Jay S. Mendell and Mike Popejoy By the first decade of the 20th century AIDS had gone through mutation after mutation, through so many mutations that only AZT-XIII was able to arrest its progress. "Juice-13" (as it was called) was fearfully expensive. No one could afford it. But they had to be made to pay. Somehow... "Let's have a look in that ear, Colonel," roared the little doctor. He pranced up behind Raymond Farr and pulled a surgical mask down over his homely little mouth and nose. Farr noted the mask with severe disapproval, and when the doctor pulled on rubber gloves, too, he wondered what the disease of the week was in Washington. Hepatitis, again, he inferred from the doctor's fussiness, hepatitis in a new strain, from some oddball Balkan backwater that had not existed ten years ago. Washington!, what a cesspool it had become since 1999! "My ear is not the problem," said Farr, icily. "Oh, sure. Right, sir. Yessir," said the doctor, staring bug-eyed at a thick print-out, "you complain of ... um ... a sore throat, swollen glands, and other flu-like symptoms. It's all here, yes, it is. But, sir, let's see that ear." The doctor carefully inserted an otoscope into Farr's ear. He peeped into the ear, muttered "Um, yes. Um, yes. Oh, my, yes." over and over, and "Yes, indeed. Yes, INDEED!" and without warning there was a shattering percussion in Farr's ear, and Farr was doubled over by a jolt of severe, short-lived pain screeching from his head to his shoulders and back. "What the hell!" gasped Farr, and reached for his ear. The doctor grasped Farr's hand and gently arrested it. "Try not to touch it sir. Oh, no, don't ever touch it. Never, ever touch it." Then in a stage whisper, "I just tagged your ear canal with a miniature radio transmitter. Don't try to probe in there and remove it, sir. Don't even rub it, sir. These babies are spring-loaded with a cyanide needle... so you won't wander away." "What the hell!" "According to this, sir" -- the doctor used the very tips of his fingertips to nudge the inch-thick print-out toward Farr and whipped his hand back when Farr reached for the paperwork-- "you are carrying the AIDS virus. Makes you a menace, doesn't it, sir?, Makes you nobody that anyone would wish to associate with, up close. No, not if they wanted to live a full life. So you'll please excuse me." He scuttled behind his desk and removed his mask, peeled off his gloves, and dropped both in a basket marked HAZARDOUS WASTE. "And may we skip the denial-bargaining-depression routine? I'm terribly sorry, but you've got it, Colonel. Bet on it, sir: you've got it." Okay. Farr perceived his pulse increasing, arrested his breath, forced it in and out regularly, fought the urge to whip out a handkerchief and mop droplets of sweat from his brow, dab at spittle around his mouth, wipe tears from his eyes. The paperwork was a U. S. Army work-up, stamped APPROVED FOR INDUCTION INTO THE THIRD SECTOR. What it meant was, Farr would be allowed to live. He leaned shakily toward the doctor, shifting his weight forward a few inches, and caught and held the doctor's shiny, shifty brown eyes. The doctor jerked his chair a few inches backward, but was unable to wrench his deer eyes free of Farr's headlight glance. "I'm not a member of a high risk group," said Farr. "I don't associate with high risk people. Regular Army is what I am. West Point." "It says there you've served all over the world." "But I never mingled with the locals." "Well, somebody you mingled with, mingled." Farr set the paperwork in his lap and icily examined the doctor. Nervous. Short. Fat. Younger than Farr and a captain. An ethnic, no doubt. We like the ethnics now, in the Army ... That's an order. "Very bad epidemic now, Colonel. Mutations. New strains. Afraid to use a public toilet, and I'm a doctor and should know better. See patients in a mask and gloves, then burn the mask. Ridiculous. Everyone's jittery." Farr said, "I can handle bad news. No denial, no depression." West Point, '99. Regular Army. Already prepared to start a new life in the Third Sector, and it's only been 5 minutes. Duty demands.. The doctor was babbling, wringing his hands, waving his hands, shifting his weight from the left to the right and back, drawing pictures in the air with his hands, gesturing hysterically, totally out of his tree by now. Zoned out. Get on with it, man. "Bad business," said the doctor, "very bad, bad, bad ..Um. Um. Um.. Keeps me jumping, I can tell you." Then he leaped up and added cheerfully, "Hey, you think you got problems? You're approved for life extension. Look't this one." There was a gurney in the corner of the office by the window, and on the gurney was a mound under a sheet, with a callused foot sticking out, five red-painted toes, the big toe tagged. The doctor peeled the sheet away from the cadaver. "Now this one, this one was not so very lucky. A lieutenant's wife, a dance therapist, can you believe it? No pre-approval. I gave her a cyanide dart, bang! in the ear, hey! hey! just