In The House Of Secret Enemies

Dark Hole on a Silent Planet

Dr. Peter Barnum's craggy, fifty-year-old face was slightly flushed, and I thought I knew why: Barnum didn't like moonlighting college professors or celebrities, and he felt I belonged in both categories. I didn't know how he felt about dwarfs and I didn't care, but I was curious as to what he was doing in my downtown office on a Saturday morning. I took the hand he extended. It felt moist.

"Dr. Frederickson," Barnum said, "do you have a few moments?"

My services not being that much in demand, I invited him to sit down. Barnum perched on the edge of the chair, as if he were waiting for someone to call him to a speaker's platform.

"I'd like to hire you, Dr. Frederickson," Barnum said, rushing. "I mean, as a private detective."

"You didn't have to come down here. You could have seen me at the university."

"I know," he said, waving his hand in the air as though I'd made a preposterous suggestion. "I prefer it this way. You see, what I have to say must remain in the strictest confidence."

For a change, the air conditioning in the building was working. Still, the few wisps of blond hair that ringed the bald dome of Barnum's head were damp with sweat. A vein throbbed under his ear. I decided to take a little umbrage at his attitude.

"Everything my clients tell me is taken in confidence. It's the way I work."

"But you haven't said whether or not you'll help me."

"You haven't said what it is you want me to help you with. Until you do, I can't commit myself." That wasn't exactly true, but I hoped it would force the issue.

The university president finally passed a hand over his eyes as if trying to erase a bad vision, then leaned back in the chair. "I'm sorry," he said after a few moments. "I've been rude. I didn't want to risk having us seen talking to each other at great length at the university. It might have seemed strange."

"Strange to whom?"

Slowly, Barnum raised his eyes to mine. "I would like you to investigate one of your colleagues, Dr. Vincent Smathers."

I let out a low, mental whistle. I was beginning to understand Barnum's penchant for secrecy. Vincent Smathers was the university's most recent prize catch, an experimental psychologist who was a Nobel Prize winner. University presidents don't normally make a habit of investigating their Nobel Prize winners. The usual procedure is to create a specially endowed $100,000 chair, which was what had been done for Smathers. "What's the problem?"

Barnum shrugged his shoulders. "I don't know," he said at last. "Perhaps I'm being overly suspicious."

"Suspicious about what?"

"Dr. Smathers brought with him an assistant, Dr. Chiang Kee. Dr. Kee, in turn, brought two assistants with him, also Chinese. Quite frankly, those two men don't look like people with university backgrounds."

"Neither do I."

Barnum flushed. "I suppose you're implying-"

"I'm not implying anything," I said. I was feeling a little abrasive. "I'm saying that you, better than anybody else, should know that you can't judge a man by his looks. I'm sure Smathers knows what he's doing. I just don't want you to waste the university's money."

Barnum thought about that for a moment. "I suppose I am on edge," he said distantly. "Ever since they found that man's body on the campus-"

"I have a brother who's a detective in the New York Police Department, so I'm able to keep track of these things. Nobody has accused anybody at the university of killing him, if that's what you're worried about. He was fresh off the Bowery."

"Yes, but there's still the question of what a Bowery derelict was doing on the campus."

"This is New York," I said, as if that explained everything. "Do you think there's some connection between Smathers and the killing?"

"Oh, no!" Barnum said quickly. "But the university has come under increasing scrutiny, simply because the body was found there. I have to make sure that everything. . appears as it should."

"Besides the Chinese, what else doesn't appear as it should?"

Barnum took a deep breath. "There is the matter of the hundred-thousand-dollar yearly endowment Dr. Smathers receives for the academic chair he holds. While it's true that a man of Dr. Smathers' proven administrative abilities is not normally expected to-"

He was filibustering against his own thoughts. I cut him short. "You don't know what's happening to the money."

Barnum looked relieved. "That's right," he said. The rest seemed to come easier. "I believe you know Mr. Haley in the English Department?"

