The Children of Hamelin

by Norman Spinrad

  I tried to see the clockwork behind their eyes, but I couldn’t quite cut that straight. So, leaping into the frying pan, I sat down in the dock, said with what I hoped was a sufficiently irritating look of contrition: “I suppose you’re all wondering why I gathered you here tonight—”

  The silent inward snarls behind the earnestly-concerned masks were not ungratifying.

  “This is what we call a Situational Group, Tom,” Harvey said, ignoring all the vibes in the room. “In other words, a group called together to focus on a specific problem of a particular member. By exploring a specific event, in this case your behavior at Saturday’s party, a Situational Group should give unusual insight into your internal reasons for your external behavior.”

  “Yeah, I dig,” I said. “Nothing new. The same thing’s gone by other names: witch-hunt, Red Guard self-criticism session, meeting of the House Un-American Activities Committee.”

  Harvey smiled professionally. “That attitude is entirely consistent with the paranoid delusions you displayed Saturday,” he said. “This paranoia would seem—”

  “It’s not that I’m paranoid, it’s just that everyone’s against me.”

  “Such an attempt to pass over a threatening truth with a humorous remark is clearly indicative of—”

  Oh Wow. “Look Harv,” I said with a great display of misunderstood earnestness, “I didn’t mean that as a joke. What’s your definition of paranoia, anyway?”

  “A paranoiac is someone who clings to a delusion system in which he is being persecuted by others—and in advanced cases, even by inanimate objects—when in fact no such persecution exists in object reality.”

  Objective reality? Is there such a thing as objective reality or is objective reality nothing more than the opinion of the middle class? Somehow I had the feeling I wouldn’t get very far challenging the existence of objective reality inside the mechanism of the old Cuckoo-clock. So:

  “Okay. Now take this cat who thinks about eighty million people are out to do him in because they think he’s less than human; he thinks all kinds of monsters are out to catch him, pull out his gold teeth, kill him, and melt him down for soap. Paranoia?”

  “A rather extreme example of paranoia.”

  I smiled sweetly. “Forgot to tell you the cat in question is a Jew in Nazi Germany,” I said.

  Ted, Doris, Rich, even Linda-uptight-Kahn, stifled laughs in spite of themselves. Two points for the defense.

  “Point is,” I said, “paranoia is a relationship between what someone thinks is going on and what is going on. Can’t have paranoia without delusions by your own definition, Harv. If things really are as crazy as someone sees them, he’s not paranoid no matter how many monsters he sees, not if they’re really there.”

  “What’s that got to do with you?” Linda-uptight-Kahn said. “You were gibbering about... let’s see... piano rolls... cuckoo clocks... programmers... Harvey changing people’s piano rolls... and ended up screaming and cursing. If that’s not paranoia, what is it?”

  “Poetic imagery,” I informed her.

  “Bullshit,” said Charley.

  “Really? I mean literally bullshit? Fecal matter from a male bovine?”

  “Ah, stop playing word games,” Rich said.

  “How can I do that without either shutting up entirely or grunting like an ape? Isn’t this whole group nothing but one big word game?”

  “All this is quite beside the point,” Harvey said.

  “No man, it is the point. Point is, I am no paranoid. I saw a truth Saturday night and expressed it in allegory, poetic image, word game if you will. If I didn’t succeed in explaining it to you, I may be a lousy word game player, but that doesn’t make the truth I saw any less true. And if the truth I saw was a bummer, that doesn’t make me paranoid for calling a spade a spade.”

  “Truth, schmuth,” Ida said. “You were babbling. You didn’t make a word of sense to anyone.”

  “She’s right, Tom,” Arlene said sympathetically. “You were babbling nonsense. No one understood a word of it.”

  “I’ll bet you don’t even remember what you said yourself,” Linda said. “I’ll bet you don’t even know what this great revelation you’re bullshitting about is any more.”

