toward him. In a frenzy, he gripped the wrist and twisted hard. The capsule came free and dropped to the floor. Then Joe did something he’d wanted to do for a year or more, he slapped the matron just as hard as he could. He would have liked to have gone on and on slapping her, but once was enough. This wasn’t the time to lose control of himself, once would be quite sufficient. The woman was well-proportioned. She could have returned the blow. Instead she groveled to him, as a beaten dog will grovel.

The matron was distinctly good-looking, in her early thirties. The desire to assault her nearly overwhelmed the boy. Then he remembered she was quite burned out. In a flash the desire was gone, to be replaced by a deep sadness for the woman. He let her go and waited. He tried to sit, but all he could do was to sit a bit, then shuffle a bit, then look out of the window. Alter half an hour they came for him, two medical orderlies. They were strapping, bronzed fellows. There was no point at all in resisting them, nor had Joe planned to do so. Probably they had orders to bring him by restrained force if necessary. So he went along with them quietly and without comment. He was gambling that if he went placidly they wouldn’t force an injection on him at this stage. He thought they’d now wish to interrogate him, and the injections they’d need for the interrogation wouldn’t be the same as the one they needed for the operation.

Joe had also gambled on the direction in which the orderlies would take him, past a certain bush in the gardens surrounding the crèche. Earlier that morning, he’d stuck a good stout stick vertically in the ground, so it looked for all the world like a part of the bush itself. The young fellows didn’t march him aggressively now they saw he was so calm, for they were not conditioned themselves to be aggressive, or swift-moving. No grown-up was conditioned to be aggressive, for that matter. When they came abreast of the right spot, Joe darted with the agility of the young to the bush and pulled up his stick. Before the first man had recovered from his intense surprise at the lightning change in Joe’s disposition, the boy hit him hard across the kneecap. The second man he hit furiously across the shoulders. Then, like the wind he was running toward the vehicle the men had brought, the vehicle in which he planned to escape into the wild country.

There were lots of communities like the one Joe lived in scattered over the Earth, maybe a hundred of them. Nothing of a material kind ever passed between them, except sperms for breeding purposes. Uninterrupted electromagnetic communication passed between the different centers, but the content of that communication had nothing to do with humans. The only thing electromagnetic to do with humans was the light entering their eyes and, of course, the general monitoring itself. The nearest other community was something like three hundred miles away. Joe wasn’t exactly sure, because there hadn’t been anybody who could tell him. Such information wasn’t thought useful in any way. Nor had he been able to find much on this topic during his nocturnal prowl through the big library. At any rate, he knew there was something like three hundred miles of wild country, country without roads, without tracks even, except where tracks had been made by wild animals. It was a country of mountains, lakes, and forest.

His first problem was the vehicle. Although he’d never driven one before, he knew every detail about how a vehicle should be driven. But knowing how to drive and actually driving are two different things, as Joe speedily discovered. Still, he did manage to get the machine working. He did manage to make it move in a crazy sort of way. The drivers of other vehicles saw something was wrong and quickly got themselves out of his path. It didn’t take long to clear the few miles to the outer boundary of the community. Here he ditched the vehicle and set off into the woods.

Joe expected to be quickly pursued. They couldn’t monitor him, of course, but they could order a general aerial search. He saw the more frenzied his flight the more obvious would his path be, and the more easily might they trace him from above. So he stayed quite close to the community. Once he had found good shelter, there was really little point in pushing on any further. Besides, the nearer he stayed to the community the better could he judge what actions were being taken. It soon turned out that no actions were being taken, for a reason Joe came quickly to appreciate.

In the books he’d always read that other animals were markedly inferior to man. Yet in their own world, Joe found this not to be so. His uninstructed efforts to trap and to fish met with negligible success. He found some edible fungi, clumps of wild berries, and this was about all. It was enough to keep him alive, but it was not encouraging for the future. The only aid Joe had managed to bring with him was a source of fire. Even this would become exhausted after a while. He saw he had badly misjudged the wild country. Only with risk now could things be retrieved. If he could find one, he’d simply have to try raiding an unoccupied Camp.

After a lot of weary slogging, he did manage to find a Camp that seemed to be unoccupied, but the buildings were solid, impenetrable to bare hands, even to sticks and stones. He was trying one of the smaller buildings when he was horrified to hear a voice behind him. “Ah, I thought you’d turn up sooner or later, young fellow-me-lad.”

In panic and anger Joe swung round to find it was only an old man. Joe had seen him often enough in the community, out had never spoken to him.

“Hee-hee, gave you quite a start, didn’t I? Suppose you take a look at this, eh!”

“This” was a basket, quite large, crammed with food. The starving boy grabbed it without comment and began to wolf its contents. He’d never eaten so fast in his life, or even conceived it was possible to eat so fast. Not until he was completely stuffed did the boy give any attention to the old man. Then he said, “How did you know I’d turn up?”

