by Don Wilcox
“If Alex T. had come lived then, and had taken the serum, and had come down through the centuries with these prisoners, would he have been the kindly, warm-hearted director that we know today? No. He would have been a man with a heart of hatred for these prisoners.
“The hatred that should have died with the 20th century would still be alive.”
I felt highly complimented over these remarks, naturally. But my job carries certain requirements, and for this series of records I hasten to add that, officially speaking, I am aware that these sixty-two creatures were once the world’s dangerous criminals. As such they must always be guarded closely.
Officially speaking, I despise them. I took an oath to despise them when I accepted this position; I also made a brief survey of the movies which were supposed to rekindle the hatred of every new generation. These movies, incidentally, furnished a certain amount of comedy for my travelling companions on my round-the-world tour. It isn’t easy to mix the pleasure of travel with the pain of instilling one’s self with an official hatred. But at any rate I have fulfilled this requirement.
Some people may think I am too lenient. I have allowed the prisoners to talk. Although they are bestial in appearance and to some extent in habits, they are more vociferous in their speech than the most ill-mannered normal people of today.
In fact, they are not above shouting all manner of insults at the passing crowds. Some of their remarks, especially those of 22-E, and 7-H, are highly obscene.
I have begged the crowds to excuse these surly cat-calls as typical actions of caged beasts.
But there are many objections, particularly from the women visitors—
(Note: This 355th annual report was left incomplete, owing to the sudden arrest of Alex T. He was convicted for negligence of duty. Meanwhile, more petitions from the public, particularly from women’s organizations, have demanded reforms in the conduct of this prison.)
SUMMARY OF REFORMS, from the 356th Annual Report, Feb. 1, 2301.
A thorough study of old photographs and movies has been made, proving that the features of these prisoners have changed radically since World War II.
Their bones are shortening. Their ears are growing more pointed. Their legs are shorter and less often straightened. They show a definite tendency to crouch.
The public is still admitted three days a week, but each prisoner can only be seen through the glass of his individual cage front. None of his bellicose jabber reaches the ears of the passing throngs.
Each prisoner has been closely analyzed for his present personality trait. Hitler-2 2-E is the most hateful and troublesome of the group. He is never approached by less than four guards at a time, well armed, as a matter of accident prevention.
Himmler-7-H, although generally less talkative than most, is regarded as the most treacherous.
Hitler-30-E is the most docile, and still easily intimidated, especially by 22-E’s shouts and snarls and Boche war cries.
All sixty-two prisoners have been brought into a guarded room, one at a time, and made to listen to a recital of their war offenses against innocent people. Their acts of unprovoked brutality were thrown in their faces.
Each in turn was asked whether he felt any remorse for his crimes.
Hitler-2 2-E and twenty others reacted with defiance. They would do it again if they had the chance.
“Maybe a hundred years from now you’ll be ready to change your tune . . . Another hundred years of the concentration camp? How would you like that?”
“Let us out in a hundred years and we’ll show you,” Hitler-2 2-E said. “We’ll blow up the world with the biggest war you ever saw.”
Twenty others were almost as incorrigible.
Of the remaining forty-one, all but one were completely silent and expressionless in the face of these charges. And since we applied no torture measures to force them to talk, they got away with their silence—a silence which at present can have no interpretations.
Yet in the silence of these forty, lies our hope that these centuries of time may be working a change for the better in the characters of these criminals.
Still, if the doctors are correct in their theory that the carp extract tends to exaggerate one’s physical characteristics that most nearly match his mental and moral nature, we have no reason to be optimistic. Every year these creatures look a little less like men, a little more like skulking beasts. Their prison clothes fail to disguise this slow transformation.
One of the sixty-two, whose reactions were not described above, was Himmler-7-H. He is in a class by himself—the only one who professed to any remorse and sorrow over his deeds of long ago.
“My one hope,” he said to us in a confidential manner, “is that I will live long enough to make up, somehow, for all the evil I have done. I want you to help me.”
The words sounded good, but there was the devil’s light in his eyes. Not one of us believed him.—A.A.A., Director, Longevity Department, Ivanoff Laboratories, Feb. 1, 2301.
(EDITOR’S NOTE: In the next six or seven hundred annual reports there are to be found two parallel threads of interest, both too complicated to be included in this brief compilation, but too important to be passed over:
One concerns the political situation of the country and its reverberations upon the administration of the Longevity prison.
Through the 25th century, the women, as a distinct political party, were rising in power. Many Russian cities became completely dominated by the women’s party, and eventually the board of directors of the Ivanoff Laboratories went female.
Dozens of annual reports pictured the struggle involved here. The startling thing was, judged by standards of past centuries, that the women’s party charged the male administrators with being soft, too unimaginative in its treatment of the Boche prisoners, too unappreciative of the mistreatment innocent people suffered at their hands.
The other thread of interest weaving in and out of the many annual reports concerns the baffling case of Himmler-7-H. Was he an innocent man, mistakenly identified as a Himmler officer?
