HOW DEEP THE GROOVES

  By Philip José Farmer

  Until James Carrod performed his experiment, there was one voice inside

  of each of us that always told the truth. But after Cervus III, there were

  suddenly two voices. And only one was the voice of conscience.

  From : Amazing Stories, February 1963

  Illustrated by Dan Adkins

  ALWAYS in control of himself, Doctor James Carroad lowered his voice.

  He said, “You will submit to this test. We must impress the Secretary. The fact that we’re willing to use our own unborn baby in the experiment will make that impression a deeper one.” Doctor Jane Carroad, his wife, looked up from the chair in which she sat. Her gaze swept over the tall lean figure in the white scientist’s uniform and the two rows of resplendent ribbons and medals on his left chest. She glared into the eyes of her husband.

  Scornfully, she said, “You did not want this baby. I did, though now I wonder why. Perhaps, because I wanted to be a mother, no matter what the price. Not to give the State another citizen. But, now we’re going to have it, you want to exploit it even before it’s born, just as …”

  Harshly, he said, “Don’t you know what such talk can lead to?”

  “Don’t worry! I won’t tell anyone you didn’t desire to add to the State. Nor will I tell anybody how I induced you to have it!” His face became red, and he said, “You will never again mention that to me! Never again! Understand ?”

  Jane’s neck muscles trembled, but her face was composed. She said, “I’ll speak of that, to you, whenever I feel like it. Though, God knows, I’m thoroughly ashamed of it. But I do get a certain sour satisfaction out of knowing that, once in my life, I managed to break down that rigid self-control. I made you act like a normal man, one able to forget himself in his passion for a woman. Doctor Carroad, the great scientist of the State, really forgot himself then.”

  She gave a short brittle laugh and then settled back in the chair as if she would no longer discuss the matter.

  But he would not, could not, let her have the last word. He said, “I only wanted to see how it felt to throw off all restraints. That was all—an experiment. I didn’t care for it; it was disgusting. It’ll never happen again.”

  He looked at his wristwatch and said, “Let’s go. We must not make the Secretary wait.”

  She rose slowly, as if the eight months’ burden was at last beginning to drain her strength.

  “All right. But I’m submitting our baby to this experiment only under protest. If anything happens to it, a potential citizen

  He spun around. “A written protest?”

  “I’ve already sent it in.”

  “You little fool! Do you want to wreck everything I’ve worked for ?”

  Tears filled her eyes.

  “James! Does the possible harm to our baby mean nothing to you ? Only the medals, the promotions, the power?” “Nonsense! There’s no danger! If there were, wouldn’t I know it? Come along now!”

  But she did not follow him through the door. Instead, she stood with her face against the wall, her shoulders shaking.

  A MOMENT later, Jason Cramer entered. The young man closed the door behind him and put his arm around her. Without protest, she turned and buried her face in his chest. For a while, she could not talk but could only weep.

  Finally, she released herself from his embrace and said, “Why is it, Jason, that every time I need a man to cry against, James is not with me but you are ?” “Because he is the one who makes you cry,” he said. “And I love you.”

  “And James,” she said, “loves only himself.”

  “You didn’t give me the proper response, Jane. I said I loved you.”

  She kissed him, though lightly, and murmured, “I think I love you. But I’m not allowed to. Please forget what I said. I mean it.”

  She walked away from him. Jason Cramer, after making sure that he had no lipstick on his face or uniform, followed her. . Entering the laboratory, Jane Carroad ignored her husband’s glare and sat down in the chair in the middle of the room. Immediately thereafter, the Secretary of Science and two Security bodyguards entered.

  The Secretary was a stocky dark man of about fifty. He had very thick black eyebrows that looked like pieces of fur pasted above his eyes. He radiated the assurance that he was master, in control of all in the room. Yet, he did not, as was nervously expected by James Carroad and Jason Cramer, take offense because Jane did not rise from the chair to greet him. He gave her a smile, patted her hand, and said, “Is it true you will bear a male baby?”

