"By erasing his mind."
"That's simplistic! To begin with, the minds of the people I'm talking about have been rendered worthless anyway. These men and women are no good to themselves, or to anyone else. Don't moralize to me!"
"The thought never crossed my mind."
Smathers took a deep breath. "Sensory deprivation, combined with other forms of therapy, can literally destroy a man's craving for drugs and alcohol. It can remove the root psychological causes and make a man or woman whole again, a rational, intelligent human being." He paused, picked up a pencil and began to roll it back and forth between his thumb and forefinger. Guilt was beginning to rise in his voice, like steam from a hot spring. "Manning originally came here of his own accord, in exchange for the money we offered him. Part of our treatment involved sound therapy, the use of certain tones as a therapeutic device. One day while Manning was on the machine he became frightened and touched some controls. The resulting frequencies punctured his eardrums. We would have treated him, but he escaped soon after that. I knew he would probably go to the authorities, so I was getting ready to go myself. When I heard he'd been killed, there didn't seem much point."
"Convenient, wasn't it?"
Smathers' head jerked around. "What does that mean?"
His indignation had the ring of sincerity. I sidestepped. "Did it ever occur to you that the same techniques you use to treat drug addiction could be used to alter a man's political beliefs and behavior?"
"Don't be melodramatic, Frederickson. I'm a scientist, not a politician."
"How did you team up with Dr. Kee?"
"I don't think I have to answer any more of your questions."
"That's right, you don't."
He answered it anyway. "I knew that Dr. Kee had worked for the Chinese Army during the Korean War. That seemed irrelevant now. He is an expert in induced aberrational psychology. He is the only man in the world who knows enough to assist me."
"How did he come to assist you?"
"I was at a conference in Poland and it was made known to me through intermediaries that Kee wished to come to the United States and work with me. I jumped at the chance. He came to me soon after that."
I grunted. "Smathers, your brilliance is matched only by your naivete." I expected him to get angry, but he didn't. Perhaps it was all coming home to him now; his blind passion for his work had pulled him down a long, very dark passageway, and only now was he beginning to see the ugly things at the end. "I'll bet that a little checking would turn up the fact that Kee is in this country illegally, hiding behind your reputation. He's here brushing up on the latest brainwashing techniques so he can go home and use them on his own people."
"You realize, my work is very important. Perhaps you don't fully understand how important."
I gave him the tag line. "I think Kee killed two men."
"Impossible!"
"I think he killed Manning, and I think he killed Fred Haley, an English professor who knew who Kee really was."
Smathers' face suddenly drained of color. "Mr. Haley was here just the other day. I saw him talking to. ." He let it trail off. "What do you want me to do?"
"I want you to turn yourself in to the authorities before they come after you. My brother is a detective in the New York Police Department. He's waiting for me right now in my office. He doesn't know anything about this yet. You come and tell him your story. Things may end up easier for you."
"Why should you want to help me?"
"Because I respect any man who's been awarded the Nobel Prize. Also, if your work is as important as you say it is, I'd like to see it continued. If it's true that your only crime is being incredibly stupid, perhaps you can rebuild your career when all the debts have been paid."
I hadn't heard a sound, but the sudden jerk of Smathers' head and the look of alarm on his face was warning enough. I half turned in my seat and glimpsed a very large Chinese poised behind me. His eyes were great pools of darkness set in a field of flesh that might have been fine, yellow porcelain. I didn't get that much time to study him; his hand flicked forward and landed on the nape of my neck. Everything went dark. .
It stayed dark. Something was rapping on the inside of my head, not hard or painfully, but persistently, with a sound like a pencil eraser on soft wood. Then I realized it was only the blood pulsing through my veins. I listened for a few moments, and then it was gone, replaced by a voice.
"Dr. Frederickson. Robert. This is Dr. Kee." The voice came from everywhere and nowhere. It started from somewhere back of my eyes and undulated out, filling my head-or what I thought was my head. There was simply no more head, no toes, no fingers, no body. There was only my mind, and I wondered how long that was going to last; all things disappear when you end up in one of Smathers' fish tanks.
"I am your friend," the voice continued. "There has been a very great misunderstanding on your part. That will be corrected. You will learn to love my voice-and then you will learn to love me. My voice will be your only contact with reality, and you will look forward to hearing it. Soon you will pay careful attention to what I have to say."
I waited for more. There wasn't any more. After a while, I wished there were, just as Kee had predicted. I cursed, slowly, methodically. My voice came back to me muffled, as from a great distance.
I tried to visualize myself: I would be floating in one of the tanks, the saline water warmed exactly to body temperature. My arms and legs would be strapped together, loose enough to allow for circulation, but tight enough to restrict any kind of movement. I imagined my head was encased in some kind of black hood into which oxygen was pumped; naturally, the hood had earphones. There were probably tubes stuck in my body through which I was being fed intravenously.
The next thought that occurred to me was that I'd be there forever, living in absolute darkness. Smathers and Kee would never take me out; they would go away and lock the steel door behind them. I would be left floating. . floating forever, until I died, and rotted, and my bones sank to the bottom of the tank.
I found I was crying. I could just barely feel the tears sliding down my cheeks. I thought of my mother, a beautiful woman who had loved me as I was and who, with my brother, had kept me whole during the nightmare years of my childhood and adolescence.
I tried to sleep. Maybe I did. It was impossible to tell; sleeping and waking were all the same. Then the voice came again.
"Hello, Robert."
"Go to hell," I said; or maybe I only thought I said it.
"You've been with us for twenty-four hours now, Robert, I know you've missed my voice. I hope you've had time to think about your mistakes, your bad thinking."
I tried to match the voice to the face I'd seen in Smathers' office. The voice was like the face, smooth, unemotional, capable of sudden, unexpected violence.
"You should give some thought to-"
The voice broke off in midsentence. I strained, listening for the rest, but then I realized that the sudden break was all part of the game. The voice would be my only link with reality, and soon I would be willing to do anything it asked of me. My mind screamed, and I backed away from the terrible need, backed down into myself.
I found myself on a plain, stretching off to nothing. There was no horizon, only a black pit directly in front of me. I backed up, and the pit moved forward. It yawned before me like a dark hole on a silent planet.
There were sounds in die hole, wailing winds, screams, groans; and the hole was myself, the deepest part of me. That was where Kee wanted to push me, to trap me-and then remake me.
I was losing my mind.