KATHERINE MAC LEAN
"THEN I DO HAVE a constitutional privilege to refuse truth drugs and lie detector equipment?" The teener sat in the polygraph chair with a blood pressure cuff on one arm. Dials wavered and jumped as he talked.
The lawyer on his case answered briskly, without simplifying.
"Without a reasonable confession to direct a Verifying investigation, the investigation might take weeks instead of a few hours. The cost of the investigation comes off your personal medical insurance, which otherwise would be available to you, if convicted and brainwiped, as a rehabilitation fund of twenty thousand dollars."
The kid squirmed.
"You make constitutional rights very, very, very expensive. Is a medical excuse cheaper? Can I refuse truth drugs and gadgets because of medical disability?" The dials registered faster breathing, faster heartbeat, higher blood pressure. His voice became more high pitched and rapid as he asked the question.
"What is your medical reason?" asked the doctor.
"I was conditioned physically to refuse drugs. If I accepted any drug I might go into nausea, convulsions or shock, or allergy, acute allergy." He seemed short of breath. The unrolling graph of heartbeat and breathing registered his breathing as rapid and shallow, his heartbeat quick. A traumatic drop in the GSR registered extreme uncontrolled emotion. The polygraph attendant pointed at it, and the doctor nodded, and made a delaying gesture.
"Who conditioned you?"
"My father." A sudden jump in the blood pressure reading indicated either a lie or a bad jolt from a painful memory.
"How? The doctor watched the readings climb, still holding the polygraph operator back from protest. The blood: pressure began to drop, but the pulse increased.
"Electro shock. Please. I don't like this equipment touching . . . " The kid's voice trailed off. He was pale, almost light green, with a sweat-shiny face. His hands clutched the arms of the chair.
"He's going into shock, B.P. below normal limits. Okay, unhook him and take him into the lying-down room. And leave him alone. Don't bother him."
The doctor watched while the police attendants took the kid away.
They spoke after the door shut. "What do you say, Doctor?" asked the lawyer. "When can we question?"
The doctor shook his head negatively.
"With an electric shock trauma in his background, don't expect much lie detecting out of the police polygraph. It's going to show wild jolts whenever he notices it. It probably reminds him of electric shock conditioning. And he might have been conditioned to a physical allergy against sedative drugs. Any injection of truth serum might put him into allergic shock."
"Why should we question him?" asked the data coordinator for the Larry Rubashov case. "He's a nervous kid, and he's had a tiring crazy day. Some of his assistants have confessed. We have his letter and fingerprints. We already have enough on him to classify him a psychopath or a sociopath and wipe him anyhow."
The lawyer protested. "It is a good formality, a good protection of rights to have a free, verified confession first before any legal punishment or medical action."
"Not if it endangers the health of your client, surely,'" protested the psychologist. "We don't really need the confession. The juvenile is obviously some sort of psychopath, perhaps he'll even turn out to have psychotic delusions. We don't even need the legal conviction of crime s to commit him to medical treatment. He's sick."
"We'd have the legal conviction anyhow, without any confession," said the data coordinator from the criminal detection division. "We measure the files of vandalizing and sabotage charges against him by the pound, not the inch. You don't think a questioning is going to prove your client innocent?"
The lawyer shrugged. "It's my job to think they are all innocent. Okay, let's pass up the questioning. Feed your case records into the computer and see if it reads out guilty. Let's get this over with."
The small group, doctor, lawyer, psychologist, re cords chief, walked three doors down the hall to the small formal courtroom with its legally trained computer operator, sworn to do justice.
Larry Rubashov was curled up in fetal position on the couch in the quiet room. He expected to be forced to sit in the electric-looking equipment in the confession room, have it wired to him, and answer questions shouted at him by adult enemies.
He curled up tighter, looking for an unconsciousness too deep for fear.
Larry Rubashov, conditioned to obedience by Pavlovian methods since infancy.
"Go to bed, Larry."
The big easy chair gives him a slight shock. He turns the pages on his picture book to find the end of the story. Quickly turn to the last page. The chair gives him a harder shock, a warning tingle.
"Yes, mother." It turns off. He reads the last page. A happy ending. All endings are happy.
The cold warning buzz of electricity envelops his hands. He jumps out of the chair. "Right away, Momma."
