“Just routine stuff? Why, the Lodge Master told me I was carrying a message of vital importance. That fat old joker!”
The technician grudged a smile. “I’m afraid he was pulling—Oh!”
“Eh?”
“I know what he meant. You were carrying a message of vital importance-to you. You carried your own credentials hypnotically. If you had not been, you would never have been allowed to wake up.”
I had nothing to say. I left quietly.
My rounds of the medical office, psych office, quartermaster, and so forth had begun to give me a notion of the size of the place. The “toy village” I had first seen was merely the administrative group. The power plant, a packaged pile, was in a separate cavern with many yards of rock wall as secondary shielding. Married couples were quartered where they pleased-about a third of us were female—and usually chose to set up their houses (or pens) well away from the central grouping. The armory and ammo dump were located in a side passage, a safe distance from offices and quarters.
There was fresh water in abundance, though quite hard, and the same passages that carried the underground streams appeared to supply ventilation-at least the air was never stale. It stayed at a temperature of 69.6 Fahrenheit and a relative humidity of 32%, winter and summer, night and day.
By lunchtime I was hooked into the organization, and found myself already hard at work at a temporary job immediately after lunch-in the armory, repairing and adjusting blasters, pistols, squad guns, and assault guns. I could have been annoyed at being asked, or ordered, to do what was really gunnery sergeant work, but the whole place seemed to be run with a minimum of protocol—we cleared our own dishes away at mess, for example. And truthfully it felt good to sit at a bench in the armory, safe and snug, and handle calipers and feather gauges and drifts again-good, useful work.
Just before dinner that first day I wandered into the B.O.Q. lounge and looked around for an unoccupied chair. I heard a familiar baritone voice behind me: “Johnnie! John Lyle!” I whirled around and there, hurrying toward me, was Zebadiah Jones-good old Zeb, large as life and his ugly face split with a grin.
We pounded each other on the back and swapped insults. “When did you get here?” I finally asked him.
“Oh, about two weeks ago.”
“You did? You were still at New Jerusalem when I left. How did you do it?”
“Nothing to it. I was shipped as a corpse—in a deep trance. Sealed up in a coffin and marked “contagious".”
I told him about my own mixed-up trip and Zeb seemed impressed, which helped my morale. Then I asked him what he was doing.
“I’m in the Psych Propaganda Bureau,” he told me, “under Colonel Novak. Just now I’m writing a series of oh-so-respectful articles about the private life of the Prophet and his acolytes and attending priests, how many servants they have, how much it costs to run the Palace, all about the fancy ceremonies and rituals, and such junk. All of it perfectly true, of course, and told with unctuous approval. But I lay it on a shade too thick. The emphasis is on the jewels and the solid gold trappings and how much it all costs, and keep telling the yokels what a privilege it is for them to be permitted to pay for such frippery and how flattered they should feel that God’s representative on earth lets them take care of him.”
“I guess I don’t get it,” I said, frowning. “People like that circusy stuff. Look at the way the tourists to New Jerusalem scramble for tickets to a Temple ceremony.”
“Sure, sure-but we don’t peddle this stuff to people on a holiday to New Jerusalem; we syndicate it to little local papers in poor farming communities in the Mississippi Valley, and in the Deep South, and in the back country of New England. That is to say, we spread it among some of the poorest and most puritanical elements of the population, people who are emotionally convinced that poverty and virtue are the same thing. It grates on their nerves; in time it should soften them up and make doubters of them.”
“Do you seriously expect to start a rebellion with picayune stuff like that?”
“It’s not picayune stuff, because it acts directly on their emotions, below the logical level. You can sway a thousand men by appealing to their prejudices quicker than you can convince one man by logic. It doesn’t have to be a prejudice about an important matter either. Johnnie, you savvy how to use connotation indices, don’t you?”
“Well, yes and no. I know what they are; they are supposed to measure the emotional effects of words.”
“That’s true, as far as it goes. But the index of a word isn’t fixed like the twelve inches in a foot; it is a complex variable function depending on context, age and sex and occupation of the listener, the locale and a dozen other things. An index is a particular solution of the variable that tells you whether a particular word is used in a particular fashion to a particular reader or type of reader will affect that person favorably, unfavorably, or simply leave him cold. Given proper measurements of the group addressed it can be as mathematically exact as any branch of engineering. We never have all the data we need so it remains an art—but a very precise art, especially as we employ “feedback” through field sampling. Each article I do is a little more annoying than the last—and the reader never knows why.”
“It sounds good, but I don’t see quite how it’s done.”
“I’ll give you a gross case. Which would you rather have? A nice, thick, juicy, tender steak-or a segment of muscle tissue from the corpse of an immature castrated bull?”
I grinned at him. “You can’t upset me. I’ll take it by either name . . . not too well done. I wished they would announce chow around here; I’m starved.”
“You think you aren’t affected because you were braced for it. But how long would a restaurant stay in business if it used that sort of terminology? Take another gross case, the Anglo-Saxon monosyllables that naughty little boys write on fences. You can’t use them in polite company without offending, yet there are circumlocutions or synonyms for every one of them which may be used in any company.”
I nodded agreement. “I suppose so. I certainly see how it could work on other people. But personally, I guess I’m immune to it. Those taboo words don’t mean a thing to me-except that I’m reasonably careful not to offend other people. I’m an educated man, Zeb-"Sticks and stones may break my bones, et cetera.” But I see how you could work on the ignorant.”
Now I should know better than to drop my guard with Zeb. The good Lord knows he’s tripped me up enough times. He smiled at me quietly and made a short statement involving some of those taboo words.
“You leave my mother out of this!”
I was the one doing the shouting and I came up out of my chair like a dog charging into battle. Zeb must have anticipated me exactly and shifted his weight before he spoke, for, instead of hanging one on his chin, I found my wrist seized in his fist and his other arm around me, holding me in a clinch that stopped the fight before it started. “Easy, Johnnie,” he breathed in my ear. “I apologize. I most humbly apologize and ask your forgiveness. Believe me, I wasn’t insulting you.”
“So you say!”
“So I say, most humbly. Forgive me?”
As I simmered down I realized that my outbreak had been very conspicuous. Although we had picked a quiet corner to talk, there were already a dozen or more others in the lounge, waiting for dinner to be announced. I could feel the dead silence and sense the question in the minds of others as to whether or not it was going to be necessary to intervene. I started to turn red with embarrassment rather than anger. “Okay. Let me go.”
He did so and we sat down again. I was still sore and not at all inclined to forget Zeb’s unpardonable breach of good manners, but the crisis was past. But he spoke quietly, “Johnnie, believe me, I was not insulting you nor any member of your family. That was a scientific demonstration of the dynamics of connotational indices, and that is all it was.”