Chapter Nine
Extending Control
It wasn’t the first time Klaus had told that particular story; it was something of an obsession with him, really.
Or maybe I should call it a professional tic: A Post-Skinnerian Behaviorist, after all.
“It’s 1950s Australia,” he always starts. “It’s a pharmaceutical factory. People,” beeble, he said in his soft accent, “pushing buttons, yes? On the assembly line, sorting pills, hmm?”
I was supposed to nod at that point; I always did.
And he always went through the same pantomime—his tone, the angle at which he held his head, the manner in which he knit his eyebrows in seeming perplexity: no matter how many times he told the story, with near word-for-word precision, he always gave the impression that this was an issue with which he was grappling for the
