MINEFIELD
“The Ellay expressport is tonight out of service for quote an indefinite period unquote following an explosion that fired forty-three thousand gallons of stored rocket-fuel. Casualties are expected to number over two hundred. The authorities state that the explosion followed sparking of a static charge on the tanks of an express newly arrived from Manila. Accident has been ruled out, and in a statement just networked the Paul Revere Society calls for a total ban on the landing of all foreign-owned aircraft in the United States to prevent a repetition of this disaster.”
Among the securest investments open to anyone are shares in the ever-booming defence industries. Currently offering above-average returns are Specialised Air Conditioning Inc. (war and police gases), Public Health Research Inc. (mutated bacteria and viruses), and the Rapid Expansion Corporation (explosives of all types).
CHARGE
I am directed by the General Officer Commanding to perform the sad duty of notifying you of the demise of your son Peter. He was today buried with full military honours at censored. During an attack on censored he displayed the highest possible courage and was personally responsible for killing censored of the enemy by planting a censored on one of their censored vehicles. He has been posthumously recommended for a decoration for gallantry.
“Which means there’s no need for you to knuckle under to anybody from now on. With your bare hands, with a knife, with an axe or broadsword, with a narrow sword, with a projectile side-arm, long arm or spray-gun, with a bolt-gun, kazow or rocket-launcher, with pocket and non-pocket nukes, with chemical explosives, with instant or delayed time-bombs, with gas, with infectious bacteria, with hot iron or razors or poison or a club or a rock, with a lance or a mace or a box of matches, with an H-T cable or thermite or acid, with your teeth or your nails or a hypodermic or a diadermic, with a flame-thrower or a kitchen carver or a length of rope or a hammer or a belt or a chisel or a boot or a bath of water or a Karatand or a Jettigun or a modified domestic laser or a quarterstaff or a broken bottle or a bucket of cement or an ordinary door or window or a staircase or a pillow or a piece of adhesive tape or a cooking-pan or an article of clothing or wet mud or long hair or a sewing-needle or a brand out of the fire or a splinter or a bottle of medicine you can give those freaking Chinks their own back.”
WAR GRAVES COMMISSION
Briefly, Bennie Noakes remembered someone had had his balls caught in the draft. He wondered whether he had imagined it or whether it was real, and decided it was real because he didn’t imagine things as unpleasant as that.
But he took a little more Triptine to prevent a recurrence.
“It is the sentence of this court that you shall be taken hence to the place from which you came, and thence to a place of execution, there to be hanged by the neck until you are dead. And may God have mercy on your soul.”
SHAMBLES (sham’-blz) n. pl. constr. as sing. [Ang-Sax. scamel or sceamol, Lat. scamellum] Abattoir, slaughterhouse; metaph. scene of death and destruction. (Not cogn. w. SHAMBLE, v.i. above.)
context (15)
BRED AND BORN
“‘We’re all Marxists now’ is a common cry among the world’s intellectuals, and it is true insofar that it remains the mark of a progressive man to feel that social forces, rather than genetic ones, mould our behaviour. But today’s commonplace is often tomorrow’s fallacy, and arguments from biology are increasing both in scope and precision.
“J. Merritt Emlen of the University of Washington, writing in the current issue of the Journal of Theoretical Biology (vol. 12, p. 410), puts forward the view that modern genetic theory can provide more subtle interpretations of human behaviour than is generally realised. Of course it is difficult to unravel the tangle of culture and biology which shapes man. Genetic influences on behaviour are always masked by social processes like teaching and parental care; but equally, these social processes are themselves reflections of man’s biological possibilities and limitations … Complete explanation or not, this genetic approach is worth exploring…”
—New Scientist, London, no. 531, p. 191, 26th January 1967
continuity (16)
THE REVISED VERSION
If anyone had asked him, Donald could have said why the discontinuation of Donald Hogan Mark I was so quick and so efficient. It was because the process had begun before he arrived at Boat Camp, triggered off by the discovery that the assumed-familiar world was only biding its time before springing a trap and making him its prey.
But nobody did ask. The people he encountered treated him as though he were a faulty bread-board mock-up for a novel device, to be tested and made over into a version suitable for the production-line. Were he to meet any of them again in other surroundings, he would fail to recognise them. They had no identity apart from the frame they occupied. He categorised them not by name but by what they did to him.
Some administered drugs, chiefly to destroy perceptual sets. When new knowledge was laid across his plastic mind it sank in deep with neither preconceptions nor independent judgment to hinder its passage. It was as though one were to remove a man’s skeleton and replace it with another of stainless steel—and nowadays, in fact, bones could be changed.
In Donald’s case, of course, nothing so immediately detectable could be risked. Whatever was done to him had to be confined to that citadel of private thought no one had yet penetrated except with weapons as clumsy as blunderbusses.
But they did make him allergic to “Truth or Consequences”. Administration of a usable dose for interrogation purposes would drive him into fever and delirium.
Certain other drugs stimulated his auditory and tactile memory, atrophied by long years of studying the printed page and the replay screens of recorders. Another heightened his kinesthetic faculty, giving him an almost painful awareness of the relative positions of his limbs. There were more, which he didn’t bother to ask about. He was not co-operating in what was done to him, so much as passively accepting it as a possible cure for the impending death of his old self.
After that, they moulded him. In a drugged trance designed to ensure that something told to him once would reverberate in his circulating memory until it had grooved as deeply into his brain as something rehearsed a thousand times in real life, they taught him what he might need to know during the task ahead.
Engrelay Satelserv equipped all their reporters with a communikit in a nine-inch case, specially designed and built for them by GT’s electronics section. It combined an instreplay recorder with a polytelly, a miniature TV adaptable to the line standards and sound frequencies used anywhere in the world. Army experts modified one of these and gave it to him. Now, it incorporated a transceiver hidden under a changeochrome coating, the circuit elements reduced to molecular monofilaments. He was supposed to book routine calls to headquarters via whichever of Engrelay Satelserv’s satellites was overheard at the time, precisely as a legitimate correspondent would. But if he had something to say which he didn’t want overheard, he could record it in advance and the communikit would impose it as a parasite modulation on the phone signal, automatically scrambled and compressed into half-second blips.
Additional frills were dealt with by sleep-teaching; he was taught an acrostic verbal code, an association-code, and a cipher.
They did not, however, allow him to sleep while teaching him the serious aspects of his subject. As one of the interchangeable instructors told him, the last service a secret agent could perform after his cover had been broken was to tie up a disproportionate number of the opposition while they were trying to capture him, and in pursuit of that end they were going to make him capable of taking on a battalion.