Between 2400 and 2900 this prisoner has continually protested his innocence. Nine hundred years is a long time for an innocent man to be kept in prison.
Unfortunately, there was no one alive by the end of the 29th century who could look back more than 200 years (the state has placed a limit on the use of the longevity serum, so that no one is now allowed to live more than two centuries, with the exception of these human guinea pigs) and therefore none could testify from personal experience whether Himmler-7-H’s story had any basis in fact.
His story is that one of the directors of the 23 rd century agreed to check back through the records to see whether he, 7-H, was not innocent. The director went through the old evidence and was forced to conclude that 7-H was innocent and had been taken through an error. However, the director quickly covered his findings and even went to the pains of rewriting some of the old records, falsifying them so that 7-H would always be thought guilty.
This was, of course, simply 7-H’s story. But the details were so complete as to disturb the laboratory staff. A lot of investigating followed, and it seems evident that Himmler-7-H was a model prisoner all the while. Since he and his fellow prisoners were the only ones who could testify from personal observations of nine or ten centuries in the past, they enjoyed considerable advantage in building up this legend of a prisoner’s innocence.
The facts were still in question at the end of the 29th century, and by that time the women scientists were at the helm, with their own program of prison administration.)
FROM THE ANNUAL REPORT OF THE YEAR 3000:
The men have named this the Hard-Boiled Era.
We women have enforced the laws to the very last punctuation mark.
The future directors of this prison may judge for themselves whether we have executed our duties efficiently.
As manager of the 37 Boche guinea pigs for the past ten years, I, Olga K., wish to report the following items
of interest:
The last wave of suicides, recorded more than two hundred years ago, resulted in dropping the prison requirement of clothing for prisoners. This was because most of the suicides were performed by hanging or stranglings from ropes made of clothing.
However, in the past two centuries the no-clothing policy has never been officially sanctioned; not until our Hard-Boiled Era swept the country and took over these laboratories.
We, the women officials of the prison, have officially prohibited the Boche inmates from having clothing or any other goods or properties which might obstruct the progress of this experiment in lengthening life. They’re going to live long and like it.
We have decreed that they don’t need clothes. They’re not human beings.
Under my directorship, it has been officially declared that they are non-human animals.
Human beings may—and generally do—require clothes. Animals don’t. Our scientific findings determined that these Boche creatures deserved to go naked.
How did we arrive at this scientific conclusion? During my first year as manager I compared, for the laboratory board, the century-by-century photographs of these prisoners. The gradual physical changes that have come about through the past ten centuries are phenomenal. We agreed that this slow but sure transformation has been continually toward a physical form, that expressed the twentieth century characters of these beasts.
After ten centuries they had definitely acquired the looks that fit their acts of the nineteen-forties.
Accordingly, Madam Marie J. of the prison board drafted the famous resolution which stated that according to the photographs of February 1, 2945, one thousand years after their imprisonment, they were by all physical standards animals, not men.
These details were noted in that resolution:
Their heads bore some resemblance to human heads; but so do the heads of many monkeys and apes.
Their speech resembled that of human beings; but so does that of parrots. The frequent repetition of “Heil Hitler” was noted as a distinctly parrot-like trait.
Their bones had shortened and changed in proportions through the years. Their hind legs had become adapted to an animal-like crouch comparable to that of a dog.
Their bellies had become puffed, their skin was weather-toughened. Their tail-bones were developed into actual tails like those of pigs.
Their talk, still reminiscent of some of the phonograph records of Hitler’s speeches, was made up of snarls and grunts and all manner of barking and hissing, not unlike that of the wart-hog in combat.
Their heads and faces have lost their individuality through the ravages of time and the tell-tale exaggeration of the longevity serum. Their heads have acquired pointed tops like pinhead idiots, their faces are typed with lines of fear, suspicion, terror, and skulking. The cruelty of their eyes is that of the savage beast.
Nakedness has brought no sense of shame; for the consciences that might have nurtured some sense of decency or respect for civilized conventions were warped and calloused and ground into nothing long before their war deeds were committed.
So much for the evidences that these creatures were now animals, deserving to be treated as nothing else.
We continue to handle these creatures as we would manage a prison of poison snakes.
In the line of experiments, we have made 20 trials at adapting their social life to that of other animals: all were unsuccessful.
We placed pigs in cages adjacent to theirs and observed the reactions. The pigs would not associate with them.
Dogs, whose loyalty to mankind is proverbial, reacted toward these Boches creatures as if they were mad hyenas.
These conclusions do not deny, however, that the Boche creatures possess one very disturbing trait, namely, a great amount of thinking power, compared to that of other animals, which might even be called intelligence. Still, can we of this enlightened if hard-boiled age, looking back on their war deeds, consider their thinking processes to be intelligent or even rational when they failed to heed the most elementary moral principles of the civilized world?