I said I did. Fred Haley and I had shared a few cups of coffee together.

"Mr. Haley swears to me that he's seen Dr. Kee before, in Korea. As you probably know, Mr. Haley was a POW. He tells me that Dr. Kee-who was using a different name then-was an enemy interrogator, in charge of the brainwashing program to which all of the POWs were subjected. He had a reputation for brutality, psychological and physical."

I mulled that over in my mind. Fred Haley was not a man given to wild accusations. At least he was no more paranoid than anybody else who has to live and/or work in New York.

"It wouldn't be the first time a former enemy had come to work in the United States," I said. "Often it works to our benefit, as in the case of Von Braun. He changed his name to keep people from rattling the skeletons in his closet. It's possible everything's on the up-and-up."

"Yes, it's possible. But since the good name of the university is involved, don't you feel it's worth some investigation?"

I said I thought it was. We discussed the mundane subject of fees and I told him I'd look into it.

I checked into my university office, did some paperwork, then locked up and headed across the campus toward Marten Hall, an older building which houses the Psychology Department.

It soon became apparent that one doesn't just walk in and strike up a conversation with a Nobel Prize winner; Smathers' security system would have shamed the nearest missile-tracking base. His first line of defense was his secretary, a 250-pound, hawk-faced woman who had somehow escaped the last pro football draft. The nameplate on her desk said Mrs. Pfatt. It really did.

She stopped torturing her typewriter long enough for me to introduce myself as one of Smathers' university colleagues, a criminologist who wanted to consult with Dr. Smathers on a question of criminal psychology, if you please.

I was told Dr. Smathers had no time for consultations. The typewriter groaned and clacked.

"In that case, perhaps I could speak with Dr. Kee."

I was told Dr. Kee had no time for consultations.

I left Mrs. Pfatt and walked down a long corridor lined on both sides with classrooms. A few undergraduate classes were in session, filled with sleepy-looking freshmen. Everything looked distressingly in order. Most of the students in the building recognized me and waved. I smiled and waved back.

Marten Hall has four floors, and I assumed Smathers had his private offices and research labs on the top one. I worked my way up the floors as casually as possible. The third floor was mostly offices and laboratories sparsely populated on a Saturday morning with a few graduate researchers. I headed toward the stairway at the end of the corridor, stopped and stared. Somebody had installed a heavy steel door across the entrance to the stairs. NO ADMITTANCE-AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY was stenciled in red paint across the door.

Less money should have been spent on material and more on the lock; I got out my set of skeleton keys and hit on the third try. I pushed the door open. A narrow flight of stairs snaked up and twisted to the left, out of sight. I was beginning to understand where much of the first year's $100,000 had gone; the inside of the door, as well as the walls and ceiling of the staircase, had been soundproofed. It seemed a curious expense for a Psychology Department; mental processes just don't make that much noise.

I climbed the stairs and found myself at the end of a long corridor, expensively refinished with glassed-in offices on one side and closed doors on the other. I pushed one of the doors and it swung open. I stepped in, closed the door behind me and turned on the lights.

It was a laboratory, large, heavily soundproofed. There was an array of monitoring machines, computers and other sophisticated equipment lined up against the walls. All had wires leading to a large, water-filled tank in one corner of the lab. The tank looked like an aquarium designed to hold a baby whale. It was at least ten feet long, three feet wide and four feet deep. Electrode nodes were built into the glass walls of the tank, along with black rubber straps that now floated on the surface.

I poked around the machines for a while, but couldn't figure out what they were supposed to do. I turned off the lights, went out of the lab and walked quietly down the corridor, glancing in the other rooms with the closed doors. They were all labs, similar to the one in which I had been. The offices on my left were all empty-except for the last one.

