WE PURCHASED PEOPLE

by Frederik Pohl

Version 1.0

Jack Williamson and I have collaborated on eight or nine novels over the years. I’ve collaborated with a number of other writers, and so I know what I’m talking about when I proclaim that working with Jack, who is a wise and gentle human being, is as nearly painless as writing ever gets. Especially collaborative writing.

Still, there are times when our interests diverge a little.

As in all writing, there are occasions when one of us thinks up a scene or a situation that is too attractive to throw away but doesn’t fit properly into the joint effort.

When Jack and I were writing our novel Farthest Star, we each came up with one of those displaced bits.

Jack’s was a lovely sequence that dealt with an immense mountain called Knife in the Sky. The episode

he had in mind did not fit into the novel, but he made it into a short story for Boy’s Life. Mine was this one: “We Purchased People. There are some themes that I seem to come back to over and over. The only way I realize that is by thinking the process over afterward, when it’s history; I’m not usually conscious of it while I’m doing it. One of those themes is overpopulation-a theme on which, you will observe, I have played variations at least twice in this collection alone. Another is the idea of “possession. That appears not only in the two novels with Jack Williamson, Farthest Star and its sequel, Wall Around a Star, but in my solo novel Plague of Pythons (lately revised and rereleased as The Demon in the Skull) and several short stories-including this one. Why is this theme so permanently appealing to me over decades? I have a suspicion that there is a psychological basis for it. I wonder if it does not represent a metaphor for a deep-seated fear of manipulation from outside, of control by external forces that overrule our basic, instinctual decency and common sense…

but I guess I will leave the resolution of that question to my shrink.

On the third of March the purchased person named Wayne Golden took part in trade talks in Washington as the representative of the dominant race of the Groombridge star. What he had to offer was the license of the basic patents on a device to convert nuclear power plant waste products into fuel cells. It was a good item, with a ready market. Since half of Idaho was already bubbling with radioactive wastes, the Americans were anxious to buy, and he sold for a credit of $100 million. On the following day he flew to Spain. He was allowed to sleep all the way, stretched out across two seats in the firstclass section of the Concorde, with the fastenings of a safety belt gouging into his side. On the fifth of the month he used up part of the trade credit in the purchase of fifteen Picasso oils on canvas, the videotape of a flamenco performance, and a fifteenth-century harpsichord, gilt with carved legs. He arranged for them to be preserved, crated, and shipped in bond to Orlando, Florida, after which the items would be launched from Cape Kennedy on a voyage through space that would take more than twelve thousand years. The Groombridgians were not in a hurry and thought big. The Saturn Five booster rocket cost $11 million in itself. It did not matter. There was plenty of money left in the Groombridge credit balance. On the fifth of the month Golden returned to the United States, made a close connection at Logan Airport in Boston, and arrived early at his home kennel in Chicago. He was then given eighty-five minutes of freedom.

I knew exactly what to do with my eighty-five minutes.

I always know. See, when you’re working for the people who own you, you don’t have any choice about what you do, but up to a point you can think pretty much whatever you like. That thing you get in your head only controls you. It doesn’t change you, or anyway I don’t think it does. (Would I know if I were changed?) My owners never lie to me. Never. I don’t think they know what a lie is. If I ever needed anything to prove that they weren’t human, that would be plenty, even if I didn’t know they lived 86 zillion miles away, near some star that I can’t even see. They don’t tell me much, but they don’t lie.

Not ever lying, that makes you wonder what they’re like. I don’t mean physically. I looked that up in the library once, when I had a couple of hours of free time.

I don’t remember where, maybe in Paris at the Bibliotheque Nationale, anyway I couldn’t read what the language in the books said. But I saw the photographs and the holograms. I remember the physical appearance of my owners, all right. Jesus. The Altairians look kind of like spiders, and the Sirians are a little bit like crabs. But those folks from the Groombridge star, boy, they’re something else.

I felt bad about it for a long time, knowing I’d been sold to something that looked as much like a cluster of maggots on an open wound as anything else I’d ever seen. On the other hand, they’re all those miles away, and all I ever have to do with them is receive their fast-radio commands and do what they tell me. No touching or anything. So what does it matter what they look like?

