by Robert Price
Corliss went over to the water cooler and filled a cup. Sipping it with her lips puckered, she started to turn away when Talbot came over.
“So, you’re part of this cabal of zealots? I would’ve thought…”
She smiled frostily. “Thought I was just another lapsed Communist turned professional informer…”
Talbot shrugged over to the water cooler.
“But now you’re thinking I’m a lady G-Man, or even a double or triple agent… Well, go on, what are you thinking?”
He filled the cup, drained it and refilled it. “I’m struggling to give you the benefit of the doubt, because we’ve never met and you’re rather swell in the flesh for a stool-pigeon, but I can’t figure why such a nice girl would name someone she never met—”
“Oh, so you know.”
“As luck would have it, yes.”
“Please don’t take it hard. It wasn’t my idea; I didn’t even know your name until they fed it to me in executive session. They said you were involved with some English radical group after the war. I had to give them what they wanted. It wasn’t just a question of working or not…”
“I’ve never seen you in anything, have I…?”
She gave him a tired, flattered smile, but looked away and covered her eyes. “I’m not an actress. I’m a scenarist, just like you. Or I was… Now, I seem to’ve become more of a gossip columnist.”
“A parrot as well as a stool pigeon. You’re quite a catch.”
“I didn’t have any choice. And the pay is nothing to save the family farm, but I had to sell scripts through a male front long before there was a blacklist. Any girl who won’t submit to the casting couch is a radical, in this town.”
“Alright, it’s tough all over. But why are you here, now? What did they tell you?”
She bit her lip as she loaded a cigarette. Red-black lipstick smeared on her teeth. “That something was going to happen. I write a column, I have a program on KABC, and I… I wield a certain degree of influence in the ex-Communist community. Cooley said I would have a role to play, so I came. I do what they tell me, and you should, too.”
As she touched his hand, she dropped a tightly folded note into it. He went to the bathroom and sat on the toilet before he read it.
Please don’t be angry with me. There’s no time.
I know that one of us is going to be recruited to work for them,
and the other is going to die. Not even they know, yet, which will
be picked. Nobody knows the rules to this game…but if we work
together, maybe we won’t have to play.
He shredded the note and put it in his mouth, chewed it and spat it into the toilet.
They adjourned to a dimly lit screening room. Cooley sat in a chair in the back and mixed highballs at the wet bar while a stooge in a lab coat ushered Talbot and Corliss to the front row of seats.
An older man in a doctor’s smock came out the door beside the screen and bowed deeply. “Doctor Fleming, ah…Tiverton,” he said with a lipless peck at Lila’s extended hand.
Picture a short, bald, asthmatic geezer with thick glasses and a wispy mustache like catfish whiskers. He looked like Peter Lorre, if Lorre were nearsighted and addicted to skin cancer. The other man, who only introduced himself as the station engineer, wore grubby coveralls and didn’t look like anyone at all.
“Mr. Talbot, Miss Corliss,” Tiverton lisped, “we have offered you the opportunity to assist us in an urgent mission for the cause of national security. Your discretion would, naturally, be compulsory. Now, ah… We have devised a very effective method of conditioning the viewing audience to insure order in the event of an emergency…”
“Brainwashing them, you mean,” Talbot cut in.
“No, ha ha, quite the opposite. We were initially charged with finding a foolproof method of inculcating American values into the broadcast signal itself. Television is the greatest vehicle for such work. The viewer’s attention passively rests on a single point instead of roaming and sorting out distractions. With our carrier signal added to all channels, the forebrain all but goes to sleep, allowing the program to saturate the deeper, more primitive regions of the brain.
“Not to make them slaves, but to set them free, or as free as anyone would really want to be. They are subliminally conditioned by rhythmic distortions in the cathode radiation to internalize the program’s overt messages about the American way of life: hard work, respect for private property, rewards for initiative and individual achievement…”
“And a healthy dose of blind patriotic fervor, no doubt,” added Miss Corliss.
