by John Saul
“They’re like sleepwalkers!” Judith flared. “Whatever you’re doing, it’s destroying their minds.”
“No,” Greg replied. “That’s where you’re wrong. What we’re doing is freeing their minds. By the time we get finished, we’re going to be able to create a population such as the world has never seen before!”
Judith gasped, and suddenly thought she understood the whole thing. “Slaves,” she breathed. “You’re turning people into slaves, aren’t you?”
Greg’s features hardened. “That’s an ugly word, Judith,” he said. He began pacing the floor, then stopped and looked at her again. “You’re a teacher, Judith. It seems to me you, of all people, would be able to see what’s going on in this country. What we’re faced with is economic ruin. It hasn’t happened yet, but it’s on the horizon. America simply can’t compete. Our people aren’t well enough educated, and they have no self-discipline. They spend half their time wanting things they can never have, and the other half being miserable about it. Christ, look at this town. Is anyone here really happy? No. They hate the town, they hate their jobs, they hate their whole lives. Well, I’ve figured out a way to change all that. It’s simply a matter of making some adjustments to the brain itself. And what we’re going to wind up with is a whole population that is going to have powers of concentration such as no one has ever seen before. They’re going to be able to take orders from their managers, and then carry out their jobs with so few mistakes that even the Japanese will sit up and take notice.”
Judith stared up at Greg, almost unable to believe what she was hearing. “But they’re not people,” she said. “For God’s sake, haven’t you even seen what you’ve done to them? Gina Alvarez was a bright, vivacious child three days ago. Now she doesn’t speak unless she’s asked a direct question. She doesn’t seem to be interested in doing anything. She just sits and stares!”
Greg Moreland looked at her almost pityingly. “But if you asked her, she’d tell you she was feeling just fine, wouldn’t she?” he demanded. “And that’s the whole point—for the rest of her life, Gina—and all the others—will be happy.”
“Happy?” Judith echoed. “My God, Greg, she won’t be happy—she doesn’t feel anything anymore. You’ve killed her, just like you killed Frank and Max and—” Her voice broke and her body was wracked with a sob she couldn’t control.
Greg Moreland’s lips twisted into a sardonic smile. “Well, that’s a matter of opinion, isn’t it?” he asked. “At any rate, it won’t be much longer until you can experience a realignment for yourself.” Judith shrank back on the bed, and Greg’s smile broadened. “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “For most people, it doesn’t seem to be too unpleasant. Nothing more than a bad dream. Except that I expect you’ll be wide awake when it happens. And tomorrow, when I ask you where you got that syringe, you’ll tell me. You’ll want to tell me.”
Nodding once more to Black-hair, he walked out into the night.
* * *
“That’s it,” Jed said quietly. He brought the truck to a stop a few yards from the antenna on the rim of the canyon. Jed’s first impulse had been to go directly to The Cottonwoods, but Peter had talked him out of it. “If they’ve got Judith, they’ve probably already given her a shot. By now those things will have lodged in her brain, and they can activate them any time. Is there a way we can disable the antenna? If we can get it shut down for a while, at least it’ll buy us some time.”
Now Peter stared through the windshield at the chain-link fence surrounding the antenna. It had an ugly look to it in the silvery light of the moon, though for the moment it seemed totally inactive. Finally Jed opened the door of the truck and got out, Peter following him.
There was a large toolbox in the bed of the truck, and Jed immediately went to it, taking out a hacksaw and a large plastic-handled screwdriver. He and Peter approached the fence.
“Don’t touch it,” Peter warned, remembering the fence that surrounded the Brandt Institute. “It might be electrified.”
Jed stepped forward, and making sure he was touching nothing of the screwdriver except its plastic handle, laid the tool against the fence.
Nothing happened.
Jed shook his head. “I don’t get it,” he said. “There’s got to be an alarm system.”
Peter frowned. “Maybe they figured an alarm would make it look too important,” he suggested.
Jed shrugged. “Well, there’s only one way to find out.” Putting the screwdriver in his hip pocket and slipping his right arm through the frame of the hacksaw, he quickly climbed to the top of the fence, swung over the top, then dropped to the other side.
Instantly, a siren began to wail and four bright floodlights came on, wiping away the darkness with a brilliant artificial glare.
“Holy Christ,” Peter swore. “Get out of there, Jed. They’ll have guards up here in a minute!”
But Jed made no move to reclimb the fence. Instead, he moved to the antenna itself, where the PVC pipe that snaked up the canyon wall emerged from the concrete floor of the antenna pad. “We have some time,” he yelled over the din of the sirens. “It’ll take at least twenty minutes for anyone to get up here.” Kneeling down, he began sawing at the PVC.
Peter, feeling almost naked in the glare of the floodlights, looked around for a way to turn them off, but it was impossible. They hung from the tops of metal posts, and the lamps were covered with thick Plexiglas, itself protected by heavy metal mesh.
For a moment he felt a twinge of panic, but inside the fence Jed, apparently unaffected by the lights and sirens, pumped steadily at the saw. The blade penetrated the top of the PVC pipe, then moved quickly as it cut downward. But then the blade struck the cables within the pipe and Jed paused.
