“Stand clear!” barked Tiger. And the sticks went harmlessly down to drag their running rigging and canvas in the sea.
The three vessels, piled tight into the narrows, were unbothered by any swell. They settled gently, crowding and rending each other as the first two slid little by little off and crushed the third. Tiger’s lugger was already decks awash. The crew, salvaging their belongings and treasure shares, sped over the settling decks of the brig.
The brigantine, aided by the wind, steadied by anchor and kedge, had eased back until she rested near the forepart of the brig. She was almost aground herself but the crews of the three wrecks could cross to her on hastily thrown gangways of planks and within fifteen minutes of the first grounding, all hands were on the brigantine, staring now at the oncoming men-o’-war and at the settling wrecks which blocked, without opening, the narrows.
The jinn must have seen the first grounding and then the second without suspecting that the way was entirely blocked, for such was their angle of view that they would not have seen the complete state of the pass. The vanguard was halfway down the run before she realized it. Thick-wittedly she came on.
With a cool bravado her captain began to furl without haste. A gang of human sailors was driven forward, swarmed around the kedge and struggled aft with it under the stinging whips of the marids. Signal flags snapped into view in the rigging of the flagship. The weigh began to come off the vanguard. Her kedge, properly hawsered, was dropped astern and she came to a steady, slow halt, still in channel, still intact. It must follow that she had to manage to turn herself with capstan and wait for a shift of wind or kedge herself up out of the pass. Behind her, with naval precision, the identical maneuver was carried out ship after ship.
Ten vessels, which had not yet entered the pass and could, by kedging, turn and reach back to sea the way they had come, were stopped by signals. All went smoothly with the eighteen remaining ships in the pass until a first-rater, the El Zidan, by some accident failed to grapple bottom. As eighth in line of battle, she had seven ships between herself and the blockade.
High-sided, sails still exposing great resistance to the freshened wind, the El Zidan crashed into the Sapor and tore out the Sapor’s kedge which, when it caught again and tried to hold two great ships, shattered the hawsers. With the wind pressing them, the El Zidan and the Sapor crushed into the Ramus and the three, gathering weigh and pressed harder by the resistance they offered, swept rapidly down upon the remaining ships and smashed all into the narrows, a tangle of spars and rending hulls and falling rigging. Only two ships of the eight had held their own. The flagship, borne down upon by the mass, was crushed into the barrier, her masts snapping into stumps.
A greedy and high-pitched fire chattered in the rigging of the brigantine. At a range of less than a hundred yards the buckaroons, freshly reminded of the activities of ifrits by the fate of their shipmates who had sought to escape earlier, poured an accurate fire into the wreckage with every small arm to hand. Their targets were ifrits and marids, particularly ifrits, and the targets, gleaming in gold and scarlet, could not well go unremarked. Many an ifrit dragged himself from the water back into the tangle of wreckage only to fall dead with a buckaroon slug in him. Many another raised a sword to indicate the brigantine as a target to some marid sharpshooter he had located and went into the sea before the command could be uttered, shot thoroughly and gleefully by a buckaroon.
The tangle of ships, the disorder of men and the clutter of entwined spars and hemp and canvas was so great that it was not possible to remove every officer by such execution, and a small party was organized out of the wreckage to attempt to bridge the gaps and charge the brigantine. Marids and ifrits and a handful of zealous humans were permitted to reach the coral just astern of the brigantine when a puff of grape wiped the coral clean.
And tangled up and confused in the wreckage was Admiral Tombo, rewarded by such command for his valor at Balou Bay. A dozen times death had whispered close to Tombo; a score of times he had sought to organize a means of attacking the brig which towered above the wrecks. And then death whispered closer.
Sliding an inch of sharp steel into Tombo’s back as the admiral stood on a tilted quarterdeck, Tiger said, “Be quiet now, Admiral, dear. One word of alarm and you’re dead.” One word of alarm would have been lost in the screaming din and Tombo twisted around to see Tiger, water dripping from him after his swim, teeth set in a hopeful grin. Tombo succumbed.