like that. Never knew what hit her. Better that way, for her, for me. I used to hate counseling the ones ARCHON denied for life extension, but this new license to kill law is a dream. Much nicer. No talking it over. No denial, no bargaining, no depression. Look in their ear, make a little small talk right to the end ... weather, baseball, ballet ... squeeze the trigger, and it's bye, bye, baby." "Nice looking young person," said Farr. His palms were sweaty, he was feverish, his mouth was dry, his bones ached, and his bowels were tied in a knot, but he still pretended to be aroused, excited, by the body. Had to appear manly. "Right. A good-looker," said the doctor, "but you take today's economy, what can you do with a dance therapist? Who needs 'em? You feed them into the ARCHON computer, and ... chunk, chunk, chunk... it comes back, it says NOT APPROVED." He whipped the sheet back over the stiff. "ANY SECONDARY SKILLS? it wants to know. Hey, this one couldn't even type. Not worth keeping alive, not worth the medicine. You know what AZT-XIII costs?" "I have federal benefits," said Farr. "Ha! Read your policy," said the doctor. "Ha! That's a good one. Federal benefits. Best laugh all week... No disrespect, Colonel." A sour old man with breath you could smell across the room came in. "Good timing," chirped the doctor. "This is Ol' John," said the doctor, "come to escort you to the IQ, the Third Sector induction quarters." "I need to clean up my assignment at the Pentagon." "Forget it. They stripped and boxed your office ten minutes ago. Tomorrow everyone you shook hands with in the last five years will be interrogated. Unless they were wearing a glove," he said. "A rubber glove, I suppose," ventured Farr, "not lambskin." The doctor looked at him blankly, then got the joke. "Oh, I get it -- funny. real funny. Hey, keep that sense of humor." Funny? Farr was never funny. His associates most often described him as bitingly ironic. To outsiders, IQ was not only dark: it was impenetrably black, uninviting, and menacing. Yet clearly it was not dead. Dead buildings do not scream late at night; and neighbors reported hearing from IQ dreadful moans, wails, sobs, groans, screams, shouts, gasps, and shrieks. The Third Sector was created by that lovable rogue, Senator Jake Peters, D., Mass., in the Epidemic Relief Act of 2009. By the first decade of the 20th century AIDS had gone through mutation after mutation, through so many mutations that only AZT-XIII was able to arrest its progress. "Juice-13" (as it was called) was fearfully expensive, or, as Senator Jake put it, "Jeez, the president could support her husband's bimbos on what we pay for this stuff." No one could afford it but the government. Hence the need for a Third Sector. The name -- Third Sector -- came to Senator Jake in a moment of inspiration. He had actually thought of it himself. "What are we going to do about all these AIDS people," he asked the chairwoman of the Committee on Health and Welfare. "More cases every week. Mowing down the voters." "Let 'em die," said the honorable Republican senator from Utah, reaching under the bed for her panty hose. "Can't afford to treat them." "Wrong," he said. "We'll make them work for their juice. No work, no juice. Sure: we'll make 'em do public service work." "Oh," said the honorable chairwoman, "Put it that way, and I love it. Public sector work with a private sector incentive. Produce or die." "A Third Sector!" warbled the senators. The IQ was the one grim structure on Embassy Row, the merriest part of Washington, since the collapse the Soviet Union allowed the U. S. to kick butt and take names. IQ was not only an anachronism, being a 1950s structure, but a menace: it squatted ready to flick out its tongue and suck up a passing tourist bus. "Dead-eyed" is the way one critic described IQ. Its window panes had been painted an impenetrably dull black, and the shrubbery in front had been allowed to die, since from the inside there was no view, and most visitors crept in or out at night through an underground parking garage called P-One -- Purgatory, Level One. A Congressional committee planned a surprise visit once, hoping to dig up some dirt on the senator from Massachusetts's pet project, and arrived in a super-stretch limo. But when all the senators began shaking and sweating, the driver had the good sense to cruise on by and deliver the committee to Duke's, in time for the Happy Hour. It was a lovely, moonlit, warm summer's night in Washington when the marshal brought Farr to the induction quarters. The IQ, by contrast, was cold and depressing, as usual, dark, surrounded by a fence, barred. To outsiders, IQ was not only dark: it was impenetrably black, uninviting, and menacing. Yet clearly it was not dead. Dead buildings do not scream late at night; and neighbors reported hearing from IQ dreadful moans, wails, sobs, groans, screams, shouts, gasps, and shrieks. *** Farr was fascinated and appalled by Ms. Pamela Jones, the chief induction