“It is a skill.” He smiled slightly. “One that guarantees I will spend all my days in a four-walled prison, which is what I vastly prefer.” He picked squares of paper off the bunk and stacked them neatly on a clear patch of floor. “Please sit. Let us investigate this problem.”

He was very helpful. The basic procedure for motivating somebody to do something unpleasant or dangerous was to separate out the various ways a person would benefit from doing it—sexual appeal, enhanced self-image, prospect of future comfort or security… all the way up to purely altruistic benefits such as the approval of God or to serve you generations yet unborn. He wrote down twenty-three separate areas of reward. The basic technique of opinion engineering was to figure out which of these areas would be most effective for your target population, and pack as many of them as practical into a single memorable statement. Pictorial associations at least as much as words; we’re not working with logic here.

I made a series of recorded appeals, using sexy young things of both and indeterminate genders, for lumberjacking and welding and so forth, which went on the Random Walk cube. But the “advertisements” weren’t scheduled at random.

People tend to watch cube at the same time each day, if they watch it. Most of the people I was seeking were more or less addicted to it. So I set them up several days in a row before each ad. I “primed” them, using Prime to help me search through the millions of small scenes in the Random Walk library. We came up with hundreds of pretty specific episodes extolling the pleasures of physical labor in the good old outdoors. Almost all of them in good weather. Maybe Epsilon does have good weather all the time.

None of the kids I’m after has ever experienced weather. Better remind them to take hats.

I should feel guilty about all this. But it’s fun, and ultimately to everyone’s benefit. As whoever invented television probably said.

FINAL APPROACH

PRIME

O’Hara talked it over with Evy and agreed that she would do most of John’s care-and-feeding during the months remaining until Epsilon. Evy would have him for years or decades after that. (Daniel was willing to help, but John resisted, sometimes violently; he obviously didn’t want another man to minister to him.)