Two hours later, in the cabin of the brigantine, Tiger received the complete and unconditional surrender of all ships and men in Admiral Tombo’s command.
The haggard ifrit, as thoroughly frightened of Tiger as if that gentleman were Sulayman himself, went passively into captivity. Tiger had gained some four thousand human sailors and considerable armament.
But the victory was short. The Terror, uninformed of the action until she had seen it happen so that if it failed the main buckaroon vessel and Wanna would escape, sent back a sailing cutter as soon as she was near the end of the channel through the shoals.
A popeyed Ryan was told what had happened and why all these strange sailors were cheering Tiger for their deliverance. The telling was done in the cabin of the brigantine and Tiger was anxious to start up to the deck and pass a signal to the intact men-o’-war.
“You can spare that,” said Ryan. “It’s evening and the wind’s shifted. Your birds have flown. You got six out of twenty-eight and that’s wonderful, but twenty-two sail are gathered up there on the north end of the passage.”
“I’ve got their surrender right here!” said Tiger.
“You ain’t got the surrender of Arif-Emir,” said Ryan. “And he’s right there with ’em with fifteen more men-o’-war. They’re peaceful. Go see for yourself from the truck.”
Tiger knew Ryan. He didn’t have to look. “Fish out all pulling boats from the wrecks. Cram them with men and weapons. We’re making a run for Denaise and with luck we’ll be there before two days are out.”
“Where do you think those fleets will head?” said Ryan. “Denaise! And they may make it before us!”
“We’ve got to try,” said Tiger. “Lively! Let’s go!”
Chapter Twelve
Trapped!
Jan woke with a strange tension in him. For a moment he hung between slumber and wakefulness, a sound lingering in his ears—the combined sibilance of water rushing under a keel, the whistle of wind in the standing rigging, the slither of steering cables. He felt for an instant the rise and buck of a vessel striking urgently through the seas and then the sound and the feeling faded from him and he saw overhead the dirty white of the sanitarium ceiling. He tried to orient himself back to where he had been. He knew he had been elsewhere but a moment before and now he was here but he could not recall. He sat up rubbing his eyes and yawning.
A new sound was coming to him now. It was an automatic, emotionless screaming, “Let me out, let me out. I’m caught, I’m trapped. Let me out.” The prefrontal lobotomy case across the hall, the case which had not been a success, had begun his daily rote.
Jan shuddered. He recognized his whereabouts, he knew what day this was. By evening he might also be screaming some nonsense or, at best, sitting with a dead man’s stare, finished and done.
An optimism came to him. Alice might have gotten a writ of habeas corpus or some such thing. It was early—and then he saw the slanting rays of the sun and saw how little they slanted from the bars. It was almost noon. The institution had let him sleep, saving a breakfast.
He pulled on his clothes and while in the act he heard them coming up the hall. He looked around. There must be some weapon he could use, some way he could defend himself against this mockery of modern science. But the sanitarium was not in the habit of making things easy for a rebellion.
But they did not stop before his door. Instead they halted across the way where the prefrontal lobotomy case screamed monotonously. Dr. Dyhard and two student neurosurgeons looked interestedly at the case
.
“If he had been a classic schizophrenic,” Dyhard said, “the operation would have been more spectacular for he would have been far more insane.”
“What was his psychosis?” said an intern.
“Why, as for that,” said Dyhard clearing his throat, for the chant seemed to make him very nervous, “he demonstrated some very strange reactions. It was most difficult to classify him, most difficult. He was clearly mad, though. He saw two waiters in the inkblot test.”
“Ah!” said both interns. “Two waiters!”
“Bowing!” said Dyhard for emphasis.
“Ah!” said the interns.
“What was his classification?” said an intern.
