After thinking about it for a while I saw the rationale. “Not just Greta,” I said slowly. “All of us. We were all declared officially dead when they sent us here. They wouldn’t want to have our bodies turning up outside, years later. So the answer’s obvious—dump us with the garbage!”
“Not with the garbage. Like the garbage. Do you believe me now?”
I nodded.
“And what about my plan?”
“Judith, it’s the best I’ve heard. But it still founders on those damned transponders.”
“I’m a surgeon. I can take yours out.”
“And we’ll be isolated and hauled off for mind-wipe within minutes. Those things stop transmitting the moment you get them free. They’re powered by the myopotentials of the muscles they’re in.”
“I know how the transponders work!” she said, with a trace of impatience. “They have a pair of fine wires running among the muscle fibers. The wires act as both power pickups and antennae. If you hold them firmly between your fingers they’ll go on transmitting well enough to satisfy the central surveillance computer.”
“How do you know?”
“I’ve helped at autopsies. Taken transponders out and tested them. I managed to implant Greta’s into a rabbit. The computer tried to insist that Greta was alive and in the animal colony!”
“If you fool around with those things—”
“I wasn’t fooling around. I was finding a way of keeping ours going after we’ve gone.” Her whisper became intense. “I can take out yours, plant it in a rabbit—”
“A rabbit? What rabbit?” Prisoners weren’t allowed to keep pets.
“Rabbits from the test colony. We use them for bioassays. When there are a couple under test over a weekend they let me keep them in my cell for observation. It saves having to come and escort me down to the colony on a Saturday and Sunday just to take a rabbit’s temperature. I’ve set it up so that I’ll have a pair trader test starting Friday night. The surveillance center will go on reporting we’re in my cell, and maybe they won’t interrupt us for half the morning.”
“Us? You’ve only switched mine. How are you going to switch yours?”
“I won’t. You will!”
“Me? Impossible! I’ve seen the mess amateur surgeons have made of each other’s backs trying to dig those damned things out.”
“I’ll show you how. I’ve already got a surgical kit, local anesthetics, everything needed, stashed away in my cell. We i ;in rig mirrors so you can watch me take out yours. Then I’ll 1'iiide you while you take out mine.”
“You’d really let me cut into your back?”
“I’d let you do it without anesthetic if that was the only way to avoid mind-wipe. Gavin, are you game?”
“It’s the only game there is.”
“I want one promise from you before we start to play.” “What’s that?”
“You’re not desperate to get out of the Pen just to get out of the Pen. You’ve been programmed to kill somebody!” “Programmed? Me? What the hell do you mean?”
“You’re no murderer. In fact I’d call you cautious, sympathetic, and sensitive.” That was the first time for many years that anybody had called me sympathetic or sensitive. Before I could deny the charge she had gone on, “But when you talk of escape you go glazed. You’re not a hater, but you hate someone. You’ve had a defined hatred planted in you.”
“That’s a lot of bull!”
“I don’t think so.” She shrugged. “I’m betting everything on this escape because there’s something I’ve got to do. It’s not particularly dangerous, but I’ll need help. So before we agree to go together I want your word that you’ll help me with my task before you start on yours. After that, I’ll help you.”
“I won’t need anybody’s help.” I brought myself under control. The face of Futrell had risen in my mind and set me shaking. “But I promise to help you first—if we get out.” “Good.” She sat up and patted her Titian hair. “Then we’d better ask for permission to cohabit Friday.”
“Why not tonight? So we can plan some more?”
She eyed me. “Gavin—you’re not planning on planning tonight! But sure—we can ask. The old hen on duty won’t let us. She’ll tell me to think it over and come back when I’m sure I want to commit myself.”
Judith was right When we went to the interview booth and asked the Controller on duty if I could spend the night in Judith’s cell, the elderly woman on the screen smiled benignly, gave us a brief lecture on human relationships, and advised Judith to consider a little longer before she gave herself to me. “Ask again tomorrow, after you’ve had time to think.”
“Thank you, ma’am,” said Judith. I grunted.
We walked together toward our cells while I seethed and Judith chattered. When we came to her corridor she said, “Wait here, darling. There’s a book in my room I’d like you to read. I’ll fetch it for you.” And she had shot off before I could say that I didn’t want to read any damned book that night.
She returned with a paperback, The Lighted Road, some kind of religious tract. As she kissed me she whispered, “My story’s hidden in there. I’ve got another copy, so file that one in the library tomorrow. On some back shelf.” She kissed me again. “See you at breakfast.”
I walked slowly to my cell as the curfew chimed; more frustrated than excited.
III
My—your—name is Judith Grenfell, whatever they may call you now, and I am—was—a neurosurgeon (MD Hopkins ’20, Chief Neurosurgical Resident Bethesda ’24, Staff of Mercy Hospital and Research Associate NIH ’24— ’26). For more about our past life read my obituary in the Journal of the National Institutes of Health.
