WE PURCHASED PEOPLEWE 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 Groom- 
bridge 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 Groom- bridge 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.