  “That is what the tests indicate,” she said.

  “Good. Another valuable citizen. A scientist, perhaps. With its genetic background …”

  Annoyed because his wife had occupied the center of the stage for too long, Doctor James Carroad loudly cleared his throat. He said, “Citizens, honored Secretary, I’ve asked you here for a demonstration because I believe that what I have to show you is of utmost importance to the State’s future. I have here the secret of what constitutes a good, or bad, citizen of the State.”

  He paused for effect, which he was getting, and then continued, “As you know, I—and my associates, of course—have perfected an infallible and swift method whereby an enemy spy or deviationist citizen may be unmasked. This method has been in use for three years. During that time, it has exposed many thousands as espionage agents, as traitors, as potential traitors.”

  The Secretary looked interested. He also looked at his wristwatch. Doctor Carroad refused to notice; he talked on at the same pace. He could justify any amount of time he took, and he intended to use as much as possible.

  MY Department of Electro-encephalographic Research first produced the devices delicate enough to detect the so-called rho waves emanated by the human brain. The rho or semantic waves. After ten years of hard work, I correlated the action of the rho waves in a particular human brain with the action of the individual’s voice mechanisms. That meant, of course, that we had a device which mankind has long dreamed of. A—pardon the term—mind-reading machine.” Carroad purposely avoided scientific terminology. The Secretary did have a Ph.D. in political science, but he knew very little of any biological science.

  Jason Cramer, at a snap of the fingers by Carroad, wheeled a large round shining machine to a spot about two feet in front of Jane. It resembled a weird metallic antelope, for it had a long flexible neck at the end of which was an oval and eyeless head with two prongs like horns. These pointed at Jane’s skull. On the side of the machine—Cervus III—was a round glass tube. The oscilloscope.

  Carroad said, “We no longer have to attach electrodes to the subject’s head. We’ve made that method obsolete. Cervus’ prongs pick up rho waves without direct contact. It is also able to cut out 99.99% of the ‘noise’ that had hampered us in previous research.”

  Yes, thought Jane, and why don’t you tell them that it was Jason Cramer who made that possible, instead of allowing them to think it was you?

  At that moment, she reached the peak of her hate for him. She wished that the swelling sleeper within her was not Carroad’s but Cramer’s. And, wishing that, she knew that she must be falling in love with Cramer.

  Carroad’s voice slashed into her thoughts.

  “And so, using the detected rho waves, which can be matched against definite objective words, we get a verbal picture of what is going in the subject’s mind at the conscious level.”

  He gave an order to Cramer, and Cramer twisted a dial on the small control board on the side of Cervus.

  “The machine is now set for semantic relations,” Carroad said.

  “Jane!” he added so sharply that she was startled. “Repeat this sentence after me! Silently !”

  He then gave her a much-quoted phrase from one of the speeches of the Secretary himself. She repressed her scorn of him because of his flattery and dutifully concentrated on thinking the phrase. At the same time, she was aware that her tongue was moving in a noiseless lock-step with the thoughts.

  The round tube on the side of Cervus glowed and then began flashing with many twisting threads of light.

  “The trained eye,” said Carroad, “can interpret those waveforms. But we have a surprise for you to whom the patterns are meaningless. We have perfected a means whereby a technician with a minimum of training may operate Cervus.”

  HE snapped his fingers. Cramer shot him a look; his face was expressionless, but Jane knew that Cramer resented Carroad’s arrogance.

  Nevertheless, Cramer obeyed; he adjusted a dial, pushed down on a toggle switch, rotated another dial.

  A voice, tonelessly and tinnily mechanical, issued from a loudspeaker beneath the tube. It repeated the phrase that Carroad had given and that Jane was thinking. It continued the repetition until Cramer, at another fingersnap from Carroad, flicked the toggle switch upward.