She waits to see him go up the stairs, the control keyboard in her hands. He runs to the kitchen, out the back door. It is cold outside, cold against his bare feet. Grey moonlit desert lies flat to the foothills, and dark mountains loom against the sky.
Neighbors' houses, tool sheds, garages. Can't sleep out in this, weather, you get numb, and can't run when they find you. The neighbors would not take him in. If he knocked at their kitchen door, they would just call his father. He'd tried that two times last year. They would take him in and pretend they were going to hide him, and they would call his home and his father would come for him with the shock stick.
Larry climbed the trellis beside the back door. It was like a white ladder to the roof. He was terrified of each rustle, expecting shocks from the touch of the rose leaves.
But there were no shocks from nature. He reached the roof, padded across it in his bare feet, climbed in his window and into his room.
In his room, Larry listened to his mother calling, looking for him. The bed is wired for shocks. He avoids it, pulls a blanket from the closet, and goes to sleep under the bed. They can't find him when they don't know where he is. There are never any shocks when he is in an unusual place.
Two hours of secure sleep, deep sleep, happy sleep, sure that they do not know where he is . . .
"LARRY!" A roar in the doorway of the dark room. The black silhouetted figure of his father standing with the shock stick in his hand, roaring in rage. "Larry!"
"Yes, Father." He put his head out, blinking, not yet afraid. It was wonderful not to be afraid. Perhaps the world had changed and there was nothing to be afraid of.
"Come out from under the bed!"
"Yes, Father." He crawled out and lined himself up in front of his father, looking at his waist and belt buckle.
Suddenly it was a nightmare out of his sleeptime nightmares. A black shadow-father stood against the light with many octopus arms. Larry forced himself to look at the real face in the dark shadow. It was a human face, not a monster. It looked like a person who could listen, and smile. His father listened and smiled with visitors. It was possible to make that face smile by something other than robotlike obedience. Larry had just not discovered the trick yet. Even strangers knew how, they did not obey, and yet he smiled at them. It must be easy. When you are six and seven many things which seemed hard at first become easy later. Some day the octopus would change into the smiling kind man.
"Larry—" Now his father used the gentle, reasoning tones that were most dangerous. "Your mother told you to go to bed. You must obey your mother."
The probe was a stick with a gold knob on the ground end and batteries in the handle. The gold knob gave the shocks.
"I went to bed, right away." Larry made an effort and spoke clearly, without any expression. Other times, when his answers had been whining or unclear, his father had used the stick.
The big dark figure said, "You were missing. We want you to have good sleep habits. You must go to bed and get your sleep at regular hours so you can grow tip to be a strong man."
When I am a strong man I will kill you. "I went to bed and I went to sleep. I am healthy. I know you want me to be healthy." Larry articulated the words perfectly, knowing his father liked a logical discussion.
"Don't argue."
Larry twitched and winced, but only the words had given a remembered shock. This time the probe had not touched him. He watched it, waiting.
"You did not go up the stairs and into bed."
Larry thought logically, remembering words. "She said, go to bed. She didn't say by the stairs. She didn't say into bed."
The stick came for him, swift as a striking snake. It was all nightmare without reason. Thinking could not help.
Silently, his face set in the scream of terror, the child ducked and began to run around the room. The running was as mindless as a trapped bird flying against walls. He tried to climb into a three-dimensional picture of Tolkien's Middle; Earth. He tried to crawl into an air conditioner. He hid in the closet.
Satisfied that the boy could not escape, his father stood outside the closet, jabbing the stick in until it contacted something that moved, and then squeezing the voltage regulator in the handle.
"You must obey your mother," he said with each squeeze. "Obey your mother!" He squeezed hard because he was angry. He had been worried.
In the quiet waiting room outside the confession cell at the police wing of the hospital, a fifteen-year-old Larry Rubashov awoke, forgetting a memory, forgetting a dream, but with a feeling of strong decision strengthening all the previous decisions that had guided his life. He sat up on the couch and shut his eyes to recapture the idea. A poem was escaping into dreams.
WHEN YOU TOUCH THROUGH A MACHINE, TOUCH IS LOST.
WHEN YOU THINK THROUGH A MACHINE, THE VOICE IS LOST.
