Perhaps his thoughts would continue to be his own, but thoughts wouldn’t help his body, which was dangling like a marionette on biochemical strings.
The contrastingly backward technology of the hospital led him to think. He watched nurses take oral temperatures with old-fashioned liquid-lead thermometers, the standby of home medicine chests for ages. Even with the dumb technology, minimum sanitary measures were followed. Those thermometers were sterilized, and for a thermometer the only way to do that was immersion in alcohol; for oral purposes that meant ethyl alcohol, ethanol. Methanol, wood alcohol, was poisonous.
If his unconscious bodily mechanisms were being monitored internally, was there something he could ingest that would suppress those mechanisms? Drugs, maybe. Drugs were here, and he could get to them, but what sort of drugs would suppress autonomic responses? Tranquilizers? Maybe, but he doubted that any in use here would be effective enough. Narcotics? Possibly. But he was naturally wary of those. After all, overdosing was as easy as falling off a ghetto stoop.
Narcotics were easily available, in the sense that there were no physical barriers. The drug cabinets had no lock. In this society locks were unneeded. And for that reason he couldn’t touch them. He couldn’t approach the cabinets with the intention of stealing drugs without risking intervention by InnerVoice.
But the thermometers made him think. He had seen no taverns, no liquor stores. As far as he knew, this society was teetotal. Why? Perhaps because the effects of booze could thwart InnerVoice.
There was probably a bottle of ethanol in the drug cabinet, and if not there, in the supply lockers. But the question was, could he steal the alcohol?
No. The same constraints applied, or would be applied. He couldn’t even risk thinking about it too much.
Back to square one. He ruefully half entertained thoughts of sidling up to the bottle, eyes averted, whistling innocently, then grabbing it and chugging as much as he could before InnerVoice grabbed his gut and squeezed. But the ploy was absurd. He couldn’t very well plan to do something without knowing he was going to do it. There was no one to fool but himself.
Was there no way out besides hoping for his internal police force to go on the fritz?
He might have to face up to the possibility that there was no way out of this. The thought of it was numbing. An eternity here?
What about the castle? They surely had missed him by now. Surely they’d send out a search party.
The thought of castle folk in doublets and tights wandering around in this universe was incongruous. But Linda was smart enough to know that a strange universe would call for caution.
Maybe that was the reason for the delay in finding him. Just how would they go about it, anyway? This was a big world, a complex society, and a very dangerous one. He couldn’t know for sure that the rescuers had not also been abducted and injected with InnerVoice.
If so, there was no hope. The portal could close, if it hadn’t already, and he’d be stuck here forever.
He went home after his first day, made himself boiled potatoes, ate, and sat down to log screen time. While he watched, he thought. At length he resolved on a course of action. Absurd idea though it was, tomorrow he would try stealing the bottle and downing as much alcohol as he could, neat, before the shakes got to him. He wouldn’t try to fool himself or InnerVoice, he would just do it. He simply could not think of anything else to try.
The resolution enabled him to sit through the evening’s “entertainment” without too much distress. Afterward, he was restless. He decided to go out for a walk. As far as he knew, it was allowed. Anything that was allowed, he could do.
Maybe he would keep walking. He’d had about enough of this place.
Then he considered what might happen if he tried to escape. He had refrained from daring another attempt out of simple fear. He did not want to experience again the excruciating psychic pain, the unbearable sense of impending doom, the unremitting terror that he had felt under InnerVoice’s lash. The very thought of it made his stomach spasm.
No, he wasn’t quite ready to face it again, and the bottle-grabbing notion now struck him as stupid and rash. In time, maybe. For now about all he could risk was taking a walk.
He was on the stairway between the second and third floors when she came through the door opening on the landing. He almost bumped into her. It was the woman he’d seen last night.
She seemed startled at first, then burst into the forced smile she’d given him before. “Hello, citizen!”
“Hi,” he said. Then he blurted, “I’m going out for a stroll. Want to walk with me?”
The smile disappeared, and she gave him a penetrating stare.
He stood there, letting her gauge him, taking his measure. She seemed to be weighing the risk, trying to figure whether this was a test or a trap. Could she trust him? Should she dare? All this she spoke with her eyes, and he was vastly relieved to hear it. It was the first evidence he’d had of humanity, of conscious volition, behind the universal facade of robotlike obedience.
“Yes,” she said finally.
They walked out of the building together.
The night was cool and the city was quiet. Too quiet. It was not yet Lights Out, but along the stark faces of the high rises there were more dark windows than lighted ones. A musky, watery smell came on a breeze from the river. There was little traffic on the boulevard. No one else was about. It was late.
“When did it stop?” she asked after they had walked in silence for a stretch.
“When did what stop?”
“InnerVoice.”
“It hasn’t.”
She halted and looked at him. “You just haven’t realized it yet. It’s gone.”
He shrugged. “I haven’t tried to do anything unsocial yet.”
“You’re doing it now.”
“I didn’t know evening walks were forbidden.”
“They’re not. There’s no need to forbid it. No one does anything that’s not on his daily schedule. It’s too risky. Don’t you know that?”
“No,” he said. “I’m new here.”
“Were you an Outperson?”
“Yeah. If that means a foreigner.”
“An Outperson is someone without InnerVoice. The whole world doesn’t have InnerVoice yet.”
He had wondered about the outside world, and about how much of the planet InnerVoice had under its control. There was no news at all on the screen, nothing except endless propaganda about heroic production efforts and quota overfulfillments.
“What do you know about Outpersons?” he asked.
“Nothing,” she said. “We haven’t been able to get any accurate news for years.”
“Who’s ‘we’?”
She started walking again. “People who’ve lost InnerVoice.”
“So, not everyone’s controlled.”
“No, not everyone.” She gave him a glum look. “But it might as well be everyone. There are so few. You’re one, even if you don’t know it yet.”
“How do you know that you don’t have InnerVoice anymore?”
“Because I can do anything I want. Like go for walks in the evening, take an extra portion of food, not watch the screen when I don’t want to. I almost never do anymore.”
“No wonder. It’s awful stuff.”
She smiled. “See? You wouldn’t be able to say that if you hadn’t lost it.”
He shook his head. “I wish you were right. But they just shot me up with the gunk the other day. Can it fail that quickly?”
“We don’t know. Most maladapts lose InnerVoice in their late teens. That’s when I lost mine. I’m twenty-six now. And they haven’t caught on yet.”
“Is there danger that you’ll be found out?”
“Oh, of course. There’s always that danger. But you get used to it. The thing is, even though InnerVoice is silent, habits are hard to break. I don’t do anything really unsocial. Just little things.”
They turned a corner and walked toward the river.