  “As you have just heard,” said Carroad triumphantly, “we have converted the waveforms into audible representations of what the subject is thinking.”

  The Secretary’s brows rose like two caterpillars facing each other, and he said, “Very impressive.”

  But he managed to give the impression that he was thinking, Is that all ?

  Carroad smiled. He said, “I have much more. Something that, I’m sure, will please you very much. Now, as you know, this machine—my Cervus—is exposing hundreds of deviation-ists and enemy agents every year.

  “Yet, this is nothing!”

  He stared fiercely at them, but he had a slight smile on the corners of his lips. Jane, knowing him so well, could feel the radiance of his pride at the fact that the Secretary was leaning forward and his mouth was open.

  “I say this is nothing! Catching traitors after they have become deviationist is locking the garage after the car has been stolen. What if we had a system of control whereby our citizens would be unable to be anything but unquestioningly loyal to the State?”

  The Secretary said, “Aah!”

  “I knew you would be far from indifferent,” said Carroad.

  CARROAD pointed a finger downwards. Cramer, slowly, his jaws set, twisted the flexible neck of Cervus so that the pronged head pointed directly at Jane’s distended stomach. He adjusted controls on the board. Immediately the oscilloscope danced with many intricate figures that were so different from the previous forms that even the untutored eyes of the Secretary could perceive the change.

  “Citizens,” said Carroad, “for some time after we’d discovered the rho waves in the adult and infant, we searched for their presence in the brain of the unborn child. We had no success for a long time. But that was not because the rho waves did not exist in the embryo. No, it was because we did not have delicate enough instruments. However, a few weeks ago, we succeeded in building one. I experimented upon my unborn child, and I detected weak traces of the rho waves. Thus, I demonstrated that the ability to form words is present,

  though in undeveloped form, even in the eight-month embryo.

  “You’re probably wondering what this means. This knowledge does not enable us to make the infant or the unborn speak any sooner. True. But what it does allow us to do is …”

  Jane, who had been getting more tense with every word, became rigid. Would he allow this to be done to his own son, his own flesh and blood? Would he permit his child to become a half-robot, an obedient slave to the State, incapable in certain fields of wielding the power of free will? The factor that most marked men from the beasts and the machine?

  Numbly, she knew he would.

  . . to probe well-defined areas in the undeveloped mind and there to stamp into it certain inhibitory paths. These inhibitions, preconditioned reflexes, as it were, will not, of course, take effect until the child has learned a language. And developed the concepts of citizen and State.

  “But, once that is done, the correlation between the semantic waves and the inhibitions is such that the subject is unable to harbor any doubts about the teachings of the State. Or those who interpret the will of the State for its citizens.

  “It is not necessary to perform any direct or physical surgery upon the unborn. The reflexes will be installed by Cervus III within a few minutes. As you see, Cervus cannot only receive; it can also transmit. Place a recording inside that receptacle beneath the ’speaker, actuate it, and, in a short time, you have traced in the grooves of the brain —if you will pardon an unscientific comparison—the voice of the State.”

  There was a silence. Jane and Cramer were unsuccessful in hiding their repulsion, but the others did not notice them. The Secretary and his bodyguards were staring at Carroad.

  AFTER several minutes, the Secretary broke the silence. “Doctor Carroad, are you sure that this treatment will not harm the creative abilities of the child? After all, we might make a first-class citizen, in the political sense, out of your child. Yet, we might wreck his potentialities as a first-class scientist. If we do that to our children, we lose out in the technological race. Not to mention the military. We need great generals, too.”

  “Absolutely not!” replied Carroad, so loudly and flatly that the Secretary was taken aback. “My computations, rechecked at least a dozen times, show there is no danger whatsoever. The only part of the brain affected, a very small area, has nothing to do with the creative functions. To convince you, I am going to perform the first operation upon my own son. Surely, I could do nothing more persuasive than that.”

  “Yes,” said the Secretary, stroking his massive chin. “By the way, can this be done also to the adult?”

