by Jerry
The only trouble was that I had a few little hidden tricks that they’d never get around. If they started fiddling too much with my mind, a nice little psychosomatic heart condition would suddenly manifest itself. I’d be dead before they could do anything about it. Oh, I was expendable, all right.
“Do you want to say anything before we start?” the colonel asked.
“No.” I didn’t see any reason for giving them information they didn’t earn.
“O.K.” He stood up, and so did the mutton-chopper. “I’m sorry we have to do this, Gifford. It’ll be hard on you, but you’ll be in good condition inside of six or eight months. So long.”
They walked out and carefully locked the door behind them.
I sat up for the first time and looked around. I didn’t know where I was; in an hour, I could have been taken a long ways away from the city.
I hadn’t been, though. The engraving on the bed said:
DELLFIELD SANATORIUM
I was on Riverside Drive, less than eight blocks from the rendezvous spot.
I walked over to the window and looked out. I could see the roof of the tenth level about eight floors beneath me. The window itself was a heavy sheet of transite welded into the wall. There was a polarizer control to the left to shut out the light, but there was no way to open the window. The door was sealed, too. When a patient got violent, they could pump gas in through the ventilators without getting it into the corridor.
They’d taken all my armament away, and, incidentally, washed off the thin plastic film on my hands and face. I didn’t look so old any more. I walked over to the mirror in the wall, another sheet of transite with a reflecting back, and looked at myself. I was a sad-looking sight. The white hair was all scraggly, the whiskers were ditto, and my face looked worried. Small wonder.
I sat back down on the bed and started to think.
It must have been a good two hours later when the therapist came in. She entered by herself, but I noticed that the colonel was standing outside the door.
She was in her mid-thirties, a calm-faced, determined-looking woman. She started off with the usual questions.
“You have been told you are under some form of hypnotic compulsion. Do you consciously believe this?” I told her I did. There was no sense in resisting.
“Do you have any conscious memory of the process?”
“No.”
“Do you have any conscious knowledge of the identity of the therapist?”
I didn’t and told her so. She asked a dozen other questions, all standard build-up. When she was through, I tried to ask her a couple of questions, but she cut me off and walked out of the room before I could more than open my yap.
The whole sanatorium was, and probably had been for a long time, in the pay of Quintell or Grendon—or, possibly, one of the other Immortals. It had been here for years, a neat little spy setup nestled deep in the heart of Rowley’s territory.
Leaving the hospital without outside help was strictly out. I’d seen the inside of these places before, and I had a healthy respect for their impregnability. An unarmed man was in to stay.
Still, I decided that since something had to be done, something would be done.
My major worry was the question of whether or not the room was monitored. There was a single scanner pickup in the ceiling with a fairly narrow angle lens in it. That was interesting. It was enclosed in an unbreakable transite hemisphere and was geared to look around the room for the patient. But it was not robot controlled. There was evidently a nurse or therapist at the other end who checked on the patients every so often.
But how often?
From the window I could see the big, old-fashioned twelve-hour clock on the Barton Building. I used that to time the monitoring. The scanner was aimed at the bed. That meant it had looked at me last when I was on the bed. I walked over to the other side of the room and watched the scanner without looking at it directly.
It was nearly three quarters of an hour later that the little eye swiveled around the room and came to a halt on me. I ignored it for about thirty seconds, then walked deliberately across the room. The eye didn’t follow.
Fine. This was an old-fashioned hospital; I had known that much. Evidently there hadn’t been any new equipment installed in thirty years. Whoever operated the scanner simply looked around to see what the patient was doing and then went on to the next one. Hi ho.
I watched the scanner for the rest of the afternoon, timing it. Every hour at about four minutes after the hour. It was nice to know.
They brought me my dinner at 1830. I watched the scanner, but there was no special activity before they opened the door.
They simply swung the door outward; one man stood with a stun gun, ready for any funny business, while another brought in the food.
At 2130, the lights went out, except for a small lamp over the bed. That was fine; it meant that the scanner probably wasn’t equipped for infrared. If I stayed in bed like a good boy, that one small light was all they’d need. If not, they turned on the main lights again.
I didn’t assume that the watching would be regular, every hour, as it had been during the day. Plots are usually hatched at night, so it’s best to keep a closer watch then. Their only mistake was that they were going to watch me. And that was perfectly O.K. as far as I was concerned.
I lay in bed until 2204. Sure enough, the scanner turned around and looked at me. I waited a couple of minutes and then got up as though to get a drink at the wash basin. The scanner didn’t follow, so I went to work.
I pulled a light blanket off my bed and stuffed a corner of it into the basin’s drain, letting the rest of it trail to the floor. Then I turned the water on and went back to bed.
It didn’t take long for the basin to fill and overflow. It climbed over the edge and ran silently down the blanket to the floor.
Filling the room would take hours, but I didn’t dare go to sleep. I’d have to wake up before dawn, and I wasn’t sure I could do that. It was even harder to lay quietly and pretend I was asleep, but I fought it by counting fifty and then turning over violently to wake myself again. If anyone was watching, they would simply think I was restless.
