The Barons of Behaviour Read online

  “Stop him! Don’t let him go any further!”

  A girl jumped in front of the wheelchair. “Don’t let him poison our brains! He’s spying on our brains so they can sell us more garbage! Don’t let him do it! Stop him! Stop him!”

  People moved toward him across the lawns. A crowd gathered around the chair. Faces swung past Nicholson’s eyes. A woman screamed at him from the back of the crowd.

  “Kill him! Kill him! Tear him to pieces! Show him*what we do to snoops!” A fist dropped. The blows snapped his head back and then forward, past the faces, the lawns, the houses, the big, soft…

  Suddenly Nicholson knew their secret, their terrifying, overwhelming secret. But could he get out of Greenplace alive and in time to save these savages from themselves?

  TOM PURDOM

  THE BARONS OF BEHAVIOR

  ACE BOOKS

  A Division of Charter Communications Inc.

  1120 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, N.Y. 10036

  the barons of behavior

  Copyright ©, 1972, by Tom Purdom

  All Rights Reserved.

  Cover art by C. A. M. Thole

  Author’s Dedication:

  For Sara

  Printed in U.S.A.

  I

  Nicholson stopped walking on the outskirts of the development some real estate developer s advertising department had decided to call Greenplace. He took the drug injector out of his shirt pocket and lowered himself into the wheelchair. For a moment the injector trembled above the lower half of his biceps.

  He twisted around in the chair and looked up at the big man standing behind him, the sec he had hired to push him around while he was drugged. “We may get into a fight,” he said. “Will you give me a hand if I have to fight?”

  The sec stared down at him. He looked like a man who would enjoy tossing people around. He was stiff and formal, and he looked at the world around him with the wooden contempt of a man who hated a society that made such trivial use of muscles. Secs had been the lowest class of unskilled labor ever since the invention of the voicetyper had made the old trade of stenographer-typist obsolete. Usually a sec was just a living status symbol, a set of muscles hired to carry some professional man’s files and dictating equipment.

  “I don’t get paid to fight,” the sec said. “You didn’t ask for a bodyguard.”

  “How much would you charge if I paid you extra?”

  “I don’t get paid to fight.”

  Nicholson turned around in the chair. He stared at the lawns and houses across the street with the wry, lopsided smile that was so much a part of his personality four of his five daughters had imitated it before they were three. The Lone Knight confronted the fortress of the enemy. The daring and resourceful fighter for right and freedom reconnoitered the battleground with his keen, experienced eye and wished his damned hands would stop shaking.

  The tube glued to the middle finger of his left hand was a nonlethal personal defense weapon called a scrambler—a finger-length generator that fired a tight beam of sound and light in a pattern designed to disrupt the human nervous system. He had a pair of bombs loaded with high pressure psychoactive gas in his left shirt pocket, and he had installed a sound generator and an odor generator in the bottom of the wheelchair. He didn’t know what the two generators could do for him if he got into trouble, but they had been the only other portable weapons he could think of that looked like he might be able to use them while he was drugged. He had selected the strongest psychic energizer on the market—a combination of modified enzymes that increased the powers of observation and the rate and quality of thought by a factor between three and seven—and the drug had one bad side effect. His coordination would be completely disrupted as soon as the drug started working on his metabolism. He would be a helpless blob of flesh for the next four hours.

  He held the injector above his biceps again. His hand trembled again. He shook his head and pressed the release. Two cc’s of red liquid shot into his flesh. The sec stiffened and he put the injector back in his pocket.

  Children ran and yelled in the yards across the street Lawn mowers hummed across the grass while their owners watched them with sleepy eyes. It was a sunny Saturday afternoon in June and he was sitting in the shade of the last apartment tower for nearly a mile. Greenplace had been built in the early 1970’s, and it was a typical example of the developments that had been built in that era. Every block had less than fifteen houses. Every house had its own lawn and back yard.

