by Barbara Paul
“Hungry?” Dr. Snooks asked. “They have a good kolbassi here.”
He looked around. When they’d come in there’d been waiters everywhere, coyly dressed as stadium vendors. Not a one in sight now.
“He’ll be back,” Dr. Snooks said dismissively. “Dr. Algren, I’m glad I ran into you tonight. I have an intriguing new case—something more in your field than mine. Have you ever had a patient who claimed he’d been hypnotized without knowing when it happened?”
Algren’s glass paused halfway to his mouth. “Without knowing it?”
“That’s what he claims. He—”
“He?”
“A youngster, a fifteen-year-old boy. At first I made the mistake we’re never supposed to make. I assumed the kid was just looking for attention and had found a novel way of getting it,” she ad-libbed happily, getting the hang of it. “But now I don’t think so. Trouble is, I’ve had no other case like it for comparison. Have you run into anything like that?”
Algren slowly took a drink, not allowing himself to relax. “No. Never.”
“Well, this boy claims he was programmed to steal his father’s keys and have duplicates made—the father owns a jewelry store.”
“Then the impulse to steal was already in the boy.”
“Is that always the case?”
“The subject must cooperate with the hypnotist, you know that.”
“But a subject can be lied to under hypnosis. He can be made to think that what he’s doing is not wrong in the context of his personal value system. I think that’s what happened to this kid. And I believe him when he says he was hypnotized without his knowing it. It wasn’t until later that he figured out what must have happened.”
“Why? What makes you believe him?”
“His responses under hypnosis are identical to those he makes when he’s not in a trance. The textbooks hedge some, but generally they seem agreed that a subject can’t be hypnotized without his knowledge.”
“The textbooks are right. Don’t take this the wrong way, Dr. Snooks, but some subjects are quite skilled at faking a trance state.”
“Not this boy. What I was wondering was if there was some new drug for inducing relaxation that I didn’t know about, something especially fast-acting. Anything new on the market—say, within the past year?”
Algren shook his head, thinking the coincidences were coming at him suspiciously hot and heavy lately. “There must be some other explanation. If your patient—”
He was interrupted by some sort of disturbance at the door. Looked like some kid trying to get in without any I.D.
“What is it?” Dr. Snooks asked, twisting in her seat for a better look. “Oh!”
“You know him?” Algren asked, thinking the kid looked vaguely familiar.
“No, no—I thought at first he was one of my patients, but I was wrong.”
Then Algren remembered. The kid who’d just been tossed out looked very much like the twerp Megan Phillips had sent to his office. He muttered a hasty excuse to Dr. Snooks and made his way to the door. Outside: noise, dirty streets, perambulating people. But no twerp. Algren looked both ways but couldn’t spot him. He went back into Out in Left Field and sat down.
“Thought I knew him too, but he’s gone. I didn’t really get a good look at him. Good lord, will you look at that? That drink is foaming. Waiter!” He didn’t notice Dr. Snooks glaring at him. A stadium vendor materialized and Algren ordered a fresh drink and kolbassi on a soft roll. His companion said she wasn’t hungry—which surprised him.
One of the bar customers had taken a baseball bat from the wall and was demonstrating a grip to his drinking buddies. Dr. Snooks eyed him skeptically. “If he swings that thing, he’ll decapitate six people.”
But the customer wasn’t that drunk. After he finished making his point, he slipped the bat handle back into the bracket that held it to the wall and called for an Iron City beer. Pronounced Arn City.
A waiter in stadium vendor’s outfit plopped Algren’s kolbassi sandwich on the table. Smelled good. Algren heard Dr. Snooks make a funny noise. She choked—and then spewed beer all over the table.
“Get a towel,” Algren said to the waiter.
And found himself looking at the twerp.
The kid stared bug-eyed at him for a second—and then took off. Algren slid out of the booth and went after him. The kid burst through the door to the kitchen; Algren wasn’t far behind. The short-order cook looked up from his grill at this unexpected intrusion into his domain.