But what kind of freaky creature is it that never says anything that is not objectively the truth, never changes its mind, never makes a promise that it doesn’t keep?

They aren’t machines, I know, but maybe they think I’m kind of a machine. You wouldn’t bother to lie to a machine, would you? You wouldn’t make it any promises.

You wouldn’t do it any favors, either, and they never do me any. They don’t tell me that I can have eighty-five minutes off because I’ve done something they like, or because they want to sweeten me up because they want something from me. Everything considered, that’s silly.

What could they want? It isn’t as if I had any choice.

Ever. So they don’t lie, or threaten, or bribe, or reward.

But for some reason they sometimes give me minutes or hours or days off, and this time I had eighty-five minutes. I started using it right away, the way I always do.

The first thing was to check at the kennel location desk to see where Carolyn was. The locator clerk-he isn’t owned, he works for a salary and treats us like shit-knows me by now. “Oh, hell, Wayne boy, he said with that imitation sympathy and lying friendliness that makes me want to kill him, “you just missed the lady friend. Saw her, let’s see, Wednesday, was it? But she’s gone. “Where to? I asked him. He pushed around the cards on the locator board for a while, he knows I don’t have very much time ever so he uses it up for me, and said: “Nope, not on my board at all. Say, I wonder. Was she with that bunch that went to Peking? Or was that the other little fat broad with the big boobs? I didn’t stop to kill him.

If she wasn’t on the board, she wasn’t in eighty-five-minute transportation range, so my eighty-five minutes-seventy-nine minutes-wasn’t going to get me near her.

I went to the men’s room, jerked off quickly, and went out into the miserable biting March Chicago wind to use up my seventy-nine minutes. Seventy-one minutes.

There’s a nice Mexican kind of restaurant near the kennel, a couple of blocks away past Ohio. They know me there.

They don’t care who I am. Maybe the brass plate in my head doesn’t bother them because they think it’s great that the people from the other stars are doing such nice things for the world, or maybe it’s because I tip big. (What else do I have to do with the money I get?) I stuck my head in, whistled at Terry, the bartender, and said: “The usual. I’ll be back in ten minutes. Then I walked up to Michigan and bought a clean shirt and changed into it, leaving the smelly old one. Sixty-six minutes. In the drugstore on the corner I picked up a couple of porno paperbacks and stuck them in my pockets, bought some cigarettes, leaned over and kissed the hand of the cashier, who was slim and fair-complexioned and smelled good, left her startled behind me, and got back to the restaurant just as Alicia, the waitress, was putting the gazpacho and the two bottles of beer on my table. Fifty-nine minutes.

I settled down to enjoy my time. I smoked, and I ate, and I drank the beer, smoking between bites, drinking between puffs. You really look forward to something like that when you’re working, and not your own boss. I don’t mean they don’t let us eat when we’re working. Of course they do, but we don’t have any choice about what we eat or where we eat it. Pump fuel into the machine, keep it running. So I finished the guacamole and sent Alicia back for more of it when she brought the chocolate cake and American coffee, and ate the cake and the guacamole in alternate forkfuls. Eighteen minutes.

If I had had a little more time I would have jerked off again, but I didn’t, so I paid the bill, tipped everybody, and left the restaurant. I got to the block where the kennel was with maybe two minutes to spare. Along the curb a slim woman in a fur jacket and pants suit was walking her Scottie away from me. I went up behind her and said, “I’ll give you fifty dollars for a kiss. She turned around.

She was all of sixty years old but not bad, really, so I kissed her and gave her the fifty dollars. Zero minutes, and I just made it into the kennel when I felt the tingling in my forehead and my owners took over again.

In the next seven days of March Wayne Golden visited Karachi, Srinagar, and Butte, Montana, on the business of the Groombridgians. He completed thirty-two assigned tasks. Quite unexpectedly he was then given 1,000 minutes of freedom.

