Raft sat, unable to summon the needed movement, able to do anything but stand up.
‘I believe you’ve seen something of the range of hypno-drugs; now you’re meeting one. It is in the chair seat, volatilised by body warmth and taken in directly through the pores. This is normal clinical procedure and clients expect it, but the sensation of being under command while nominally in control of all faculties can be schizophrenic unless explained to the patient. Now you needn’t worry further about it. We’ll go into the question of why you consider yourself a cold man.’
Raft watched him sullenly. Grierson nodded over his head to Playfair, enmeshed behind him in unidentifiable leads and panels and machines.
A buzz, a click, and the projection screen blazed with immediately riveting colour. Geometrical shapes leapt in a coruscation of alternate green and red, green receding to some central emerald infinity, red leaping from the screen to assault. Brilliance shocked his retinae; vision petrified, then commenced agonisingly to move in unpractised directions. The squares shook, split, reformed in interlocking triangles which moved even more confusingly to and away, simultaneity defying sight to fix the action.
His wrists were caressed and he glanced down – with a distinct wrenching of the gaze – to see his forearms locked to the chair.
‘Look up!’ His head jerked. ‘You must not look away from the screen.’
Thereafter he could not.
The patterns changed continually, hypnotic in a soporific sense other than the effect of the drug. He heard his voice remark from position above and outside his level of interest, ‘We called this op art. It was out of date.’
‘The hell it was!’
Playfair spoke for the first time. ‘This one, I think.’ ‘This one’ was a marvel of orange and indigo pentacles, interacting most absorbingly in a complication of relationships he could not determine. It was necessary to solve the pattern if only to rest his painful, tearfilled eyes.
Grierson, alongside but in another continuum, said, ‘You may blink.’
He blinked furiously; vision cleared a little; pain eased; the pentacles related mockingly as he failed to analyse the pattern.
‘Did you love your father?’
Something in him chuckled, Not old Oedipus! and forgot it at once because consciousness was pinned ferociously to colour and line. He said what he said thereafter, not knowing and not remembering.
‘No.’
‘Did he love you?’
‘No.’
‘Did he hate you?’
‘No.’
‘What did he feel for you? Be explicit.’
Very nearly he understood the pattern when, most unfairly, it changed and he had to begin again. His voice chattered about its own affairs.
‘No feeling. Annie wanted a son; Annie got a son. Her husband could afford it, so why not? Or a swimming pool or a new lounge suite? As long as it didn’t bother him. He was busy. He proposed a system for recognising prime numbers of any magnitude; give him a fifty-digit number and he could tell you in a couple of seconds. You have to be busy to do that sort of thing.’
‘What was your feeling for him?’
High, contemptuous laugh. ‘He wasn’t there.’
‘Do you mean your parents were not—’ Grierson was uncertain of the old marital terms ‘—did not live together?’
‘No, no. For me he wasn’t there. Like furniture; you don’t notice it.’
Grierson said, not sure he made sense in the terms of a lost era. ‘So, effectively, you had no father.’
‘Oh, I did, I did.’
‘Explain that.’
‘John was my father. When I was ten John became my father.’
‘Who was John?’
‘Doctor Heathcote.’
‘He loved you like a father?’ What, he wondered, did loving like a father involve? He supposed he would find out some day.
‘I think so.’ A correction. ‘I thought so.’
‘Aren’t you sure?’
‘He changed.’
‘He stopped being father?’
A strange, muddled sound. Wrong question, Grierson decided; too many possible meanings. He substituted, ‘Did he stop loving you?’
‘No. Yes.’
Grierson said aloud, ‘Wrong question again. What can he mean? Um – when did he stop loving you?’
‘He didn’t stop. He changed.’ Something down in the dark seemed to have sorted itself out.
‘When did he change?’
‘When I grew beautiful.’
The ill-made face was worth a smile. ‘Why did he change?’
‘He just wanted me for his work. He wasn’t father.’