  I smiled an eat-shit smile at her. “You’re faded, baby,” I said. “What I saw was the essential nature of the Foundation, namely as an old-fashioned cuckoo clock, you know, with a lot of little mechanical figures that go through their numbers when the clock strikes. You people are the clockwork figures. Harvey is the Black Forest Elf that put the clock together according to his own notions of what kind of creatures you should be and what funny numbers you should run through every hour on the hour. The piano rolls are the individual programs that Harvey has put in your heads. The Master Piano Roll is the total Foundation bag. Changing the piano rolls means putting new ideas into your heads. The San Francisco Piano Roll is Harvey’s new game of getting you all to think you want to move the Foundation to San Francisco. See? It all makes poetic sense.”

  Harvey nodded sagely. “Paranoid systems of delusion are often internally self-consistent,” he said. “Surely you don’t expect anyone to believe that the Foundation is a... er, cuckoo clock, that they are mechanical figures on the clock, that—”

  “Man, are you dense!” I snapped. “The real truth is that the Foundation is a structure designed to make you suckers act the way Harvey wants you to, that’s robbed you of free will. The proof of it is that you really do believe that going to San Francisco is your idea, not Harvey’s. You’re being had, folks.”

  I looked squarely at Arlene. Was there the dawn of comprehension in her eyes? Maybe... Because I was being so fucking brilliant? Or just because the idea of going to San Francisco turned her off?

  “You dig, Arlene?” I said. “I’m talking to you. Dig why you really couldn’t take the key to my apartment? Because the piano roll in your head programmed you to reject it.”

  Arlene seemed to be looking inward. She was wondering; it was no longer a question of whether she understood what I was saying but whether she would accept it. And the question seemed to be hanging suspended in the silence....

  Then Ted blew it: “Aw come on, all this is bullshit and you know it, man. You were stoned out of your mind, is all. What was it, acid?”

  “Hash,” I corrected evenly.

  “Must’ve been awfully good hash,” old Rich couldn’t help saying. He got six poisonous looks from the clockwork creatures and prim disapproval from the Cuckoo-Clock Maker for his troubles.

  “Nothing but the best,” I said. Then, strictly for nasties: “Could probably get you a dime’s worth.”

  Rich seemed to be really considering the proposition as Linda Kahn said: “A dope-pusher too!” Arlene got a frightened (but fascinated?) look in her eyes. Hmmm... maybe she had a cherry in an unexpected place ready for plucking.

  “Now we get to the heart of it,” Harvey said. “You admit that your actions Saturday were taken under the influence of hashish?”

  “And that dirty little hippy he had with him was probably on drugs too!” Ida said. A little spasm went through Arlene.

  “Sure Harv,” I said. “And there’s plenty to go around. I might be able to get you some, too.”

  Harvey ignored the invitation. “So your delusions were caused by drugs,” he said. “That’s encouraging—your paranoia may not be so deep-seated, but only a part of your drug problem.”

  “I don’t have a drug problem.”

  “You just admitted you were on hashish!” Linda said.

  “Sure. But what’s the problem?”

  “You don’t consider drug addiction a problem?” Harvey said.

  “I never said that. That problem I have had. And I licked it. Now I’ve got a healthy attitude towards drugs: a nice place to visit, but I have no intention of living there.” I could see that Arlene was definitely getting interested, oh yes she was....

  “That’s a common attitude among drug-users,”
Harvey said. “It’s part of the drug-neurosis itself—the false notion that one can use drugs without losing one’s perspective on reality.”

  Well, by god, there we were back with good old objective reality—no way around it.

  “What’s reality?” I asked.

  “The fact that you could ask such a question is a clear—”

  “Aw bullshit! Dig, you’d say that reality is the real nature of the external universe, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay, so let’s assume that there is an objective reality, one way the external world really is. But that’s only an assumption. We get all our data on external reality through our sense organs and we interpret it with our brains, all of which are based on a particular biochemistry. When you turn on, you change the biochemistry and your subjective reality changes.”

  “Exactly,” said Harvey. “You distort your perception of object reality.”

  “Which is subjective to begin with! How can you know that straight biochemistry gives you a more accurate picture than stoned biochemistry? Answer: you can’t. You can’t even be sure that there is an objective reality. If you used drugs, you’d see that reality has styles, depending on your biochemistry of the moment.”