“Because I knew you’d be hungry. You see, I did the same myself once.”

“You mean you refused the operation?”

“Yes, I did the same as you, made the same break into the country. But I had to come back in the end.”

“So then, they made you have it?”

“No, they didn’t.”

Joe glanced quickly at the old man. but he couldn’t tell anything, because the old fellow had a good-sized hat well pulled down. The train of thought must have been obvious, for the old man chuckled and said, “I’m not going to take it off, just to gratify your curiosity. You believe what I tell you. They didn’t force me to have it.”

“Then what did they do to you?”

“Nothing, nothing at all, and they’ll do nothing to you. It’s no good, you going off again into the country. There’s no way there. The only way is for you to come back with me.”

Joe thought he saw what the idea was. “So that’s why they didn’t bother coming after me. They got you to do it instead.”

The old man looked a long time at the boy and then shook his head gravely. “Listen, my young friend, do you really think they, they, have need of me to do their work for them? D’you know what they’d have done if they’d really wanted to bring you back?”

“An air search.”

“Nonsense, not with you unmonitored. You could hide for a million years out there. For a bright lad you show a surprising ignorance.”

“So there’s nothing they could do except send you.”

“Don’t you know there’s a kind of animal with special gifts for tracking? You give it the smell of somebody. The clothes you left behind had your smell, my boy. Those animals would have followed wherever you went, through the woods, over the hills, down the valleys. When they came at last upon you they’d simply have held you there—until an aerial vehicle arrived.”

Joe did remember reading something like this somewhere. He had a feeling the old man was exaggerating and he wondered why. The old fellow got up from a sitting posture and added, “Now I think it’s time we stopped all this nonsense and started back home.”

Naturally, Joe had no intention of going with the old man. Saying he would think about it, he seized the remainder of the food and made off at a run into the forest.

During the next two days Joe did in fact do a lot of thinking. From his earliest years he’d been taught that it was quite impossible to live in the wild country. All the children in his crèche, all the children in every crèche, were impregnated with the dangers and horrors of the wild country. All his experience seemed to show this was right. Yet, was it really right, or was it just a clever illusion? The information about animals, about their simplicity, perhaps even that was part of the deception? Joe saw the beginnings of a plan now. It meant returning to the community. There was no help for it but to return, unfortunately, because he hadn’t done his preparatory work properly. In fact, he hadn’t done his preparatory work at all. Which was where he’d been deceived. Joe knew he’d have to go very slowly and with the utmost caution.

The matron received him back at the crèche as if nothing had happened. Nobody attempted to molest him, just as the old man had told him would be so. It meant they were playing a game, just as he himself was beginning to play a game.

In the next few weeks there was a good deal of spare time, because his group were still away convalescing. Joe read mostly the things he was supposed to read. The illicit things he did only in tiny fragments. He also walked about quite a bit. He’d become used to the feel of his legs while he’d been out in the wild country. It made him horribly restless now, being cooped up in the crèche.

One afternoon his wanderings took him to the thing he hated most. It was a building, massive and strong, entirely without windows. It was built in a circle about a mile in diameter. In the center he could see the cluster of high towers from which all the monitoring was done. There were two entrances, Joe knew, but only one could he see. The other was concealed from all but the special servants. Only they knew the manner of its opening. The entrance Joe could see was as plain as it could be, a wide-open entrance. It led nowhere, of course, except to the cubicles, the cubicles which every grown-up member of the community visited every two weeks. Joe watched people coming out and going in. They were paying their compulsory visits to the cubicles as if it was the most natural and normal thing to do.

This building, so forbidding to Joe, but taken so much for granted by the others around him, was the home—or rather, the housing—of they. People always referred to the thing as they, but how did anybody know it really wasn’t it? Perhaps there was only one. Then there’d have to be just one of the things in each of the other communities. Perhaps somewhere there was a completely dominant one, perhaps even the thing in this building. Joe allowed himself to toy with the wonderful airy dream of destroying it, just as he’d done hundreds of times before. For years he’d lain in bed at night building fantasies around this idea. But now he saw it couldn’t possibly work that way. Even if this one could be destroyed, there would still be all the others, hundreds of them. Even if he destroyed the dominant one, the others might again be able to make another dominant one, like bees can always make a new queen.