That time I was in, I think it was, Pocatello, Idaho, or some place like that. I had to send a TWX to the faggy locator clerk in Chicago to ask about Carolyn. He took his time answering, as I knew he would. I walked around a little bit, waiting to hear. Everybody was very cheerful, smiling as they walked around through the dusty, sprinkly snow that was coming down, even smiling at me as though they didn’t care that I was purchased, as they could plainly see from the golden oval of metal across my forehead that my owners use to tell me what to do. Then the message came back from Chicago: “Sorry, Wayne baby, but Carolyn isn’t on my board. If you find her, give her one for me.

Well. All right. I have plenty of spending money, so I checked into a hotel. The bellboy brought me a fifth of Scotch and plenty of ice, fast, because he knew why I was in a hurry and that I would tip for speed. When I asked about hookers, he offered anything I liked. I told him white, slim, beautiful asses. That’s what I first noticed about Carolyn. It’s special for me. The little girl I did in New Brunswick, what was her name-Rachel-she was only nine years old, but she had an ass on her you wouldn’t believe.

I showered and put on clean clothes. The owners don’t really give you enough time for that sort of thing. A lot of the time I smell. A lot of times I’ve almost wet my pants because they didn’t let me go when I needed to.

Once or twice I just couldn’t help myself, held out as long as I could and, boy, you feel lousy when that happens.

The worst was when I was covering some kind of a symposium in Russia, a place with a name like Akadeingorodok. It was supposed to be on nuclear explosion processes. I don’t know anything about that kind of stuff, and anyway I was a little mixed up because I thought that was one of the things the star people had done for us, worked out some way the different countries didn’t have to have nuclear weapons and bombs and wars and so on any more. But that wasn’t what they meant.

It was explosions at the nucleus of the galaxy they meant.

Astronomical stuff. Just when a fellow named Eysenck was talking about how the FG prominence and the EMK prominence, whatever they were, were really part of an expanding pulse sphere, whatever that is, I crapped my pants. I knew I was going to. I’d tried to tell the Groombridge people about it. They wouldn’t listen. Then the session redactor came down the aisle and shouted in my ear, as though my owners were deaf or stupid, that they would have to get me out of there, please, for reasons concerning the comfort and hygiene of the other participants.

I thought they would be angry, because that meant they were going to miss some of this conference that they were interested in. They didn’t do anything to me, though.

I mean, as if there was anything they could do to me that would be any worse, or any different, from what they do to me all the time, and always will.

When I was all clean and in an open-necked shirt and chinos I turned on the TV and poured a mild drink. I didn’t want to be still drunk when my thousand minutes were up. There was a special program on all the networks, something celebrating a treaty between the United Nations and a couple of the star people, Sirians and Capellans it seemed to be. Everybody was very happy about it, because it seemed that now the Earth had bought some agricultural and chemical information, and pretty soon there would be more food than we could eat. How much we owed to the star people, the Secretary General of the UN was saying, in Brazilian-accented English. We could look forward to their wise guidance to help Earth survive its multitudinous crises and problems, and we should all be very happy.

But I wasn’t happy, not even with a glass of John Begg and the hooker on her way up, because what I really wanted was Carolyn.

Carolyn was a purchased person, like me. I had seen her a couple of dozen times, all in all. Not usually when either of us was on freedom. Almost never when both of us were. It was sort of like falling in love by postcard, except that now and then we were physically close, even touching. And once or twice we had been briefly not only together, but out from under control. We had had about eight minutes once in Bucharest, after coming back from the big hydropower plant at the Iron Gate. That was the record, so far. Outside of that it was just that we passed, able to see each other but not to do anything about it, in the course of our duties. Or that one of us was free and found the other. When that happened, the one of us that was free could talk, and even touch the other one, in any way that didn’t interfere with what the other was doing.

The one that was working couldn’t do anything active, but could hear, or feel. We were both totally careful to avoid interfering with actual work. I don’t know what would have happened if we had interfered. Maybe nothing?

We didn’t want to take that chance, though sometimes it was a temptation I could almost not resist. There was a time when I was free and I found Carolyn, working but not doing anything active,just standing there, at TWA Gate 51 at the St. Louis airport. She was waiting for someone to arrive. I really wanted to kiss her. I talked to her. I patted her, you know, holding my trenchcoat over my arm so that the people passing by wouldn’t notice anything, or at least wouldn’t notice anything much. I told her things I wanted her to hear. But what I wanted was to kiss her, and I was afraid to. Kissing her on the mouth would have meant putting my head in front of her eyes. I didn’t think I wanted to chance that. It might have meant she wouldn’t see the person she was there to see.

