"Disch, Thomas M. - Camp Concentration" - читать интересную книгу автора (Disch Thomas M)

But I did not, not at once, go away. I stood there before him, though he seemed to have become quite oblivious of me. Gently he rocked back and forth, from his heels to the balls of his feet, then back on his heels. His fine hair stirred in the steady, hissing exhalation from the ventilator.
He spoke aloud to himself, but I could only catch a little of what he said. "Linkages of light, corridors, stairways. . ."

The words had a familiar ring, but I could not place them.
"Spaces of being and shields of bliss."
Abruptly he took his hands from his face and stared at me. "Are you still there?" he asked.
And though the answer was self-evident, I said that, yes, I was stifi here.
In the semidarkness of the corridor his irises had dilated, and it was this perhaps that made him seem so sad. Again he laid three fingers on my chest. "Beauty," he said solemnly, "is nothing but the beginning of a terror that we are able barely to endure." And with those words George Wagner heaved up the entirety of a considerable breakfast into that pure Euclidean space. Almost at once the guards were about us, a brood of black mother hens, giving George a mouth rinse, mopping up, and conducting us our separate ways. They gave me something to drink too. A tranquilizer, I suspect; else, I should not have the presence of mind yet to document the encounter.
What a strange fellow he was though! A farmboy quoting Rilke. Farmboys might recite Whittier perhaps, or even Carl Sandburg. But the _Duinoser Elegien?_