The Chinese caught me out of the corner of his eye. He was the original Captain Flash, out of his chair and standing in front of me in a lot less time than it would have taken Superman to find a phone booth. I should have listened to Barnum's sermonette on first impressions; the man in front of me looked like a refugee from some tong war. Somebody had tried to use his head as a whetstone; the whole right side of his face was a sheet of white, rippled scar tissue. The right eye was stitched shut, unseeing, but the other eye was perfectly good, and it was obvious that he had all the moves. He was crouched now, perfectly balanced on the balls of his feet, his calloused hands rigid and extended in front of him like knife blades.

I smiled and gave him a cheery good morning. He must have taken it as a Chinese insult, or maybe he just didn't like dwarfs. He grabbed my right shoulder and threw me over his hip. I bounced off the wall and fell to the floor, where I stayed, eyes half-closed, watching him. He came forward in the same crouch, his hands in front of him. This guy could kill.

I waited until he was just above me, then snapped my left leg out, catching him on the side of the knee with the instep of my shoe. The joint snapped. His eyes flecked with pain and he toppled backward. He didn't stay down for long. Somehow he managed to get up on his one good leg and, dragging the smashed one behind him, he came toward me.

The karate had surprised him, but that was finished. I had a black belt, but so, obviously, did he. This time he meant to kill.

His arm darted out like a snake's tongue, the deadly knuckle of his middle finger aiming for my forehead. An ear-splitting scream deafened me as I ducked. The missile that was his hand went over my head and smashed into the wall behind me. I came up with my head into his solar plexus. He grunted as he rose into the air, then screamed when he came down on the bad leg. He crumpled over on his side.

The man was finished, staring up at me with hatred and unspeakable pain forming a second skin over his eye. I suddenly felt sick to my stomach. I went back down the stairs and headed for my office.

It didn't take Smathers long to get there. He burst through the office door, long brown hair flowing behind him, his face the color of chalk. He barely managed to bring himself to a halt in front of my desk. He stood there, trembling with rage, literally speechless. A tall, thin man with pale, exhausted eyes, he leaned on the desk and finally managed to speak.

"What were you doing in my private laboratories?"

"I got lost looking for the men's room."

Smathers' rage was probably more justified than my sarcasm, but he looked fairly ridiculous. His tongue worked its way back and forth across his lips. "You, sir, are a liar!"

"Okay, Dr. Smathers," I said testily. "The reason is quite simple. I was looking for you or Dr. Kee. I wanted to consult on a professional matter."

"My secretary told you that neither Dr. Kee nor I have time for such matters."

"I don't like doing business through other people's secretaries."

"The door to the laboratories was locked!"

"Not when I got there, it wasn't," I lied. "Talk to your keeper of the keys; the door was open when I walked by, so I just went up. The next thing I knew I was face to face with Fu Manchu."

"Do you realize that that man may never walk properly again?"

"He was trying to kill me. If you or your associates want to press charges, go ahead. We'll take it up with the president. Barnum might like to find out what's so important to you that you feel the need to keep it locked behind two inches of steel."

That backed him up. He took his hands off the top of my desk and straightened up, making a conscious effort to control himself. "I don't think there's any need for that," he said. "We're both professionals. I have no desire to get you into trouble and, quite frankly, I can't spare the time from my work that bringing charges against you would entail."

"Just what would that work be?" I asked casually.

"Surely you can appreciate the fact that I don't care to discuss my private affairs with you."

"Sorry, I was just making conversation. I couldn't help but be curious as to what kind of research requires a human watchdog like the one that came after me."

Smathers made a nervous gesture with his hand. "Quite frankly, Dr. Kee and I are involved in research into some of the more bizarre human mental aberrations. On occasion, we have potentially dangerous people on that floor. Tse Tsu thought you might have been one of them. He overreacted in simply doing his job."

"What are those water tanks for?"

Gates clanged shut behind Smathers' eyes. "You've been spying!"

"Not at all. I just happened to be looking around for you and noticed the tanks. Naturally, I was curious."

"You will not come up there again, Dr. Frederickson."