Tiverton nodded like he was shaking off a bee. “Indeed! The old CONELRAD—the Control of Electromagnetic Radiation network—allows us to relay the alert signal to the nation’s TV and radio frequencies. The new Emergency Broadcast Signal system will allow us to directly seize control of the entire broadcasting spectrum.
“The new EBS tone acts as a post-hypnotic trigger to induce an orderly civil response to an atomic exchange. But many of our test subjects have a poor reaction to the activating tone. They disregard their programming and seem to, ah…regress…”
Way off across the room, Cooley whistled the Star-Spangled Banner. He loped over, pushing a projector on a cart. “Don’t tell them. Show them.”
The lights went down and the projector lit up the screen. Tiverton stood in the glow as the numbers counted down to zero. “Now, these test subjects were, ah, paid volunteers…but they could not, of course, have been told of the true nature of the, ah, test…”
A TOP SECRET graphic flashed over the civil defense logo, then a proper title: CONELRAD EMERGENCY BROADCAST SYSTEM STRESS TEST No.107-LA-11f
“They were participants in a civil defense test in which we simulated a real atomic attack upon Los Angeles. This subject family unit took shelter immediately after hearing the fortified CONELRAD signal.”
“They thought it was real?” Talbot asked. “How could you—”
“Shut up,” said everyone.
A starkly lit concrete bunker viewed from high up on a wall, through the grate of a ventilation shaft. Below, the floor hidden under opened, half-empty cans and smashed bottles. A middle-aged woman with a bloodied face presses into a corner between a wall and a bunk bed, holding a young boy to her bosom and screaming as she points a revolver at the man of the house, who crouches holding his bloody shoulder and bobbing, looking for an opening. A hammer in his hand trembles and then flies at the mother. As it hits the wall beside her face, she fires and hits him in the throat. He falls, and the mother looks to her son, half-eaten but still, somehow, alive. Singing something—reading lips, it comes clear (O’er the la-and of the free) just before she resumes eating (and the home of the brave) his face.
Cooley applauded. Talbot buried his head in his hands and dug red furrows in his forehead with his fingernails.
Tiverton stepped in front of the screen as it cut to the film’s tail leader. “This family self-destructed on day eleven of the simulation. They were the last group to implode.”
Talbot asked, “Out of how many?”
“That’s classified,” Tiverton said.
Talbot looked around, from the engineer to the doctor to Lila Corliss to Cooley, lurking at the back of the room, nodding like he’d seen this film a hundred times. “You made them think… Jesus… Okay… I just don’t see how, even if this thing does what you say it does…how is this going to help fight Communism?”
The engineer spat tobacco juice into a wastebasket. “Who gives a shit about Communism?”
“Show him the control group,” Cooley said.
“I don’t see how that would, ah…help.”
Cooley made the geek in the lab coat change the reels on the projector.
Over the countdown, Tiverton’s thick glasses reflected flaming pinwheels. “This is not a representative sampling, but a most interesting anecdote. All of our control groups outlasted the fortified groups, but, ah…after three months,
they all either committed suicide, starved to death or tried to leave the shelter. This one group in our last round of subjects…”
There was no title.
Another bunker, much tidier than the last. A woman lies on the floor inside a triangle within a circle drawn in charcoal. Her arms and feet are outstretched, and a man hunches over her hand. A young girl holds her other hand. An old woman, somebody’s mother, kneels at her feet and holds one up to her lips, and a little boy, barely old enough to talk, holds the other, seeming at first to be reverently, if not lustily, kissing it.
The woman’s blouse is open and her chest and belly covered in geometric designs and symbols like in Medieval alchemy manuscripts. Her breathing is slow and measured, her lips moving in a mute incantation.
The father looks up and wipes his mouth. Blood pours out of a hole in the palm of her hand, blood and something solid and not at all recognizable as part of a human body pools in stigmata in her hands and feet. By turns, each member of the family pauses to give thanks for their feast.
“Jesus,” Talbot said, and went to be sick in the wastebasket.
