PHOENIX: (Projekt Saucer series)

by W. A. Harbinson

  daily sedation. Do you know what I want?’

  ‘Matron said the stimulator.’

  ‘That’s correct. You’ve used one before?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘On me?’

  ‘No sir. On some others. This is my first time up here.’

  ‘Take your robe off,’ Wilson said.

  The girl nodded, then took hold of the hem of her garment to tug it up her shapely

  legs, off her perfect body, and finally over her head. After letting the garment fall to the floor, she stood there with her hands by her sides and her head slightly lowered. She had long legs, broad hips, a slim waist and firm breasts. Her skin, which had been sun-tanned when she was abducted, was now milky white.

  Seeing her, Wilson wanted her, though he could do little about it because he could no longer obtain an erection without special help. Nevertheless, for the good of his mental health, he required sensual stimulation and the sight of this lovely, naked girl was an aid in obtaining it.

  ‘The stimulator is in there,’ he said, pointing to a closet. ‘Bring it out and proceed.’ Opening the closet door, the naked girl wheeled out a mobile electronic console. Pushing it to the side of the bed, she raised its lid and lay it backward until it formed a tray. Withdrawing vibrating pads and electrodes fixed to cables from inside the console, she laid them side by side on the tray. She then glanced questioningly at Wilson, received his nod of consent, and reached out to untie the belt of his dressing gown. After slowly drawing the robe off his shoulders and down his body, she started when she saw the numerous scars criss-crossing his skin – the visible signs of his many surgical operations.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Wilson reassured her. ‘They don’t hurt anymore.’ Instinctively, he ran his fingers along the most recent scar, which ran across his left breast. This was from an operation to replace his old piezoelectric crystal pacemaker with a new model. Eventually, so he hoped, he would receive a pacemaker with a plutonium power source, weighing practically nothing and lasting much longer, but a successful model had yet to be developed.

  The girl nodded, relieved. ‘You want oil, sir?’

  ‘Yes,’ Wilson said, stretching out on his back on the bed to let her begin. She did so by pouring slightly heated olive oil onto her hands, then rubbing it into his skin, starting with his chest, moving down to his stomach, then sliding her fingers through his pubic hair and around his penis. Once down there, she rubbed the oil in around his scrotum, onto his inner thighs, then around his hips, back over his belly and down again to the genital area. Then, taking his penis in her oil-soaked right hand, she massaged it tenderly, expertly, eventually managing to raise it a little.

  Watching her with his unblinking gaze, taking in the rise and fall of her breasts, the full nipples, the flat belly running down to her blonde pubic hair between perfectly formed, smooth thighs, Wilson recalled how, even in adolescence, though helplessly aroused by sexual thoughts and feelings, he had translated his desire into a set of equations that enabled him to disassociate himself from the fallacy of romantic love and treat sex as a purely physiological necessity, like pissing or shitting. Now, even as his ‘comfort girl’, the abducted young beauty, Clare Collins, released his slight erection from her oil-soaked fingers and, instead, used the electric vibrating pads on the most erogenous parts of his body, he was caught between his human need to surrender to pure sensual feelings and his scientific need to transcend those same feelings and remain in control.

  Yet sensual feelings, he knew, were inextricably linked to mental health, and so, when the comfort girl dabbed paste onto his temples and fixed electrodes to him, he closed his eyes, shutting out the real woman, and let himself surrender to the voluptuous visions created by the stimulator. The Theta rhythms being passed through his brain at a rate of four cycles per second altered his mood and, in conjunction with the comfort girl’s expert massaging, both with her oil-soaked fingers and the exquisitely soft vibrating pads, replaced his icy intellectualism with steadily rising, temporary desire. As the Theta rhythms increased gradually to a rate of seven per second, filling his head with carnal visions worthy of an adolescent, the comfort girl massaged his stomach, loins and inner thighs with the vibrating pads, manipulated his hardening penis with her oil-soaked fingers, and finally, when she sensed that he was coming, covered his penis with her lips and let him come into her mouth. Without sex, or, at least, without penetration, Wilson shuddered, orgasmed, found physical release, and was returned to his intellectual concerns, above distracting desires.