"Interesting man, this colleague of yours. Did you know that Dr. Kee used to be an officer in the Peoples' Liberation Army in North Korea? I understand he was a brainwashing specialist."

Smathers flushed. "That's slanderous. Who told you this?"

"It's just a rumor. Haven't you heard it?"

"I wouldn't pay any attention to such a story."

"Why not? The war's over."

Smathers was either tired of talking or didn't like the turn the conversation had taken. He gave me a long, hard stare. "Please don't interfere in my affairs anymore, Dr. Frederickson."

I wanted to talk some more, but Smathers had already turned and was walking out of my office. He slammed the door behind him. I picked up the phone and dialed Barnum's office. After running a gauntlet of secretaries, I finally got to hear the Big Man himself.

"This is Frederickson," I said. I considered telling him about the incident-and the laboratories-in Marten Hall, then decided against it. "I have a nagging feeling that you left out parts of the story."

"I can't imagine what you're talking about." Barnum's voice was arch, restrained. I'd hurt his dignity.

"What did Smathers win his Nobel Prize for?"

"He did pioneering work in sensory deprivation. He's the top authority in his field."

"Sensory deprivation; that's artificially taking away all a man's senses-sight, sound, smell, touch, taste?"

"That's correct."

"To what end?"

"No end. That's what the experimentation was all about: to determine the effects. NASA was interested in it for a while because of its possible relation to interplanetary space travel, but they gave it up when it became apparent that it was too dangerous for the volunteers involved."

I remembered Smathers' comment about dangerous people in his laboratories. I'd assumed he'd been making excuses for his Chinese gorilla. Now I wondered; but I wasn't ready to accuse him of anything, at least not yet.

"Where did he come from?"

"Platte Institute. Near Boston."

"I know where it is. How did he come here? Platte takes good care of its prize winners. It's hard for me to believe they wouldn't have matched any offer you made."

I took the long silence at the other end of the line as an answer of sorts, a justification for the nagging itch at the back of my mind.

"There's some question about it, isn't there?" I pressed.

"There's no question that Dr. Smathers is a Nobel Prize winner," Barnum said. He sounded irritated. "They're not exactly a dime a dozen, you know."

"So you don't ask questions when one wants to leave one place and come to another?"

"No," Barnum said after a long pause. "But he came with the highest recommendations."

"I'm sure he did. Now, what you want to know is how you came to get a Nobel Prize winner at what amounts to bargain basement prices."

Again, a long pause, then: "Have you found out anything?"

"I'll get back to you."

Barnum was, after all, my client, and I wasn't quite sure why I'd held back on him. Perhaps it was because Smathers was a colleague, and scientists-especially brilliant ones-take enough nonsense from administrators as it is. I had been nosing around some very expensive equipment in an area that had clearly been off-limits to me. I wanted to do some more digging before I started telling tales.

I went to the Liberal Arts building and looked around for Fred Haley. I wanted some more information on the other, nonscholarly side of Dr. Kee. It would have to wait; Haley was away for the weekend.

The walk wasn't entirely wasted, as I managed to latch onto Jim Larkin, a former student of mine who was now a graduate fellow in experimental psychology. He accepted my offer of a cup of coffee and we went downstairs to the Student Union. I gradually steered the conversation around to Dr. Vincent Smathers.

"Strange man," Jim said. Coming from him, it was hard to tell whether this was a complaint or a compliment. Probably it was neither. Jim was a young man with an almost fanatic devotion to the notion of live and let live. "All the graduate fellows were assured before he came here that we'd have access to him, that he wouldn't be just a high-priced name for the university to print in its alumni newsletter. However. ."

"I take it that it didn't work out that way?"

"Smathers showed up at exactly one of our graduate seminars, and that was it."

"Interesting. What do you suppose he does with his time?"

"I haven't the slightest idea," Jim said. A braless co-ed, who shouldn't have been, had entered the cafeteria and was bobbing along the tables. I made a stab at getting Jim's attention back.