Who turned out to be a Ghanaian police officer arriving to discuss the sale of some political prisoners to the Groombridgians. I was there when he came down the ramp, but I couldn’t stay to see if she would by any chance be free after completing the negotiations with him, because then my own time ran out.

But I had had three hours that time, being right near her. It felt very sadand very strange, and I wouldn’t have given it up for anything in the world. I knew she could hear and feel everything, even if she couldn’t respond.

Even when the owners are running you, there’s a little personal part of you that stays alive. I talked to that part of her. I told her how much I wished we could kiss, and go to bed, and be with each other. Oh, hell. I even told her I loved her and wanted to marry her, although we both know perfectly well there’s not ever going to he any chance of that ever. We don’t get pensioned off or retired; we’re owned.

Anyway, I stayed there with her as long as I could. I paid for it later. Balls that felt as though I’d been stomped, the insides of my undershorts wet and chilly. And there wasn’t any way in the world for me to do anything about it, not even by masturbating, until my next free time. That turned out to be three weeks later. In Switzerland, for God’s sake. Out of season. With nobody in the hotel except the waiters and bellboys and a couple of old ladies who looked at the gold oval in my forehead as though it smelled bad.

It is a terrible but cherished thing to love without hope.

I pretended there was hope, always. Every bit of freedom I got, I tried to find her. They keep pretty careful tabs on us, all two or three hundred thousand of us purchased persons, working for whichever crazy bunch of creepy crawlers or gassy ghosts happens to have bought us to be their remote-access facilities on the planet they themselves cannot ever visit. Carolyn and I were owned by the same bunch, which had its good side and its bad side. The good side was that there was a chance that some day we would be free for quite a long while at the same time. It happened. I don’t know why. Shifts change on the Groombridge planet, or they have a holiday or something.

But every once in a while there would be a whole day, maybe a week, when none of the Groombndge people would be doing anything at all, and all of us would be free at once.

The bad side was that they hardly ever needed to have more than one of us in one place. So Carolyn and I didn’t run into each other a lot. And the times when I was free for a pretty good period, it took most of that to find her, and by the time I did she was like half a world away. No way of getting there and back in time for duty. I did so much want to fuck her, but we had never made it that far and maybe never would. I never even got a chance to ask her what she had been sentenced for in the first place. I really didn’t know her at all, except enough to love her.

When the bellboy turned up with my girl, I was comfortably buzzed, with my feet up and the Rangers on the TV. She didn’t look like a hooker, particularly. She was wearing hip-huggers cut below the navel, bigger breasted than I cared about but with that beautiful curve of waist and back into hips that I like. Her name was Nikki. The bellboy took my money, took five for himself, passed the rest to her, and disappeared, grinning. What’s so funny about it? He knew what I was, because the plate in my head told him, but he had to think it was funny.

“Do you want me to take my clothes off? She had a pretty, breathless little voice, long red hair, and a sweet, broad, friendly face. “Go ahead, I said. She slipped off the sandals. Her feet were clean, a little ridged where the straps went. Stepped out of the hip-huggers and folded them across the back of Conrad Hilton’s standard armchair, took off the blouse and folded it, ducked out of the medallion and draped it over the blouse, down to red lace bra and red bikini panties. Then she turned back the bedclothes, got in, sat up, snapped off the bra, snuggled down, kicked the panties out of the side of the bed,and pulled the covers over her. “Any time, honey, she said. But I didn’t lay her. I didn’t even get in the bed with her, not under the covers; I drank some more of the Scotch, and that and fatigue put me out, and when I woke up it was daylight, and she had cleaned out my wallet. Seventy-one minutes left. I paid the bill with a check and persuaded them to give me carfare in change. Then I headed back for the kennel. All I got out of it was clean clothes and a hangover. I think I had scared her a little. Everybody knows how we purchased people came to be up for sale, and maybe they’re not all the way sure that we won’t do something bad again, because they don’t know how reliably our owners keep us from ever doing anything they don’t like. But I wished she hadn’t stolen my money.

