The Mountain Cage

by Pamela Sargent

  The first report had come in less than an hour ago, at around seven-thirty. People were roaming through the mall, taking whatever they wanted, completely out of control. That was all she had been able to find out before driving out here.

  Chris strode toward the knot of policemen outside the main entrance, with Bob trailing her. She recognized a detective she had interviewed just last week. “Hey, Andy,” she called out. The detective glanced toward her. “What’s happening?”

  Before he could give her an answer, the doors of the entrance opened. People were coming out of the mall. A few carried boxes, but others were empty-handed. Several small children were among them, clutching toys. All of them looked surprisingly calm.

  “I see a security guard with them,” Andy the detective said.

  Chris moved closer to her cameraman, who was already taping footage. “We’d better go live with this one,” she murmured to Bob. “I’ll call and ask for—” She paused, seeing a familiar face among the crowd at the mall entrance. Lou Collado of WHND was with them, wearing the same placid, goofy-looking smile as the rest of them.

  “Remain where you are,” an amplified man’s voice bellowed. Chris wondered how many people were inside the mall. Probably a lot, maybe thousands. They might have to call out a National Guard unit to handle them if it got ugly. What could have made so many people start acting so weird?

  She thought then of the Holder Building, just a mile up the road from the Hannaford Center Mall. Twenty people, all of whom had moved to the suburbs of Hannaford a year ago, worked in the small office building for something called MindData Associates, and nobody seemed to know exactly what they did. Chris had sniffed around for a while, and had found out only that MindData had something to do with communications technology and that they were rumored to be part of a government project. MindData had recently installed a big dish on the roof of the Holder Building. Chris had supposed that they needed the dish for uplinks to satellites. She had soon turned her attention to stories that were likely to get her more spots on WKLY’s Action News.

  Why was she thinking of MindData Associates now? It couldn’t mean anything, but her newswoman’s guts—which had warned her earlier that year that Councilman Roland was taking bribes and obstructing justice just before it was announced that he had been indicted—were signaling to her again.

  More people came out of the mall entrance. “Stay where you are,” the amplified voice said, but the ones in the front kept moving, slowly but deliberately, toward the police, all of them with those eerie grins on their faces.

  “Jesus,” Bob said as he aimed his camera toward them. “They look like zombies.”

  “Not quite,” Chris said. “Zombies don’t smile.” She wondered if the police could bring themselves to shoot unarmed people. They wouldn’t shoot; they would try tear gas or something else first. Maybe they would close off the mall and wait. The siege of the Hannaford Center Mall—that might be the kind of human interest story that could run for days and maybe even get her noticed by station managers in cities with bigger markets than raggedy-assed old Hannaford.

  Lou Collado was moving in her direction, in the middle of a knot of smiling people. Chris suddenly felt an overwhelming sympathy for the other TV news reporter. She could still hope to escape Hannaford, but Lou was over forty even if he claimed to be thirty-five and he had been at WHND for almost ten years now. He would have to make his peace with …

  “… being a local fixture on News 12,” Lou said. “That’s all right, Chris. It isn’t so bad. WHND gave me a big raise in my new contract. I won’t have to uproot my kids. I’m actually starting …”

  “… to enjoy it,” a woman next to Lou finished. “I’d rather be where I am than where you are, pushing yourself and dreaming of turning yourself into Christa Kelly the network anchor.”

  She had never told anyone about imagining herself as Christa Kelly the network anchor, but then again Lou and his station had not announced his new contract and raise, either. What do you know? she thought. I know what you’re thinking. A wave of warmth swept toward her, making her feel a contentment she had not felt in years, and then uneasiness suddenly gripped her.

  “What is it?” Bob said.

  “Andy,” Chris said, turning toward the police detective, “you’ve got nothing to worry about.”

  “I’ve got nothing to worry about,” Andy replied.

  “I’ve been wanting to get inside your pants ever since we began working together,” Chris said. Those weren’t her words; they belonged to Bob Unger.