"What happens to a man when he undergoes sensory deprivation?"

Jim turned back to me. "That's Dr. Smathers' field."

"I know."

"Well, simply put, he goes out of his mind. To be more precise, his mind goes out of him. You take away all a man's sensory landmarks and he becomes like a baby, with no past, present, or future, at least while he's undergoing the deprivation. He becomes very suggestible."

"You mean he's brainwashed?"

Jim made a face. "That's an old-fashioned term."

"Uh-huh. Is it like brainwashing?"

"I suppose so."

"How do you go about this sensory deprivation?"

"The first thing you need is a controlled medium in which to support the man's body."

"Like water?"

"Yeah, water's good. What are you getting at, Dr. Frederickson?"

"Just curious," I said with a straight face. "What do you think of Smathers' Chinese helpers?"

Jim shrugged noncommittally. "I'll tell you this," he said after some thought, "I think there's some strange business going on in that department."

"What kind of strange business?"

"You heard about that guy who was shot on campus? The old Bowery bum?"

I said I had.

"I saw him in Marten Hall one day. He was walking with one of Dr. Smathers' assistants, one of those Chinese guys."

Garth, as usual, was chin-deep in paperwork. My brother, all six-feet-plus of him, was sitting behind a desk which might have fit me, merrily clacking away at a typewriter, vintage nineteenth century. His face was grim; his face was always grim when he was doing paperwork. He didn't bother looking up.

"Look what the ants dragged in. What's happening, Mongo?"

"I just wanted to drop in and say hello to my brother."

"You're here to pump information," Garth said evenly. He hit the wrong key and swore.

"There was an old man killed on the university campus a few weeks back. Shot."

Garth frowned. "I don't recall it."

"You probably had fifty murders the same day. In any case, I'd like a look at the file."

"Why?"

"C'mon, Garth. I'm on a fishing expedition."

Garth leaned back in his chair and stared at me. His eyes were hard. "You're beginning to take our relationship for granted, Mongo. This is a police station, a public agency, and you're a private citizen. You can't just walk in here and ask to look at a confidential file." He paused. Something moved behind his eyes. "You got a lead on this thing?"

"I'm groping around in the dark, Garth. Maybe yes, maybe no. I don't want to talk about it, not yet. And I happen to know that that precious file is buried somewhere. The New York Police Department doesn't have time to investigate the death of some Bowery bum. Sure, you did an autopsy because it's required by law in a murder case, but it's never going to be investigated because you just don't have the manpower. It's not going to hurt to let me look at the file."

Garth's eyes flashed and the bald spot on top of his head reddened. "You've got a lot of lip today, brother."

"It's the truth, and you know it. Besides, you owe me a couple. Let me see the file, Garth."

Garth hesitated a moment, then got up and disappeared into another room. He returned a few moments later with the file. I thanked him, but Garth said nothing. He went back to his typing and I went over to a corner with the file.

The dead man's name was Bayard T. Manning, and his only known address had been a flophouse on the Bowery. Everything was covered in three short paragraphs. The most interesting part was the results of the autopsy, covered in the last paragraph. Manning had been a dedicated alcoholic; cirrhosis of the liver had set in years before, and his brain had been just about pickled. The curious thing was that he'd been off the juice for at least a month, according to the pathologist's report. Not a drop. Bone dry. The texture of his skin indicated that he'd spent a great deal of time in water just before his death. He'd been holding a transistor tube in his hand when he was killed.

Also, his eardrums had been punctured.

Some legwork had been done; a cursory investigation of his usual haunts had turned up the fact that he hadn't been seen in a month.

I had a pretty good idea where he'd been.

I put in a restless Sunday reading the New York Times and trying to watch the Jets. My file on the case was building, spinning a web around Vincent Smathers. If the web got any tighter, Smathers was going to be eaten by some very nasty spiders, the kind that hatch in a man's mind when he has to spend the rest of his life in prison.