The overall strategies and objectives of the star people, particularly the people from the Groombridge star who were his own masters, were unclear to the purchased person named Wayne Golden. What they did was not hard to understand. All the world knew that the star people had established fast radio contact with the people of Earth, and that in order to conduct their business on Earth they had purchased the bodies of certain convicted criminals, installing in them tachyon fast-radio transceivers. Why they did what they did was less easy to comprehend. Art objects they admired and purchased. Certain rare kinds of plants and flowers they purchased and had frozen at liquid-helium temperatures. Certain kinds of utilitarian objects they purchased. Every few months another rocket roared up from Merritt Island, just north of the Cape, and another cargo headed for the Groornbridge star, on its twelve-thousand-year voyage. Others, to other stars, peopled by other races in the galactic confraternity, took shorter times-or longer-but none of the times was short enough for those star people who made the purchases to come to Earth to see what they had bought. The distances were too huge.

What they spent most of their money on was the rockets.

And, of course, the people they purchased, into whom they had transplanted their tachyon transceivers. Each rocket cost at least $10 million. The going rate for a healthy male paranoid capable of three or more decades of useful work was in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, and they bought them by the dozen.

The other things they bought, all of them-the taped symphonies and early-dynasty ushabti, the flowering orchids, and the Van Goghs-cost only a fraction of one percent of what they spent on people and transportation.

Of course, they had plenty of money to spend. Each star race sold off licensing rights on its own kinds of technology.

All of them received trade credits from every government on Earth for their services in resolving disputes and preventing wars. Still, it seemed to Wayne Golden, to the extent that he was capable of judging the way his masters conducted their affairs, a pretty high-overhead way to run a business, although of course neither he nor any other purchased person was ever con-sulted on questions like that.

By late spring he had been on the move for many weeks without rest. He completed sixty-eight tasks, great and small. There was nothing in this period of eighty-seven days that was in any way remarkable except that on one day in May, while he was observing the riots on the Place de La Concorde from a window of the American Embassy on behalf of his masters, the girl named Carolyn came into his room. She whispered in his ear, attempted unsuccessfully to masturbate him while the liaison attache was out of the room, remained in all for some forty minutes, and then left, sobbing softly. He could not even turn his head to see her go. Then on the sixth of June the purchased person named Wayne Golden was returned to the Dallas kennel and given indefinite furlough, subject to recall at fifty minutes notice.

Sweetest dear Jesus, nothing like that had ever happened to me before! It was like the warden coming into Death Row with a last minute reprieve! I could hardly believe it.

But I took it, started moving at once. I got a fix on Carolyn’s last reported whereabouts from the locator board and floated away from Dallas in a cloud of Panama Red, drinking champagne as fast as the hostesses could bring it to me, en route to Colorado.

But I didn’t find Carolyn there.

I hunted her through the streets of Denver, and she was gone. By phone I learned she had been sent to Ran-tout. Illinois. I was off. I checked at the Kansas City airport, where I was changing planes, and she was gone from Illinois already. Probably but they weren’t sure, they thought, to the New York district. I put down the phone and jumped on a plane, rented a car at Newark, and drove down the Turnpike to the Garden State, checking every car I passed to see if it was the red Volvo they thought she might be driving, stopping at every other Howard Johnson’s to ask if they’d seen a girl with short black hair, brown eyes, and a tip-tilted nose and, oh, yes, the golden oval in her forehead.

I remembered it was in New Jersey that I first got into trouble. There was the nineteen-year-old movie cashier in Paramus, she was my first. I picked her up after the 1 A.M. show. And I showed her. But she was really all wrong for me, much too old and I much too worldly. I didn’t like it much when she died.

After that I was scared for a while, and I watched the TV news every night, twice, at six and eleven, and never passed a newsstand without looking at all the headlines in the papers, until a couple of months had passed. Then I thought over what I really wanted very carefully. The girl had to be quite young and, well, you can’t tell, but as much as I could be sure, a virgin.