I needn’t have bothered. I dropped off—sound asleep. The next thing I knew, I was gagging. I almost drowned; the water had come up to bed level and had flowed into my mouth. I shot up in bed, coughing and spitting.
Fully awake, I moved fast. I pulled off the other blanket and tied it around the pickup in the ceiling. Then I got off the bed and waded in waist-deep water to the door. I grabbed a good hold on the metal dresser and waited.
It must have been all of half an hour before the lights came on. A voice came from the speaker: “Have you tampered with the TV pickup?”
“Huh? Wuzzat?” I said, trying to sound sleepy. “No. I haven’t done anything.”
“We are coming in. Stand back from the door or you will be shot.”
I had no intention of being that close to the door.
When the attendant opened the door, it slammed him in the face as a good many tons of water cascaded onto him. There were two armed men with him, but they both went down in the flood, coughing and gurgling.
Judging very carefully, I let go the dresser and let the swirling water carry me into the hall. I had been prepared and I knew what I was doing; the guards didn’t. By turning a little, I managed to hit one of them who was trying to get up and get his stunner into action. He went over, and I got the stunner.
It only lasted a few seconds. The water had been deep in the confines of the little room, but when allowed to expand into the hall, it merely made the floor wet.
I dispatched the guards with the stunner and ran for the nurse’s desk, which, I knew, was just around the corner, near the elevators. I aimed quickly and let the nurse have it; he fell over, and I was at the desk before he had finished collapsing.
I grabbed the phone. There wouldn’t be much time now.
I dialed. I said: “This is G
ifford. I’m in Dellfield Sanatorium, Room 1808.”
That was all I needed. I tossed the stunner into the water that trickled slowly toward the elevators and walked back toward my room with my hands up.
I’ll say this for the staff at Dellfield; they don’t get sore when a patient tries to escape. When five more guards came down the hall, they saw my raised hands and simply herded me into the room. Then they watched me until the colonel came.
“Well,” he said, looking things over.
“Well. Neat. Very neat. Have to remember that one. Didn’t do much good, though. Did it? Got out of the room, couldn’t get downstairs. Elevators don’t come up.”
I shrugged. “Can’t blame me for trying.”
The colonel grinned for the first time. “I don’t. Hate a man who’d give up—at any time.” He lit a cigarette, his gun still not wavering. “Call didn’t do you any good, either. This is a hospital. Patients have reached phones before. Robot identifies patient, refuses to relay call. Tough.”
I didn’t say anything or look anything; no use letting him think he had touched me.
The colonel shrugged. “All right. Strap him.”
The attendants were efficient about it. They changed the wet bedclothes and strapped me in. I couldn’t move my head far enough to see my hands.
The colonel looked me over and nodded. “You may get out of this. O.K. by me if you try. Next time, though, we’ll give you a spinal freeze.”
He left and the door clicked shut.
Well, I’d had my fun; it was out of my hands now. I decided I might as well get some sleep.
I didn’t hear any commotion, of course; the room was soundproof. The next thing I knew, there was a Decon robot standing in the open door. It rolled over to the bed.
“Can you get up?”
These Decontamination robots aren’t stupid, by any means.
“No,” I said. “Cut these straps.”
A big pair of nippers came out and began scissoring through the plastic webbing with ease. When the job was through, the Decon opened up the safety chamber in its body.
“Get in.”
I didn’t argue; the Decon had a stun gun pointed at me.
That was the last I saw of Dellfield Sanatorium, but I had a pretty good idea of what had happened. The Decontamination Squad is called in when something goes wrong with an atomic generator. The Lodge had simply turned in a phony report that there was generator trouble at Dellfield. Nothing to it.
I had seen Decons go to work before; they’re smart, efficient, and quick. Each one has a small chamber inside it, radiation shielded to carry humans out of contaminated areas. They’re small and crowded, but I didn’t mind. It was better than conking out from a psychosomatic heart ailment when the therapists started to fiddle with me.
I smelled something sweetish then, and I realized I was getting a dose of gas. I went by-by.
When I woke up again, I was sick. I’d been hit with a stun beam yesterday and gassed today. I felt as though I was wasting all my life sleeping. I could still smell the gas.
No. It wasn’t gas. The odor was definitely different. I. turned my head and looked around. I was in the lounge of Senator Anthony Rowley’s Lodge. On the floor. And next to me was Senator Anthony Rowley.
I crawled away from him, and then I was really sick.
I managed to get to the bathroom. It was a good twenty minutes before I worked up nerve enough to come out again. Rowley had moved, all right. He had pulled himself all of six feet from the spot where I had shot him.
My hunch had been right.
The senator’s dead hand was still holding down the programming button on the control panel he had dragged himself to. The robot had gone on protecting the senator because it thought—as it was supposed to—that the senator was still alive as long as he was holding the ORDERS circuit open.
I leaned over and spoke into the microphone. “I will take a flitter from the roof. I want guidance and protection from here to the city. There, I will take over manual control. When I do, you will immediately pull all dampers on your generator.