“The control groups were chosen from the migrant Mexican population, because they’ve never been exposed to our television or radio. This one started out like all the others, but a few days after the food ran out, they prayed until they seemed to go into a trance, and then they started doing this. They’ve survived for more than thirty days on…whatever the hell they’re getting from her. We’ve been ordered to sit back and see how long they hold out.”
Talbot said, “I don’t suppose I can just say no and not expect to end up in a bomb shelter, can I?”
The engineer pushed Talbot back in his chair. “We need programs that will put the intellect to sleep and massage the emotional centers of the brain—weepy, soft-boiled sob stories—so the conditioning will stick without turning the audience into a pack of shit-flinging baboons when the duck-and-cover tone plays. You think you can do that?”
They both nodded, then looked at each other, then away. “I have to try,” Talbot said, “but I don’t even understand how you’re…” He put his hand over his mouth, bit down on his fingers until his eyes bulged out and a droplet of blood streaked down his chin.
“You’ve had quite a shock,” Tiverton said. “Why don’t you take a minute… both of you.” He and the engineer and Cooley and the stooge all left by separate doors, but locked them in perfect unison.
Corliss got up out of her chair. “Did you ever stop to think that maybe the hysteria over Communism might be…you know…a result of the conditioning they’re putting into the water and over the airwaves? They’ve created an enemy to justify these experiments…”
He sprang out of his chair and crossed the room with his hand out to cover her mouth.
She turned away to fend him off, but then caught him by the arm and pulled him close. “I never gave politics a second thought when I wrote scripts, did you?”
He couldn’t look her in the eye. For a moment, they looked past each other and their lips almost met. “I just tried to remind people how humans are supposed to treat each other, so maybe…”
She pulled away. “I think about it now, and it seems so silly, but I guess I was just playing with dolls. I used to play all day with my paper dolls and make up elaborate scenarios for them, with mistaken identities and lovers separated by cruel and fickle fate… And I suppose it just seemed like coming to Hollywood and writing for the movies would be like playing with the prettiest, most beloved paper dolls of all…”
The speaker above her head gave a keening noise for fifteen seconds, but he heard it in his bones, he will always hear it until the day he dies.
He already likes working here, he’d live here, if they’d let him, if only they’d turn down that noise—
Lila didn’t like it. She knelt on the floor, hyperventilating. “Don’t touch me…don’t…”
Sliding his tie off his collar, he wound the narrow end round his knuckles and snapped the double-stitched silk like a garrote between his fists.
“Lila,” he said, straining not to look for the cameras, “I think I figured out why they invited you…”
Talbot pounded on the door until it opened. He stumbled into an office even darker than the screening room, but for the cadaverous blue-white light from a wall of television sets. The engineer got up from a drafting table with an elaborate circuit diagram on it.
Talbot held a handkerchief to his cheek but failed to staunch the stream of blood that trickled down his neck to stain his collar.
The engineer led him to a chair then sat on the corner of his desk, tamping a charnel-smelling tobacco blend into his pipe. “Boy, when you want a job, you don’t mess around.”
“I didn’t mean to… I mean, I didn’t…” He shivered and looked at his hands, then he laughed. “For a minute there, I thought I…”
“Oh, but you did. I can show you the replay…the lighting is terrible, but it’ll play well enough for a jury.”
“Why? Why did you…you made me do it!”
“We told you the tone was buggy.”
Wiping his hands on his legs, he let out a whipped, whimpering scream. “You’d better kill me too, or I’ll—”
“You’ll what, son? Tell them whatever you want, somebody might even listen. But it’ll be a lot easier for a jury to understand that a convicted radical former screenwriter strangled the woman who fed him to the Committee.”
“But why? I was going to cooperate. We both were…”
“You ‘show business’ people never can be trustworthy unless your own necks are in the noose. I’m sorry, but it’s true. You think you’re an exception to every rule. Well, now you’re one of us. Now, we have your undivided loyalty.”
Talbot slumped in his chair. For a long minute, the only sound was the patter of flop sweat and blood hitting the concrete floor.