These are a rare species, thanks to Mother Nature. They began life with the forms of men, but their minds and hearts were of the Devil, and now we have these visible evidences that they became beasts to the very core.
If this judgment of our Hard-Boiled Age sounds severe to future historians, let them know that we, the laboratory board (all women) are glad to take full responsibility. (Signed)
Olga K., 3000 A.D.
FROM THE ANNUAL REPORT OF THE YEAR 3045:
Other entries of past centuries have made reference to Hitler-2 2-E, Hitler-30-E, and Himmler-7-H. At this date these three are still easily distinguishable, although—as Olga K. noted forty-five years ago—all of these beasts have grown to be very much alike.
I have just walked around the prison square under the mid-afternoon sun. For the most part, all is quiet. The prisoners are napping in their separate cells. They may be seen through the glass fronts, but one does not hear them snoring or mumbling in their sleep or padding back and forth across the floor unless one walks through the inner corridors. I took this walk again today.
I passed the guards in the course of my rounds. They were attending to business. With an injection needle built into the end of a spear-like staff they were administering the longevity serum to each of the inmates, none of whom trouble themselves to offer any resistance.
Himmler-7-H has been very quiet and orderly for almost half a century. There was a time, according to the records, that he almost bluffed the staff into accepting his claims of innocence. But the Hard-Boiled Era put an end to that foolishness. Olga K. had recordings made through the nights of this culprit’s sleep-talk. It was discovered that when he was alone he would mumble all sorts of treacherous plans, and in his half sleep he would gloat over the days when he ordered men and women shot down and babies trampled, and houses plundered and burned.
Olga K. had these recordings played back to him one day, and that stopped Himmler-7-H cold. Although he admitted nothing, he lapsed into a long
Recently he expressed only one sentiment, that of hatred for the original Hitler. “Hitler put us here . . . Hitler put us here . . . Hitler . . . Hitler . . . the plague!”
His words no doubt find their way around to other inmates. Though they are seldom brought together, they have invented ways of exchanging ideas.
Take the methods of Hitler-2 2-E, for example.
The thud of tramping feet is one that carries along the prison floor, and Hitler-2 2-E is very fond of starting a series of such noises. We have found that when he jumps to his feet and starts pounding the wall, it is his way of telling the others that the original Hitler is coming. Then everyone along the line must jump to his feet. The sounds of thudding feet spread both ways around the rectangular block of cells.
When Hitler-2 2-E knows that visitors or officials are watching him he will put on a show of rallying soldiers to his command. He will leap around like a kangaroo, and huff and puff and snarl, beat his naked arms against the glass, and make the most hideous faces of any animal in captivity.
In contrast, Hitler-3 0-E never indulges in any antics of attack. He still ducks for cover, as if from bombs, but it is doubtful whether he knows why he ducks. His memory is very dim, if not completely blacked out. His whole attitude is that of fear and skulking. He hates and ignores Hitler-22-E, and will never join in the tramping or thumping of feet when Hitler-22-E starts one of his mad rallies. Probably there is an old jealousy here that has been nursed since their pre-laboratory days.
I have just returned to the office, and I find on my desk a petition from the women farmers, complaining about the name that has been given these Boche laboratory specimens.
“There is no fairness in calling them ‘pigs’ or any other name referring to swine,” the petition reads. “We who are in the honorable business of raising hogs resent having out good stock maligned.”
I shall reply with a pu
blic statement that these creatures are not, strictly speaking, pigs; nor have they ever been classed as such, officially. However, I doubt whether this statement will have much effect. The popular phrase, “the Devil’s own pigs,” has caught on. It will probably stick.
The petition recalls certain experiments which Olga K. and her associates tried 45 years ago, and I will refer to them in my reply to these proud farmers.
According to the record, the “meanest, scrawniest, black-leggiest pigs that could be found were also placed in cages adjacent to those of the inmates. But the scrubby farm animals scorned the Berlin beasts, and turned up their noses in a distinctly snooty manner.”
One final note must be added to this annual report. Some men assert that the Hard-Boiled Era is passing and that the women are not managing as efficiently as they used to. We stoutly deny this. We are in power and we intend to stay. (Signed) Madam L., 3045 A.D.
The Temple of Athena
Grecian Gardens
West Ivanoff Suburbs
June 1, 3100
This is Katherine Z. reporting. I have some important things to say. To begin with, I state confidently that any future historian who looks into the events of this century is sure to find me.
I am a charter member of the Society for the Uplift of the Uncultured; a member of the League for the Dissemination of Classical Literature; a contributor to the All-European Foundation of Ancient Music.
I am the president of the Liberators of the Downtrodden; and third vice-; president of the Volunteer Solicitors for the Cure of the Incurables; and for the past score of years I have been the First Advisor to the Committee for the Restoration of Greek Esthetics.
It is this last title which accounts for my official address, the beautiful Grecian Gardens.
Let there be no mistake about it, the Hard-Boiled Era is gone.
