How Deep The Grooves, page 2
“Well, man, what is it?” bellowed the Secretary.
The mysterious voice had struck sparks off even his iron nerves.
Jane answered for her husband.
“I’ll tell you what it is. It’s the voice of my unborn son.”
“Jane, you’re insane!” said Carroad.
“No, I’m not, though I wish I were.”
“God, he’s at the window!” boomed the voice. “And he has a knife! What can I do? What can I do?”
“Turn that off until I get through talking,” said Jane. “Then, you can listen again and see if what I’m saying isn’t true.”
Carroad stood like a statue, his hand extended towards the toggle switch but not reaching it. Cramer reached past him and flicked the switch.
“James,” she said, speaking slowly and with difficulty. “You want to make robots out of everyone. Except, of course, yourself and the State’s leaders. But what if I told you that you don’t have to do that? That Nature or God or whatever you care to call the Creator, has anticipated you? And done so by several billion years ?
“No, don’t look at me that way. You’ll see what I mean. Now, look. The only one whose thoughts you could possible have tapped is our son. Yet, it’s impossible for an unborn baby to have a knowledge of speech. Nevertheless, you heard thoughts, originated by a boy, seeming to run from the first years of speech up to those of an adolescent. You have to admit that, even if you don’t know what it means.
“Well, I do.”
Tears running down her cheeks, choking, she said, “Maybe I see the truth where you don’t because I’m closer to my baby. It’s part of me. Oh, I know you’ll say I’m talking like a silly woman. Maybe. Anyway, I think that what we’ve heard means that we—all of humanity without exception—are machines. Not steel and electrical robots, no, but still machines of flesh, engines whose behavior, motives, and very thoughts, conscious or unconscious, spring from the playing of protein tapes in our brains.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” said Carroad.
“If I’m right, we are in hell,” she said. “Through no fault or choice of ours. Listen to me before you shut your ears because you don’t want to hear, can’t hear.
MEMORIES are not recordings of what has happened in our past. Nor do we act as we will. We speak and behave according to our ‘memories,’ which are not recorded after the fact. They’re recorded before the fact. Our actions are such because our memories tell us to do such. Each of us is set like a clockwork doll. Oh, not independently, but inter-meshed, working together, synchronized as a masterclock or masterplan decrees.
“And, all this time, we think we are creatures of free will and chance. But we do not know there isn’t such a thing as chance, that all is plotted and foretold, and we are sliding over the world, through time, in predetermined grooves. We, body and mind, are walking recordings. Deep within our cells, a molecular needle follows the grooves, and we follow the needle.
“Somehow, this experiment has ripped the cover from the machine, showed us the tape, stimulated it into working long before it was supposed to.”
Suddenly, she began laughing. And, between laughing and gasping, she said, “What am I saying? It can’t be an accident. If we have discovered that we’re puppets, it’s because we’re supposed to do so.”
“Jane, Jane!” said Carroad. “You’re wild, wild! Foolish woman’s intuition! You’re supposed to be a scientist! Stop talking! Control yourself!”
The Secretary bellowed for silence, and, after a minute, succeeded. He said, “Mrs. Carroad, please continue. We’ll get to the bottom of this.”
He, too, was pale and wide-eyed. But he had not gotten to his position by refusing to attack.
She ordered Cramer to run the beam again over the previous areas. He was to speed up the process and slow down only when she so directed.
The result was a stream of unintelligibilities. Occasionally, when Cramer slowed Cervus at a gesture from Jane, it broke into a rate of speech they could understand. And, when it did, they trembled. They could not deny that they were speeding over the life thoughts of a growing male named James Carroad, Junior. Even at the velocity at which they traveled and the great jumps in time that the machine had to make in order to cover the track quickly, they could tell that.
AFTER an hour, Jane had Cramer cut off the voice. In the silence, looking at the white and sweating men, she said, “We are getting close to the end? Should we go on?”
Hoarsely, the Secretary shouted, “This is a hoax! I can prove it must be! It’s impossible! If we carry the seeds of predeterminism within us, and yet, as now, we discover how to foresee what we shall do, why can’t we change the future?”
“I don’t know, Mr. Secretary,” said Jane. “We’ll find out—in time. I can tell you this. If anyone is preset to foretell the future, he’ll do so. If no one is, then the problem will go begging. It all depends on Whoever wound us up.”
“That’s blasphemy!” howled the Secretary, a man noted for his belligerent atheism. But he did not order the voice to stop after Jane told Cramer to start the machine up again.
Cramer ran Cervus at full speed. The words became a staccato of incomprehensibility; the oscilloscope, an almost solid blur. Flickers of blackness told of broad jumps forward, and then the wild intertwined lightning resumed.
Suddenly, the oscilloscope went blank, and the voice was silent.
Jane Carroad said, “Backtrack a little, Jason. And then run it forward at normal speed.”
James Carroad had been standing before her, rigid, a figure seemingly made of white metal, his face almost as white as his uniform. Abruptly, he broke into fluidity and lurched out of the laboratory. His motions were broken; his shouts, broken also.
“Won’t stay to listen … rot … mysticism … believe this … go insane! Mean … no control … no control …”
And his voice was lost as the door closed behind him.
Jane said, “I don’t want to hear this, Jason. But …”
Instantly, the voice boomed, “God, he’s at the window! And he has a knife! What can I do? What can I do? Father, father, I’m your son! He knows it, he knows it, yet he’s going to kill me. The window! He’s breaking it! Oh, Lord, he’s been locked up for nineteen years, ever since he shot and killed my mother and all those men and I -was bom a Caesarean and I didn’t know he’d escape and still want to kill me, though they told me that’s all he talked about, raving mad, and . . .”
THE END
Philip José Farmer, How Deep The Grooves
