The clever and compact little microphones and transmitters could spy on all sounds. The polygraph could, in a sense, spy upon the mind itself. And there was a dreadful inevitability about that day in the future when the state of the art obsoleted the business of affixing the sensors to the subject, the day when polygraphs could be taken without the knowledge of the subject. This would be the final and deadly invasion of all privacy.
He could recall the precise incidents which had led to his feeling of uneasiness. He had consented to handle a divorce action for an old friend. It was an area of the law he found distasteful. The old friend showed up with the specialist he had employed. The specialist had traced the wife to the particular motel where she would go with her lover. He had then installed equipment in a particular room and arranged that the couple be given that room. With obvious professional satisfaction, the specialist, in Sam Boylston’s darkened office, had projected his infra-red 8-mm movie film, taken by a camera mounted inside a ventilator grill, and had concurrently played a tape captured by a mike and transmitter affixed to the underside of the motel bed. He heard the voice of the woman whose parties he and Lyd had attended, saying in a moaning and gritty voice, “Now! Now! O God! O beautiful! O beautiful!”
When the film ended, the expert had turned off the tape and opened the blinds. As he rewound tape and film onto the reels, the only sound in the office had been the muffled hacking sobs of his friend sitting there with his face in his hands. Sam had told him to find another attorney, one who would be willing to use this inadmissible evidence as a club to beat down any demand the wife might make for support. The expert was not angry or upset. Merely very very puzzled. Without such brutal and clinical proof, the marriage might have been mended. But once exposed to the fleshy explicits, the husband could not endure the thought of any reconciliation.
The second incident occurred when a small corporation in San Antonio, engaged in a proxy battle, had engaged him to find out how all their strategies became known before they could put them into effect, and what charges they might bring against the raider.
By employing another firm of investigators, a branch office of a national organization which made much of the number of ex-FBI agents they employed, he learned that the internal security had been penetrated in an unusual manner. An expert had imbedded a sensitive and shock-resistant induction mike and transmitter into a ball of sticky putty-colored material the size of an English walnut, and from outside the security fence, at night, had used a sling shot to paste it against an upper panel of one of the third floor windows of the conference room where, every morning, the executive committee of the Board of Directors met. The transmitter had a thirty-six hour life, and the substance in which it was imbedded took about the same amount of time to dry out and fall from the pane. The tape recorder, voice activated so that no attendant was necessary, had been placed along with the receiver in the store room of a diner well within the five-hundred-yard range of transmittal. Realizing the difficulties of taking legal action, Sam had recommended that the executive committee meetings be continued in such a way as to provide information that would seem valid but would mislead the opposition, and that the actual battle plans be arranged in secret meetings off the plant premises.
To protect himself professionally against this ever more sophisticated electronic invasion, Sam had employed the agency to give him a thorough grounding in the advanced techniques, and had also contracted to have his offices “swept” from time to time at random intervals to determine if any devices had been planted therein.
The third incident was far more subjective. It happened after Lydia Jean had been gone from home for two months, living with their boy in Corpus. And one night as he was going to bed, he had the sudden thought of how easy it would be to employ an agency to install phone taps and keep track of her movements and make regular reports. He knew that the thought was not as sudden as it seemed. It had that special flavor of thoughts which lie on the floor of the mind for a long time before emerging into the conscious mind.
It was a wretched idea. If she could not be trusted, there could be little point in yearning for her to come home. If she learned he could do that to her, his chances of ever getting her back were that much less. As he discarded the idea, he realized that ever since he had learned of the new marvels in electronic espionage, he had been gradually accustoming himself to speak less openly to everyone in his own offices and in those he visited. He had thought of it as merely a sensible precaution. If one assumed everything was overheard and recorded, one could cease worrying about what might be safe to say. It made a life more drab, more guarded, more ceremonious. All men of any degree of responsibility had begun to speak for the record, for the unseen audience, and old intimacies had withered because closeness must depend upon the exchange of the innermost thoughts. Orwell, in 1984, had not considered the consequences of such a diffusion. An ever-watchful Big Brother could be outwitted, but a gnat-throng of little brothers could only be endured. Miniaturization of electronic circuitry was effecting that great change in human relationships which, in other cultures, had been created only by using secret arrest, imprisonment and torture to turn brother against brother.
He got behind the wheel of his rental car, but before he could start the engine, another of those strange spasms of grief and loss squeezed and twisted his brain and his heart. Chin on chest, eyes tightly shut, he grasped the steering wheel with such strength it numbed his hands and started a tremor in his arms and shoulders. It was more like a combination of terror and anger than like a sense of loss. During those few moments when it was most intense, the three women of his life merged into a single entity, something which was sister-dead, wife-lost, mother-dead, fading swiftly, leaving him to stand chilled and alone, like a small figure in a barren landscape in an old book.
He came out of it and, as before, found that the spasm had dulled and slowed his mind. Daylight had a cinematic unreality, and he had to reconstruct the schedule he had set himself, putting each errand into its proper place, like stacking tumbled blocks of great weight.
When Sam Boylston returned to the Nassau Harbour Club there was a message for him to call a Mr. Cooper at a number in Austin. Yandell Binns Cooper, known throughout the southwest as Stuff Cooper, father of Carolyn, Bix Kayd’s second wife. Sam returned the call and braced himself for the force and weight of Stuff’s imperative personality.
But after the secretaries had put him through, Cooper sounded vague and mild. And old. “Sam? Sam, boy, I tracked you down through your office. Is it like all the papers and television got it?”
“I’m afraid it is, Mr. Cooper.”
“Damn all! Ever’ one of ’em, eh? All the time I was thinking it was some kind of thing ol’ Bix was pulling. Everybody knowed he was upsot having to let go too much of that Bee-Kay stock a couple years back. What I figured it for, he wanted to turn up missing so as some of his people could buy it in cheap. Thursday it had fell off to eleven something and I picked up some on a hunch. When he calls me back I know what my broker man is going to tell me, he can’t find any takers noplace. Damn over-the-counter stuff. Sam?”