Grierson exclaimed to Playfair, ‘The bastard’s crying! Little boy all lost and alone. You loved him very much, didn’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘But you stopped loving him when he stopped being father, is that it?’
‘Yes. No.’
‘Damn! Did you feel the same as before?’
‘No.’
‘Tell me how you felt?’
Raft’s voice became lighter, younger. ‘I went cold.’ With a slight whine of resentment he corrected himself. ‘I went hard.’ His face worked; childish petulance surfaced more clearly. ‘I stopped inside. I stopped.’
Grierson doubted if he would get that much more clearly; Raft was regressing and taking clarity of expression with him, becoming limited to the verbal ability of the remembered age.
‘Do you mean you stopped feeling?’ Meaningless stuttering told him he had fumbled again; with inspiration he asked, ‘Do you mean you made yourself stop?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
‘So as not to get hurt.’
‘But deep down did you love him just the same, underneath the part where you stopped?’
Raft pouted and twisted his neck but seemed unable to answer. Perhaps the question, involving abstract visualisation, did not chime with the child’s equivalent abstraction. He tried more directly, ‘Did you still think of him as father?’
‘Yes.’
The single word dripped in the laboratory air, infinitely alone and dreary. Grierson let out a breath. ‘First signpost. There’s room here for a split loyalty.’
Playfair said, ‘Poor little bugger.’
Grierson cried out from his own depths, ‘Why pity him? How many of us knew our parents? Do we have to be self-pitying slobs?’
Playfair’s voice swirled in Raft’s ears without touching his brain. ‘He wanted what all kids had in his day but it went rotten on him. That’s worse than never having.’
Grierson spat savagely, ‘I know, I know,’ furious at the betrayal of a self he had not known existed.
(Disturbed, Campion pondered the little scene. He had never imagined himself essentially deprived by the lack of known parents, yet he felt an obscure but definite pleasure in the idea of possessing a visible, touchable grandparent, a representative of an existence extending beyond the self. It was a feeling not for on-the-spot assimilation. It occurred to him, with a fresh warning of instability in the universe, that all Security men of operational status – those who actually participated in manipulation of public affairs, not laboratory or clerical Techs like Playfair – were group-raised. It might have a bearing on facets of Security psychology. It was a disquieting thought, that there actually might be special facets of Security psychology making them not completely as other men are.)
Grierson asked, ‘Did you love your mother?’
Raft screamed.
Grierson muttered, ‘Whee-oo, man! Now there was a kick.’ He asked, ‘Didn’t she love you?’
The answer came half-strangled, ‘She hated me.’
But Annie had wanted— ‘Was her name Annie?’
‘Yes.’
‘But she wanted a baby.’
‘Only a little one. One to play with. Not to grow up.’
‘So when you became big she turned against you. Is that what happened?’
His face cleared, relaxed, miraculously erased lines and took on false, bright smoothness; his expression faded to the vacuity of repose, of youthfulness before character was imprinted. His quivering mouth produced a shrill discord as adult vocal chords screeched at the vanished treble of the child.
‘She hated me she didn’t want me she hit me always!’
Large, trembling tears.
Playfair’s mouth wrinkled in distaste for a woman of a dead era but Grierson asked in unbroken continuity, ‘And did you hate her?’
The face transformed itself from within, dredging darkness until adult evil peered out. The cracked voice shrieked and bellowed together, ‘I’ll kill the bitch!’
