“Yes,” Cliff said. “Every one of us from the village have been implanted except for infants under a year old.” Again that searching look probed Eric. “Except you. Why not you?”

Eric sat back down on the cot heavily, and Cliff joined him. “Don’t ask me. I’ve been sitting in this stupid cell slowly going mad trying to find out what’s going on. Until Mom came, I didn’t even know if anyone else from the village was here, or even alive.”

“That’s another puzzling thing. Why are you being held here? The rest of us are free.”

“I don’t know! Don’t ask me what’s going on. Tell me more about this thing. What does it mean to be implanted?”

Cliff opened his hands, his eyes defeated. “It is, very simply, the perfect human-control device.”

“Control device?”

Cliff sighed wearily. “Let me back up and start at the first.” The frustration pulled down the corners of his mouth. “I don’t know the whole story yet. The man in charge is someone they call the Major. Evidently locating settlements like ours and hauling in people from all kinds of places is standard procedure, but newcomers aren’t the only ones implanted. Every person in Shalev and the Alliance gets one of these little numbers.”

“You mean everyone—” He left the sentence unfinished as the enormity of the thought hit him.

“Everyone, as near as I can find out. Over two hundred thousand in this so-called Alliance of Four Cities and every one of us penned up like sheep—only the fences are invisible, electronic ones.”

He stopped suddenly, breathing deeply.

“Are you okay?” Eric asked.

Cliff nodded, but he continued to take deep gulps of air until his color started to return. “Okay,” he sighed, “it’s going now.”

“What? What is it?”

“You have just witnessed the little black box in full operation. I’ve got to learn to be more careful. Whenever I start thinking about what this whole thing means, I start seething inside. That’s all it takes.”

Eric shook his head. “I don’t understand.”

“It’s really very simple. I got angry and the little black box slapped me down for it.”

“But how? How can it do that?”

Cliff took a deep breath. “Do you remember when you were in high school and I gave a lecture on operant conditioning to your social studies class? Pavlov and his dog and all that?”

Eric nodded. “Ring the bell when you bring the dog dinner, and he salivates. Pretty soon all you have to do is ring the bell to make him salivate.”

“Right. That’s conditioning in its simplest form. Well, I won’t bore you with all the technical details, but this Major, whoever he is, has developed the ultimate conditioning device. Compared to this, Pavlov is a piece of academic trivia. These guys are light years ahead of him.”