June 6

ROOM 34
stolid stainless-steel numbers pasted to a prosaic blond-wood door, and beneath, in white letters graven on a rectangle of black plastic (like those that show a bank teller's name on one side and NEXT WINDOW PLEASE on the other):
DR. A. BUSK
My guards led me within and entrusted me to the severe tutelage of the two chairs, which, webs of black leather slung from bands of chromed steel, were but the abstractions--an attar, as it were--of the guards themselves. Chairs by HarleyDavidson. Hard-edge paintings (chosen for the pleasures of such chairs) flattened themselves against the walls, yearning to become invisible.
Dr. A. Busk strides into the room and threatens me with her hand. Am I to shake it? No, she is only motioning me to be seated. I am seated, she is seated, crossing her legs, snicksnack, puffing at the hem of her skirt, smiling. It is a credible if not a kindly smile, a little too thin, too crisp. The high, clear brow, and reticent eyebrows of an Elizabethan noblewoman. Forty years old? More likely forty-five.
"Excuse me if I do not offer you my hand, Mr. Sacchetti, but we'll get on much better if we dispense with that kind of hypocrisy from the beginning. It's not as though you were spending your vacation here, is it? You are a prisoner, and I am . . . what? I am the prison. That's the beginning of an honest, if not altogether pleasant, relationship."
"By honest do you mean that I shall be allowed to insult you as well?"
"With impunity, Mr. Sacchetti. Tit for tat. Either here or at your leisure, in your journal. I am sent the second copy, so you can be certain that anything unpleasant you have to say will not be in vain."
"I'll keep it in mind."
"Meanwhile, there are a few things you should know about what we are doing here. Yesterday you met young Wagner, but in your journal you pointedly refrained from any kind of speculation concerning his rather remarkable behavior. Though you certainly must have given the matter some thought."
"I certainly must have."
Dr. A. Busk pursed her lips and tapped a ragged fingernail on the envelope clipped to her clipboard--the Sacchetti dossier again. "_Do_ let's be candid, Mr. Sacchetti. It must have occurred to you that young George's behavior was not wholly consistent, and you must also have associated these inconsistencies with certain remarks concerning your role here that my colleague, Mr. Haast, has let drop. Not, I may point out, accidentally. You must, in short, have come to suspect that young George is the subject--one of the subjects--in an experimental program that is being carried out here?" She raised a reticent, questioning eyebrow. I nodded.
"You could not have guessed--and perhaps it will ease your mind to learn?--that young George is here voluntarily. You see, he deserted the Army while on furlough in Taipei. The usual sordid sort of thing with a soldier and a prostitute. Of course he was found and court-marshaled. His sentence was five years imprisonment, a mild sentence, you must admit. Had we been officially at war, he might have been shot. Yes, quite likely."
"Then it _is_ the Army that's kidnapped me?"
"Not exactly. Camp Archimedes is operated under a grant from a private foundation, though to preserve the necessary secrecy we are quite autonomous. Only one officer of the foundation knows the exact nature of our research. For the rest of them--and for the Army--we come under that all-inclusive category of weapons development. A good many of the personnel--most of the guards, and I myself--have been borrowed, as it were, from the Armed Services."
With that knowledge, all her attributes--the scrubbed face, the stiff manner, the defeminized voice--coalesced into a viable image: "You're a WAC!"
In reply she made an ironic salute. "So, as I was saying, poor George went to the brig, and he wasn't happy there. He could not, as my colleague, Mr. Haast, is wont to say, adjust to a brig environment. When the opportunity came for him to volunteer for Camp Archimedes he leaped at it. After all, _most_ experiments these days are in the field of immunology. Some of the new diseases are extremely unpleasant. That's young George's story. The other subjects you will meet have analogous backgrounds."
"This subject doesn't."
"You are not, precisely, a subject. But to understand just why you've been brought here, you must first understand the purpose of the experiment. It is an investigation of learning processes. I need not explain to you the fundamental importance of education with respect to the national defense effort. Ultimately it is intelligence that is a nation's most vital resource, and education can be seen as the process of maximizing intelligence. However, as such it is almost invariably a failure, since this primary purpose is sacrificed to the purpose of socialization. When intelligence _is_ maximized, it is almost always at the expense of the socialization process--I might cite your own case in this respect--and so, from society's point of view, little has been gained. A cruel dilemma.
"It is perhaps the chief mission of the science of psychology to resolve this dilemma--to maximize intelligence without vitiating its social utility. I hope that's clear?"
"Cicero himself had not so pure a Latin style."
La Busk crinkled her high, unpenciled brows, not getting the point, then, deciding it wasn't worth her while to pursue it, mere a-social levity, unfurrowed and continued:
"And therefore we are exploring certain new educational techniques here, techniques of adult education. In an adult, the socializing process has been completed. Few subjects exhibit marked character development after age twenty-five. Therefore, if the process of inteffigence maximization can be initiated then--if the stultified creative faculties can be reawakened, so to speak--then we may begin to exploit that most precious resource, the mind, as it has never been exploited before.
"Unhappily we have been given what amount to defective materials to work with. When one must rely upon Army brigs for experimental subjects, one introduces a systematic error into the work, since for such people the process of socialization was clearly unsuccessful. And to be quite candid, it's _my_ opinion that this error in selection is already having its unhappy consequences. I hope you note that down in your journal."
I assured her that I would. I couldn't refrain then--little as I wanted to give her the satisfaction of seeing how much she had picqued my curiosity--from asking: "By new educational techniques, am I to assume you mean drugs?"
"Ah ha. Then you have been giving the matter some thought. Yes, certainly, drugs. Though not in the sense you perhaps suppose. There are, as any college freshman these days knows, drugs available from extralegal sources that can temporarily assist memory retention by as much as two hundred per cent, or speed up other learning processes proportionately. But the learning curves flatten out with continued use of such drugs, and one soon reaches the point of diminishing returns, and finally no returns at all. There are such drugs, and there are others too, such as LSD, which can produce a specious sense of omniscience. I needn't tell _you_ of such drugs though, need I, Mr. Sacchetti?"
"Is _that_ down on my profile? I must say you've been thorough."
"Oh, there's very little we don't know about you, sir. Before you were brought here you may be sure we examined every dirty little cranny of your past. It wouldn't do to bring just any conchie here, you know. We had to be certain you were harmless. We know you inside and out. Your schools, relatives, friends, what you've read, where you've been. We know what room you occupied in every hotel you stayed at in Switzerland and Germany when you had your Fulbright. We know every girl you dated at Bard and afterward, and just how far you got with each. And it hasn't been a very good showing, I must say. We know, in considerable detail, just how much you've earned during the last fifteen years, and how you've spent it. Any time the government cares to, it can send you right back to Springfield on tax evasion charges. We have the records from your two years of psychotherapy."
"And have you bugged the confessionals as well?"
"Only since you came to Springfield. That's how we found out about your wife's abortion and your nasty little affair with that Miss Webb."
"Good-looking though, wasn't she?"
"If you like weak types. But to get back to business . . your task here is quite simple. You will be allowed to circulate among the subjects, to speak with them, to share, as far as possible, their day-to-day life. And to report, in brief compass, the matters with which they are preoccupied, their amusements, and your own estimation of the. . . what shall I say? . . . of the intellectual climate here. I suspect you will enjoy the work."
"Perhaps. But why me?"
"One of the subjects recommended you. Of the various candidates we considered, you seemed most apt for the work--and certainly the most available. In all honesty it must be said that we have been having . . . communications problems with the subjects. And it was their ringleader--Mordecai Washington his name is--who suggested that you be brought here to act as a sort of go-between, an interpreter. Do you remember Mordecai? He went to the same high school you did for one year, '55."
"Central High School? The name seems vaguely familiar, but I can't place it. I may have heard it read off of some attendance sheet, but he certainly wasn't a friend. I never had so many that I'm apt to forget their names."
"You'll have ample opportunity to repair that omission here then. Are there any more questions?"
"Yes. What does the A. stand for?"