executive. She had no face!, the woman had no ears and no nose, there was a gap between her teeth, and she limped. Yet she seemed entirely comfortable with herself. And, allowing for the fact that her face and maybe a foot were floating in formaldehyde somewhere, she was a good looking woman, might have been a great looking woman once, and even now had a commanding presence, a firm stare and a steely voice. She was bony, but they all were, all the old-timers in the Sector. The corpulent required more juice, and Congress was not going to fork over big bucks for fat Sectorites. He'd be bony one day, Farr figured. Right now, he was hungry and bearing it stoically. Ms. Jones had a philosophy. "People are saying, `The public sector is a mess, and thank God for the Third Sector.' Last week, the city manager died in Landover. Six assistant city managers and the mayor were at the funeral and, do I have to tell you? a million shyster lawyers. Got the picture? The power structure was there, every bit of it. Cellular phones in everyone's briefcase, beeping and peeping and chirping and buzzing. A fleet of city cars. BMWs from the private sector, naturally. "Well, a city work crew arrived and began jack-hammering open the street right on the other side of the fence from the grave. Deafening, as you can imagine." Farr was especially repelled by Ms. Jones's habit of flicking the tip of her tongue between the gap where her front teeth should have been, and he had to wrench his attention back to the conversation. He said, "Must have been quite a racket. But, what's your point?" Civic works failed to engage his interest, unless conducted under hostile fire. "Well, wouldn't you think the mayor and six ACMs could get that crew to go dig somewhere else? You would, wouldn't you? Uh-uh, no such luck. Because the crew only took its orders from a certain Benny, and at that time of day Benny was incommunicado, being `off somewhere' with one of the babes from the city hall secretarial pool. Not taking phone calls. They had to cancel the funeral oration," she lamented. "What a mess." "Your point is what?" asked Farr again, striving not to scratch his cyanided ear. "My point is, of course, that there is no incentive in the public sector for responsible management, and people are starting to see the beauty part of our Sector work ethic. `Produce or die.' The taxpayers love it." At the evening meal, Perry was frog-marched to the back of the dining hall and spread-eagled by the marshals, while Pamela stood over his body and pounded the heel of a marshal's shotgun into his mouth. "Spit 'em out," she screamed, "Spit 'em out, damn you." Farr asked several of Pamela's staff how she had lost her body parts, but their evasions bordered on muteness. One old fellow who chewed an imaginary cud claimed to have been one of her trainers when she was oriented, but under close questioning, he clammed up. "Let's say hers was the toughest induction we've ever seen, and let it go." Farr failed to appreciate how profound an explanation that was. As for indoctrination, the Sector was opposed to sloth. That much was clear. And sex: it stood firm against sex. Sex was why they were there, wasn't it? Corpulence and sex accounted for many tedious hours of whining self-flagellation. "My name is Harry Jones," someone would say in training, "and I suffer from sloth." Eleven trainees and the induction staff would murmur disapproval of the big, bad three: sex, sloth, and swallowing. They were all Joneses, now, and not colonels or doctors or professors, either. Just a bunch of Joneses, trainee Joneses, Carol Jones, Peter Jones, Edward Jones, Leonard Jones -- Raymond Jones of course -- just a bunch of anonymous Joneses, and so it went. The training drifted along without end, without goals, without sophistication, like an AA meeting, but with no discernible results. Everyone was expected to sit in a warm room, on hard chairs, and castigate themselves. Farr -- he was Raymond Jones now-- was relieved: he'd expected advanced psychological reorientation -- brainwashing -- Pamela Jones poking into crevices of his mind, inserting a wedge, widening the crevice, splitting his consciousness open like an oyster. He preferred to keep his mind intact. On the third day there was a field trip up five flights of clangy stairs to the hospice, where unproductive Sectorites were brought to die slowly without access to their juice. Even Raymond was discomfited, and the others were terrified. They twitched, they were close to tears, they looked at anything but one another. Who among them was going to die up here someday? Most of the patients lacked fingers, toes, hands, feet, facial parts. The real training began on the fifth day, when one of the trainees fouled up. Perry Jones was accused of overeating. Maybe the charges were trumped up. Where was he going to find any more food than anyone else? At the evening meal, Perry was frog-marched to the back of the dining hall and spread-eagled by the marshals, while Pamela stood over