  Opening his eyes, he watched the comfort girl wiping her lips dry with a tissue; she then turn off the vibrating pads and removed the electrodes from his temples. Her naked body now seemed offensive to him and he wanted no part of it.

  ‘Put your robe on immediately,’ he told her, ‘then return the stimulator to the closet and take your leave.’

  ‘Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.’

  Backing away from him, keeping her head bowed, the girl put her robe back on and then wheeled the electronic console back into the closet and hurriedly left the room. Wilson heard her crossing the lounge. He waited until the door of the elevator had opened and closed, then he put on his dressing gown and picked up the phone to order breakfast.

  ‘I’ll have a fruit-and-nut cereal,’ he said, ‘and a glass of white wine. Very dry. Very cold.’

  He had a single glass of dry white wine with every frugal meal of the day, including breakfast. Apart from those three glasses of wine, he did not partake of alcohol. Nor did he eat meat or fish.

  His breakfast was delivered by an Ache Indian who had been lobotomised to render him passive, totally obedient and easily trained. He was dressed in grey coveralls, his feet in soft felt slippers. Knowing better than to speak to Wilson, he simply placed the tray on a table that wheeled over the bed – a steel-framed hospital trolley – and then left the suite as unobtrusively as he had entered it, taking the elevator back down to the slave accommodations located near the base of the mountain.

  When the Indian had departed, Wilson had his breakfast while watching the world news on his satellite-dish TV monitors, flicking repeatedly from one screen to another, one country to another, one news item to another, impatient with the triviality of human beings and their idiotic conflicts, most of which were, in his view, based on primitive notions of patriotism or religion.

  Finishing his breakfast, he pushed the wheeled tray to the end of the bed, then swung his feet to the floor, shucked off his dressing gown, and proceeded to dress in his standard working outfit of black coveralls. Leaving the bedroom, he passed through his spacious, dome-shaped, steel-and-concrete study, which also offered a wonderful view of Antarctica, and took the elevator down to the parapsychological laboratories.

  Like most other experimental areas of the underground colony, the laboratories had been hacked out of the interior of the mountain, with the exposed rock face covered in black pitch. The irregular shape of the walls made the enclosed spaces seem even more cavernous than they were in reality. Light came from the arc lights fixed high above the stone-flagged floors. While being adequately heated by phase-change solar-heat pumps located outside the mountain, the laboratories, with their pitchcovered rock, looked bleak and unwelcoming. Though not quite as hideous as the laboratories where doctors King and Eckhardt kept their Frankenstein’s collection of severed human heads, limbs and internal organs, the parapsychological laboratory now held its fair share of similar horrors. These included electric chairs with buckled straps on the arms and head-braces with microphones, used for experiments that could cause haemorrhaging from the eyes, ears and nose, as well as inducing cardiac arrest or bursting the blood vessels of the brain, leading to madness or death; water tanks used for sensory-deprivation experiments on human subjects; and small, dark cells with leaded-steel doors, used for a combination of other sensory-deprivation experiments and even more cruel experiments with strobe lights flickering at a rate that caused drowsiness, nausea, acute
depression or fear, absolute obedience, uncontrollable violence, and epileptic seizures.

  The most notable of the horrors in this laboratory, however, was the severed head of the unfortunate Marlon Clarke, which, almost thirteen years after Clarke’s abduction, was still functioning in an inhuman way with the aid of a special stereotaxic skullcap and numerous electronic hairpin implants. At one stage Clarke’s severed head, then kept in a class casing with an inner temperature reduced to just above the point of freezing, had been recording dying brain-waves on the EEG machine to which it had been wired. But before those brain-waves died out completely, Dr King had used a combination of electronic implantation and injections of chemicals to revitalise them enough to keep the brain functioning. By that time, Clarke’s brain, though certainly functioning again, was doing so in an insane, chaotic manner; but eventually, when attached by the severed neck to a steel-clamp base containing artificial blood vessels and wired to the still beating human heart in a temperature-controlled glass case nearby, as well as to a pair of amputated hands, it had been able to manipulate the latter in a crude fashion, making the fingers open and close as the hands crawled across the table like large, deranged spiders.

