“An explanation, that’s all it is. When the worst happens, I’ve always thought it would be a small comfort to be informed of its exact dimensions. It’s that, my faith in meremeasurements , more than any special competence or knowledge, that makes me a scientist. Perhaps it’s a faith you wouldn’t share, and if this weremy earthquake, I don’t know whether I would be that interested in the seismograph readings. Perhaps in the labyrinth of my motiveswhat I am offering in the name of charity–this explanation–is only a new twist of the old thumbscrew. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps–the word multiplies itself as wantonly as an amoeba. I won’t say it again.
“When I outlined this project, it was then an abstracter kind of crime. The prospectus was completed before I knew thatyou existed, months before you were brought back to the Village. I did wonder, later on, whether their decision to retrieve you had been determined by the parameters I’d drawn up for selecting an optimum subject. (Subject! there’s a lovely euphemism. We psychologists have invented a richer treasure of cant than all the gentlewomen of the 19th Century together.) If thatwas their purpose, then they took long enough getting around to it. Perhaps–oh, I’ve said it!–perhaps Number 2was your friend, insofar as it must have been he (or she) who kept you from this day for . . . how long? Over two months. Surely it’s significant that the order to set to work should be issued immediately Number 2 had escaped, departed, whatever.
“I keep saying ‘they.’ What I mean, of course, is Number1. Number 1 has never been able to find a lieutenant exactly to his taste. Either they have been enterprising and imaginative in performing their duties, in which case they have invariably shown an imperfect loyalty, a tendency to place their individual interests above the interests of the Village and of Number 1. (An orthodox faith would not distinguish between the two.)Or he would be a man of unquestionable loyalty who proved, at a moment of crisis, to be a nincompoop. Once, Number 1 discovered a subordinate who combined both failings–he was a disloyal nincompoop–but he’s never found someone who was at once fanatically loyal and a brilliant administrator. Few dictatorsever have had that good luck, with the possible exception of those four paragons of the Golden Age of Authority, the ’30’s and ’40’s.
“For a dictator nothing is impossible: that is the first tenet of orthodoxy. Number 1 decided that since he could not find an ideal 2, he would have one made to order. I was brought here expressly to design a model of this superveep and to work out a method by which that model could be converted from graphs and equations into flesh and blood. Since science hasn’t yet advanced to the stage where it can create a true homunculus from raw scraps of DNA, it was clear that something like a metamorphosis was called for. It was also clear that it would be more feasible to graft loyalty to an already existing imagination than the other way round.
“Which is not all as easy as you may think. Though it would take at most 48 hours to transform you, or someone of your sort, into a perfectly loyal minion, such a transformation would virtually destroy those qualities that would make your loyalty worth having: initiative, creativity, and all those other vague words that are lumped under the heading of (that vaguest word of all) Spirit. The usual techniques of brainwashing affect these virtues the way ordinary laundering affects the more perishable kinds of clothing: at worst they are demolished, like laces, and at best they shrink, like argyle socks. The merit ofmy program is that those useful qualities will be preserved, while your loyalty is shifted, ever so gradually, from its present locus to where Number 1 would like to see it, revolving in a worshipful orbit about the sun of that exalted idea: One, Oneness, Number 1. Since your present loyalty is centered not on any particular nation, institution, or surrogatefather, but about a pantheon ofideas –Truth, Justice, Freedom, and the rest of the Platonic tribe–its transfer to this new orbit will be relatively easy, for the idea of One is no less abstract, vague and exalted than, for instance, the idea of Freedom.
“In fact, even as I talk to you now, even as you listen, the process has begun. Like Ishtar disrobing on her progress through the seven gates, you, in the amniotic void of that tank, have surrendered your senses, one by one, till now it is only the sound of my voice that ties you to reality. When my voice ceases you will exist in an elemental state. You have read, I’m sure, about these experiments, and you know how people, under sensory deprivation, become malleable as refined gold. The mind cannot tolerate a vacuum, and when the senses no longer are pumping data in, it begins to fill up from the springs of its own unconscious. Fantasy takes over, but not the fantasy of dreaming, for there is no distinction now between dreaming and waking. It is the conscious mind that dreams, the ego. And it is, at these moments, intensely suggestible.
