The Madness of Crowds

A short story from Little Machines

To answer some of your questions:

Yes, I really am Bill McAbe's older, not-so-smart, and much-less-famous brother;

Yes, I do know why he disappeared. He told me everything, and toward the end I was part of it.

How do you know that I'm who I say I am, if what I'm going to tell you is true? Be patient, friend. I'll get to that.

As far as I'm concerned, it began three weeks ago, when I got back from a disappointing dinner party, at which a very good friend of mine tried his worst to match me with someone totally unsuitable, to find my answer phone blinking. It was the manager of this club I happen to know. He said that he had someone in his office who claimed to be my brother. One of the security guys had found him found him prowling around on the roof, and would I like to come down and sort it out or would I prefer he called the cops?

I went right over, and it was lucky for Bill that this guy, Stavros, a three-hundred-pound Greek sweetheart, happened to owe me a favour after I had designed the club's wet room at cost price. I got Bill out of there after only a half hour of kissing ass, making all kinds of promises that it would never happen again. I even got Bill's stuff back, although the security guy had stomped on it pretty thoroughly, thinking it was some kind of recording equipment; the club, a very discrete consensual sex place, is highly sensitive about that kind of thing. Well, it was recording equipment of a kind, although it wasn't a video camera or a tape recorder. Bill hugged the bag to his chest all through the ride downtown to his loft apartment in Tribeca, for once in his life clamming up -- you know Bill, so you know how unusual that is -- and refusing to tell me what he had been doing up there on the roof, fussing with his bleeding nose and saying that maybe he'd let me know in a couple of days, providing the Samoan asshole who'd kicked his stuff up and down the stairs hadn't compromised the samples.

I didn't push it. I was tired, I had a headache from too much wine and Stavros's cigar smoke. I even forgot about Bill's promise, until I got a call three days later.

Bill and I both lived in New York City, and we saw each other once a month for a pizza pie lunch at Hot John's, in the Village, where Bill would suck me dry about gossip about the romantic world of TV drama production and speculate a little too loudly about which of the off-duty firefighters, cops and other municipal workers who hung out in the restaurant would make a good boyfriend for me. Yes, you know how Bill was. Like a Tourette's sufferer, he couldn't keep his thoughts to himself, he had no inner monologue, no censor, and he also had a filthy mind and a pretty childish sense of humour. In many ways, he had never really grown up -- you only had to look at his apartment, the laboratory at one end full of all kinds of scientist's toy, the living room at the other full of all kinds of boy's toys. He had a bad, bad jones for gadgets, robots, and sci-fi props. He had the world's biggest lava lamp. I believe he was one of the first to buy one of those silly-looking dumbbell/pogo stick people movers.

This time, though, he was all business, and we didn't meet in Hot John's, but in a coffee shop over in the East Village like a perfect little time-capsule of 1950's futurism, with streamlined chrome trim on its counter and stools and china decorated with black-and-white starscapes and rocketships.

He said, "You want to guess what I was doing on that roof? You can have three chances. Get it right, I'll pick up the check."

I said that I'd rather pay, to save time and to make sure that we got out of there alive -- Bill is the meanest tipper I've ever encountered.

"I was collecting pheromones," he said, favouring me with one of his chipmunk grins. He never would wear his braces when he was a kid, and as a result he had an overbite that would cost tens of thousands of dollars to fix. Not that he didn't have the money of course, from the two dozen patents on his Spin Resonance Chromatograph and those other techy gadgets he invented; it just never occurred to him to spend money on something as mundane as dentistry.

Now you know what pheromones are, of course, but I had to suffer one of Bill's little Dick-and-Jane lectures on the way that chemicals released into the air in absolutely minute quantities could affect our behaviour; I had to watch his eyes roll when I essayed that they were like perfumes; I had to listen to his condescending and perfectly tedious explanation that we are very sensitive, at an unconscious level, to subtle variations in body odour, that the mix of complicated organic chemicals in our sweat is determined by the make-up of our immune systems, that it had been experimentally proven that girls prefer men who smell like their fathers ("Of course, you'll probably prefer men who smell like our mother," he couldn't help adding) because that means they have compatible immune systems and so will produce better children. I'm sure I've gotten some of this wrong, but you get the drift.

I asked him what this had to do with his little roof-top escapade.