  Since then, further advances had been made and now the jaw, mouth and nose of the severed head had been removed and replaced with a metal prosthetic, the neck of which was attached by a combination of electric wiring and artificial blood vessels to the body of a small Ache Indian whose head and hands had been surgically removed, the former to be replaced with Clarke’s head, the latter to be replaced with myoelectric hands that looked like steel claws.

  Clarke’s eyes, which once had been filled with unutterable incomprehension and dread, were now unseeing and could only be revitalised by the carefully controlled input from the electronic implants of his stereotaxic skullcap. With his metal claws, metal lower-face prosthetic and bizarre metal skullcap, the once normal human being now looked like a monstrous creature from outer space.

  ‘He seems pacified at last,’ Wilson said, speaking fluent Russian, to the head of the laboratory, Dr Nikoloi Tugarinov, world-famous physiologist and former Vice President of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. Listed officially in the Soviet Union as ‘missing’, Tugarinov had actually been abducted by one of Wilson’s saucer teams, ‘indoctrinated’ with a combination of drug therapy and hypnotic suggestion that did not otherwise impair his faculties, and then became a willing – or, rather, helplessly obedient – member of the parapsychological laboratory, working hand-inglove with doctors King and Eckhardt in the adjoining laboratories, where the development of cyborgs and much larger Cybernetic Anthropomorphous Machine Systems, or CAMS, was racing ahead, regardless of the cost in human suffering.

  ‘Yes,’ Tugarinov confirmed, also speaking Russian. ‘As you know, Dr King’s main problem was not in perfecting the psychophysical interaction between head and body, but in somehow retaining the orderly functioning of the severed head – given that it was in a state of delirium, or insanity, caused by disbelief and trauma. Having revitalised the head’s dying brain-waves, which potentially opened the brain again to shock and insanity, we solved the problem by inducing amnesia with a combination of chemicals and electric stimulation. Hideous though Mr Clarke now looks, he has no recollection of himself ever looking any different and, indeed, thinks of himself as being perfectly normal. Mr Clarke is now a prototype cyborg who, when activated, will have no recollections of his former life, will therefore think of his controller as a god, and subsequently will do exactly what he is told.’

  ‘Excellent,’ Wilson said. ‘But his focus seems turned inward at the moment. What’s happening to him?’

  ‘Amazing,’ Dr Tugarinov replied. ‘What we’re finding through the parapsychological experiments relating to cyborg mentality is that being deprived of most of their senses – the loss of a sense of smell because of the lower-face prosthetic; the breathing with lungs created artificially to enable them to withstand the extreme pressures of outer space or the seabed; the inability to speak because of the severing of the vocal cords; and the general loss of their past memories and emotions

  – this particular form of deprivation has heightened their mental processes in another manner, enabling them to communicate telepathically, often over very great distances. Clarke appears to be focused inward at the moment because he’s been programmed to cast his thoughts elsewhere.’

  ‘I’ve developed such talents myself,’ Wilson reminded him, ‘by the ruthless suppression of all redundant emotion and feelings.’

  ‘True – but look!’ Dr Tugarinov pointed up at a row of monitor screens that were tilted just above the encased, severed head of the surgically mutated, partial cyborg, Marlon Clarke. The screens showed a series of different images, cloudy but distinct enough, of barbed wire fences, military installations, aircraft on the ground or in flight, and long-distance views of parabolic radar dishes. They were, as Wilson knew, all located in the United States, mostly military establishments chosen by Clarke’s ‘controller’, Dr Tugarinov, and being telepathically relayed to the TV monitors wired up to the cyborg’s stereotaxic skullcap and keyed into a highly advanced computer system.

  In the West, electronic miniaturisation with an integrated circuit using a single tiny chip of silicon had been demonstrated for the first time the previous year, but Wilson’s scientists, unrestrained in every way, were already well advanced in computer technology and had, in fact, used their first crude silicon chips as part of their secret barter with the United States government.

