Leo Torres returned to Spring Farm too exhausted to care what happened next. Otharine Jones had demonstrated her new role of dutiful admirer by staying quiet through most of the slow, plodding horse ride. It was a mercy.
As soon as the two arrived, Leo dismounted and Otharine pulled the horse away. “Back tomorrow for your parade,” she said, and rode off with the paint horse following.
On the wide front porch, Jane Early was waiting. “Are you all right?” she began.
Leo looked at her suspiciously. “You don’t know where I was?” he asked.
“All any of us know is that you left sometime after we went to bed. All I could think about was that it had something to do with me. You were clearly displeased with me at dinner. I know I did something, but I can’t think what. The dinner was supposed to be so lovely.”
“It wasn’t you,” Leo said, and left it at that. Quick to change the subject and the tone, he added, “Show me the laboratory?”
Jane Early led him to an outbuilding near the house. Outside, it was of modern, utilitarian construction. Not a permanent building, but of corrugated metal, still somewhat shiny, so not very old. Inside, the main room was more like a factory than a lab. There was no ceiling, and the rafters were high above them. In the center of the room was an enormous steel drum. If a normal drum contained 55 gallons of liquid, then this big one must have contained 500. The drum was suspended within two large circles of heavy steel, one slightly larger than the other. The steel circles were set perpendicular to one another. Gears and pulleys were attached to each circle.
Behind the apparatus, Jane showed him a kind of dashboard with gauges. Apparently, everything was operated from here, but it was difficult to tell what anything might have meant when nothing was animated by power. Stacked in the back of the room were metal cans of unmarked chemicals.
“There’s just one other room,” Jane said, and led him to an area sectioned off. Inside was a hospital bed with the portable desk and the usual accoutrements that one would see in a hospital room. It was very clean and smelled of disinfectant.
“That’s it,” Jane said. “I have no idea what any of it does. It’s been shut down forever.” As they returned to the house, Dr. Johns rushed out. “You’ve already seen everything?” he asked. “I meant to show it to you myself. Did you have any questions, Commissioner?”
“What does it do?” Leo asked.
Johns was taken aback. “You mean that Paul Kerr sent you out here with no idea of the importance of what we’re doing? I thought you were at least aware of the significance of our work, and knew the principles. Well, let’s leave it at that and just start from square one over lunch, shall we?”
Mrs Davis brought them sandwiches and tea on the porch, the coolest place they could find. Dr. Suez joined them. Johns began with small talk. “Normally, in normal times, this would be iced tea. People drank it by the gallons out here. They never touched hot tea, but had iced tea constantly. I wonder what effect it might have had. One could compare regions that drank it with those that didn’t, and I’ll bet there would be some measurable difference, because of the enormous quantities of iced tea they drank. Wouldn’t you say so, Suez?”
“I thought it strange when I first came here and saw them putting away giant tumblers of that sugary stuff.”
Leo added nothing.
“Well, let me explain how the equipment works. The two big circles can be moved in any way and on any axis, which means that the drum’s movements can be completely random in terms of direction or of speed. Randomness is the key to the entire concept. Dr Suez has done a number of marvelous things in his illustrious career, but I daresay that this mechanical device is his greatest. It’s finely balanced. As far as I know, it is the best machine of random motion ever created by the hand of man. Wouldn’t you say so, Suez?”
“It does what it’s supposed to do,” Suez affirmed.
“He also installed all the control and monitoring equipment, which is actually attached to the barrel itself and moves with it. The control generates random numbers, which become the coordinates of movement. The feedback information is transmitted wirelessly to the control panel. The drum moves freely, independently, and completely randomly while the information is generated at the monitoring panel. The only thing that the operator actually does is turn it on and then, when the process is complete, turn it off. Anybody could do it.”
Jane Early, who had said nothing, was listening intently, Leo noticed. He wondered if he was not the only one hearing the machine’s explanation for the first time.
Dr. Johns continued proudly, “Random motion was just a part of the project. There was an electro chemical element, too, and we had the best of help with that, although those engineers are not currently staying with us. I assume we’ll return to full staff once we’re up and running again.”
“What’s the point?” Leo interrupted.
Johns took a deep breath. This was going to be the touchy part, Leo surmised. “The point is to recalibrate organisms. The point is to lose control. We’re on the psychological side of the business now, so I’ll have to ask you to bear with me. Have you ever thrown a small child into the air and caught it?”
“No.”
“Well, if you did, you’d find that the child finds it pleasurable. The same thing is true of adults throughout life. We enjoy losing control of ourselves. It’s the reason that people ride roller coasters or dive off high boards. It’s why people enjoy sexual orgasms so much. It’s why, even though we are naturally terrified of falling, people sky dive. It’s why people used to pay millions of dollars to go into space, to experience weightlessness. Living organisms, including human beings, have a fundamental desire to give up control of themselves. Well, I see from your expression that I haven’t convinced you, but let me go on.