"I told you. I was collecting pheromones. It's my new field. I'm getting some very useful results. You'll be interested to know, for instance, that the samples I collected from the air vent of that club prove that men like you are just like men like me."

"How alarming."

"Pheromonally speaking. You produce the same inducers as hetros."

I made the mistake of asking what inducers were, and was rewarded with another insufferable lecturette on the effect of pheromones on the parasympathetic nervous system, on brain chemistry, on human behaviour.

"As we smell," I said, "so shall we reap."

"Not bad," Bill said. He made a big deal about noting it down in his PalmTop, and said, ever so casually, "What are you doing next week, by the way?"

He knew of course. I was resting. The production company that made City Girls was in negotiation with NBC for a third season, so everyone, including their set designer (c'est moi), was on a break.

"How would you like," Bill said, "to go to Las Vegas? Top hotel, all expenses paid. If you say yes, I'll even pay for this coffee."

I thought that Las Vegas in February sounded pretty nice, even with Bill attached to the package. I thought, what's the harm? Really, how dumb can you get?

Because there was, of course, a catch. And of course Bill didn't tell me about until we were there. After I'd told him, at length, how much I hated boxing, he shrugged, and said, "All you have to do is sit there, two or three hours, the equipment in the bag on your lap. It's just a pump that flushes large volumes of air through activated charcoal filters. I take the filters, bake off the organics, run them through the old SRC."

"And you can't do it because -- "

"Because you know how much I hate crowds."

I couldn't argue with that. He'd always taken taxis, never the subway or the bus, even when he was a poor-as-a-church-mouse postgraduate student. It wasn't claustrophobia, and it wasn't that he hated people. It was just that large numbers of them in a small space freaked him out. That was why he got so interested in the whole pheromone thing, of course, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

Well, the fight didn't take three hours, or even two. I reeled out, my ears singing with the aftereffect of the atrocious rock music they pumped at full volume to get the crowd going, and Bill wasn't waiting where he said he would wait, and he wasn't answering his cell phone either.

Where he was, I learned, a couple of hours after I got back to our hotel, was in jail, for attempted assault on one of the contestants.

He was out the next day. He bailed himself for a cool hundred thousand, was full of his little adventure. While I was being battered by hard rock in the audience, he stood in the little crowd of autograph hunters outside the arena's freight entrance, waiting for one of the boxers to arrive. Somehow, he got past the man's handlers, and now he was looking at ten years for assault. With a cotton-wool bud.

"I wanted a sweat sample," he said, utterly unrepentant. "I have a theory about boxers, about people who like to fight."

"You could have gone to a gym."

"The guy is the heavyweight champion of the world. He's the alpha male's alpha male."

"He was the world champion," I said. "He lost in the first round. You're lucky he doesn't sue you."

"At least you got the sample."

"My ears are still ringing. And I don't think I'll ever get the stink of cigar smoke out of this suit. Which is Paul Smith, by the way, imported from London, England, not that it will mean anything to you. The least you can do is tell me what all this is about."

"I promise. Once I'm certain."

I know. Not at all like the run-off-the-mouth Bill we all know. He was very serious about this thing of his.

We flew back, Bill in First Class, me in Business (using my bicoastal air miles to upgrade the stowage ticket he'd bought me), and I didn't see him for two weeks, although he kept sending me faxes of newspaper stories. A massacre of Muslims by Hindus in India. A mob in England that burned alive an old man incorrectly suspected of paedophilia; after they set fire to his house, they drove back firefighters and police with stones and petrol bombs. A baying mob of Protestants outside a Catholic school . . . all kinds of human brutishness. Do you get the idea yet? No, nor did I, until Bill Explained All.

This time it was in a scruffy riverside park in lovely post-industrial northern Brooklyn. I took the 'L'; Bill took a taxi. He looked terrible: red-rimmed eyes, a bum's stubble, greasy hair, a haunted expression, the jitters. We clutched cardboard cups of coffee and shivered in the breeze off the East River, and he told me what he had been researching, and what he had found.