I sat in a luncheonette in Perth Arnboy for three whole days, watching the kids get out of the parochial school, before I found the second. It took a while. The first one that looked good turned out to be a bus kid, the second was a walker but her big sister from the high school walked with her. The third walked home alone. It was December, and the afternoons got pretty dark, and that Friday she walked but she didn’t get home. I never molested any of them sexually, you know. I mean, in some ways I’m still kind of a virgin. That wasn’t what I wanted, I just wanted to see them die. When they asked me at the pretrial hearing if I knew the difference between right and wrong, I didn’t know how to answer them. I knew what I did was wrong for them. But it wasn’t wrong for me, it was what I wanted.

So, driving down the Parkway, feeling discouraged about Carolyn, I noticed where I was and cut over to Route 35 and doubled back. I drove right to the school, past it, and to the lumberyard where I did the little girl.

I stopped and cut the motor, looking around. Happy day.

Now it was a different time of year, and things looked a little different. They’d piled up a stack of two-by-twelves over the place where I’d done her. But in my mind’s eye I could see it the way it had been then. Dark gray sky.

Lights from the cars going past. I could hear the little buzzing feeling in her throat as she tried to scream under my fingers. Let’s see. That was, oh, good heavens, nine years ago.

And if I hadn’t done her she would have been twenty or so. Screwing all the boys. Probably on dope. Maybe knocked up or married. Looked at in a certain way, I saved her a lot of sordid miserable stuff, menstruating, letting the boys’ hands and mouths on her, all that…

My head began hurting. That’s one thing the plate in your head does, it doesn’t let you get very deeply into the things you did in the old days, because it hurts too much. So I started up the car and drove away, and pretty soon the hurting stopped.

I never think of Carolyn, you know, that way.

They never proved that little girl on me. The one they caught me for was the nurse in Long Branch, in the parking lot. And she was a mistake. She was so small, and she had a sweater over her uniform. I didn’t know she was grown up until it was too late. I was very angry about that. In a way I didn’t mind when they caught me, because I had been getting very careless. But I really hated that ward in Marlboro where they put me. Seven. Jesus, seven years. Up in the morning, and drink your pink medicine out of the little paper cup. Make your bed and do your job-mine was sweeping in the incontinent wards, and the smells and the sights would make you throw up.

After a while they let me watch TV and even read the papers, and when the Altair people made the first contact with Earth I was interested, and when they began buying criminally insane to be their proxies I wanted them to buy me. Anything, I wanted anything that would let me get out of that place, even if it meant I’d have to let them put a box in my head and never be able to live a normal life again.

But the Altair people wouldn’t buy me. For some reason they only took blacks. Then the others began showing up on the fast radio, making their deals. And still none of them wanted me. The ones from Procyon liked young women, wouldn’t ever buy a male. I think they have only one sex there, someone said. All these funnies are peculiar in one way or another. Metal, or gas, or blobby, or hard-shelled and rattly. Whatever. And they all have funny habits, like if you belong to the Canopus bunch you don’t ever eat fish.

I think they’re disgusting, and I don’t really know why the USA wanted to get involved with them in the first place. But the Chinese did, and the Russians did, and I guess we just couldn’t stay out. I suppose it hasn’t hurt much. There hasn’t been a war, and there’s a lot of ways in which they’ve helped clean things up for us. It hasn’t hurt me, that’s for sure. The Groombridge people came into the market pretty late, and most of the good healthy criminals were gone; they would buy anybody. They bought me. We’re a hard-case lot, we Groombridgians, and I do wonder what Carolyn was in for.

I drove all the way down the coast. Asbury Park, Brielle, Atlantic City, all the way to Cape May, phoning back to check with the locator clerk, and never found her.

The one thing I did know was that all I was missing was the shell of her, because she was working. I could have had a kiss or a feel, no more. But I wanted to find her anyway. Just on the chance. How many times do you get an indefinite furlough? If I’d been able to find her, and stay with her, sooner or later, maybe, she would have been off too. Even if it were only for two hours. Even thirty minutes.

And then in broad daylight, just as I was checking into a motel near an Army base, with the soldiers’ girls lined up at the cashier’s window so their boy friends could get back for reveille, I got the call: Report to the Philadelphia kennel. Soonest.