his body and pounded the heel of a marshal's shotgun into his mouth. "Spit 'em out," she screamed, "Spit 'em out, damn you." Perry Jones spat out several front teeth, quite a lot of blood, and his punishment was concluded. "Let that be a lesson," said Pamela. It was. With his front teeth missing, Perry now looked less like himself and more like Pamela. In the second week, the marshals appeared during class and brought one of the men, Leonard Jones, to the front of the class. Other trainees stared at the desk tops, at their shoes, anywhere. Lucy Jones wept softly. The director, Pamela, used a cable cutter to shear off Leonard's nose, taking care to cut flush with the face, through crunchy tissue. When the woman, Lucy Jones, was brought up and similarly disfigured, no one had to guess what vice was involved. Now, one way or another, three members of the group looked like Pamela. *** In the third week there was a field trip in the IQ's van to the Telecommunications Turnpike, a complex of one-meter-diameter pipes buried beneath the city, through which telephones talked to telephones, computers to computers, and TV companies to their customers, all this by laser light running through optical fiber cables. This was the trainees' first day outside of IQ. They were pleased and excited, except for the three who had been shamed by partial dismemberment. They had not seen daylight in two weeks, and when they were taken out into the glare of the sun and set by the curb, the new Sectorites were paralyzed and blinded by the brightness. It seemed they had been reborn, except that Ol' John was there, waving his shotgun and pointing at one after another. There they stood blinking and squinting and peering through cracks between their fingers, and when their pupils had accommodated, they looked all around, like tourists -- except for the three who had last body parts: they faced into a huddle and turned their backs to the world. The van had arrived at a port into the Turnpike, Pamela Jones unlocked a manhole cover, and they peered down into blackness. A ladder ran down into the pipes. "These pipes are full of roaches and rats," explained Pamela. "Someone has to clean them. Each of you has been given a plastic bag, and one by one you will be sent down through. You will then crawl exactly 100 meters south and emerge from a trapdoor over there by Marshal Murphy." She waved down the street to Murphy and he waved his shotgun back to her. A group of teenagers observed, and some old women slowed down as they pushed their shopping baskets. A dog sniffed their legs, but Pamela did not shoo him away. It was an ordinary urban street scene, a bunch of thin men and women, some of them dreadfully disfigured, being harangued by a supervisor. "You will emerge with one plastic bag full of dead roaches, partially decomposed rats, and maybe the fresh fecal material of the trainee who preceded you. It's dark down there, but keep crawling. If you feel something eating your face, it's a rat. Don't stop crawling. Never stop crawling." Raymond was sent down first. The pipes were dimly lit by the red glow of laser light. A big man like Raymond had to squeeze along on his stomach. He heard a sigh of cool air being pumped down, and the scuttle of rats moving away and back, testing him, preparing to attack en masse. By willpower, he kept the rats away. They hadn't given him a flashlight, and things were closing in. Breathing was difficult. He was claustrophobic, yet he told his lungs it was natural: it was dark here, yes, but all he had to do was follow discipline. He ordered himself forward, forward, forward, and when his body parts were moving without thinking, he began to grope on the bottom of the pipe, scooping dead roaches into his bare hands and transferring them into the plastic bag, and rats' skeletons, and some things he did not think about, because they resisted. He crawled and scooped, and scooped and crawled, until he saw white daylight above, and he handed up his cache to Marshal Murphy. He had been below for thirty minutes. He had set an example. Yet he knew what the others thought of him. West Point. Regular Army. Too much discipline, no life of his own. No will. No ideas. By late afternoon seven more trainees had been goaded into traversing 100 meters. Regrettably three claustrophobics refused to go down. Pamela accused them of not listening to orders, cut off each one's left ear, and returned it to them in a roach bag. Now six members of the group bore a family resemblance to Pamela. The building was an oven, but his mind had retreated behind a psychic fire door and his body had taken command, as it had in the pipe in the Turnpike. As he studied his fellow trainees sitting glumly around the training table late at night, under a single bulb hanging high above, with six mutilated trainees lurking in the shadows, each and all demeaning themselves with obligatory revelations of their own former sloth and reciting the Sectorites' creed, "Produce or Die!," Raymond understood