‘This business of losing control has been known to psychologists since the first Greeks experimented with the first psychological cures. In one way or another, we’ve all used it in every form of therapy. Why would the Greeks report success with the idea of throwing mental patients into pools writhing with electric eels? It was the first shock therapy, and, to some degree it worked. For centuries after that, therapists would use insulin shock or electric shock, or even surgery, lobotomies, to assist their patients in the basic fundamental act of – losing control!”
‘Adventurous psychotherapists in the 1960s experimented with sensory deprivation. They thought they were doing something new – suspending students in darkness and water for short periods – but all they were really doing was assisting their subjects in that same fundamental process – losing control. It didn’t work, by the way. They didn’t cure any problems, but they were pretty excited by the fact that they could actually bring on psychological trauma temporarily. During that same time, and with about the same results, psychologists gathered data on the use of psychotropic drugs.
‘None of the treatments for losing control worked. In a way, they all worked, but none of them was reliable. Nobody could put a subject through a certain procedure and predict the outcome. Psychology has heretofore been an art rather than a science. Therapists dabble in this or that treatment, and they have just enough success to be considered somewhat legitimate, somewhat quacks. The psychologists, through the ages, had part of the answer. In the arts, they had another part. Painters, poets and scribblers illustrated the idea that people wanted to return to an earlier state. Sometimes they would say that earlier forms of society were cleaner, or somehow more attuned to humanity, than current forms. In individual cases, they would say that men or women wanted to return to childhood, or even, in some particularly insightful works, they said that people wanted to return all the way to the womb.”
Johns was watching Leo closely, but Leo remained as unreadable as ever. The Doctor wound up his presentation, “What we have in that building you saw this morning is that womb, the one that everyone yearns to return to. The insides of the drum are soft and giving, the temperature is 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit, and the chemicals are as comforting as any amniotic fluid. Inside the drum, organisms get exactly what they want and need, a return to the womb, a complete and thorough loss of control.”
Jane Early had hung on every word, and was struggling to assimilate their meaning. Leo’s expression made it clear that he was still waiting to be impressed or enlightened. Johns seemed disappointed that Leo wasn’t impressed.
Johns went on: “The problem for some time, and I’ll have to admit it was a problem of mine, was that we didn’t go far enough. We experimented with short treatments, then longer treatments. We’d put a subject into the drum then spend days and days evaluating our results. Sometimes we’d see some measurable improvement, and other times we’d see measurable regression. It was no better than any therapy through the ages. We were getting results, but the results were never final and never predictable.
‘Finally, we went all the way. We kept up the treatment until all signs of brain activity stopped. Technically, a person is dead when brain activity stops, and we had been afraid to go so far, but we did eventually. When all brain activity stops, then the process is whole. We immediately stop the treatment and take the subject out of the drum. That’s when our success was complete. That’s when we knew that we had done something that had only been approximated throughout the centuries. We didn’t just cure problems willy-nilly here and there, we could give a complete new start to our subject. In a way, we could create a new person from the assorted protoplasm and chemicals of an old one. Humanity has at last found a way to remake itself, and to bring itself to a whole new plane!
‘That’s when your revolutionaries intervened, just when we were certain of success at last. When the greatest of all scientific discoveries was ours, some gun-toting cowgirl walked in and shut off our generator.
‘I would have thought that Paul Kerr would have explained all this to you. He’s known about my ideas since we were in school together. Even though we went separate ways, both of us wanted to resolve human problems, and both of us respected the ideas of the other. He, I assume, feels a certain amount of success for the role he’s played in the current revolution, even though I daresay it was caused by external forces much more than by him or any of you. I, on the other hand, have the ultimate success here at Spring Hill Laboratories. I have done what mankind has always striven for, and I, we, only need a nod from you to bring this wonder to the world.”
Leo remained taciturn.
“And, I might add, it’s just barely in time. You and your revolutionaries haven’t saved the world. There’s only a part of it left, and you’re trying to save that, but you can’t be sure you’ll succeed. You’re experimenting with your solution. I am positive of mine!”
“So you put people in there, and they come out better?” Leo asked for clarification.
Johns was clearly offended with Leo’s bluntness. “We put wrecks in there, and they come out whole. Can’t you see? We can take the severest cases of mental illness and turn them into real human beings with the sweetest concerns, the bravest ambitions, the most intelligent curiosity – all of the things we value and want to be.
‘Look at us. Look at all of us. Try to find a single person that isn’t traumatized, held back, unreasonably fearful. Try to find a group of people that aren’t racist, or homophobic, or chauvinistic, frightened of other individuals and frightened of other groups. Try to find someone who can share like a child instead of grasping everything for themselves. Try to find people who are truly generous and not the subjects of their own hates, prejudices and defense mechanisms. They aren’t out there because society can’t create us any way other than the way we are. If we are ever to improve, if we are ever going to stop killing each other and destroying our world, we have to break from society, get outside it completely, if only temporarily, and change! We have to lose control, completely lose control. That was never possible before, but now it is.” Johns sat back, self-satisfied.
Leo realized that he had been listening to a sales pitch. And he waited for the salesman to close. It came right away: “Let us turn on our generator!”
“Have to think about it,” Leo said nonchalantly, and rose to go.