“Very difficult, very difficult. He came to us suffering from chronic alcoholism. Family very wealthy, very. And—”
“What psychosis?” persisted the intern.
“Very neurotic,” said Dyhard wisely. “Drank.”
“Ah,” said the interns.
“And we gave him the best we could offer. Family very anxious to have it done swiftly. No time for Freudian treatment.”
“No Freud?” said an intern.
“Would have been long and difficult and we’re so pressed for time. Besides, he had been psychoanalyzed eight times. He came to us too late. And so we gave him the best we could offer—”
Two male nurses came, one of them carrying a straitjacket, the other carrying a stretcher. They brushed by the trio at the door, entered the cell and with expert twists soon had the madman prone, bound and ready to be taken away.
“You gentlemen,” said Dyhard, “will be interested in this. The topectomy is very new. It was imported, you know. From the very smartest clinics in Europe.”
“That was the transorbital leukotomy,” said an intern, apologetically coughing behind his hand.
“Ah, yes. Of course,” said Dyhard. “But you’ll be interested in this topectomy. The instrument is not unlike an apple-corer. First one takes out a round section of skull about two centimeters or so in diameter. Then one selectively reaches into the brain and carves out a section.”
They had begun to walk down the hall where the victim lay upon a wheeled table now.
“We’ve been able to do some wonderful research with topectomies,” continued Dyhard. “One can take out the part of the brain which inverts images. He can take out the part which translates sound into thought. He can remove the portion which registers physical feelings. Very useful operation. I am sure that by removing a certain section from the patient here we can stop his screaming very easily.”
“Ah,” said the interns and the trio followed after the table and out of sight.
Jan had no thought of breakfast. He waited dismally, hopelessly. According to what he had been taught in school, the prefrontal lobes were that portion of the brain which distinguished man from the lower animals. In elementary psychology, much stress had been placed on this by the instructor, a kindly old professor who held the remarkable tenet that much was yet to be learned about the mind; that psychology, if a science, was, in 1936 at least, a very inexact one at best and that someday someone might resolve the riddle of human behavior. He had laid considerable stress upon the fact that the two lobes behind the forehead, at the front of the brain, were much larger in man than any other animal and that they probably contained that ability to rationalize which made man a rational being. What would happen, Jan thought anxiously, when his prefrontals were sliced to ribbons by Dyhard? It seemed logical that insanity was irrationality. Why seek to cure it by damaging beyond hope the only part of the mind which made man rational? What strange insanity was this which stalked the society wherein the most elevated “healers of the mind” slashed and stabbed and withered with electricity the only portion of the mind where sanity lived? Could it be that some of those “healers” through long association with insanity were, themselves, no longer sane?
He shuddered as he waited through the hours. The sun slanted down into the west and his cell was but dimly lighted when they came again into the hall. The two nurses were wheeling a something on a table. They deposited it in the cell across the way and ran their cart to Jan’s cell door.
Jan thought of resistance and then recalled the straitjacket. He was too slight to fight them. His wits racing wildly, thinking hard for the last time he might have the chance, he submitted in the hope of a future moment better suited to an all-out effort.
They saw he was docile and let him sit on the cart.
The thing they had brought back, Jan had supposed to be still under an anesthetic. But as he passed the door he saw that the drugs had worn off. The thing would need no further drugs now, no alcohol, nothing. It was awake, staring vacantly at the ceiling. Tractable now, it obviously was, and it would so remain until the mercy of death came to it. The operation had been an entire success.
Jan clenched the edge of the table. The nurses were watchful but they had brawn and there was no place to run.
Evidently Dyhard, after the morning’s operation, had gone about his affairs, for he entered the hall now dressed in his street clothes. He saw Jan being wheeled by and Dyhard’s eyes kindled with suspicion.
“It won’t do you any good to plot,” said Dyhard. “Watch him closely now,” he admonished the nurses. And walking at a respectful distance behind the table, followed on into the operating room. He saw that Jan was laid out on the table and then started for the washroom to remove his street clothes.