There was only one door out of the kitchen; Algren headed for it. It opened into a storeroom—and a door to the alley was still swinging shut. The light was bad and he didn’t see the spare wall decorations stacked in his way. Man and baseball bats went sprawling, making a racket. Algren cursed and got to his feet just as Dr. Snooks came panting into the storeroom.
Algren ignored her and stumbled out through the door. He saw the twerp running down the alley and yelled, “Hey! Hey you! Wait!”
And then the sky exploded. He was conscious of shock, then of falling, then of nothing at all.
“For crying out loud,” Megan said with annoyance, tossing away her baseball bat. “If I had to leave it to you two, we’d be playing Dungeons and Dragons all night. Snooks, get out your happy juice—I’ll go get the car.”
CHAPTER 14
Algren was stretched out on the couch in Snooks’s office; the psychiatrist was dabbing something on his head and muttering. “Why’d you hit him so hard? He’s going to have one hell of a headache tomorrow.”
“How do I know how hard you have to hit a man to knock him out?” Megan said irritably. “I’ve never done it before.” She turned to Gus, who was still wearing his vendor’s uniform. “And take off that ridiculous outfit. Why did you dress up as a waiter anyway?”
“I was trying to find out what was going on,” he said, pulling the tunic over his head. “I couldn’t get in the front way—no I.D. And I’m almost twenty-two!”
“Well, it was dumb.”
“Oh, stop grumbling, Megan. He’s here, isn’t he? And Snooks says he’ll be able to talk. That’s something—considering the fact that everything went wrong.”
“Did you actually take a sandwich to him?” Megan asked.
“I didn’t know it was his sandwich. I found the waiter’s outfit in the storeroom and put it on. Then when I walked through the kitchen the cook thrust this sandwich at me and said, ‘Booth twelve.’ He didn’t even look at me—they must use a hell of a lot of temporary help in that place. So I took the sandwich to booth number twelve. I didn’t realize it was Algren’s until I actually got there.”
“What were you doing there?” Megan asked Snooks. “Why a bar?”
“Thought I could slip him a Mickey,” Snooks mumbled. “Didn’t work.”
Gus said, “You scared the hell out of me when you walked out of that office building with him and he was alert and talking and moving right along. Why didn’t you inject him while you were in the elevator?”
“How could I stick a needle in his butt when he stood facing me and talking all the time?”
“I thought you weren’t going to speak to him.”
“He spoke to me.” Snooks looked embarrassed. “It seems we know each other—or at least we’ve met. All right, all right, so I forgot. It doesn’t matter now.”
“How long before that stuff starts to work?” Megan wanted to know.
“It’s probably working now. But let’s give it another five minutes.”
While they were waiting, Snooks took out a tape recorder and set it up. She spoke into the mike, testing to make sure the machine was recording. “You can talk,” she told Megan and Gus. “But keep your voices flat and unemotional.”
Then she started. Snooks suggested to Algren that he was comfortable and rested and on top of the world. She took a long time with it, concentrating on convincing him that he felt no pain. Then it was time to see if he would respond.
“Can you hear
me?” Snooks asked.
“Yes.”
“How do you feel?”
“Very good. Comfortable.”
“Do you feel any pain?”
“No.”
The other three in the room breathed a collective sigh of relief. Algren was under.
Snooks asked him what he had done last Christmas Eve. Algren couldn’t recall detail the way Megan did, but he was able to give them a fair account of his alcoholic celebration. Snooks went on to pick dates at random—January 20, February 13, March 8—bringing him up gradually to the April weekend they wanted to know about.
“I want you to remember April twenty-eighth. It is a Friday. Do you remember?”
“Yes.”
“It’s five-thirty in the afternoon. Where are you?”
“On the twenty-first floor of the Sprague Building. In the hallway by the elevators.”
“Why are you there?”
“I’m waiting for a woman named Megan Phillips. I am to get on the elevator with her.”