Joe turned over in his mind some of the forbidden things he’d read in the history books. The worst thing of all, really, was the incredible complacency, the incredible selfishness, of the generations which had brought this situation to pass. The foremost scientific authorities of bygone ages had solemnly declared that inorganic instruments could never be dangerous, because it would always be necessary for them to be programed by man. Idiots. Even while such statements were being made, the facts were already pointing in exactly the opposite direction. Surgeons, human surgeons, had already discovered simple forms of behavior which could be induced, whether the subject willed it or no, by electrical potentials imposed on the brain. This discovery had come during brain operations—with the brain exposed, the electrical fields could be imposed quite simply from outside. The next stage had been to insert electrodes in the brains of animals. Fierce animals could be rendered tame through such devices. Still nobody saw the obvious implication, even though electronics had reached the stage of micro-miniaturization. The implication which everybody, except imbeciles, perhaps, should have noticed was that the interior of the bony structure of the skull could be permanently impregnated with a complex mass of ultra-sensitive miniature electronics. With the skull replaced, there would be no need for crude electrodes sticking out from the head. Signals from outside could be rectified within the head to produce a highly configurated electric field. The principle was already there in the dim, distant reaches of history. Superlative technical skill was needed to convert the principle to a reality. The intervening centuries had supplied the skill, and now it was humankind itself that was being programed, exactly the opposite from what the wise men of history had asserted.

Joe looked across at the inner towers. It was from those towers that the monitoring signals issued, directing and controlling the brain of every “grown-up” in the community. By definition, a grown-up was simply someone who had experienced the operation. With the exception of Joe himself, all his group were grown-ups now.

One possibility would be to stop the signals going out from the towers. Yet even if there should be a natural interruption to the flow of signals, due to some unexpected defect, perhaps, Joe saw the grown-ups would be foolish enough to repair the defect. With the monitoring turned off, rivalries would soon develop, and out of those rivalries one group or other would carry through the repairs. Indeed, this was exactly the psychology of the way power had passed gradually to the inorganic instruments. Down the centuries, it turned out more and more that a group of humans could acquire power over other humans by itself yielding power to the inorganic instruments. The more you yielded yourself up to those instruments, the more you could impose your will on other humans. There was an inevitable natural selection in it. Paradoxically, ambition and the insistent desire to dominate contained within themselves the seeds of servitude.

The last step toward servitude came with the offer of immortality, or what seemed like immortality, to a number of renegades, whom Joe hated above all else. The thing in this grim, gray building was no longer purely inorganic. It had many actual human brains, or portions of brains, integrated into itself. This was why the controls were so delicate and why the special servants were needed. Joe had never been able to discover exactly what status the human brains occupied in the total functioning of the thing. His suspicion was that the brains were merely used as ancillary instruments, as “lower centers.” Yet they enabled the thing to understand human psychology, to understand human psychology through and through. It was only after brains had become a part of the thing that the monitoring system itself was gradually developed.

The bitterest aspect of the monitoring was the relentless way in which steps were taken to insure the full efficiency of the control, by means of highly compact storage devices placed inside the skull of every grown-up. It was just in order to have these devices checked and read that all grown-ups were required to pay regular visits to the cubicles. Because of these visits, imposed by the monitoring control, it was impossible for grown-ups to plan subversion. It was impossible for them to escape in a geographical sense, as Joe had done. They were prisoners, emotional toys in the hands of a pitiless master.

The time came when Joe’s group returned from convalescence. He’d expected to see far more in the way of ugly wheals on the upper part of the skull. It was only because the hair was still growing that the mark of the operation was at all obvious. It was easy to see why you had to look hard, once recovery was complete, to see the tiny telltale line in the hair growth. The operation produced essentially no departure from normal, so far as outward appearances were concerned. Even so, Joe had the feeling of something unclean about the whole lot of them. The strange thing was they all seemed to feel the same way about him. Only too obviously he was no longer their natural leader. They made him feel more and more the odd man out. Only Pat tried to treat him normally. She even wanted him to kiss her. There wasn’t anything in the kisses, but Joe was surprised the monitoring control didn’t stop it. The control could easily have made Pat freeze up completely. The situation must be completely known, because Pat was paying regular visits to the cubicles, just as all the other members of his group were.

The days slipped by. Joe played his hand very slowly, taking the steps he had to take one by one, often with a couple of weeks separating consecutive moves.

One morning, Joe came down to the usual communal breakfast to find the whole of his group gone. This was the day Joe had dreaded for so long, the day of the first Camp. He hadn’t told Pat anything of the real purpose of the Camps. This was one of the things he’d learned in the big library. The principal object of the Camps was to shatter the sexual drive of all young grown-ups. Joe could see enough of the point of view of “the other side” to understand how much of a nuisance sexual drive would be if it pervaded the community. It would destroy the crèche system, which permitted such careful conditioning of the young. Love would induce rivalries that might soon destroy the carefully knit communal life. Sexual drive might even cause men and women to become brave, even to resist the dominance of the thing in the building without windows. Sexual drive might cause ordinary men and women to attack and destroy the special servants of the thing, whatever the cost to their reason and sanity. Joe could understand why sexual drive had to be rigorously controlled. What appalled him was the calculated way in which it was destroyed.

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.