That bothered me. Why should a Nobel Prize winner jeopardize his whole reputation and future by enmeshing himself in a set of circumstances that could destroy him? It was easy to pin any possible blame on the shadowy Kee, but Kee was Smathers' responsibility, assuming a crime had been committed. In fact, I wanted to make very sure I knew what I was talking about before I brought in the police or turned Smathers' future over to a pedantic, professional fund-raiser like Barnum.

I made it to half-time in the ball game, then went to the phone and called Fred Haley's home on the outside chance that he might have returned early. There was no answer. I had nothing better to do, so I drove out to the suburban town where Haley lived. I'd wait for him.

Haley's car was in the driveway of his house. I parked my car behind his, went up the flagstone walk in front of the house and knocked at the door. I waited thirty seconds, then knocked again. There was still no answer.

Something cold crawled up my back. I went around to the back of the house and knocked on that door. I got the same response. I got out my skeleton keys and let myself in.

Fred Haley hadn't gone anywhere that weekend. His body lay on the floor of his study, very stiff with rigor mortis. I guessed he'd been dead at least two days. The odd angle of his head told me he'd died of a broken neck.

I spent the next two hours answering questions, avoiding speculation on possible connections between Haley's death and his knowledge of Chiang Kee's background. It could very well be that Haley had been killed by a burglar he'd surprised. The ransacked house pointed to it-except that Fred Haley, as far as I knew, was no slouch at defending himself; and he was supposed to have left on a Friday afternoon, which was a strange time for a burglar to be prowling around.

That much I told the police. The detective in charge dutifully noted my opinions in his notebook and went about his business; Garth showed up later and backed me into a corner. I got him off my back by promising to come in to see him with everything I knew, after I made one more stop. That didn't do much to pacify him, but it gave me time to catch one of the shuttle flights out of Kennedy Airport to Boston.

I knew it was useless trying to talk to any of the officials at Platte. If they talked to me at all, they'd have nothing but glowing reports for Smathers. That was the way the academic game was played; screw up, and you were asked to resign; resign, and nobody has anything but good things to say about you.

I went to the best source of information I could find, the janitor who worked in the Psychology Department.

I landed back at Kennedy at one the next afternoon and got my car out of the parking lot. It was time to report to Garth, and then to Barnum to warn him about the approaching storm. Instead, I put in a call to Garth's office and left a message for him to meet me at my university office in an hour. Then I drove back to the campus and parked in front of Marten Hall.

Mrs. Pfatt was in her usual good form; she looked as though she'd gained weight during her day off. "I told you before that Dr. Smathers does not see visitors."

"He'll see me this time," I said pointedly. "You tell him I just came back from Platte Institute."

Mrs. Pfatt bridled a bit, but she finally called Smathers on the intercom. Her face went through a series of changes as she talked to him. She hung up the phone and stared at me as though I'd just performed a miracle.

"Dr. Smathers will see you, Dr. Frederickson," she said with a new ring of respect in her voice. "He's in his laboratories upstairs. He'd like you to come up."

I went up. The steel door was unlocked. I opened it and went up the soundproofed stairway. Smathers was in the first office. I made a point of checking to make sure that the other offices and labs were empty, then went in to see him.

"You know," he said without looking at me.

"I know that you got pressured to leave Platte because you insisted on performing experiments that had been legally and medically forbidden to you."

"Why are you doing this to me?"

I showed him a photostat of my license. "Besides being a criminology professor, I'm also a private detective. I was hired to investigate you."

"Who hired you?"

"Sorry. I won't tell you that."

The fire in Smathers' eyes went out as quickly as it had flared. "They were fools," he said hollowly. "I'm surrounded by fools.

I'm on the verge of a very important discovery-a profound medical breakthrough-and they will not leave me alone."

"You've discovered a cure for the common cold?"

"Don't mock me, Dr. Frederickson. I can cure drug addiction and alcoholism, along with a number of other things that plague modern man."

"You do all this by puncturing a man's eardrums?"