Officially I am dead. I was found guilty of premeditated murder and sentenced to life imprisonment in the Federal Penitentiary. I have now served one year and don’t expect to serve much longer, for they are planning to close the Pen and restructure the remaining prisoners. That will wipe me out and bring you into being. If you exist I do not. But I am hoping that our body retains some remnants of my beliefs and that, if you ever read this, you will see where your-— our—duty lies.
In ’24 I went to NIH Bethesda as a Research Associate and joined a team investigating neurotransmitters. It was headed by Doctor Eugene Drummond, and the others were James Cranston and Audrey Sullivan. They were both neuroscientists and both are now dead. I was convicted of murdering them.
I did not and I don’t know who did, but that is not important. What is important is a discovery we made and which has still not been published. Whoever you are, I beg you to make sure that it is.
Our project was the investigation of Aleptin, a synthetic neurotransmitter, and we used Paxin as the control drug in a double-blind cross-over study. We chose Paxin because it had been (we thought) well-researched, and was reputed to be so safe that it had recently been deregulated and could be bought “over the counter” without prescription. There had been some objections to its deregulation, and the American Medical Association had bitterly opposed the sale of an effective drug obtainable without first seeing a doctor. But when the Directors of Medicare showed that seeing a doctor was costing the taxpayer some ten billion dollars a year (five hundred million office visits at twenty dollars a visit to get prescriptions for a drug purported to be much safer than Aspirin), the opposition died and the American Medical Association retreated.
We were working with naive rats, that is pure-strain animals who had never been used in any previous experiment. I was doing the surgical implants and, as the junior member of the team and for another reason I explain below I was also supervising most of the pre- and post-drug tests. One of the tests was a standard maze-run to measure exploratory behavior (the orientation phase of the learning process). In group after group that exploratory behavior was reduced by Paxin, the effect to be expected from a minor tranquillizer.
One evening when I was alone in the lab watching the rats run the maze, I noticed that some showed a definite asymmet
ry; they consistently took right forks. This was sufficiently unusual for me to record which of the rats were right-turn-ing. The next day a technician came from the animal colony to apologize for having inadvertently issued me a group which had been used in an operant conditioning experiment months before, and when I checked the protocol of that experiment I found that the operant response had been to turn right.
None of the rats had shown any right-turning tendency in their no-drug run but some had shown it strongly in their post-drug. I broke the double-blind code for that group, expecting to find those were the animals treated with Aleptin. They were not. All the right-turners had had Paxin.
That was an exciting observation, but it was also disquieting. I hope you can see why. Paxin was being used by half the populations in all the affluent nations of the world. And my observation suggested Paxin was a chemical reinforcer of conditioned behavior, at least in rats.
It might not have that effect in humans, but if it did the implications were so enormous that I repeated the experiment a number of times during the next few weeks. The statistical significance rose to probability levels which approached certainty.
Jim and Audrey knew that I was staying behind in the lab most evenings, and assumed that it was to sulk as well as to i un rats. Team morale was bad because soon after my arrival ut NIH I had become infatuated with Jim and we had shared a brief but hectic love affair. This had not endeared me to Audrey, his previous partner, and she had used her not inconsiderable charm to win him back from me. In fact I had not met either of my two colleagues outside the lab since I had heen dumped by Jim.
My discovery of the “Paxin effect” however was of such potential importance that it transcended personal feelings. I showed both of them my data and asked them to try and replicate my results while I carried out another survey of the human literature. Doctor Drummond was in Europe attending the World Conference on Impermease or I would have shown my data to him also.
When we met again two weeks later Jim and Audrey not only confirmed my results, their own findings suggested that Paxin in rats was an even more powerful reinforcer than I had suspected. And my search of the human literature had turned up a number of observations which, viewed in the light of our new knowledge, hinted that Paxin had the same reinforcing effect in man.
We were too excited by our discovery to let mutual hostility affect our decisions. We agreed that we must keep our results confidential until we had shown them to Doctor Drummond who was, after all, the leader of our team. His name would appear first on anything we published and the papers we planned would probably be referenced as “Drummond et al.” Jim and Audrey were already starting to resent that prospect. I myself would be proud to be among the “et al” in the authorship of a paper I was sure would be seminal, but I could not resist writing up what we had done. I included in my draft both our own findings and a catalog of those quotations from human experimentation which supported our hypothesis.
When Doctor Drummond returned from Europe we showed him our data. He was initially skeptical, then interested, and finally absorbed. We ran some groups to convince him and, once convinced, he went straight to the Federal Therapeutics Administration. He left us an enthusiastic scientist; he returned a troubled civil servant.
FTA had gone into spasm on seeing our results. Here was . a drug they had decontrolled under Administration pressure, and we were showing that it had an unexpected and socially significant side-effect. The Director of FTA pulled down a security screen over our study, and ordered Doctor Drummond to surrender all our data. He invoked the recently passed Social Stability Act and warned us we would be prosecuted if we mentioned our work to any unauthorized person. He certainly succeeded in frightening Doctor Drummond, who tried to calm our anger at the FTA’s gag by emphasizing the public uproar if people learned they had been gulping down a drug which encouraged them to act like conditioned rats!