“A picture is worth a thousand words, so let me illustrate my lecture with a slide or two. We need not bother, today, with lasers and such as that. Your own imagination, starving for images, will do our work for us.
“What shall it be? Since this is not yet the metamorphosis proper, let’s choose something pretty. A marble egg. There was a marble egg on the desk in the study of your London flat. It was rose-colored. It rested in an egg-cup of white china. You can see it now, that marble egg, the swirling veins of gray, the mottled rose that shifts, as you turn it in your hand, to pink, to a deeper rose, with here and there an arabesque of milky white. That egg has sat onyour desk for years, growing steadily more invisible as it grew more customary, but now you see it, don’t you, more clearly than you’ve ever seen it before? It is morereal now than it has ever been, even though youknow , because I’m telling you, that it is only animaginary egg of unreal marble that rests in an entirely subjective egg-cup. When we set to work in earnest, I will no longer be able to remind you of that paradox.
“Now, to demonstrate the final, and crucial, mechanism. Hold the marble egg up to the light. Its loveliness increases. A little higher, and the light will be ideal.
“You did, didn’t you? You held it up, because that is something you would have done without compunction back here, in the real world. The action did not contradict any principle or taste. But now, observe: Put the egg in your mouth. Do as I say, Number 2,put it in your mouth .
“Did you do that? Unless you have a peculiar taste for sucking marble, you did not. Such an action lies outside your character, the range of what you allow yourself tobe . You’d be amazed at how easily that range can be moved back and forth.
“We humans are, at root, Number 2, very simple creatures. Like the computers we’ve fashioned in our image, we operate on a binary code of pleasure and pain, a switch markedON and another markedOFF . Finally, everything can be reduced to one or the other, everything we’ve learned, everything we loathe or love, everything that forms our image of what and who we are.
“At this moment, Number 2, we have control of those switches. There are two wires fixed to your scalp, one for pain, unimaginable pain, and one for pleasure, unspeakable pleasure.
“Observe, now, what these switches do. Again I will insist that you put the marble egg in your mouth. Again you refuse. Again I insist–put the egg in your mouth. I do more than insist, I threaten.
“Put the egg in your mouth!
“You have not, and so I touch, gently, the switch of pain.
“I release it, and suggest, onlysuggest that you wouldlike to put the marble egg in your mouth. It is, after all, in keeping with your character to do so.
“Can you feel it there now, the larger end lodged in the soft flesh beneath the tongue, the smaller end touching the roof of your mouth, a small cold ovoid of marble, in your mouth? You do feel it there, and now I touch, briefly, this switch for pleasure.
“And, oh the bliss! You realize that it isgood to have that marble egg just where it is, in your mouth. Can you feel the goodness of it there? Can you? And I touch, again, the switch.
“If I should touch it once or twice more, you would never again be able to look at, or even imagine, a marble egg without a maniacal craving to place it in your mouth.
“That is how the human machine works. What it can be made to do depends on where we decide to drive it. The bulk of my work has consisted in drawing up that road-map. The transformation from 6 to 2 will be so imperceptible that you will never, I think, be able to detect a single bend in the road, but by the time you have arrived at your final destination, at complete Twoness, you would not be able to recognize yourself in what you have become, anymore than that new self, that perfect figure 2, will be able to see himself in you, the ‘you’ who hears this.
“And it will be a terrible loss, I think. Because I did loveyou. I loved the person that you are and that you will so soon cease to be. I doubt very much that I could love the person you’re going to become. For though I know that you don’t love me now, youmight some day, and this other person we are forming from your clay will not be able to love anything but One, the idea of One’s Oneness. You, who listen to me and whom I love, will have been lost to me, and to yourself.
“Goodbye, Number 6. Forgive me for my part in this. If I’d refused to play it out to the end, they would have sent an understudy on in my place. Like every other traitor, I am a coward and a pragmatist. If you were able to understand what it means to be like this, you wouldn’t be here now, and I would never have loved you.
“The light is blinking above the monitor. Number 1 is impatient with my speech-making, and no doubt you are, too. We will have to begin in earnest. You can, while there is still a moment, remove the marble egg from your mouth.”