  The police were milling around with the crowd. Suddenly a group of people surged toward Chris and swept her and Bob away from the police cars.

  “Holy cow,” Miller Oretskin muttered as he looked at the images on his TV screen. Joe Allard and his wife Lois had driven over to look at Miller’s big screen TV and watch a movie on one of the satellite channels. Now they were watching WKLY’s Action News, which had apparently dumped its usual format in favor of live coverage of some very strange events at the Hannaford Center Mall.

  “The mob has moved out of the mall itself,” a man’s voice said, “and taken over the parking lot.” On the TV, Miller saw a helicopter shot of what looked like thousands of people fanning out among parked cars and other motor vehicles. If this was a mob, Miller thought, it was definitely an orderly one; the crowds were moving through the parking lot in rows, reminding him of schoolchildren filing out for a fire drill. The camera zoomed in on part of the crowd. Many of the people seemed to be holding hands or linking arms with those next to them.

  “I’ll be darned,” Joe Allard muttered.

  The view on the screen changed, showing the face of a young dark-haired man. Behind him, Miller saw a square edifice with the word “Sears,” which meant that the reporter had to be on the hillside that overlooked the mall’s north side. A caption saying “WKLY Action News—Live” was in the right hand corner of the screen. Miller wondered why the pretty blonde, that Chris Szekely, wasn’t doing this particular story.

  “Several members of the Hannaford police force have been spotted among the rioters, as has our own Chris Szekely,” the reporter said. Guess that answers my question, Miller thought. “We still have no word on what exactly happened inside the mall, since no one has been able to get inside.”

  The scene changed again, showing the two WKLY anchors, Ed Stapleton and Elisa Nguyen, behind the blue desk of the Action News set. Stapleton leaned forward and rested his elbows on the desktop. “Bruno,” the anchorman said, “we’ve just had a report from the mayor’s office confirming that local units of the Army National Guard are being dispatched to the mall, with orders to disperse the mob.”

  “Holy mackerel,” Joe said. “We have to drive over the Dunn Bridge and past the mall to get home.”

  “Unless we take a detour on Route Five,” Lois added.

  “Maybe you better stay overnight, then,” Miller said. “Doesn’t look like Hannaford’s the safest place to be right now.”

  The reporter’s face was back on the tube now, with a legend reading “Bruno Flick—Reporting Live” running across his chest. “It’s eerily quiet here now,” the young man said. “Every once in a while, you hear these sounds, almost like a kind of hum, coming out from the mob, and then it’s silent again.” Flick held out his microphone, as if trying to pick up some sounds; Miller heard a wailing that might have been the wind. “Now it looks like they’re coming this way, toward the bridge.”

  “Maybe you better get out of there, Bruno,” the voice of Ed Stapleton said.

  The image changed. Now Miller was looking at a helicopter shot of three long lines of people converging on the ramp that led up the hill to the Dunn Bridge. A yellow satellite truck with a dish on its roof was parked by the ramp; Flick and his cameraman stood next to the vehicle. There was no traffic in sight, so presumably the roads around the mall had been closed off. He would have to put Joe and Lois up in the spare room tonight.

  “They’re at the
ramp,” Flick said in a voiceover. The cameraman with him turned and aimed the camera on his shoulder at the people nearing the ramp as he began to back toward the van. The image changed again to reveal a row of men and women holding hands. They’re smiling, Miller thought as the camera zoomed in for a closeup. Odder still was the fact that their expressions were all the same mysterious Mona Lisa-like smile.

  Flick was talking again. “Guess we should … never liked … it was wonderful, feeling so free, not being all closed in on myself. I was always so alone before and now I’ll never have to be alone again.” The people coming at at the camera seemed to be whispering, and then suddenly the screen went blank.

  The Action News set reappeared on the screen. “Bruno,” Ed Stapleton shouted. “Bruno!”

