Omar planned to keep Hell strictly behind that chainlink fence.
“See, what you want to do,” Knox said, “is alternate random rewards with random punishments. It’s all about behaviorism.” He looked up at Omar from under the brim of his cap. Sweat covered his face with a silver sheen. “You heard about behaviorism,” he said, “right?”
“I have a feeling I’m about to,” Omar said, and wished Knox would just shut the hell up. Knox bounced up and down on the steel-capped toes of his boots. “Behaviorism’s science, see,” he said. “Real science. They worked it out with rats. See, Omar, people—and rats, I guess—they assume that when something happens, there has to be a reason. If something good happens, there has to be a reason for it. And the same with bad things. So if you reward people for no reason, other people will figure there has to be a reason for it, and they’ll try to behave, so they can earn a reward. And if you punish people at random, for no reason at all, then the other people think there has to be a reason, so they’ll be extra-careful not to do anything to piss you off.
“So what you do, see—” Knox grinned “—is give some little girl a box of candy. And then you beat the shit out of her big brother. And anyone who sees it will think that the little girl and her brother both deserved it, somehow. They’ll start to blame the brother for what you did. They’ll say it’s his fault. They’ll say, ‘Why are you making trouble? Why can’t you be more like your sister?’” Knox cocked his hat onto the back of his head and grinned at Omar again. “That’s how you control a big group of people, like you got here. You use science and turn them against each other.”
“Really,” Omar said. His headache throbbed behind his eyes.
“I read about it in a book about the Holocaust,” Knox said. “The Nazis used behaviorism on the Jews. They’d punish Jews at random—beat them, shoot them, whatever—and the other Jews would say, ‘Oh, it’s all the fault of those trouble-making Jews, the Jews who aren’t like us! They’re making trouble for everyone.’ Did you ever see Schindler’s List?”
“Nope,” said Omar. “It’s propaganda, anyway.”
“It’s got a great scene of behaviorism at work. There’s this SS officer named Amon Goeth, and he’s in charge of a prison camp. Every so often he gets up on his balcony with a rifle, and he shoots some Jew at random. Just guns him down!” Knox’s grin turned admiring. “So then the other Jews start working faster and harder, because they figure that Goeth shot the first Jew for being lazy, and the shooting was the dead Jew’s fault. It’s a great movie! I practically had an orgasm in that scene.”
“Uh-huh,” Omar said, and gave Knox a suspicious look. Didn’t he know that the movie was made by a Jew?
“Amon Goeth was a kind of tragic figure,” Knox went on. “He was on top of the world. He could kill anybody he wanted, all the women wanted to fuck him, and everyone was paying him money for privileges. He was like a king! An Aryan king! But then he fell in love with this Jewish girl, and his whole life was destroyed.” He looked solemn for a moment, but then brightened. “But he returned to the true faith in the end. He shouted ‘Heil Hitler!’ before the Mongols hanged him.”
“Mongols?” Omar said, surprised.
“You know. Russians.”
“Oh.”
“A great movie, Schindler’s List. Sort of an instruction manual for the Holocaust. Shows you everything you want to do, and all the mistakes you want to avoid.”
Omar felt sweat trickle down his temples. The sun was burning a hole in the top of his head, right through his hat, and it was barely morning.
“Of course,” he said, “everyone knows the Holocaust didn’t really happen.” Knox looked at him in surprise. “You think that?”
“Don’t you?”
“No! I mean, I know we have to say we don’t believe it, because that’s the way politics work and we don’t want to frighten the bourgeoisie, but I think the Holocaust was real! I think it was the greatest thing in human history!”
Omar felt a shock running along his nerves, almost a physical shock. He’d never heard anyone say something like that before.
“I’d like to go to Auschwitz,” Knox said, “and just roll around in the dirt. It’s holy ground, man! I’d like to take some of the dirt back with me and put it on an altar and worship it. Auschwitz was real science, Omar. The Kraut-eaters had their act together there. Real science.” He tapped Omar on the arm, stared up with his strange green eyes. “That’s what you need here, Omar. Science.”
“I guess.” Revulsion for Knox shivered through him. Even if the Holocaust actually happened, even if it was a good thing, Knox was carrying it a mite far with all this worship of Auschwitz dirt. The sun burned Omar’s head and shoulders. The metal barrel of his Remington shotgun, resting against his shoulder, was beginning to scorch a hole in his flesh. He shifted the gun, rested the butt on his hip. He couldn’t understand how Knox could stand it in his long-sleeved flannel shirt. The shirt was dark with sweat stains, and Knox had a strange chemical-bog odor, but he refused to wear anything more suitable to the climate.
“Snake!” Knox screamed, and jumped six feet. Adrenaline jolted through Omar and he leaped to the side himself, his eyes scanning the grass near Knox to find the poison monster.
“Snake! Snake! Snake!” Knox said, doing a frantic dance in his heavy boots. Omar spotted the snake whipsawing its way through the grass, and breathed easy.
“That’s just a little ol’ bullsnake,” he said. “It won’t hurt you.”
“Oh God, I hate snakes!” Knox said, still dancing. “I’m getting out of here.” He marched away. Omar wanted to laugh.
Some Aryan superman, he thought. Scared of bridges, snakes, and who knew what else?
Omar strolled away on a walk along the camp perimeter. His deputies had kept the inmates away from their vehicles, which were parked on the grass parking lot and along the highway, and he walked along between the row of deputies and the cars. Crowds of people were moving in the camp, he saw, and there was a lot of murmuring and gesturing going on.
They hadn’t found a leader yet, though. No one to tell the others what to do, no one to speak for them. Omar looked for the people he’d marked the day before, the ones who had witnessed David shooting the runaway and who would have to go where the woodbine twineth. He thought he saw some of them, but he couldn’t be sure.
“Hey. Hey, Sheriff.”
A man called to him from the verge of the invisible perimeter between the camp and the line of deputies. He was a middle-aged white man, bespectacled, nervous-looking. Somehow he’d been mistaken for an African Methodist Episcopal and put in here, or maybe he’d come with a black person or something.