His eyes dropped. "You know about that, too?"

"I can guess that Bayard T. Manning was the subject for some of your experiments. Willingly or unwillingly, I don't know. I do know he ended up dead."

"Manning was paid," Smathers said. "You see, I have discovered a cure for alcoholism. Alcoholism, like drug addiction, is primarily a psychological problem, despite the physical changes that take place as a result of dependence. The problem is one of the mind. I can literally remake a mind, erase those problems-"

"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.

The torment ended simply, even ludicrously, with a mouthful of water. My first reaction was that they'd decided to scrap the whole brainwashing business and just drown me. I didn't care; anything was better than the terrible silence. Then somebody was holding my head above the surface, ripping off the black rubber mask. The light hit my eyes like razor blades. I screwed them shut and turned my head away. Hands reached down and loosened the straps on my arms and legs. Needles were pulled from my body. Still keeping my eyes closed, I planted my feet on the bottom of the tank and pushed, propelling myself over the side. I landed hard on my back and the breath whistled out of me. The hands reached down and grabbed me under the armpits.

"Get up, Dr. Frederickson!"

I opened my eyes a crack and the blurred image of Smathers flooded in. He pulled me to my feet and I promptly fell down again. After being held absolutely motionless for twenty-four hours, my legs weren't working, but now my eyes were growing accustomed to the light.

"What's the matter? You have a change of heart?" I asked Smathers.

He was white. His flesh trembled.

"I … I must have been out of my mind. I don't know what … I just couldn't let him do this to you. Can you walk?"

"No. Did you have anything to do with the killings of Manning and Haley?"

"No. I swear to you I knew nothing about them."

"But you let Kee talk you into this."

"I saw everything I'd worked for crumbling around me. If you only knew how close I am to controlling the reactions! Dr. Kee convinced me that you could be made to forget everything, perhaps even be made to work for us."

"You were willing to work with a murderer?"

Smathers dropped his eyes. "My work is. . very important to me. It is possible that many men's lives could be salvaged."

"At the cost of turning me into a vegetable. Forget it, pal. You're no Albert Schweitzer. The first thing you have to learn is that one man's life is the most important thing; one life, many lives, it's all the same thing. It wouldn't have worked anyway. My brother would have eventually tracked me down. He might have been too late, but he'd have been here. And my brother isn't exactly used to hearing me talk like a robot." My legs were beginning to feel slightly more solid than a plate of mashed potatoes. I tried getting up on them. They still weren't ready to carry me to a world record in the hundred-yard dash, but they worked.

I looked around for something to cover my nakedness, didn't see anything, decided that modesty was not an appropriate concern at the moment. "Let's get out of here."

Smathers grabbed my arm and I shook his hand off. I felt almost normal. We started toward the door. A huge electronic monitoring machine off to the right blinked, as if welcoming me back to the real world at last.

I should have taken it as a warning. Kee suddenly appeared in the door. Behind him was the healthy half of the Tong Twins. Kee didn't take long to size up the situation; his eyes flicked back and forth between Smathers and me. Then he made a sound in his throat and put his hand back in the direction of his helper; the helper put a.38 in it. Kee flicked his wrist and fired a bullet through Smathers' forehead. Smathers flipped backward and landed on the floor with the sound that only heavy sacks and dead men make. The bullet continued on through his skull and shattered the tank behind him. A few hundred gallons of water roared out through the ruptured glass and hit me full in the back, sweeping me across the floor and bringing me up hard against the monitor. I cringed, waiting for the next bullet. It didn't come.

Kee had other plans for me-like framing me for Smathers' murder. In a way, it made sense; if he could knock me unconscious and place the gun in my hand, it might just confuse the issue long enough for him to slip back over whatever border he'd crossed in the first place. At least Kee seemed to have it figured that way. He was half smiling as he advanced on me. Brother Tong was waiting in back of him, his hands on his hips like a referee.

In my present condition I was no match for either of them.