  Miller looked over at Lois and Joe. “I wonder what the hell that was all about,” he said.

  Everyone’s thoughts were flowing through Chris now, so many and so rapidly that she could no longer tell where she ended and someone else began. She mourned with the woman whose son would no longer speak to her, rejoiced with the boy who had just won his varsity letter in basketball, sympathized with the insurance executive who had skirted the legal and ethical edges for his company and had come to despise himself for it. Up ahead, under one of the ramp lights, she saw her rival Bruno Flick standing near a yellow WKLY van.

  I never liked all that competition between us, Chris thought.

  “I never liked it at all,” several people in her row murmured.

  It’s wonderful, Chris thought, feeling so free, not being so closed in on myself. I’ll never be alone again.

  Bruno smiled at her as she and the others came up the ramp. Then she noticed headlights behind him and saw that several cars were coming toward them. No, not cars, she thought as the motorcade whined to a halt. Jeeps, and trucks, and helmeted men in uniform who jumped out of the vehicles and lined up in the road.

  She wanted to turn and run. She was trapped inside herself, standing on a ramp in the middle of a mob with the National Guard preparing to shoot them all. A moan rose from the people around her, and for a moment she feared that the link binding her to them had broken, but then her thoughts were joined to theirs once more.

  I love you all, she thought, but it wasn’t the same. The fear was still inside her, and now it was also growing, leaping from one mind to another, a fear that was becoming part of the All.

  Jessamyn’s left hand was in Kyle’s; her right hand clutched the arm of the man named Rich. He had a wife named Anna; she had picked that up from his thoughts, too. They were following the lines of people in front of them. It came to her that they were all moving north, toward the bridge that spanned the river. I’m cool with that, Jessamyn thought. It didn’t much matter where they went, as long as they were together.

  “Feedback,” Kyle was saying, or maybe he was only thinking it. She was at the point now where she was picking up so much that she could not tell if the others were saying their thoughts aloud or only thinking them.

  “Not feedback,” someone else said—or thought. “Not quite, although that’s not a bad way of putting it. Something went wrong.”

  “Something went wrong,” Jessamyn repeated.

  “Somebody screwed up big time.”

  “Somebody screwed up big time,” Jessamyn said. More was coming to her, and she sensed that others among her companions were also picking it up. “We were supposed to test it out in an isolated spot, aim the signal at some small community, see how they reacted, then shut the sucker down with no one being the wiser.”

  “I guess,” Kyle said, “the system worked.” Jessamyn found herself mouthing the words along with him. “We wanted crowd control, and we’ve got crowd control. We’ve got this whole damned crowd under control. The only problems are that we don’t know what the transponder’s range might be, how long the dish will keep sending, and how long these mental reverberations will persist even when it …”

  “… does shut down,” Rich finished.

  “Sabotage,” someone behind Jessamyn said, “that’s what it is, or else some asshole jumping the gun on testing. They’ll trace the whole mess back to MindData Associates when this is all over and then it’s going to be lawsuit city.”

  Another emotion was flowing into her, a despair that was almost numbing. “I can’t bear it,” a voice whispered. “Nothing will ever be any better. I just want the pain to stop.”

  Jessamyn did not know this voice, this mind. “That’s one of the problems with this project,” Kyle said. “You can’t tell whose thoughts are going to resonate more than others. You don’t know who’s going to set the tone. You don’t know if you’re going to have a happy controlled crowd or a very unhappy one. It all depends …”

  I’m afraid, Jessamyn thought, I am really afraid now.

  Lois finally went to bed just after midnight. Miller, knowing he would not be able to sleep until he knew what was going on in Hannaford, stayed up with Joe, watching the helicopter shots of the mall mob and listening to the commentary of Ed Stapleton and Elisa Nguyen.

  People were lined up on the bridge and along the ramp. The parking lot, except for the vehicles parked there, was empty. Calling out the National Guard units, Miller thought, had accomplished exactly nothing. The uniformed guards were now scattered among the crowd, standing on the bridge with them, waiting for—what?