the brilliance and madness of Pamela's method. Only Raymond and four others retained their whole faces. It was inconceivable that any one of them would foul up, now that the stakes were known clearly. On Friday of the fifth week another field trip was planned for the Tele-Pike. Their van passed slowly through a slum neighborhood, one of the worst in Washington. Ol' John drove, and another marshal held a shotgun warily, not sure whether to point it at the trainees on the bus or the street people. Here youths sat on tenement steps, trading in narcotics. There teenagers were stripping a car. Residents leaned out broken windows and hollered down unintelligible obscenities, and from the street others hollered back and used gestures imaginatively. A small girl set down her school books and pitched a rock at the van, which shattered a window and bloodied the face of Eudora Jones. It was her first stigma. The van turned into a particularly beaten-down side street populated by particularly small, dark people with curly black hair; and ahead, was a crowd of street people, milling around a burning building, with some energy, showing some cohesiveness by controlling their obscene gestures, shouting encouragement to their neighbors to join them, and everyone looking at the second story of an old wooden building, where a young, brown woman was holding a baby and shouting hysterically as she leaned out a window. Pamela ordered the marshal to halt, to stop in this "bad" neighborhood, one which the fire department seldom visited without police protection. "Inductees," commanded Pamela, "Do we see a citizen in need of assistance? Your duty! Do your duty." To the immense and raucous amusement of the street people, one marshal encouraged the trainees -- at gun point -- to run straight up to the inferno's door, and there ten of the trainees stopped, shifting their weight from foot to foot, because even the threat of death by gunshot was not enough to move them another step into the house. One of them dirtied his clothing. Trainees with fully formed faces were now wrestling with fear and calculating the utility of having a fully formed face. The mutilated trainees began to scuffle and push and curse one another in the strange and stupid voices of persons deprived of noses and ears. Upstairs, the woman leaned farther out the window, alternately bellowing and ululating. "It's people like her who make this a bad neighborhood," Leonard Jones screamed. Raymond agreed, of course. Yet, his feet understood discipline. He found himself running up the front stoop. He found himself kicking in the front door. He did not want to do it or not do it, but he ran up hot metal stairs, and it hurt dreadfully, right through his shoes, like walking barefoot across a parking lot in Iran. The building was an oven, but his mind had retreated behind a psychic fire door and his body had taken command, as it had in the pipe in the Turnpike. Raymond's feet kicked down the door to the front apartment. The smoke poured right into his face, and his hands covered his mouth, and his mouth and nose resolved not to breathe. There was the woman, shorter, fatter, and more homely, more dark than she had seemed from below and more energetically hysterical. His arms clasped the woman, and she clasped her baby, and his body dragged her and the baby toward the stairs and down. She beat him with her elbows and kneed him, which made no sense, but he dragged her down the stairs and into the front yard. The baby was crying healthily, but the woman was turning blue, under her darkness. Raymond was coughing and drawing his first breath in three minutes, yet at once he was determined to offer resuscitation. But Ol' John pressed his shotgun to Raymond's forehead. "Touch that woman," said Ol' John, "and you die." Raymond remembered: yes, of course, he was a carrier. *** That evening an all night orientation session was announced. Raymond was brought down for a few minutes from the infirmary, his hands and feet bandaged, but still a good looking, lean, muscular man. They gave him a round of applause, and everyone toasted him with wine brought out for such an occasion. The brown woman and her baby had died, of course. But no matter, since in the eyes of the Sector, Raymond had vindicated his training. After receiving a commendation, he was sent back to the infirmary, where the cyanide needle was removed from his ear. He would have liked to sleep, but he was kept awake all night by harrowing screams from the all night training session, where Pamela Jones, the toughest case who had ever survived orientation, dismembered the faces, hands, and feet of ten recalcitrant trainees. Jay S. Mendell and Mike Popejoy Jay Mendell, Ph. D., is a professor at Florida Atlantic University in Fort Lauderdale. Michael Popejoy, Ph. D., was Jay's student when he suggested the idea for this story. Circuit Traces wants to know what you think. Please send your comments to the editor.   Copyright© Circuit Traces Communications1995-1996.