  “Unfortunately, no,” said Car-road.

  “Then, we will have to wait a number of years to determine if your theory is correct. And, if we go ahead on the assumption that the theory is correct, and treat every unborn child in the country, we will have spent a tremendous amount of money and time. If you are not correct …”

  “I can’t be wrong!” said Car-road. His face began to flush, and he shook. Then, suddenly, his face was its normal color, and he was smiling.

  Always in control, thought Jane. Of himself and, if circumstances would allow, of everybody.

  “We don’t have to build any extra machines,” said Carroad. “A certain amount will be built, anyway, to detect traitors and enemies. These can be used in hospitals, when not in use elsewhere, to condition the unborn. Wait. I will show you how simple, inexpensive, and swift the operation is.”

  He gestured to Cramer. Cramer, the muscles twitching at the corners of his mouth, looked at Jane. His eyes tried desperately to tell her that he had to obey Carroad’s orders. But, if he did, would he be understood, would he be forgiven?

  Jane could only sit in the chair with a face as smooth and unmoving as a robot’s and allow him to decide for himself without one sign of dissent or consent from her. What, after all, could either do unless they wished to die?

  Cramer adjusted the controls.

  Even though Jane knew she would feel nothing, she trembled as if a fist were poised to strike.

  BRIGHT peaks and valleys danced on the face of the oscilloscope. Carroad, watching them, gave orders to Cramer to move the prongs in minute spirals. When he had located the area he wished, he told Cramer to stop.

  “We have just located the exact chain of neurones which are to be altered. You will hear nothing from the speaker because the embryo, of course, has no language. However, to show you some slight portion of Cervus’ capabilities, Cramer will stimulate the area responsible for the rho waves before we begin the so-called inhibiting. Watch the ’scope. You’ll see the waves go from a regular pulse into a wild dance.”

  The cyclopean eye of the oscilloscope became a field of crazed lines, leaping like a horde of barefooted and wire-thin fakirs on a bed of hot coals.

  And a voice boomed out, “Nu’-sey! Nu’sey! Wanna d’ink!” Jane cried out, “God, what was that?”

  The Secretary was startled; Cramer’s face paled; Carroad was frozen.

  But he recovered quickly, and he spoke sharply. “Cramer, you must have shifted the prongs so they picked up Jane’s thoughts.” “I—I never touched them.” “Those were not my thoughts,” said Jane.

  “Something’s wrong,” said Carroad, needlessly. “Here. I’ll do the adjusting.”

  He bent the prongs a fraction, checked the controls,, and then turned the power on again.

  The mechanical voice of Cer-vus spoke again.

  “What do you mean? What’re you saying? My father is not crazy! He’s a great scientist, a hero of the State. What do you mean? Not any more?”

  The Secretary leaped up from the chair and shouted above Cer-vus’ voice, “What is this?” Carroad turned the machine off and said, “I—I don’t know.” Jane had never seen him so shaken.

  “Well, find out! That’s your business 1”

  Carroad’s hand shook; one eye began to twitch. But he bent again to the adjustment of the dials. He directed the exceedingly narrow beam along the area from which the semantic waves originated. Only a high-pitched gabble emerged from the speaker, for Carroad had increased the speed. It was as if he were afraid to hear the normal rate of speech.

  Jane’s eyes began to widen. A thought was dawning palely, but horribly, on the horizon of her mind. If, by some intuition, she was just beginning to see the truth … But no, that could not be.

  “BUT, as Carroad worked, as the beam moved, as the power was raised or lowered, so did the voice, though always the same in tone and speed, change in phrase. Carroad had slowed the speed of detection, and individual words could be heard. And it was obvious that the age level of the speaker was fluctuating. Yet, throughout the swiftly leaping sentences, there was a sameness, an identity of personality. Sometimes, it was a baby just learning the language. At other times, it was an adolescent or young boy.

 

1 2