“You don’t realize how close we are to Terminal Midnight, son. Even clowns like Cooley, they don’t get the big picture. A full-fledged atomic war would be a blessing, next to what we face. Without a real solution, America is going to be besieged on every front within the next ten years and totally overrun by hostile aliens, and I don’t mean wetbacks. Something has to be done. Our brains and bodies need to be immunized, or we will go insane. As a nation, as a race, as a species, we’ll become violent psychopaths or simply shut down in the face of the changes…”
“And you need me to make propaganda films…”
“No, we just need you to script and direct the same melodramatic crap you always did. We’ll even let you direct your own shows, if you don’t foul it up. We’ll get your name off all the lists. Lila Corliss will disappear on a cruise in the Caribbean.”
“So…you’re already putting this programming out on the airwaves?”
“Of course, didn’t our little demonstration get through to you? The program is going out over all radio and TV channels. Has been since last summer. We have to do it, or we’ll be left behind… You must’ve soaked up enough of it, yourself, obviously.”
“Oh, if the other side is doing it, that’s the best reason to do it to ourselves, too? Why don’t we just find another way? There’s got to be a way to preserve order without turning people into…into…”
“This isn’t anything. It’s a toy. If the signal were boosted and the audience synchronized… Well, then, that would be something.”
“Yeah?”
“If an army walks across a bridge in perfect lockstep, their synchronized footfalls will set up vibrations, which will potentially shake the bridge to bits. The Chinese are working with similar technology even now, which will utilize the observer effect… If an entire population observes a single object simultaneously, with their perceptive judgment yoked to a single influencing source, then their combined, unified perception could become an energy weapon like a gigantic magnifying glass, focusing the sun’s rays upon and utterly destroying or even fundamentally altering anything they behold.”
“Sure, all they need is eight hundred million TVs. You’ve got me, you can quit shoveling that shit, now.”
The engineer showed Talbot to the restroom, boxed him in when he tried to go wash his hands. “I know what you’re thinking. Just nod and smile and back out of the room, all the way to the car and run for your life. Don’t. We need you to do this for us.”
“For Mr. and Mrs. America and all the ships at sea.” Sidling past the engineer, Talbot bent over the sink and splashed cold water on his face. “I don’t know. How many innocent maidens can the hero tie to the railroad tracks, and still wear a white hat? Is it really better than whatever you’re fighting?”
“Listen…I’ve been out here since ’51, but before, I was in New Mexico, when the…when it crashed, and I followed it to Nevada. The stories they let out that it was a spaceship from another planet were easier to swallow than the truth. The truth was, we still don’t know what the fuck we found. It’s not from another planet, it’s from another dimension. And it’s not a machine, as we know them. It’s alive, and we can’t kill it.
“Those atomic tests out in the desert? They’re not really tests. There’s something down there that we’ve dropped a couple dozen H-bombs on, and so far, we’re just spitting in its eye.”
Talbot looked around. Nobody was watching, unless there were cameras. There were always cameras. “So…you don’t get out much…”
“They probably told you this was temporary, didn’t they? Don’t get me wrong, this is no gulag. They take pretty good care of us, heh… And you can leave.
“This one fellow, he came from Naval Intelligence, they took him because he wrote that sci-fi potboiler stuff, so they thought he could handle it. He started spreading around the idea that the UFO was a message like the Ten Commandments. A call to worship, see? And he was the new Moses. They let him go, couldn’t afford to just kill him, it’d be bad for morale, but they stirred his brains up with the stress test tone. That’s one of the only useful things we’ve learned from this shit, see? The eggheads call it a ‘remote lobotomy.’ Us working stiffs call it the ‘fire drill,’ because that’s what it feels like. Already a paranoid schizophrenic from studying the fucking thing, they turned him into some kind of broken robot. He’s out there preaching his daffy zombie gospel, but it’s dressed up as some new kind of self-improvement grift. Looks like a loose cannon, but if they wanted him gone, he’d be gone, so cui bono, you know? Just another brainwashing machine. We’re all working for them.”