  His heart started pounding. He glanced at his chest and shook his head. All over his body the chemistry of fear was mingling with the disturbing chemistry of the drug. This was only the second time he had entered the Fifth Congressional District. This time the Boyd organization knew he was coming.

  His head rolled to one side. He scanned the clouds and the blue sky and estimated the wind velocity and the kind of weather they were having in Nigeria—the country in which his oldest daughter was spending the second semester of the fourth grade. His right hand suddenly appeared between his eyes and the clouds. He tried to return it to the arm of the chair and slapped his thigh hard enough to sting.

  He tried to lower his hand and look at Greenplace and found himself looking at the apartment tower instead. He noted the number of floors and the number of windows per floor and developed a highly original theory about the effects of high-rise apartment living, combined with current toilet training procedures, on the Oedipus complex of classic Freudian psychology. He jerked his head away from the tower and his drug-accelerated brain composed a witty paragraph about the theory for his popular column in Current Psychology before the last window slid out of his field of vision.

  “Let’s…g…g…goooo… ”

  The sec pushed him forward. The landscape swung past his swaying head. He heard the wheels of the chair rumble on the street and he calculated how much heat they were generating and formulated two contradictory hypotheses about what the motion of all the wheeled vehicles on Earth was doing to the annual temperature and rainfall of the northeastern United States.

  The sec rolled him off the street onto the sidewalk. Two boys mounted on electric rhinos were engaging in a duel with stunner swords on the first lawn. A heavy man in dirty shorts and an unbuttoned shirt looked away from die duel and glanced at the wheelchair. The man’s eyes narrowed. His face hardened and he stuck a cigar butt in his mouth.

  Nicholson’s head rolled again. People stared at him from the other side of the street. Every eye on the block over twelve years old was focused on him. They had known what he was doing as soon as they had seen him coming. Psych technicians were manipulating them all the time but they still resented it Very few organizations did their psych surveys this openly anymore. A big organization like Boyd’s could study the voters without filling a psychologist with a drug and sending him out in a wheelchair.

  Turbines whined in his ear. “Cop,” the sec grunted.

  An air cushion police car swung past his bobbing head. Two policemen and a dog stared at him from the front seat.

  The policemen slid out of his vision. For a moment he and the fat man with the cigar eyed each other. The boys had stopped jousting and the man was standing with his legs spread and his arms folded on his chest in front of the exact center of his house. There was a comical resemblance between the human figure and the front of the house. They were both extremely broad for their height. The fat man had a fat house…

  “Just a minute, mister. Hold on.”

  Fear erased everything but the policemen from his nervous system. Every detail of their appearance registered on his sensitized consciousness and he formulated three hypothetical models of their personality structure and started working out a
test that would eliminate two of them. His right hand shot toward the sky and then dropped over die arm of the chair. He moved it again and it landed on the arm. His fingers brushed the plastic buttons that controlled the generators.

  “Ssss…tttt…oppp…”

  The sec stopped. The cops got out of the car and stepped in front of the wheelchair. One of them held the dog on a u-shaped leash. The other one held out his hand.

  “May I see your identification, please?”

  “You making an arrest?” the sec said.

  “We’re just making a routine check.”

  “We don’t have to.”

  “Don’t have to what?” the cop with the dog said.

  “You have to arrest us for something. No arrest, no ID.”

  The cop’s face hardened. The grinning dog bobbed across Nicholson’s vision. The thick muscle in his mouth quivered.

  “Aaaaaag…verrr…gggggg…”

  “What are you doing here?” the cop with the dog said. “Who sent you here?”

  The sec kept his mouth shut. A bony hand jerked the dog’s leash. The dog growled.

  “You want us to run you and your friend in for disturbing the peace, little boy?”

  “We aren’t making noise. You have to make a noise.”

  “You’re a real lawyer, aren’t you?”

