I knew this time that it was a potent drug that I would be unable to resist. Darkness closed in rapidly. My brain fled headlong into a black, empty void.
Seventeen
My vision was blurred by a brilliant, blinding, white light that was shining directly into my eyes. I must have been unconscious a long time. I thought I was paralyzed. I couldn’t move my arms or legs. Slowly, as my vision cleared, I saw that I was in a stark white room, like a hospital room, and that the blinding light was coming from a fixture set in the ceiling directly above me. I was lying on my back, and my arms and legs were strapped down securely by leather straps.
I opened my mouth and tried to yell at the top of my lungs, but I made only a hoarse croak. Even so, my sound brought four burly men, in white jackets that hospital orderlies wear, close around me. They raised the upper portion of my bed so that I was sitting upright.
From my new position, I could see two other people in the room besides the four “orderlies.” One was my companion of the previous night. Suzanne Henley, her red hair flaming, looked beautiful in a white nurses uniform and low-heeled white shoes. The other was a white-haired man, probably in his sixties, who was dressed in a white smock, white trousers, white shoes, and white gloves. He was sitting in a wheelchair. I knew instinctively that I was now inside the Rejuvenation Health Spa and that this man was Dr. Frederick Bosch.
The doctor rolled his wheelchair closer to my bed and gave me a thin-lipped, icy smile. Suzanne Henley gazed at me briefly without expression and turned away.
“Welcome to our spa,” the doctor said, his voice thick with a German accent, “although I’m afraid this visit may not improve your health.” He paused and then added, “Mr. Nick Carter.”
His recognition of me gave me a start, and I struggled futilely for a moment against the bonds that held me tightly.
The doctor gave a wave with his hand. “It’s quite, quite useless to struggle, Mr. Carter. You are powerless here. Besides, why should you be anxious to leave when you’ve wanted to come here so much?”
He spun around in his wheelchair and ordered the four white-coated attendants to take me upstairs.
The men quickly rolled me, still strapped to the bed, across the room to a large elevator that appeared immediately when one of them pressed a button. They pushed me into the elevator, and we were joined by Suzanne Henley and the doctor in his wheelchair. No one spoke as the elevator lifted soundlessly. We rode up what seemed to be several stories before the elevator stopped, the doors opened, and I was taken into a huge, open room.
As I looked around the room, I saw that it was as large as a square city-block and glassed in from floor to ceiling on all four sides. We were on top of the spa, and since that establishment sat on the peak of a towering mountain, there was a view through the glass wall on every side down into deep valleys. It was a breathtaking sight, especially in full daylight with the sun shining on the snow.
But there was an awesome sight within the room — an enormous humming, buzzing computer in the center that occupied most of the space. Lights from the computer flashed and blinked continuously, and the machine made a steady, quiet whirring sound. Otherwise, since the room was obviously soundproofed, it was eerily silent. The doctor made a motion with his hand, and the four men rolled my bed closer to the machine. When I was in place there, one of the men worked a crank at the foot of my bed and I was suddenly sitting upright, still strapped, with my back up and my legs down as if I were in a chair.
The four men returned to the elevator and left us when the doctor signalled with his hand again.
Suzanne Henley stood beside the computer and began to twist and turn dials while the doctor scooted over in his wheelchair so that he was directly in front of me.
“There it is, Mr. Carter,” he said with a flourish of his hand, indicating the computer, “the answer that you have been seeking. There is the power behind what you once called the ‘Assassination Brigade.’ There it is, and you still don’t know what it means, do you?”
He was right. I didn’t know the meaning of the computer, nor how it had created a world crisis.
“Who are you?” I asked. “What’s this all about?”
The doctor spun away from me, and I noticed for the first time that his wheelchair was fully mechanized, apparently operated by controls that he could manipulate without manual effort. He laughed gleefully as he whizzed once around the room. Then he returned to where I sat.
“Let me introduce myself,” he said, making a mock bow from the waist. “Introduce myself by my real name, not the one everyone else knows me by, Dr. Frederick Bosch. It is a name that will be familiar to you — I am Dr. Felix Von Alder. I see the raised eyebrows, Mr. Carter. You know my wife and my three lovely daughters. But that is only a minor part of the story.”
He paused for a moment and regarded me quizzically. “Before I tell you my story, Mr. Carter, I want you to understand why I am telling you. You see, you’re now in my power — physically, and soon you will be in my power totally — physically and mentally. Nothing can stop that, I assure you, and you will soon see for yourself. But before that time I want you to hear what happened. You, with your past achievements, are a proper audience for the brilliant tale I have to tell. I wanted you here alive for this moment, because you are someone who can truly appreciate what I have succeeded in doing. Otherwise,” he spun once more in his chair, “otherwise, my work would be like creating a great masterpiece, like a symphony that no one who appreciated good music ever heard, or like a painting no one ever saw. You understand?”
I nodded. What was the explanation, I thought, of this apparent madness?
Dr. Felix Von Alder sat motionless in his wheelchair for a moment before he leaned toward me to talk.
He had been a brilliant scientist in Germany, working for Adolf Hitler on the control of human behavior. The experiments in the ‘30s and ‘40s had only involved animals and had been very crude, using chemical and surgical methods to alter and control the brain.
“I had some success,” Von Alder said proudly, “even then. Der Fuhrer decorated me repeatedly.
I was ready to move on to humans. Then it was too late — the war ended. There was an Allied raid on Berlin where I was working—” he paused in his story and slipped off his white smock. I saw that his arms, with his white gloves on the hands, were artificial. He moved his shoulders, and both arms fell to the floor. “I lost both arms in the raid.”
Soon after that, he continued, the war ended. When the Russians came to Berlin, they searched for him because they knew of his experiments. When they found him, they’d taken him to the U.S.S.R. In the confusion of the times, the Germans had thought he was dead. There was no record of the continuing existence of Dr. Felix Von Alder.
In Moscow, he continued his work, but he’d had more sophisticated electrical processes at his disposal. The Russians had constructed artificial arms and hands for him, and he’d been a brilliant success.
“But the Russians,” he added, “never stopped being suspicious of me.” He paused again and moved his hips against the seat of the wheelchair. Both legs, which I now saw were artificial, fell to the floor.
“They cut off my legs so I could never escape. They knew I was their enemy. I have always believed in die superiority of the German people. All my work had been to help die German state rule the world — and now that I’ve perfected my techniques, my dream will come true.
“But to return to the Russians — they had been investigating the history of the Third Reich and they’d discovered my deep, personal devotion to Hitler. But that didn’t stop them from wanting to use my scientific knowledge. They believed I was close to a breakthrough in my experiments. So they kept me in isolation; I had nothing but my work.”