The instant Dyhard was through the swinging doors, Jan measured the situation and executed the action.
“I can pay you twenty thousand dollars apiece if you will get me out of here!” he said urgently to the male nurses. “I’m Jan Palmer, head of Bering Steam—”
“Pleased to meetcha. I’m Rockefeller,” said the shorter nurse.
“Lie down!” said the other.
Jan appeared to lie meekly back. But the moment the shorter one leaned over to fix the straps, Jan exploded. He chopped a short rabbit punch to the base of the man’s skull and then, throwing himself forward, struck the other with both feet. That one sailed backwards. Jan reached the door and flung it open. He was about to dart through when the guard, approaching at that moment, enfolded him in a crushing grip and bore him struggling back. The nurses were on him in a moment and the three carried him to the table.
Swearing, the shorter nurse drew a straitjacket from a closet and they crammed Jan into it. They laced his arms around behind his back in a hugging position and then they tightened the laces so hard that it was all Jan could do to breathe. They slammed him to the table and brought up the web straps, three inches wide, and buckled their huge buckles tight. Jan looked at the ceiling light, dazed with lack of breath and numb from the tightness of the straps. The shorter nurse put his head in a viselike set of prongs. The other seized a razor and shaved the hair off one side of Jan’s head.
They were satisfied now, their hostilities properly abreacted. And the shorter one went about laying out the sterilized instruments. Jan could see and hear them as they were lined in a glittering row on a tray. There was a device like a brace and bit which was obviously used to drill a circle out of the skull. There were long wire loops. There was a long, sharp knife and another instrument like a buttonhook.
Dyhard came out, putting on his rubber gloves. The shorter nurse tied a face mask on him and Dyhard looked with grim eyes at Jan. They were the kind of eyes one might expect in a Roman audience or in a father accustomed to beat his child or an executioner bent on doing his public duty.
An apparatus was wheeled to the head of the table and an oxygen valve was turned out.
“Please,” begged Jan. “Please don’t. Please don’t. I—”
They slammed a cone over his face. He tried to hold his breath and could not. He heard the rattle of instruments on the tray and the click-click of the brace-and-bit affair being tested and extended to drill the proper-sized hole in the bone. There was a pass across the shaved portion of his head and it went
cold with alcohol.
He was unable to hold his breath longer. He expelled it and, sucking back, took nitrous oxide into his lungs. The cone on his face seemed to spin. His reactive mind would record and remember all this and the last glimmer of his analytical mind told him that he was probably in his last moment of sanity. After this—
The point of the bit began to screw into his bone. His scalp jerked away from it. He tried to keep from taking another breath but he could not. The cone spun faster and faster before him. The bit was finding a hold in his skull and the worm was going deeper. The extension blade began to sweep a circle.
Suddenly Jan was not looking at the cone. He was staring at an overhead hurricane lamp and he heard a plunging ship. His skull hurt damnably and he felt wrath sweep through him. Suddenly there was the cone again and the agony of the biting bit. But as suddenly he flexed his arms.
There was the crack and pop of webbing, the rip of canvas jacketing and the snap of laces which went like thread.
Tiger, strong and mighty, snatched at the auger and twisted it out of his skull! He sent the instrument crashing into Dyhard’s face. With a leap he came off the table, leaving the frayed straps behind, and with a sudden snatch had in his hands the heads of the nurses. He smashed them together and with a vicious raise of his knees, now right, now left, he wrecked his assailants for days to come.
The guard at the door had leaped ahead to help. He tried now to leap back but Tiger-Jan caught him, whirled him into the air and sent him crashing through a steel-net-reinforced window.
Whirling, Tiger grabbed Dyhard who, in a rush, had sought to escape.
“I’m caught! I’m trapped!” screamed Dyhard. “Let me go! Let me go!”
Slaves of Sleep & the Masters of Sleep Page 27