  “I have General Thorne on the phone now,” the voice of Elisa Nguyen said. “General, are there any plans to send in more soldiers?”

  “Not much point in that,” a raspy male voice replied, “if they’re just going to end up becoming part of the problem instead of part of the solution.”

  “What could be causing all of these people to behave that way?” Elisa Nguyen asked.

  General Thorne let out a sigh. “Well, if I knew that—” He fell silent.

  The scene changed to show the two anchors at the Action News desk, both still looking meticulously groomed but a tad wearier around the eyes. “In case you’ve just tuned in,” Ed Stapleton said, “we’re in the middle of live coverage of what has to be one of the strangest incidents in Hannaford city history. We’re still not clear on many of the details, but at about seven o’clock this evening, both the employees and the customers at the Hannaford Center Mall apparently looted many of the stores and then came out of the mall into the parking lots at approximately eight-thirty, where most of the Hannaford police force was waiting for them. The police, instead of restraining them, joined the crowd. National Guard units were on their way to the Dunn Bridge near the mall by ten-thirty, but it appears that they have joined the mob as well. At the moment, an estimated four thousand people are standing on the bridge—for what purpose, I can’t begin to guess. So far, there are no reports of injuries or violence.”

  The anchorman shook his head. “As I said, this has to be one of the oddest news stories I’ve ever covered.”

  “You can say that again,” Joe muttered to Miller.

  “We go now to Alexa Browne, reporting from a boat on the Leakansa River.” Ed Stapleton’s talking head disappeared, to be replaced by a young woman in a windbreaker.

  “Alexa Browne, reporting from Hannaford police boat number two.” The reporter’s usual helmet of dark hair looked windblown and ungroomed. “We’re about a quarter of a mile downriver from the Dunn Bridge. Given what has happened so far, with members of the police force and National Guard now part of the mob, Chief of Police Gibson is waiting before deciding on further action.”

  “Isn’t there a chance that the mob will simply get tired and disperse?” the voice of Ed Stapleton asked.

  “We can hope for that,” Alexa Browne replied. The camera swept away from her to a shot of the bridge in the distance. Under the lights lining the bridge, the crowd was clearly visible; people stood along the walkways and against the railings. The Dunn Bridge was old, Miller recalled; the structure had been around nearly as long as he had. Even with its recent refurbishing, he wondered how much weight
it could hold.

  “I’ll be darned,” Joe said. “Good thing we decided to sleep over. I’ll bet this story starts getting network coverage if this goes on much longer.”

  “If it goes on much longer,” Miller said, “you may be my house guests for a while.” He watched the people on the bridge, all so quiet and orderly, all standing there as if they were waiting for something. They’d have to get tuckered out eventually, he thought. He wondered what the police would do later. If they pressed charges, they would have to lock up a lot of people, including some of their own men. There were children among the mob; he had seen them earlier, when the crowd was still in the mall parking lot. How could people drag little kids into something like this?

  This whole weird business was reminding him of why he had bought this house, why he had decided to leave Hannaford and live out in the country away from other people. Being by himself, Miller could hear his own thoughts, become more like himself. If a man was around other people all the time, with little or no solitude, pretty soon he wouldn’t know what thoughts were his own and what was only received wisdom. If others kept interrupting him all the time, intruding on his thoughts, it was only natural that, after a while, he wouldn’t know what he really thought. He would not know if the voice he was hearing inside himself was his own or that of some other guy who had impressed his thoughts upon him.

  And, he told himself, all the media and phones and brand names and national franchises had done their share to make people more like one another, even inside themselves, as if they were all only part of one great big common mind. The more alike they were, the easier it would be for the politiians and the CEOs and the other high muckety-mucks of the world to control them. They should all go and read that old Robert Frost poem, he thought. “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,” it began, but ended with “Good fences make good neighbors.”