  Arlene was hunched forward, staring at me, apparently lapping it up. Yes, that was the way to turn a chick like her on: give dope a nice philosophical mystique. Way to her head was through... her head!

  But old Harv was really uptight. “That’s the way to madness,” he said. “If you think that way, you’ve got no certain ground to stand on.” And suddenly I flashed on why Harvey had to be down on drugs, why they were such a threat to him. And I was sure my hash-vision had been essentially true. Harvey was pushing certainty: Total Consciousness. Key word being Total...

  “Ah, I dig you now, Harvey,” I said, “you’re a control-head, that’s why you’re so down on drugs. You’ve got all your suckers trapped in your own brand of subjective reality. But the gimmick is that you’ve got ‘em convinced that your Foundation-reality is the real thing, Total Consciousness, the way things really are. But don’t let the suckers turn on, right? Because if they turn on and dig another style of reality, they might see that reality is all subjective and you aren’t giving them Total Reality because maybe there is no Total Reality. In short, folks, if you turn on, your heads will be outside the Cuckoo Clock and you’ll see it the way I did, and then the con-game is kaput. Anybody want some hash?”

  Hea-vy! Rich was grinning like a Nazi who had just heard Der Fuehrer rap. Ida and Charley didn’t know what the fuck I was talking about. Linda did but was good at pretending she didn’t. Ted and Doris were remembering less square days. Harvey... who could read Harvey?

  But Arlene... ah, there were dope-lights in her eyes! No doubt about it, I had turned her on to the mystique of dope. But would she put her lungs where her head wanted to go?

  “I begin to understand you, Tom,” Harvey said, giving me a nod of the old head and a plastic fatherly pucker. “I was probably wrong to attribute your problems to paranoia.... No, it would seem that drugs lie at the core of your problem—hardly surprising, since drugs seem to have structured your ego at its deepest levels.”

  “Look Harvey, I told you—”

  “Yes, I know, you have no addiction problem. But you do have a drug problem and it’s far subtler than you seem to think. Let’s go with the way you look at reality: under drugs, you claim to experience a subjective reality that is just a valid as the reality you’re experiencing now, and you claim that by experiencing more than one subjective reality, you get a more complete view of objective reality. That’s because, under drugs, you experienced a subjective reality in which I appeared as a kind of puppet-master and the Foundation as my puppet-show, you are free from control. That because drugs enable you to experience an altered consciousness, there is no Total Consciousness, and therefore no objective reality. Have I stated it to your satisfaction?”

  I nodded, sensing that Harvey had somehow taken control by the simple act of repeating what I had said. They were all sucking up his shit now, even Arlene.

  “And you still don’t see the trap you’ve fallen into.”

  I couldn’t think of anything clever to say; I had lost control of the situation at least until Harvey arrived at wherever he was going.

  “What if the reality you experience on drugs is pure delusion?” Harvey said. “What if there is such a thing as Total Consciousness of an objective reality? Then this whole business of drugs giving you three-dimensional vision would all be false and all they would be doing is introducing a distortion into your total perception of the world—a distortion that would persist even when you’re not high because you give credence to your drugged perceptions.”

  “That would be pretty scary if it were true,” I said. “But it’s not.”

  “Oh?” said Harvey with a flat, inflectionless smugness. “How do you know it’s not true? The fact is you have no way of knowing whether it’s true or not. If drugs are simply giving you distortions and the reality you perceive without them is objective reality, you have no way of judging the validity or non-validity of your drugged perceptions.”

  “Hey dig,” said Ted, “there is one way to judge whether being stoned fucks up your outlook on reality: how do you act with other people when you’re stoned?”

  “Exactly,” said Harvey. “Consider what happened to your relationship with the outside world when you were stoned last Saturday. You came to an ordinary party and felt threatened by a conspiracy...”

  “You looked like a freak,” Ida said.

  “You offended everyone in sight,” said Linda.

  “You ended up freaking-out.”

  “And you brought along that Robin-creature,” Arlene said sympathetically, grasping at the it-wasn’t-you-that-did-it-to-me-Tom-it-was-the-dope straw.