Grierson nodded. ‘Forty-two years too late. It’s a wonder he never did it, with all that pre-teenage buildup. Perhaps he did, symbolically, but there’s no point in chasing it; we’ve got enough. At least we know why Commander Raft is lonely and his women are good for a slap of sex and nothing more. I suppose part of it is guilt for hating his parents; kids of that day had to love their parents whether the so-and-sos were worth it or not. Well, here we go: One, self-hate stemming from family conflict and aggravated by a fancied rejection by Heathcote when he became too interested in his work to keep on playing Daddy to a grown man. And finally unloaded on the clone as being the alternative selves for whom Heathcote rejected him. If that rejection ever occurred outside Raft’s mind. Two, most of this awareness trouble is psychosomatic; there’s probably a real physical basis, which we don’t know how to touch, but it’s magnified by the self-hate syndrome which led to the revulsion he felt at the first-consciousness contact. Three, removing the reactions should be no problem but the fundamental awareness will remain, probably without the upsetting side effects. How does that sound, Tech?’
‘Reasonable,’ Playfair agreed, ‘from what we have. But we’d better get on with Colley’s questions first; we don’t want to take out anything bearing on that area.’
‘I almost forgot his dreary list.’ He fumbled in his pocket for Colley’s memo. ‘Commander Raft, why do you seek to assist Security with its problems when you despise the civilisation it works for?’
The change of question provenance snapped Raft back to the present as if a switch had closed. ‘Not despise. I don’t like it, I don’t understand it properly, but I don’t despise it.’ Some remnant of old training emerged in sententiousness: ‘It is never safe to despise anything or any person.’
‘Safety hints for star travellers. Serves me right for clumsiness; I presented two subjects at once and he took the second. Commander, are you willing to help Security as an adviser?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
‘To help Ian.’
‘Ian Campion?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
Raft had a surprise for him, delivered in a soft, yearning tone so uncharacteristic as to be caricature.
‘Because he is my beloved son in whom I am well pleased.’
And having said it he laughed like a maniac.
Grierson groaned, ‘Here we go again, down into the worms’ nest.’
Playfair interrupted, ‘That’s a quotation from somewhere. I’ve heard it before. Cultists, I think.’
‘Trace it through the library.’
Campion’s voice issued from the wall speaker. ‘Tell them to check the New Testament; Gospel of St Matthew I think, but don’t hold me to it. The meaning’s fairly plain but you’d better get a gloss for symbolic undertones.’ And if they wondered was he privately a cultist – a most un-Security-like activity – then let them; he had read through most of the New Testament with curiosity, bafflement and some retention of marvellous phrases.
The Central Library produced a cultist who could gloss from memory and did so in considerable and frustrating detail, leaving an ocean of possible interpretations. Grierson and Playfair handed their puzzlement to the one-way screen.
‘No,’ Campion said. ‘I have my ideas but you tell me.’
Grierson said carefully, ‘The word “son” doesn’t have to be taken literally; it is probably a general reference to consanguinity.’
‘Agreed.’
‘So the importance is not in the quotation but in the background circumstances.’
‘Go on.’
‘To be loved by an omnipotent god may be flattering but there’s the reverse consideration: who may suffer his wrath? At the moment it would be anyone who attempts to injure you, which means whoever is behind this Heathcote business, since they have already tried. Full marks to Colley’s intuition; the man is a latent bomb.’
‘But he’s our bomb, or mine if you like.’
Grierson pondered. ‘Canberra located his pre-Columbus file and there’s no history of incipient paranoia, so we can take it that was an eruption from pretty deep levels. We could go down after it but it would take time and preparation and a higher level specialist than myself.’
‘Not now, but we’ll keep it in mind. Do you think he really imagines he’s God or a god?’
‘We all do, but on those levels of the pre-conscious it doesn’t do much harm. Harm begins when other functions of the mind become pre-empted.’
‘Then there’s no point in fiddling with drama, is there?’
The rest was not difficult, merely time consuming.
An angry Campion confronted Grierson from his bed in the private ward.
‘Did you have to go at him like a butcher? Was it necessary to rip him up with your bare hands?’
Grierson had his own anger to purge and no fear of Campion; he was not a Security doctor but responsible only to the Psychiatric Board. ‘If I’d had my way the session would not have been held, but Colley leaned on me in the name of political urgency and I gave way in the name of smooth relations. Another time I’ll lean back. Between you both you put me in the position of having to dig like an amateur, and I don’t like it.’