“When you are on the elevator together, what do you do?”
“I inject her with sodium pentothal.”
“How do you know there won’t be someone else on the elevator?”
“Mr. Sperling has another man in the building. He is to make sure one elevator car stays empty.”
Snooks looked a question at Megan, who raised her shoulders and shook her head. “Who is Mr. Sperling?” Snooks asked Algren.
“An executive with Dillon Laboratories.”
Megan’s eyes grew wide. “A competitor,” she told the others.
Snooks said, “Did Mr. Sperling pay you to hypnotize Megan Phillips?”
“Yes.”
“How much?” Gus asked quickly.
Algren didn’t answer.
Snooks repeated it: “How much?”
“Forty thousand dollars.”
Megan gasped, and Gus muttered, “Told you it wasn’t just a hijacking.”
Snooks asked Algren where he’d taken Megan.
“To an apartment building in Sewickley. A man named Ferris drove us there. Mr. Sperling was waiting in the apartment.”
“And in the Sewickley apartment you took Megan Phillips down into a deep hypnotic trance?”
“Yes.”
“Did you give her a posthypnotic suggestion?”
“Yes.”
“Now I want you to tell me what suggestion you planted in Megan Phillips’s mind.”
“She was not to remember the weekend. She was to respond to reinforcement. She was to redirect the initial domestic shipments of Lipan to a warehouse complex in Los Angeles.”
“Does that mean anything to you?” Snooks asked Megan, and could tell by her face that it did. “Rest,” she instructed Algren, and went over to sit by Megan. “Lipan again. What about these ‘initial domestic shipments’?”
“He means when the product first went on the national market,” Megan said in a tight voice. “That was in May.”
“And you were to redirect everything to Los Angeles, he says. Like those shipments that mistakenly ended up in Stockton?”
Megan shook her head. “Not quite the same. Those shipments that went to Stockton were just small follow-up orders. The initial shipment was a coast-to-coast saturation release. It was the shipment.”
Gus was puzzled. “I don’t understand. You’d already been given the command—but you didn’t follow it?”
Megan didn’t understand either. “The initial shipments went off without a hitch. They certainly didn’t end up in some warehouse complex in Los Angeles.”
Snooks went back to Algren. “Who owns the warehouses in Los Angeles?”
“Dillon Laboratories.”
“And Dillon wanted all the shipments of Lipan to be directed to Los Angeles?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“I think they planned on burning the warehouses to get rid of the Lipan.”
“Why would they do that?”
“Dillon has a similar product in development. They wanted to keep Lipan off the market until their own product was ready for release.”
Ahhhhhh. “That makes sense,” Megan said. “Lipan has no generic form. Glickman has a monopoly right now.”
Gus was shocked. “You mean this other company would actually destroy … why, that’s criminal!”
“Surprise, surprise,” Megan said sardonically.
“But it didn’t happen,” Snooks pointed out. “Something must have gone wrong.” She turned back to Algren. “Did you give Megan Phillips the signal to reroute the Lipan shipments to Los Angeles?”
“No, I couldn’t.”
“Why not?”
“She was out of town when the shipments began.”
“Good god,” Megan said softly, stunned by the close call. “That’s right—I was in Boston. The computer was programmed to handle any screw-ups. I left it all to the machine.”
“And you can’t hypnotize a computer,” Snooks nodded. “Well.”
Gus thought of something. “So why is he still calling her up and reinforcing the suggestion?”
“Right,” Snooks said, and asked Algren.
“International shipments are scheduled to begin August thirtieth. Dillon has had to write off the American market, but they’re still going to try for control of the European market.”
“So it’s not over,” Megan muttered. “He knows a hell of a lot about our shipping schedule. Dillon must have a man planted inside Glickman. Ask him, Snooks.”
She did, and Algren named a name, James Daugherty.
“Know him?” Gus asked.
Megan nodded. “One of the product managers. A youngish, fresh-faced man that nobody would ever suspect of being an industrial spy.”
