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.
About the author
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.
Copyright
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.