  His fingers were still resting on the buttons that controlled the generators. He could surprise them with a blast of almost anything, from the rear of a rocket to the smell of horse manure, and then hit them with the scrambler and run. The sec would know what he wanted as soon as he started waving the scrambler. Nobody would ever know he had run out right at the start of the project. If they ever got him in the station house and worked on him with a hypno…

  “Get them out of here,” a man yelled. “Don’t take any back talk.”

  All over the block people started yelling at them. “Send them back where they came from.”

  “Sic the dog on ’em!”

  The cop gestured at the excited people. “You aren’t disturbing the peace?”

  A little girl ran toward them across the nearest lawn. “Go away, bad man! Go away! Bad man! Bad man! Bad man!” Her mother yelled at her but she kept on coming. She stumbled over a drainage ditch at the end of the lawn and fell on the sidewalk.

  Her mother screamed. The girl lifted her face off the sidewalk and screamed at him through her tears. Her mother ran across the lawn, yelling as if her child had been run over by a truck, and bent over her.

  His hand dropped toward his lap and came up again. The mother glared at him and she picked up the girl. “There, there. Come in the house now. Ill give you some candy. We’ll go in the house and we’ll eat some of the candy Granddaddy sent us. It’s all right The man’ll go away very soon.”

  The dog growled again. “Who are you working for?” the cop said. “Who sent you here? Can’t you see what these people think about spies?”

  The sec drew himself up. The cops glanced at each other. The cop holding the dog grinned. “Let him do what he wants,” the cop said. “It’s a free country.”

  They trudged back to their car. Nicholson watched them climb into the front seat and waited for them to move. They smiled back at him and he realized they were going to stay right where they were. The people standing on the lawns looked like they were’ setting up a gauntlet.

  “Ggggg…goooo…aaaaaa…aaaaaannnn…”

  The sec pushed him forward. Grown men and women screamed at him like angry children.

  “Snooper!”

  “Spy!”

  “Go back to your garbage pit!”

  The cops followed him down the block. His eyes took in everything but his brain refused to produce any insights. He took it all in: the people, the elaborate toys, the houses, the food and amusements scattered on blankets and lawn tables; and even as it flowed through his nervous system his brain planned escape routes and what he would do if they attacked. The Lone Knight was too scared to function. The kids back at the Saturday matinee were going to start booing any minute.

  “Stop him! Don’t let him go any farther!”

  A girl jumped in front of the wheelchair. “Don’t let him poison our brains! He’s spying on our brains so they can sell us more garbage! Don’t let him do it! Stop him! Stop him!”

  The sec tried to push the chair around her. She threw out her arms and stepped back. She danced down the street in front of the chair.

  “It’s just like that milk company in Chicago. I saw it on television. They had a lot of bad milk and they worked on people’s minds and made them buy it. Don’t let them do it here! Don’t let them stuff their junk down our throats!”

  A black dress swirled around her body. Flickering lights from two computer-controlled jewels in her collar—a popular type of cosmetic—played on her face and bathed her features in swiftly changing patterns of light and shadow. Her breasts seemed oddly large on her thin body.

  “He’ll fix us so we have to buy his junk! He’ll work on our minds! He’ll stuff it down our throats! Don’t you care what they do to you? Don’t you want to be free?”

  People moved toward him across the lawns. A small crowd gathered around the chair. The sec tried to push through and then stopped.

  Faces swung past Nicholson’s eyes. His tongue quivered. His hands appeared in front of his eyes and he pulled them down. Somewhere in the crowd he could hear music with a strong rhythm and a loud, thumping bass beat. A young rock was holding a plastic case that looked like an oversize portable radio. The rhythm was exactly the same as the rhythm of the lights moving over the girl’s face.

  A woman screamed at him from the back of the crowd. A man swore. Fists clenched. The fat man sucked on his cigar at the edge of his lawn.

  “Kill him!” a woman yelled. “Kill him! Tear him to pieces! Show him what we do to snoops!”

  Boom. Boom. Boom, boom, boom.