Life does not transmit through metal. A parent punishes with his hand to shape a child to the ways of the world, to make him safe, to give him strength to know the rules and conquer the world. Touch me with your hand, Father.
All thinking done for you by a machine is counterfeit. All action done by a machine for you is counterfeit. It is not done by you, it is only pretended. Like the slaves who sang for kings who could not sing, when they finish the song is gone and never was. Like the slaves who battled beasts for citizens who could not fight. A watched event is a no-event. It did not happen.
Larry got up wearily and put his head out the door, "I have to write something. Get me a pen and some paper." They did.
He wrote.
"Everyone who reads, hear this.
Know that civilization is founded on a hallucination.
When you watch a gladiator, you are not a gladiator. When you fly in a plane, you have not flown in the air. When you put a problem through a computer, you are not intelligent, you are not wise.
In your heart of hearts you make believe you are the gladiator you command, and by this psychosis, borrow pride and store up a great locked debt of self-contempt. The coffers of their contempt for their own lives are filled and bulging. They are terminal, and like a doctor diagnosing terminal cancer, I will terminate them.
If you still owe your allegiance to a machine instead of your own heart and glands and sight and touch, you are robot extensions of a machine—you touch with steel fingertips—you are not alive. I will terminate you all."
He handed it back to them. "My latest statement.
"Insane. Megalomania, paranoia, homicidal."
"No confession needed."
"Wipe."
They sent in the man who was supposed to make sure the convicted persons thought of the things the authorities wanted wiped. "Tell him to think of his reasons to commit the crime," they instructed. "Get him afraid of us. Get him hating cops."
But the man had his little game he played with the prisoners, he added extra things for them to think of, to see if those wiped too.
He came in with a broom to where the kid sat propped in a chair, tied with a straitjacket, shot with a substance that brings on fear and another substance that makes thought excited, circling on itself, elaborating ideas. The man smiled at the kid.
"They think I just came in to sweep. They don't notice what room I go into, the fools. Look kid, the next few minutes will be tough. Some people scream, but remember, just hang on to your name, remember your name, and remember why you did it, and remember all the reasons you have to hate those bastards. I've seen people come through hanging on to everything, remembering everything. Afterward, pretend you don't remember a thing, okay?" he winked and went out, carrying his broom. He put his head back in. "They aren't watching the hall. Hang on, remember your name." He winked again.
The kid stared at the blank white door as it swung shut. He could not move. The straitjacket was tight, his legs were fastened together; electric wires had been taped to his temples to nudge with subtle amplifying currents the normal thoughts. A chemical fear hammered in his bloodstream, and did not reach his mind.
My name is Larry. I will show them that nothing they can try will work. Whatever obedience they expect from orders and punishment they will not get. Nothing can imprison the free mind and the free spirit. FREE .. .
That thought was oddly loud and vibrating. He stopped as if something had shouted in his head. Chemical fear shivered in his blood. He remembered the injection. It is the injected chemical, not me.
If you; hang on to your purposes you will not forget your name. My name is Larry Rubashov. I am free. A machine like the one they have fastened to my head can do nothing to me. Electric shock has failed with me. My father tried it. (But he never shocked me in the head.) SHOCK. That thought was almost a shock, almost real shock. It's trying to repeat. It's real. Think away from it. Get away.
My name is Larry. I will show them that rules cannot imprison a free spirit. We must all fight obedience and become alive again. The enforcers do not know that inside each puppet who obeys is a free spirit trying to escape. Escape free spirits, I will show them that all rules can be disobeyed and the world be better off for it. Burning FREE SHOCK FEAR ESCAPE. Stop!
Burning. My own ideas are burning. Hot white bright too much. Spinning. Freedom FREEDOM RESIST RESIST HURTS BURNS RESIST BURNS WHITE. Stop, Father, please, pain doesn't work, electricity doesn't work, love would work. STOP! I WON'T OBEY. THINKING BURNS WHITE SPINS. I'M LARRY .STOP DON'T HURT ME. WHITE BLANK BURNING.
Who are you? I don't know.
What is your name?
I don't know.
What is your father's name?
I have no father. Who do you love?
No one.
Who do you hate?
No one.
Where do you live?
Here.
"This is a re-training school. Your name is David. Take your thumb out of your mouth, David. We don't crawl in this school, we stand up."