"What do you call this?" Wooley said politely, pointing to the overhead picture, which was a duplicate of the image of the small television screen in front of the Oriental girl.
"Hell. Ricidulously easy to put together a fake like that," Woodward said.
"Come up and-try it," Wooley said.
Woodward wasn't about to have Edgewood University blamed for this farce. He rose from the table. "Wooley, I'm going to have your job."
"After tonight, it's yours," Wooley said. He tapped the Oriental girl on her tee-shirted shoulder. "Come on, Leen Forth. Time to come out."
She opened her almond eyes sadly, then smiled at Wooley, who gently removed the discs from her forehead and throat. As he did the picture disappeared and the television screen and the wall screen both went black.
Wooley held up the four discs with the black wires leading from them.
"This is all it takes," he told the audience, "to unleash your imagination."
He gestured for Woodward to step forward. Woodward sat in the chair vacated by the busty young Oriental girl and Wooley began to attach the discs to his head.
"It is not necessary to get them attached to any precise points," Wooley explained casually. "The temples and the throat, almost anywhere will do."
As he attached the last disc to Woodward's right temple, Wooley saw the man close his eyes tight. "No need to concentrate," Wooley said. "Just think the way you normally do. Think about your favorite fantasy."
He tightened the disc on Woodward's right temple with a slight twist that made the suction cup stick fast.
A picture began to appear on the screens and the people in the cafeteria leaned forward. Some giggled in anticipation.
On the screen came a woman's eyes. They were green and beautiful.
As more of the picture became clear, the woman's eyes widened with fear. Her nostrils flared and as her entire face came into focus, everyone saw a dark piece of wide friction tape stretched tightly across her mouth.
The audience hushed and the only sound in the room were the moans and the heavy breathing coming from the woman pictured on the large overhead screen. A small trickle of blood oozed from under a corner of the tape. The beads of sweat matched those that suddenly appeared on Woodward's own head.
His own mouth opened as everyone saw her delicate hands fill the screen. They were bound together with manacles that were chained through an iron ring on a hard concrete floor. The view on the screen enlarged and the audience could see the woman's miniskirted buttocks clench and unclench in pain.
Woodward's eyes widened as the audience saw the woman's young body come into view, its shapely legs tied apart to two more iron rings in the floor. Then everyone saw Lee Woodward enter the picture. He came toward the woman, his hand reaching down, clinging to the hem of her skirt.
With a roar, Lee (Woody) Woodward, Harvard '46, Columbia University School of Education, M.A., '48, Ph.D., '50, ripped the discs off his head and jumped to his feet. The image vanished from the screen. Woodward panted.
"Hey," said Stanley Weinbaum, director of admissions, "why'd you stop it? It was just getting good."
Woodward looked at the audience which looked at him, then glanced left and right, like a small animal trying to escape a forest fire. There was no escape. He looked back at Professor Wooley, a pleading anguished look on his face.
"As I said," Wooley explained coldly, "stereophonic sound is optional."
Wooley looked up at the crowd again. "This is the Dreamocizer, ladies and gentlemen. Tomorrow, I will be available at my home on campus to answer your questions."
He reached down to the television set and from its back snapped a small plastic box to which the four electrical leads were attached. Then he put his arm around the shoulder of the Oriental girl, and they left the cafeteria through a back door.
Woody Woodward still stood in silent panic before the audience, but no one looked at him. They were busy talking with each other. The room was abuzz with whispered conversations.
Patti Shea got quickly to her feet and, not worrying about her image, lifted her long dress and ran to find a telephone.
Massello nodded at Grassione who whispered instructions to Vince Marino. Marino and Leung got to their feet and ran across the floor, toward the door Dr. Wooley and the girl had just gone through.
Dr. Harold Smith watched all this and thought. He considered, for a flickering moment, the financial value of the Dreamocizer as an entertainment device, then rejected the whole question as being none of his business. But he instantly saw its value in the field of law enforcement and intelligence. No secret could ever be safe again. No one, no matter how well-trained, no matter how close-mouthed could be hooked up to that machine and not reveal what a clever questioner wanted him to reveal.
In full color.
With stereophonic sound an optional extra.
CHAPTER NINE
Revenge was sweet. It had been a long time coming for Dr. William Westhead Wooley, five long years since Lee (Woody) Woodward had gotten the position Wooley had wanted, as head of college affairs. Five years in which Woodward had browbeaten him and denigrated his work. Five years in which Woodward had taken every opportunity to criticize Wooley, to undercut him with university officials, five years of trying to make Wooley a laughing stock on the campus and off.
Wooley understood why Woodward acted that way. It was the age-old conflict between the administrator and the artist, between the technician and the inventor. Woodward had been jealous of Wooley's genius and had tried to drag him down into the intellectual gutter of Woodward's own brain.
Five long years.
And all of it was repaid tonight, in twenty seconds of televised fantasy.
Wooley could not contain a smile. His adopted daughter, Leen Forth, looked at him quizzically.
"What's so funny, Dad?" she said.
He shushed her by pressing his right index finger to her lips.
They sat in a darkened office upstairs from the cafeteria where the Dreamocizer had just been displayed. Downstairs, Wooley could hear the scuffling feet of men who had followed him from the cafeteria, wanting to talk to him, to be the first to try to buy the Dreamocizer from him. Perhaps even to try to steal it.
Unconsciously, he pulled the translator, the small device which was able to convert fantasy thoughts into television images, closer to his chest.
Let them all wait. A night of sleeping on what they had seen and tomorrow the offers would be that much higher, the deal that much sweeter.
Not only money but recognition. To be something, to be someone, the purpose that had directed Dr. William Westhead Wooley's entire life.
He didn't want his name in lights. But he wanted a table at the best restaurants at 7:45 o'clock on Saturday nights and he didn't want to wait. He wanted to be recognized and pointed out on the streets.
He wanted Pearl Bailey to point him out in the audience during curtain calls.
Was that too much to ask?
His wife had never understood and that was why she was now his ex-wife.
She couldn't understand the driven hour after driven hour he had spent working on his invention-"tinkering" she called it. Why couldn't he just be content with being another professor at Edgewood U.? Why couldn't he enjoy his wife and their adopted daughter and their neat little house on campus and be like other people?
And he tried to tell her that teaching a course in "Technology of Cinema and Television" wasn't the way he wanted to spend his life. He tried to tell her about the students' experimental films- all nothing more than a series of arty ways to get their girlfriends to take off their clothes. That was all he saw day after day. Young girls taking off their clothes while the proud filmmaker exclaimed: "I experimented with the light sources."