“Recheck.”
The robot dutifully repeated the orders.
After that, everything was simple. I took the flitter to the rendezvous spot, was picked up, and, twenty minutes after I left the Lodge, I was in the Director’s office.
He kicked in the hypnoes, and when I came out of it, my arm was strapped down while a surgeon took out the Gifford ID plate.
The Director of the FBI looked at me, grinning. “You took your time, son.”
“What’s the news?”
His grin widened. “You played hob with everything. The Lodge held off all investigation forces for thirty-odd hours after reporting Rowley’s death. The Sector Police couldn’t come anywhere near it.
“Meanwhile, funny things have happened. Robot in Groverton kills a man. Medic guard shoots down eighteen men coming out of a burning house. Decon Squad invades Dellfield when there’s nothing wrong with the generator.
“Now all hell has busted loose. The Lodge went up in a flare of radiation an hour ago, and since then all robot services in the city have gone phooey. It looks to the citizens as though the senator had an illegal hand in too many pies. They’re suspicious.
“Good work, boy.”
“Thanks,” I said, trying to keep from looking at my arm, where the doctor was peeling back flesh.
The Director lifted a white eyebrow. “Something?”
I looked at the wall. “I’m just burned up, that’s all. Not at you; at the whole mess. How did a nasty slug like Rowley get elected in the first place? And what right did he have to stay in such an important job?”
“I know,” the Director said somberly. “And that’s our job. Immortality is something the human race isn’t ready for yet. The masses can’t handle it, and the individual can’t handle it. And, since we can’t get rid of them legally, we have to do it this way. Assassination. But it can’t be done overnight.”
“You’ve handled immortality,” I pointed out.
“Have I?” he asked softly. “No. No, son. I haven’t; I’m using it the same way they are. For power. The Federal government doesn’t have any power any more. I have it.
“I’m using it in a different way, granted. Once there were over a hundred Immortals. Last week there were six. Today there are five. One by one, over the years, we have picked them off, and they are never replaced. The rest simply gobble up the territory and the power and split it between them rather than let a newcomer get into their tight little circle.
“But I’m just as dictatorial in my way as they are in theirs. And when the status quo is broken, and civilization begins to go ahead again, I’ll have to die with the rest of them.
“But never mind that. What about you? I got most of the story from you under the hypno. That was a beautiful piece of deduction.”
I took the cigarette he offered me and took a deep lungful of smoke. “How else could it be? The robot was trying to capture me. But also it was trying to keep anyone else from killing me. As a matter of fact, it passed up several chances to get me in order to keep others from killing me.
“It had to be the senator’s last order. The old boy had lived so long that he still wasn’t convinced he was dying. So he gave one last order to the robot:
‘Get Gifford back here—ALIVE!’
“And then there was the queer fact that the robot never reported that the senator was dead, but kept right on defending the Lodge as though he were alive. That could only mean that the ORDERS circuits were still open. As long as they were, the robot thought the senator was still alive.
“So the only way I could get out of the mess was to let the Lodge take me. I knew the phone at Dellfield would connect me with the Lodge—at least indirectly. I called it and waited.
“Then, when I started giving orders, the Lodge accepted me as the senator. That was all there was to it.” The Director nodded. “A good job, son. A good job.”
&n
bsp; THE END
THE MUTILANTS
R.C. Wingfield
How far should we go in overcoming human physical limitations? This far?
I WENT along to the Establishment for Research into Human Limitations in Flight—more commonly referred to as E.R.H.L.F.—at the suggestion of Doc Lestrange. The Doc has been my adviser for years, and my physician since I was as high as a duck’s instep and twice as grubby, and for that reason—and because I was curious about E.R.H.L.F.—I polished my leaky shoes and shaved with a little more care than usual and went along for a job.
Oh yes, I should also mention that I was out of a job. And since I am strong on essential honesty today, there is the little matter of nostalgic music. Nostalgic music being, in my case, not the sound of Ava Rhonda’s voice or the strains of an oscillaphonic reproduction of “Ascent to Freedom,” but simply the straining shriek of a Superjet streaking down the runway.
At the time I had no idea what Doc’s status was at the Establishment, but I did know that he had specialised in brain surgery back in the early fifties, and that he had maintained a position of especial distinction in a London hospital until, in 1968, a mental black-out during a delicate operation cost the patient his life and the Doc his appointment. His resignation was a formality followed by temporary obscurity. Then, during the early part of the Decade of Destruction, he himself underwent a brain operation of a type only twice before attempted—and which had resulted in complete insanity on both occasions.
Doc was fortunate; the operation succeeded and he was pronounced fit to resume his work. In ’71 the declaration of war—if seven minutes warning, followed by mass H-bomb raids can be regarded as a “declaration”—dragged him back into circulation as Assistant Chief Brain Butcher, or something of the sort, at Air Ministry, where overstressed and cracked-up aircrews were taken to pieces, examined, and put together again twice nightly and a matinee on Saturdays.