Jim, in particular, was furious and said that he now understood why the Administration had pressured FTA into making Pax in easily available. Others must have already discovered the “Paxin Effect”; the Administration must have known about it for some time and were using it for their own ends. Everybody is conditioned to some extent by social pressures. We all stop automatically at a red light, and tend : to move back when a policeman tells us to. Paxin would make us jump back and would reinforce the average citizen’s I tendency to obey authority. The drug was a social stabilizer. With public agitation developing over the sudden decline in | the birth rate, the Administration was in need of all the social stability it could get, and the last thing it would welcome was news of an unexpected drawback to a widely touted drug.
That was the first time any of us realized how the Social Stability Act allowed the Administration to tighten its hold over all information dissemination. As soon as I suspected that the gag would be applied to us stored my draft in the NIH “data-dump,” the mammoth computerized filing system where the mountains of data produced by NIH research are stored for possible future reference. I filed mine under “Meprobamate,” an obsolete drug which nobody had worked with for many years and so an address which nobody was likely to access for many more.
Jim continued to protest the gag and finally by-passed Doctor Drummond, who had been acting as an unhappy intermediary between us and the FTA. He told the bureaucrats bluntly that he would only respect their security order long enough for them to prepare a soothing public statement on Paxin and amend their regulations so that it was returned to the list of Schedule II Restricted drugs. In the heated discus-
sions he had with FTA he must have let slip the information that I still had my draft report, for several days later Doctor Drummond urged me to turn it in. I told him that I had put I where there was no chance of it surfacing accidentally and that.I did not intend to retrieve it while the gag was in force.
Two days after I had refused to surrender my report I got a note from Jim asking me to drop round to his apartment at seven that evening to discuss our future plans with Audrey and himself. The message was marked “Very Important,” and was the first invitation I had had from him since we split. I couldn’t get an answer when I phoned, so at seven I dutifully went to his apartment.
The door was unlocked and I let myself in. The lounge was empty. I went to look in the bedroom and found Jim and Audrey in a collapsed missionary position. Both were naked and both appeared to be dead.
I was confirming that they were when two detectives burst into the apartment. I was standing by the bed with blood on my hands and the murder weapon on the floor. A gun I had never seen but which the records later showed I had purchased. And which bore my fingerprints.
I was arrested and charged with a double murder. Because of the FTA’s ukase neither my arrest nor my trial were made public and my court-appointed lawyer wouldn’t believe me when I tried to tell him the truth. What the judge believed was the plethora of genuine evidence that I had quarreled bitterly with Audrey and the purely synthetic evidence that I had threatened to kill both her and Jim.
Even Doctor Drummond, one of the few people allowed to visit me in jail, seemed convinced that I had killed my colleagues. He tried to suggest that our frustration over not being allowed to publish our research added to my own frustration at having lost Jim to Audrey, had led the three of us into one of those escalating quarrels which result in killings. If I would tell him where I had hidden my draft he would produce it as evidence which might persuade the authorities to reduce the charge against me.
By the time Doctor Drummond had finished outlining the reasons for me to surrender the draft I knew what would happen if I did. I’d be silenced, as they had silenced Jim and Audrey, and Drummond would be next for the axe. I told him that by refusing his offer I was prolonging his life as well as my own. He was trying to argue me out of such an absurd idea when his visiting time was cut short, and he left lamenting my fate and worrying about his own.
I was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment, and
an addendum to my sentence confirmed my confidence that I was not paranoid, but was indeed the target of an Administration growing desperate. For I was sent to the Pen without the routine examination by the Board of Psychiatric Assessors, and without the option of voluntary restructuring until I had served at least one year. The Judge tried to pretend this was “a partial punishment for my revolting crime.” (The concept of punishment is returning to the judicial process with a vengeance, as the Administration becomes more frightened and the public more bitter.)
It was not my punishment the Administration wanted, it was my draft. They didn’t want my memory wiped until I’d told them where my report was hidden. The accidental reappearance of my data in the hands of any reputable scientist would blow the whole Paxin play.
They had not allowed for the integrity of the Federal Penal Service. Immediately after I had been sentenced the FPS took me into custody and, as the law directed, held me incommunicado. Inadvertently they saved me from the intensive interrogation that is also starting to become customary with an Administration determined to maintain law and order. Or perhaps the FPS did know what would happen to me if I was given to the police and purposely protected me. Whatever the cause, I was vastly relieved to arrive here because it was the only place where nobody could get their hands on me.
Now my fears are being renewed. Not fears for myself; I am already doomed. Doomed to either clandestine execution or regulation mind-wipe. If the Pen is closed down and all the remaining prisoners restructured I may be detached and surrendered to the police for interrogation. In which event you—my new persona—will never exist.
Or the Administration may have given up on me, and is too involved in other mounting problems to trouble itself with interrogating and executing me. If I am restructured and you are bom from me, I pray to the light that this letter will reach you and that, somehow or other, you will gain access to the “Meprobamate” file at NIH and retrieve my—our—report. It must be published. The implications of Paxin when used as a social stabilizer are too immense for the decisions about it to be made by some faceless group.
Edward Llewellyn Page 5