Under the mask of bandage Campion’s eyes could still snap with his voice. ‘Are you blaming Security?’
‘Who else? Raft demanded an excision job that fortunately turned out to be simple but could have been beyond the limits of our knowledge, and in a fit of pity you let him have it when it wouldn’t have mattered a curse if his guts had churned for another week or two while we sifted evidence. Colley’s questions were pressured by personal malice as much as necessity and the answers will help nobody significantly. Don’t you people realise that it’s bad practice, bloody near unethical, to probe personality factors without prior investigation and discussion? Oh, you know, but it’s always a “special case”. All you’ve got for your rush tactics is an obscure quotation and a badly disturbed man.’
‘Disturbed?’ Campion was harsh. ‘What do you mean?’
Grierson’s aggression retreated in an onset of unease; he was, after all, a very young man in the presence of a very powerful one. He admitted, ‘I don’t know, but there may be personality changes.’
‘Serious?’
‘Too early to say; it may amount to very little. The thing is that we were working without preparation and in the area of family relations, where we haven’t enough practical experience – how many old-type families do you know of? – to appreciate the danger points. A couple of routine gambits went right to the gates of his personal hells and you might have noticed I didn’t stay there a second longer than I had to. So there may be side effects.’
‘How so? People have no recall after question.’
Grierson regarded him pensively. ‘So we say and it’s mostly true, but there’s a whole region of investigation here which we’re still only opening up. We theorise that in a case like Raft’s, where the questions moved into sensitive areas without cushioning, there can be a sort of pre-conscious shock. Pre-conscious material is forced into higher levels of consciousness; repressed characteristics are released; the ego alter
s its attitudes in accordance with the new material and perhaps a personality shift occurs. I can’t give a prognosis; we don’t know enough. You’ll just have to keep an eye on him. What comes up from the cellars isn’t normally pretty.’
He felt like adding, ‘And serves the lot of you bloody well right for insisting when we wanted no part of it.’ But Campion could report him to the Board for insolence and he had enough trouble on his plate with more depressed kids coming to light each day.
Raft woke in bed. Playfair sat at the foot, packing miniature instruments into a pouch. ‘Awake? Good. I can’t detect any physical hangover. Let me know if you suffer headaches or stomach upset in the next couple of days.’
‘My eyes ache.’
‘To be expected. That will pass.’
Raft sat up. ‘Operation successful?’
‘Only you know that.’
‘I can hardly feel them.’
‘Excellent. No nausea?’
‘None; hardly any reaction. It’s something like an activity barely noticed at the corners of vision.’
‘That’s more or less what we aimed for. Lindley’s diagnosis of mainly psychosomatic was correct. The rest was easy.’
Raft swung his feet to the floor. ‘Was it? How easy?’
‘Suppression of selected synaptic pathways and some drug-magnified hypno-suggestion; non-reaction to the clone should be habitual by the time the suggestion fades. We can’t do anything about the residual feeling; it seems to be physically based and isn’t our line. I dare say the bioclinics will winkle it out in time. Maybe a mutant gene; probably recessive, most mutes are. Anything else?’
Raft was wriggling into his overalls. ‘Yes. A record of the questioning.’
‘Why should you want that?’
‘Because I don’t know what I said down there; I was glued to that damned screen.’ He might have known the request would not make sense to the Tech.
‘The screen was the wedge to separate the strata of the mind. Better than scop or the other drugs.’
‘But it blanks memory.’
‘That could be recovered if it became necessary, but why should it? Why lay yourself open to unpleasantness? True confession isn’t necessarily good for the psyche.’
Anger would not help to present a point of view Playfair was not programmed to appreciate – and ‘programmed’ was the description for Jackson’s vaunted instructional system. He persisted, pulling viciously at zippers, ‘I’d like to know, just the same.’
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