One of the cables inside, he was sure, would be a power line. He pulled the saw from the kerf in the pipe, examining its handle carefully.
It was all metal. If he’d kept sawing and hit that power line, he would have electrocuted himself. “Peter!” he called out. “Look in the box. I need electrical tape.”
Peter dashed to the truck and quickly rummaged through the tool chest. Finally, near the bottom, half buried under a confusion of wrenches, he felt a roll of plastic tape. He jerked it free of the tools, then tossed it over the fence.
Jed snagged the roll of tape in midair and quickly began binding the handle of the saw. After he’d covered it with five layers of tape, he began working again.
The blade bit into the cables once more, and now the work slowed down. But suddenly there was a shower of sparks, and then the lights went out and the wailing of the siren abruptly died away. Jed cursed softly as his eyes—their pupils constricted against the brilliance of the floodlights—failed him completely for a moment, but despite his blindness, he kept sawing.
A few moments later, as his eyes once more adjusted to the dim moonlight, the saw bit into the last centimeters of PVC, and then the pipe parted.
Jed jerked at the saw, trying to get it to come back up through the kerf it had left between the two ends of the pipe, but the cables within had shifted slightly, and the blade jammed firmly. Finally he gave it up, abandoning the saw as he quickly scaled the fence once more and dropped to the other side.
“I don’t know how much time we have,” he said. “But it’s going to take them a while to get that back together again.”
They rushed back to the truck, but Peter stopped short to stare at Jed.
“Where do we go?” he asked. “If we go back the way we came, we’re going to run right into them.”
“We go the other way,” Jed said.
Peter shook his head. “But the mouth of the canyon’s behind us. If we’re going to go after Judith—”
Jed was already in the truck. “Just do what I say, okay? Or do you want to wait around here and see what happens?”
Jed started the engine of the truck, and then, as they saw the first glow of headlights moving toward them along the canyon’s rim, headed farther up the rut
ted road.
The track narrowed as it wound eastward, finally disappearing altogether. Peter glanced nervously over at Jed.
Jed kept going. What he was looking for was no more than a quarter of a mile up the canyon’s rim.
Chapter 30
Greg Moreland was halfway between The Cottonwoods and the communications center when the quiet of the night was shattered by the high-pitched wailing of the siren. He leaned forward over the wheel and gazed upward at the brilliant white glow of the floodlights surrounding the antenna installation, then slammed his right foot down hard on the gas pedal. The car’s rear wheels skidded on the loose dirt of the road, and the rear end fishtailed violently; a second later the tires caught and the car shot forward. Within less than a minute he braked to a sharp stop in front of the communications building and dashed inside. The front office was deserted, but in the cavern hollowed out of the cliff’s wall he found Paul Kendall and Stan Utley huddled around a computer terminal.
“What the hell is going on?” Greg demanded.
Utley didn’t even look up from the screen he was studying. “Not sure yet,” he said. “Something tripped the alarm topside, but so far everything’s working fine.” He studied the display for a few more seconds, then glanced up at Paul Kendall. “Could have been a bird,” he said. “If a mouse was poking around up there and an owl went for it, it could break the trip beam.”
Moreland shook his head. Whatever had happened at the antenna had nothing to do with an owl, or any other kind of wild animal. If Judith Sheffield had discovered what was going on, then other people had too. “I want a crew up there,” he ordered. “Right now!”
Utley shot him an irritated glance, but knew better than to argue. He picked up a phone and entered a number on the keypad, drumming his fingers impatiently on his desk until he recognized Otto Kruger’s voice at the other end. Less than a minute later he hung up. “Kruger’s going up there himself with a couple of the men from the dam,” he said. “But if there’s a real problem—”
Abruptly, the sirens stopped wailing. Utley started to smile, but as his eyes moved to the computer screen, the smile faded. “Shit,” he muttered.
Paul Kendall, his fury mounting, shoved Utley aside and studied the display on the screen. It indicated clearly that not only was the signal cable to the antenna cut, but the power cable was broken as well. “I want that fixed,” he said, his voice taking on a dangerous edge. “We’ve got a lot to do tonight, and none of it can wait.”
Utley’s tongue ran nervously across his lower lip. Until Kruger got to the antenna and assessed the damage, there was no way of telling how long it would take before the antenna would be functional again. But he’d worked for Kendall long enough to know better than to suggest the possibility that one of his orders might not be met. “I’ll let you know when I’ve heard from Kruger,” he said.
Kendall nodded curtly, his mind already on other things. He’d made his decision about what was to be done tonight much earlier, and there were preparations to be made. But instead of sitting down at one of the computers with Greg Moreland to begin designing the new program that would be broadcast out over Borrego as soon as the antenna was repaired, he found himself drawn out of the little building into the serene quiet of the canyon.