  A blond young rock smiled and edged forward through the crowd. The girl danced in front of him like a hysterical child. His right hand slid toward the chair and the buttons that controlled the generators. He could almost control his muscles if he made small movements. The cops would haul him in for assault with a deadly weapon if he used the scrambler or the psychoactive gas bombs before they attacked him, and he would be lucky if half of them moved away if he generated a bad odor or a painful noise. Sound and scent had to be used with precision. If he tried to use them in a situation in which he didn’t know his target, he might generate a stimulus that would reinforce the girl’s rabble rousing. Even if he managed to break them up temporarily, how could he keep them from chasing him?

  The girl drew herself up and pointed her finger at him. She towered over him with her back arched and her swollen breasts standing up.

  “Forget about the cops I The cops won’t stop you. They don’t want him to poison our minds either. Teach him a lesson! Don’t let him stuff his junk down our throats! Do you want him coming back again?”

  Men glanced at each other. They were still hesitating. They were making a lot of noise, but they weren’t used to violence.

  A boy slithered between two sets of legs. He stopped in front of the wheelchair and looked at Nicholson with the cruel face of a child mocking the village idiot. He was carrying a huge ice cream cone, three red-streaked scoops of vanilla piled in a high, dripping tower.

  “How do you eat, mister? Show me how you eat.”

  Nicholson opened his mouth. His tongue quivered. The boy shoved the ice cream cone across his lap and he started and moved his left hand. The ice cream shot out of the boy’s fingers and splattered on the sidewalk. The boy stepped back and brought up his hands as if he was warding off a blow.

  A woman yelled. The boy wailed. The girl’s voice rose above the crowd.

  “Show him!” Boom. “Teach him!” Boom. “He’s poisoning our brains! He’s poisoning our brains!” Boom. Boom. Boom, boom, boom.

  A hand grabbed his shirt collar. Faces moved toward him. Eyes sta
red at him over cigarettes and slowly chewing jaws. More than half the people here were smoking. Most of the rest were chewing gum.

  A hard, masculine hand slapped his face hard enough to make his eyes water. He moaned and instantly felt ashamed. The hand drew back and balled into a fist and his right hand tightened its grip on the chair arm. Less than fifteen percent of the people in the crowd should have been smokers. Most of them were young enough to have reached their teens after the big antismoking campaigns of the seventies. Why would there be more smokers in Greenplace than in the almost identical development he had surveyed last week?

  The fist dropped. The blows snapped his head back and then forward, past the blue sky, the working jaws, the lips sucking on cigarettes, the surgically enlarged breasts of the girl, the people edging toward the chair, the fat bodies—the boy had deliberately moved his hand so he would knock the ice cream out of itl—the lawns, the houses like big, soft, edible…

  Orals!

  They were all orals. Everyone in Greenplace was an oral.

  “Teach him! Teach him! Kill him! Tear him apart!”

  Questions and insights flashed through his brain. How could every person in a development this big belong to one psychological type? Could even Boyd’s organization be that powerful? No wonder they had jumped him when he was only a block in. This must be one of the best kept secrets they had. Send in your psych technicians knowing everybody could be manipulated with one kind of appeal and…

  Ads and appeals raced past his eyes as if they were being projected on a screen. Pain and noise reached him through a torrent of thoughts. No cautious modem psychologist would have explained personality types with Freud’s theories of infant development, but it was still true there were patterns of behavior that fitted Freud’s terminology. Millions of Americans were dominated by the emotions associated with sucking and eating and the full, distended belly; drinkers, smokers, big consumers, people who ate when they were tense and anxious, lovers who tended to stimulate their sex partners with their mouths instead of their hands, compulsive talkers, running words through their mouths like streams of milk, adults who let off their anger and aggression screaming like children, hungry introverts devouring books and entertainment. Study a human being with any two or three traits and you would find a dozen of the hundred other traits that could make up the pattern. See Boyd laugh. Watch Boyd eat. Boyd is warm and good-humored. Fill your house with good things. Live a full life. Vote for Martin Boyd.