Then he went, and all that remained of him was the pile of clothing
with the too-obvious Project brand. That same night he robbed three
men and exchanged the uniform for the clothes of one of them. It was
on the newscasts. After that he vanished.
I was left with Derek and the sour taste of dead love. Young Feller
had filled my head with the picture of my beautiful man licking the
hand that tossed him bits of food, resting his muzzle on the master’s
knee, trotting over when called. It wasn’t right, of course, but I knew
that the vision was with me for ever.
I waited for him to come round and then I did something unforgivable. I suppose it was unhappiness and the sense of loss, but I told him just what Young Feller had done and said.
Derek said nothing at all to that. He didn’t seem to mind. How could
the boy have done it to him? I went on to tell him this was the finish
between us, that there could be no thought of marriage. He said he
had never thought of it because he was already married.
On the nursery floor
179
The end of it, in that place and after what had happened there, was
a screaming quarrel between two people sick of each other.
Ho hum. But had she heard of changes in the Project operation, how cruelty
entered into the scheme and the bright kids had for once misjudged the tameness of the animals?
I wouldn’t know about that; I moved away to the city. But one of the
psychiatric nurses lives near here and I’m sure —
Sure he’d talk? Next move offered while ‘they’ watch and consider what I’m
about.
5 An old psychiatric nurse
Can you people leave nothing alone? The story is thirty years over,
past, finished. W hat’s dead news to you?
A good question, the one 'they' would like to know the answer to.
H um an interest? A bucket of slops to tip down your readers’
throats! Are you really tracking down eye-witnesses of C Group’s
existence? Two dozen, so far? And all you have that isn’t on public
record is a shabby tale about a gardener! I remember him. A lump of
muscle with a roving eye and a sentimental love of animals. Secret
service or some such stupidity.
Another long-liver at the taxpayer’s expense. Awarded to keep his mouth
shut? Wil it open when I quote my tape to him? They were willing enough when
finally given permission to make an all out assault on the super-human minds.
They went at them with drugs and sensory probes.'
He told you that? He could be relegated for less! Official Secrets
Act. You too, for quoting it. Well, I don’t have to worry; all the Project
staff were cleared of unreasonable, gross and improper use of investigative tools. Those were the words of the charge. Print anything different and you’ll face official denial, with the transcripts to prove
you wrong. Contempt of judicial procedure! You’ll lose your credibility, your job and your work permit. Challenge the system and feel it roll over you!
180
George Turner
The stage has lost a star. Now comes the inside dirt while‘they’ watch to see
what I do next.
O f course they did those things; they used everything they knew.
Hypnosis was useless on those bastards and truth drugs not much better; too responsive to subconscious pressures from the interrogator.
Drugs produce altered states, not honest ones. Sensory deprivation
chambers did better. They produced auto-hypnotic states where
stimuli evoked free association. Revealing? No; puzzling. They didn’t
think, in our sense of the word. We guessed that they used the subconscious direcdy, like a map of mental territory, to eliminate useless trails of reasoning at a glance. We guessed that because it made a little
sense, but we never knew.
Then there were direct probes, electrodes in the brain, with psychotape recordings of response-type and intensity. The nitwitted public called them mind-reading machines, but they read never a useful
word from C Group. They taught us about the operation of the brain
when we used them on ordinary subjects — criminals and such — but
all they taught about C Group was that their brains worked differently
from ours.
The kids resisted. Even when the fools tried physical torture they
resisted. Not physically but with some form of nervous control, just
as they controlled their autonomic systems. The results were — were
horrible.
Leave me alone, you stupid stuffer of the public mind! You can’t use
a word of this. Your own editor will kill it stone dead.
No, no, no! We didn’t kill them. They fought to live. Young Feller
was their scout into the universe and they needed his report. They
were isolated in an antiseptic think tank and they needed knowledge.
They had to live until their scout returned.
They needed life so badly that they accepted everything done to
them. They neither hated nor despised us; they assumed that what we
did was what we were, and accepted it. Imagine yourself yarded by
howling, biting mongrels that stopped short of killing because their
purpose required you alive.
I couldn’t stand it. I resigned. I wasn’t the only one. Go away, you
louse in the public hair. When I remember the Project I become afraid
of God.
Well, this one was at least glad of the opportunity to spill his guts. Catharsis.
But no clue to the next informant. Perhaps a difficult search coming up and
‘they’ want to see how I go about it. At this point I would like to confer with Dad,
On the nursery