  ‘I know what you’re showing me,’ Wilson said. ‘But what’s so special this time?’

  ‘Watch closely,’ Tugarinov said, using the computer keyboard to increase or decrease the basic rhythmic patterns of Marlon Clarke’s brain while flooding it with other impulses from the implants of the stereotaxic skullcap. The eyes in the severed head now attached by the neck to a cyborg torso – half man, half machine – suddenly widened, moved left and right above the hideous lower-face metal prosthetic, then seemed to lose focus as the mental impulses thus agitated leaped over time and space. The screens above Clarke’s head, which had previously shown a series of murky monochrome images, now cleared to show what Wilson recognised instantly as, first the exterior, then the interior, of one of his own large flying saucers. This, however, dissolved almost immediately and was replaced by the image of a smaller, less sophisticated saucer ascending vertically from what appeared to be part of the White Sands Proving Ground.

  Surprised, Wilson practically stood on tiptoe in order to check the images more clearly. The flying saucer on the screen wobbled in an ungainly manner from left to right, trying to find its centre of gravity, then it ascended vertically, languidly, above the doors of what were plainly aircraft hangars. Soon it passed off the monitors, leaving only the ghostly image of the aircraft hangars, beyond which was a barbedwire fence and a vast stretch of desert.

  ‘That wasn’t one of our saucers,’ Wilson said. ‘Is that the White Sands Proving Ground?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘So what’s so unusual about this transmission? We’ve managed to project to there before.’

  ‘I didn’t programme Clarke to telepathically leap to that area. I programmed him to track one of our own saucer flights – which you saw – and then he tuned in by himself to that new image – or, to be more precise, someone else tuned in to him.’

  ‘So where are the images coming from?’

  ‘Please observe. I’m going to key in a non-verbal request to Clarke, to identify the source of his present images. Though unable to speak, he can show you on the screens just what’s going on.’

  Tugarinov tapped his request into the computer keyboard, then stepped back and waited. After what seemed like a long time, but was actually less than a minute, a murky image of a city skyline appeared on the monitor screens.

  ‘I recognise it,’ Wilson said. ‘Portland, Maine.’

  Once Wilson had identified the location, Tuga
rinov tapped it into the computer to let the cyborg, Clarke, know that they had received the information. When he had done so, the image changed to an apartment block in the same city, then this dissolved to the inside of an apartment in the same building. A middle-aged woman with black hair and a look of pain on her face was tossing and turning on her bed. There were tablets on her bedside cabinet and she appeared to be having a migraine.

  ‘She’s in a telepathic trance,’ Wilson said.

  ‘Yes. And she’s obviously suffering severe stress. Which suggests that she’s tuned in accidentally to someone else, somewhere else. We have to find out who and where that source is.’

  Tugarinov keyed another request into the keyboard and then watched as Marlon Clarke’s eyes, framed between the metal band of the stereotaxic skullcap and the top of the lower-face prosthetic, turned left and right, desperately searching for something, then rolled upwards and went out of focus again, like the eyes of someone lost in their own thoughts.

  On the monitor screens above, the woman from Maine gradually faded out and was replaced by a repeat of the crude flying saucer ascending above the aircraft hangars of what was clearly a US Air Force or Navy aeronautical establishment in the arid wastelands of the White Sands Proving Ground.

  ‘Back where we started,’ Wilson said impatiently.

  ‘No. Wait.’ Tugarinov tapped a few more instructions into the computer keyboard. ‘He’ll now find the source for us.’

  In less than a minute, the aircraft hangars dissolved and were replaced by the exterior of a clapboard building that had barbed-wire fences beyond it and was guarded by US Army Air Force soldiers. A closer image of the same building showed signs clearly marked ‘US Army Air Force’ and ‘Top Secret’. Those signs dissolved to make way for an image of a man wearing army dungarees sitting on a chair in a booth, wearing earphones and either writing notes or drawing sketches of what he was seeing.

  The telepathic communication was not sharp or close enough to reveal what those drawings showed, but Wilson had no doubts at all.