He had collected samples from venues where aggression was literally in the air -- from rush hour subway stations to my boxing match -- and used his Spin Resonance Chromatograph to isolate and characterize a particular human pheromone. He told me that it acted like a highly specific shot of alcohol. It released inhibitions, made people reckless and heightened their tendency to behave violently. Not only that, but when you breathed in a dose, your body started manufacturing and releasing it too: it spread through a crowd like a cold, a contagious madness that could turn any crowd into a blood-hungry mob that would attack anyone who stood out -- anyone who didn't belong, anyone who was that little bit different.

"I found a version in chimpanzees, too," Bill said. "Specifically, in sexually active juvenile males who are subordinate to the alpha male. In the wild, young male chimps can be like teenage gangbangers. They rape any female chimp they come across, murder her baby, form a gang to go hunting monkeys . . . We're just like chimps, which is hardly surprising, because we share a common ancestor with them. So do gorillas, but gorillas live in family groups of females and their children and a single alpha male, and alpha males are less sensitive to the releaser. Alpha males, they're cool, they don't need to gang up with other males to show what they're made of."

"That's why you wanted to test the boxer."

"I had a better idea. Took a few meetings with CEOs of pharmaceutical companies; they're alpha males too. I spun them some bullshit, wore an adhesive plaster on one of my fingers so I could get a sweat sample when I shook hands. I found that CEO sweat is almost completely free of releaser, but most of their subordinates all have low to medium levels. You ever notice how calm it seems, up in the executive suites? It's not just because of the thicker carpets and the better lighting. It's also because of the air chemistry."

There was more. Some people were highly sensitive to the releaser, but couldn't make it themselves -- Bill was one of them, a wimp and proud of it. And Bill had broken down the releaser's structure and synthesized an antidote to it: an antagonist that inhibited the releaser's action on the human nervous system.

"The thing is," Bill said, tossing his half-empty coffee cup toward the river, "someone else has made it too."

He'd been taking control samples in what he believed would be neutral spaces -- libraries, museums, a shopping mall. And he'd found the signature of the antagonist in the air of the shopping mall.

"Not as good as mine, but it does the job. Have you ever wondered why people zone out in shopping malls, in train stations, airports? Well, now you do. It's because someone is messing with your mind."

I said that it all sounded very X-Files.

"You don't believe me? Well, the reason we met here is that I've been followed, the last week. Everywhere I go. Don't worry, I'm pretty sure the taxi driver shook them off before we left Manhattan. I've always wanted," he said, "to tell a taxi driver to lose the guy on my tail."

"Who's following you? How do they know that you know?"

I didn't have to ask how they knew that Bill knew. Once he had amassed enough data, he'd gone online, boasting to his colleagues, stirring things up in science newsgroups.

"The antagonist makes people less prone to violence," he said, "but it makes them docile too, suggestible, sheep-like. Completely lacking anger is as bad as having nothing but." He looked around for perhaps the fiftieth time in the ten minutes we'd spent together. He said that he had to go.

I wasn't one hundred per cent convinced, but I told him to be careful.

"Look after this," he said, and handed me a padded envelope and walked away.

That was the last time I saw him. The next day, his apartment and the apartments above and below it were wrecked by the crude but powerful bomb that also killed his research assistant. I don't think that was Bill, covering his tracks. If he made a bomb, it would be more carefully constructed than any of the Unabomber's. No, I think he stumbled on something someone doesn't want us to know about.

By now, I have no doubt that you're wondering how you can ever believe this preposterous story.

Well, for one thing, you're on the list that Bill gave me; you're an expert in the use of Bill's Spin Resonance Chromatography system. Go into any large shopping mall, take an air sample, and look for the signature of the organic molecule that's given in the attachment to this message. And don't try and trace this email -- I sent it through an anonymous remailer, and I like to think that I've made myself pretty hard to find.

There was a big wad of cash in that padded envelope, enough to allow me to travel in style for quite some time, and there was something else.

Two little sealed glass vials, the kind you used to get poppers in, if you've ever done that scene. Each half-full of a colourless, oily liquid. One is the releaser. The other is the antagonist. One pure madness, the other a million-fold dose of universal peace -- or the worst weapon of a brainwashing despotism.

So please. Look for that signature. Satisfy yourself that I'm telling you the truth. Think very carefully, and then go to the biochem.net newsgroup and post an answer to this question: should I destroy Bill's gift, or, like poor wretched Pandora, should I give it to the world?

If you liked this story, you might also like my novel Mind's Eye.

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>This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Licence.

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