He glanced upward, but the lights around the antenna were out now, and all he could see were the black shadows of the canyon’s northern wall. On the southern wall the pale light of the moon shone softly on the sandstone, its glorious daylight hues muted now to myriad shades of gray. Directly above, the sky glittered with stars, more stars than Paul Kendall ever remembered having seen before.
He moved away from the building, and a small breeze, redolent with sage, tweaked at him. Then, to the right, there was a flickering movement, nothing more than a shadow within a shadow, as a bat fluttered by.
The stream, running in its bed a few yards away, babbled softly in the darkness, and Kendall could hear the chirruping of frogs as they called out in an endless search for mates.
Kendall liked the canyon—even was beginning to appreciate the desert itself.
He hadn’t wanted to come to Borrego at all. Indeed, his first choice for the experiment that was taking place here had been Alaska. Up there were towns with no roads leading in or out, towns that were all but cut off from the rest of the world during the long northern winter. But in the end he’d realized that the very isolation of those places could become a liability rather than an asset. While it was true that no one could get to those towns, neither could anyone leave them.
And Greg Moreland had assured him that Borrego would be perfect. “No one cares what happens there,” he’d insisted five years ago when he’d brought his first sketchy ideas to Kendall. “No one will even notice what we’re doing.” But now, after all the years of research and planning, after all the experiments that had, in the end, proved the project to be completely feasible; now, when he was on the very verge of success, he was going to have to fold his tents, move on, and start over again.
Well, perhaps not completely over again. The mechanisms were perfected now, he was certain of that. If they’d had another month—maybe even as little as two weeks—they’d have been ready to unveil Greg’s technique to the consortium of corporations that had funded the massive project he’d headed for the last five years.
And abandoning Borrego had its advantages. Before the successes of the past few days, there had been some failures.
Reba Tucker.
No one had meant for Reba to die, not really. But they’d had to have a subject for that first human experiment, and there had been compelling reasons for selecting Reba. The teacher, from the moment Greg had suggested her, had struck Kendall as one of those women who was devoted to her students, even sometimes capable of inspiring them. But she was also the kind who was overprotective of them, just as Frank Arnold had been overprotective of his men. And it wasn’t protection anyone in the country needed. Americans, as far as Paul Kendall was concerned, had had entirely too much protection. And now, in the last decade of the century, they were paying for it.
The whole nation had become lazy, assuming that its forty years of economic supremacy was a permanent fixture on the planet’s landscape. Too many people, inspired by other people like Reba Tucker, were taking the attitude that their own personal fulfillment was more important than carrying their economic weight. And the country was paying for it.
And then Greg Moreland had come to him with his plan to realign the minds of the nation’s youth.
The most elegant aspect of the scheme—the aspect that had truly seized Kendall’s imagination—was that by its very nature the realignment would allow subjects to be customized perfectly to suit whatever tasks society—or Paul Kendall—required of them.
People with unique talents could be provided with the personalities best suited to utilize those talents. Other people—the masses of individuals who would never stand out from the crowd—would simply have their minds adjusted so that, no matter what their station in life, they would feel a contentment that nature would never have allowed them.
That, of course, was still in the future. But in Borrego the final experimentation would have taken place over the next few weeks, possibly even months. Despite Greg Moreland’s own eagerness to move forward as quickly as possible, Kendall had planned to move slowly, sending out only narrow ranges of frequencies at any given time, then monitoring the people who were affected. Already it was obvious that there were still areas in which the process needed refinement. Right now it appeared there were too many hypothalamus probes, and some of the subjects had already become almost too lethargic ever to be useful.
On the other hand, those extra probes could prove useful. Indeed, with Frank Arnold, they already had. Frank had gotten out of line, and he’d been punished.
Given time, it all could have been worked out. He and Greg Moreland would have been able to record the changes in each subject, and eventually devise perfect combinations of
probes to affect any given subject’s mind in almost any way imaginable.
That was why he’d insisted on keeping such meticulous records of who had received which shot. The probes were tuned to hundreds of frequencies. Until now they’d been very careful in their selection of subjects for realignment.
They’d started with the troublemakers, the kids who made life difficult not only for their teachers, but for everyone else as well. But now there had been a leak in the security of the project, long before they were willing to make it public. Until people could see the benefits of what they were doing, they could hardly expect them to approve. Right now, given the condition of the Alvarez girl, and the Sparks kid, they would surely be accused of “crimes against humanity.”
Kendall had decided that he simply wouldn’t let that happen.
Tonight he was going to eliminate the evidence.
Tonight, as soon as the antenna was repaired, he would send out powerful transmissions of the entire frequency spectrum to which the probes were tuned.
In the space of a few seconds every probe in the Borrego area would fire, burning itself away and leaving no trace whatever of its existence.
A lot of people would die.
Some of them might survive physically, of course, but Kendall knew there would be little left of their minds.
And then there would be the inevitable investigation, but in the end, with no evidence to show what had happened, none of the micromachines left in anyone’s brain, there would be nothing left but questions.
Paul Kendall and Greg Moreland wouldn’t be around to answer any of those questions. They would already be somewhere else, in some other small town in the middle of nowhere, preparing to repeat their experiments.