Snooks said, “All right, let’s see what we can do about it.” She told Algren he was going to rest for a while, that he would hear nothing that was said until she spoke the word outfielder. Then she stood up and twisted her torso a little, trying to get rid of a crick in her back.
“What are you going to do?” Gus asked.
“It’s a bit of a problem. I could give him a posthypnotic suggestion—to forget the recall trigger. But that wouldn’t solve anything. This man Sperling was there during that weekend, in the Sewickley apartment. He’d know the trigger too, and if Algren couldn’t give Megan the signal he’d just do it himself. Megan, you might respond to the command given by a different voice, you might not. There’s no way to tell until it happens.”
“Mm, yeah,” Gus said. “I’d forgotten about Sperling.”
“So what’s left?” Megan asked.
Snooks pulled up a chair and sat facing Megan. “What’s left is an experiment I’ve never tried before. I don’t know if anyone’s tried it before. It won’t work unless you cooperate.”
“Me? Sure.”
“Wait until you hear what it is first. I want you to let Algren hypnotize you.”
“What?” Megan and Gus both yelled.
Snooks thought it was a good thing she’d told Algren he wouldn’t hear anything. “He can remove the posthypnotic commands, Megan. He’s the one who gave them to you. He can let you remember the weekend, and he can disassociate the recall trigger from any controlled reaction. At least I think he can—there’s no reason the process should be irreversible.”
Gus was outraged. “You expect her to entrust her unconscious mind to that man after what he’s done?”
“She won’t be trusting him, she’ll be trusting me. He will say only what I tell him to say.”
“I don’t know if I can, Snooks,” Megan said doubtfully. “I trust you, of course—but I just don’t know if I can bring myself to cooperate with him.”
“Just think of him as my instrument—god, that sounds pompous. It’s his voice that we need, Megan. I have to speak to you with his voice. It’s worth a try, isn’t it?”
Megan thought a moment. “Yes, it’s worth a try,” she decided. “All right, I’ll do the best I can.”<
br />
“Good. But first I’d better change the tape.” She tended to the recorder and went back to Algren. “Outfielder,” she said. “I want you to open your eyes.”
He opened his eyes.
“Now sit up.”
He sat up.
Snooks motioned Megan to come over to where Algren could see her. “Do you know this woman?”
“It’s Megan Phillips.”
“You are going to hypnotize her. When she is in a trance, you will help her to remember the weekend she spent in Sewickley. Do you understand?”
“I will help her remember.”
“Just the weekend?” Gus asked.
“One thing at a time, Gus. Megan, sit here opposite him. Try to relax—don’t resist. Remember, I won’t let him do anything to hurt you.”
Algren’s technique was different from Snooks’s, Gus was interested to see. Whereas she told her subjects to relax one part of the body at a time, he went in for creating a sleepy, floaty atmosphere. But good old Megan—she didn’t play favorites! Algren had her in a trance shortly, responding immediately to test commands such as Raise your right arm. All during the process Snooks kept looking over at Gus, and finally he figured out why: she was checking to make sure he wasn’t being hypnotized too.
But then Algren did use one of Snooks’s techniques, that of starting at some neutral past time and leading up gradually to the weekend. Gus had to suppress an unseemly desire to giggle at what he was seeing: a hypnotized hypnotist unhypnotizing a hypnotized subject.
When Algren finally told Megan she was to remember the weekend, an instant change came over her. Her whole body tensed, she clenched her fists and gritted her teeth, her breathing became labored.
“She’s scared to death,” Gus gasped.
“That’s not fear, that’s anger,” Snooks said. She told Algren to reassure Megan that she no longer had any need to be angry.
“You are no longer angry,” Algren said. “It’s over now. You are calm, you can relax. It’s over now.”
Megan began to relax. The tenseness ebbed out of her body, and her breathing returned to normal. Algren kept repeating the soothing phrases, and soon Megan was calm again.