By then I was giddy for sleep, but I drove that Hertz lump like a Maserati, because soonest means soonest. I dumped the car and signed in at the kennel, feeling my heart pounding and my mouth ragged from fatigue, and aching because I had blown what would have to be my best chance of really being with Carolyn. “What do they want? I asked the locator clerk. “Go inside, he said, looking evilly amused. All locator clerks treat us the same, all over the world. “She’ll tell you.

Not knowing who “she was, I opened the door and walked through, and there was Carolyn.

“Hello, Wayne, she said.

“Hello, Carolyn, I said.

I really did not have any idea of what to do at all. She didn’t give me a cue. She just sat. It was at that point that it occurred to me to wonder at the fact that she wasn’t wearing much, just a shortie nightgown with nothing under it.

She was also sitting on a turned-down bed. Now, you would think that considering everything, especially the nature of most of my thinking about Carolyn, that I would have instantly accepted this as a personal gift from God to me of every boy’s all-American dream. I didn’t.

It wasn’t the fatigue, either. It was Carolyn. It was the expression on her face, which was neither inviting nor loving, was not even the judgment-reserving look of a girl at a singles bar. What it especially was not was happy.

“The thing is, Wayne, she said, “we’re supposed to go to bed now. So take your clothes off, why don’t you?

Sometimes I can stand outside of myself and look at me and, even when it’s something terrible or something sad, I can see it as funny; it was like that when I did the little girl in Edison Township, because her mother had sewed her into her school clothes. I was actually laughing when I said, “Carolyn, what’s the matter?

“Well, she said, “they want us to ball, Wayne. You know. The Groombridge people. They’ve got interested in what human beings do to each other, and they want to kind of watch.

I started to ask why us, but I didn’t have to; I could see where Carolyn and I had had a lot of that on our minds, and maybe our masters could get curious about it. I didn’t exactly like it. Not exactly; in fact in a way I kind of hated it, hut it was so much better than nothing at all that I said, “Why, honey, that’s great! -almost meaning it; trying to talk her into it; moving in next to her and putting my arm around her. And then she said: “Only we have to wait, Wayne. They want to do it.

Not us.

“What do you mean, wait? Wait for what? She shrugged under my arm. You mean, I said, “that we have to be plugged in to them’? Like they’ll be doing it with our bodies?

She leaned against me. “That’s what they told me, Wayne. Any minute now, I guess.

I pushed her away. “Honey, I said, half crying, “all this time I’ve been wanting to-Jesus, Carolyn! I mean, it isn’t just that I wanted to go to bed with you. I mean-

“I’m sorry, she cried, big tears on her face.

“That’s lousy! I shouted. My head was pounding, I was so furious. “It isn’t fair! I’m not going to stand for it. They don’t have any right !”

But they did, of course, they had all the right in the world; they had bought us and paid for us, and so they owned us. I knew that. I just didn’t want to accept it, even by admitting what I knew was so. The notion of screwing Carolyn flipped polarity; it wasn’t what I desperately wanted, it was what I would have died to avoid, as long as it meant letting them paw her with my hands, kiss her with my mouth, flood her with my juices; it was like the worst kind of rape, worse than anything I had ever done, both of us raped at once. And then-And then I felt that burning tingle in my forehead as they took over. I couldn’t even scream. I just had to sit there inside my own head, no longer owning a muscle, while those freaks who owned me did to Carolyn with my body all manner of things, and I could not even cry.

After concluding the planned series of experimental procedures, which were duly recorded, the purchased person known as Carolyn Schoerner was no longer salvageable.

Appropriate entries were made. The Probation and Out-Service department of the Meadville Women’s Reformatory was notified that she had ceased to be alive.

A purchasing requisition was initiated for a replacement, and her account was terminated.

The purchased person known as Wayne Golden was assigned to usual duties, at which he functioned normally while under control. It was discovered that when control was withdrawn he became destructive, both to others and to himself. The conjecture has been advanced that that sexual behavior which had been established as his norm-the destruction of the sexual partner-may not have been appropriate in the conditions obtaining at the time of the experimental procedures. Further experiments will be made with differing procedures and other partners in the near future. Meanwhile Wayne Golden continues to function at normal efficiency, provided control is not withdrawn at any time, and apparently will do so indefinitely.

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