Still, it was time to do something-like jump up on the monitor and pull some wires. That's what I did.

The machine whirred and popped, sending up clouds of black, acrid smoke. The live wires in my hand sputtered like Fourth of July sparklers. I spun a mental prayer wheel, something concerning proper insulation in the machine I was standing on, then threw the wires into the water on the floor.

Kee had good reflexes; he leaped at the same time I dropped the wires and managed to land on a dry spot near the wall at the opposite side of the room. Brother Tong wasn't so lucky. He tried walking on water and didn't get far. The scream was burned out of his throat by a few hundred thousand volts of electricity. Already dead, he danced around for a few seconds, then fell on his face. His body gradually stopped twitching as the electricity locked his joints and muscles. There was a smell in the air like fried pork.

The gun had fallen in the middle of the floor, out of everybody's reach. That was fine with me, because Kee had problems of his own; the water was gradually working its way over to his tiny island of dry wood. He was backed up against the wall, his arms stretched out to either side of him, as though trying to claw holes in the plaster. I sat down, crossed my legs and smiled at him.

"Win a few, lose a few," I said.

For the first time, emotion showed in his eyes. There was fear, and there was hate, a lot of hate. I shouldn't have goaded him; it was too inspirational. The main power switch was a good ten feet away, but I'd already seen the strength he had in his legs. He gave a tremendous yell, leaped straight up in the air, planted his feet against the wall and dove for the power switch.

I knew he was going to make it even before he did, and the gun was closer to him than it was to me. His fingertips hit the control switch, plunging the floor into darkness. I heard his body hit the water and I hit the floor at the same time. I raced down the corridor, toward the stairs. I could hear Kee splashing behind me, and there was no doubt in my mind that he had the gun. I caromed off the wall at the end of the corridor, scampered down the stairs and hit the steel door.

Naturally, it was locked. There wasn't going to be any naked dwarf running through the sacred corridors of Marten Hall.

I spun and crouched in the darkness, trying to make myself as small a target as possible. The frame business was finished; there were one too many bodies to explain. That meant Kee would want me out of the way as quickly and efficiently as possible. It was going to be like shooting a dwarf in a barrel.

I held my breath and waited for the crash of the gun. All I heard was a dull click. The watered fouled the firing mechanism of the gun. I waited.

I could hear Kee descending the stairs slowly. The job I'd done on his two assistants had given him some respect, but that wasn't enough. Even if I hadn't spent the last twenty-four hours under water, I'd have been no match for Kee. On the other hand, I couldn't just sit and wait for him to beat my brains out.

I waited a few seconds, then lunged upward, sweeping my hand in the general direction where I hoped his ankle would be. I got lucky. I caught his ankle and yanked. He went backward, landing on his back on the stairs. There was no way of getting by him; both his hands were deadly weapons, and he'd have broken every bone in my body by the time I got halfway past. But I had the angle on his midsection. I stiffened my fingers and drove them as hard as I could into his groin. That took the power out of a kick that would have killed me. His heel bounced off my rib cage, and I felt something snap inside.

Kee was doubled over, his shape just barely visible in the darkness. I could go past him now, but that would just mean playing cat and mouse up in the darkness of the laboratories, and that was a game I knew I eventually had to lose. I had to attack.

Trying to ignore the pain in my side, and hoping that the sudden movement wouldn't pierce any of my machinery, I moved around in front of him and clapped my hands over both his ears. He screamed and half rose, which was exactly the position for which I was waiting. He was off balance now, his concentration gone. I grabbed a handful of hair and yanked. Kee plummeted down into the darkness. He came up hard against the steel door, and there was a single, sharp sound. I didn't have to go down to know that Kee was dead, his neck broken.

I tasted blood and I was getting dizzy. I sat down on a step and braced my arm against my broken rib. I stared down into the darkness. Eventually someone would open the door. It would probably be Garth, and he would probably want to know what I was doing sitting naked in the darkness with a dead body.