  “Yeah, and that dirty little hippy was on dope, too,” Ida said, “and look how she acted.”

  “Tried to make me right in front of Doris,” Ted said wishful-thinkingwise.

  “Felt up poor faggoty old Mannie Davis in front of everyone,” said Charley Dees.

  “Foul-mouthed everyone in sight,” said Linda.

  “And made a fool out of you, Tom,” said Momma Doris. “Made you act like a jerk and then did things behind your back with half the men in the room.”

  My head was reeling. Harvey’s logic had no holes in it: I had been stoned and in their eyes I had acted like a lunatic; if drugs gave me nothing but distortion, I would have no way of knowing it.

  Yeah, the logic was all on Harvey’s side... But something in my gut told me I was right and he was wrong. But... but... could that be drug-distortion too?

  Goddamn, he was right! I had no way of knowing! Scary, yes!

  But... but Doris had been dead-wrong about Robin: she hadn’t done anything behind my back; it was all part of the game both of us were playing. And Ted was putting himself on; Robin never had eyes for him, she thought he was pathetic. And what the hell did “looking like a freak” really mean? Nothing but a difference in style! And Harvey really was a control-head (the bread he was raking in from the suckers was sure no delusion!), so I hadn’t been paranoid. And I freaked out because I saw evil and couldn’t do anything about it. They didn’t have any more of a total view of reality than I did. There was no Total Reality. We saw different styles of reality, acted on them, and so appeared crazy to each other.... AND....

  And that was it!

  “Wanna hear something really scary folks?” I said, making with a nasty grin. “Take everything Harvey’s just said and just substitute Total Consciousness for dope and see how the equation comes out. If the Total Reality Harvey is peddling is pure delusion, then Total Consciousness is just a distortion in your perception of reality as it really is. And if so, you have no way of knowing that your heads have been distorted, programmed, and that you’re trapped in the old Cuckoo Clock—because the Foundation has distorted your minds in such a way as to make the
distortion invisible to you.”

  “But... but that’s just your assumption, isn’t it?” Arlene said uneasily. It seemed like a purposeful straight-line, as if she sensed where I was taking her and wanted to get here.

  “Right,” I said. “An assumption—just like Harvey’s assumption about dope.”

  “Ah, but remember how insanely you acted Saturday night,” Harvey said.

  “Did I? From my viewpoint, you’re all acting insanely because you’re blind to what’s being done to you. If my assumption is right, you’re all nuts; if you’re assumption is right, I’m nuts.”

  “But... how can any of us know which is true...?” Arlene asked.

  I shrugged and smiled. “That is the scary part,” I said. “None of us can. What’s more, there’s no reason why we can’t all be nuts. Drugs could cause delusions... but that wouldn’t mean the Foundation view isn’t a distortion, too. Or maybe we’re both right, in which case there just isn’t any such thing as objective reality.”

  “That’s the essence of madness,” Harvey said.

  “Could be,” I conceded. “But that’s no guarantee that it isn’t the way things are. Maybe the essence of the universe is that kind of madness—in which case we damn well better learn to groove behind it.”

  “My God!” Arlene whispered. “You could be right. You really could be right! But... but how can you function, seeing the world that way?”

  Now there was the Big Question! Best I could do was fake an answer: “You told me how yourself, baby. Remember that inner core of certainty you said I had? Well, that’s what you need—you’ve gotta trust it and act off it.”

  “Sheer mysticism,” said Harvey, of all people. “You don’t even know what this inner certainty you’re talking about is, do you?”

  “Nope. That’s what makes life interesting.”

  “But this core of certainty is also affected by your drug-taking. Certainty maybe, but what makes you think it can be trusted?”

  “Instinct, Harv,” I told him. “Be like an animal, you once said—that’s Total Consciousness. Okay, so maybe I don’t have Total Consciousness—but I’ve got this little core of instinct deep inside where I can’t see it and so I gotta work off that. Man, if you start distrusting your instincts, you’re distrusting three billion years of evolution. That’s real insanity in my book.”