The tour was almost over, and they were about to enter the building where the biofeedback labs that had developed the brainwave monitor were located. Bernstein and Weller were getting along at least to the point where Bernstein had started to notice Weller’s mood.
He paused, touched Weller on the arm, studied his face for a moment, and said, “You seem a bit confused, Mr. Weller. Are you having trouble understanding what you’re seeing?”
“In a way.”
“Well, is there anything you’d like me to clarify for you before we wind things up? This will be our last stop, and I can only give you about another seven minutes of my time. ” Weller laughed. “There’s plenty I’d like you to clarify for me,” he snapped, “but I doubt if you can.”
“Try me,” Bernstein said, giving him a grandfatherly look with those big eyes.
Well, here I am at the Institute, Weller thought. If I’m not going to be me now, I don’t know when else I will. Try me, the man says … ?
“All right, Dr. Bernstein, I’ll try you. Don’t you ever think about justifying what you’re doing to yourself? While you’re playing with your fancy scientific toys, don’t you ever think about what pays for them?”
Bernstein slammed the inquiry shut like an angry clam. “I would think that the justification for our work would be self-evident to anyone with a modicum of intelligence. ”
“I’m not talking about what you’re trying to accomplish, Dr. Bernstein,” Weller said. “For the sake of argument, let’s say I’m sold on that.” He paused, pondered for a moment. Bernstein was obviously sincerely dedicated to what he was doing, perhaps too dedicated, judging from his little dig at the Pentagon. But he also had expressed distaste for Monitor methods and seemed to have a certain fear of them. If nothing else, it would be interesting, perhaps ultimately useful, to find out where he really stood.
“I’m talking about Transformationalism,” Weller said.
“Transformationalism?” Bernstein’s expression became distant again, guarded.
Leave us not be too obvious, Weller thought. “Look, you apparently worked for the Pentagon,” he said, “and I doubt somehow that you were truly dedicated to the military aspect of the work. You probably didn’t give much thought to that; all you were interested in was the funding. Now you’re being funded by Transformationalism. How about leveling with me? Do you give a damn about the people whose money is supporting your work now?”
Now Bernstein was obviously furious at something, but he kept his rage under tight control. “I get the feeling you’re a Monitor, Mr. Weller,” he said, biting off his words.
“Oh, come on, Doctor. Would John send someone to spy on you?”
Bernstein just snorted.
“So you yourself feel that your dedication to Transformationalism might be questioned?” Weller said devilishly.
“All right, whoever you are,” Bernstein said, “if this is going to get back to John, then let it. John knows that he and I have a working relationship, a quid pro quo, that I am not a worshiper of his and never will be. That was made clear and agreed to at the outset. We both know that, don’t we, so shall we stop playing games? I’m doing exactly what I said I would. John has no reason to question my loyalty, and I resent being grilled like this.”
“You just told me you’ll never been a worshiper of John, and in the next breath you tell me he has no reason to question your loyalty?” Weller said.
“Don’t play your little Monitor games with me!” Bernstein said shrilly. “I know more about the mind than your kind will ever dream of knowing. ”
“But Dr. Bernstein, I never said I was a Monitor,” Weller said. “I’m not a Monitor. I’m making a film. I’m just trying to get some depth in my material. Honest. Really.”
“Just as you say,” Bernstein said coldly. “Shall we conclude our innocent little tour then?”
So saying, Bernstein turned and trotted into the biofeedback building, forcing Weller to tag along at his heels and terminate the conversation. I’m not sure why I’m doing this, Weller mused, but it’s beginning to get a little interesting.
Bernstein whisked him in and out of a series of electronic workshops and laboratories, where brainwave monitors were being assembled from crated parts, where lab technicians were working on scratch-built experimental models, where other electronic esoterica were being fiddled with.
“Our earlier work with biofeedback led to the brainwave monitor,” Bernstein told him. “Or rather we went to biofeedback principles to invent what John was looking for.”
“The brainwave monitor was John’s idea, not yours, then?” Weller asked, as Bernstein led him down a long blue hallway.
“I’ve never claimed otherwise,” Bernstein said defensively, but also with a strange tinge of contempt. “John wanted an impressive-looking device that would scientifically measure mental states. He told me forthrightly that the processee’s belief in the credibility of the brainwave monitor was what counted. As he put it, ‘It would also be nice if it kind of worked. But whether it does or not, I need it in three months.’ ”
Bernstein shook his head, and now he seemed to be talking half to himself. “Those were the parameters. It then became a simple matter of turning biofeedback machines into a kind of lie detector. After all, a he detector is a crude attempt to measure mental states indirectly. It measures skin resistance and breathing rate and so forth, which measures physical stress, and if you assume that physical stress correlates with mental stress, you at least have a machine that tells you when a question is making someone nervous. ”
“That seems pretty crude to me,” Weller said. “And it’s not admissable evidence in court in many places. ”
Bernstein didn’t look at Weller, but his voice sharpened, as if he were talking to a bright student who had just made an intelligent point. “Of course. It doesn’t at all get at what’s going on in the brain. The electroencephalograph does that, gives you a picture of the brainwaves, and biofeedback work proves that brainwave patterns have some correlation with mental states because it shows that people can learn to change their brainwave patterns on a screen by meditating, or deliberately thinking hostile thoughts, for example.”
Bernstein paused outside a heavy steel door. He looked up at Weller, and for the moment at least seemed to forget that he thought Weller was a Monitor. “So you see, it was really a rather simple matter to turn a standard multichannel biofeedback machine into the brainwave monitor. About all I had to do was turn the screen around so that the processor was watching it rather than the subject whose brain was wired into it. In fact, as you’ve seen, we put the things together out of standard biofeedback components, for the most part. John’s idea was the main thing, what I did was rather an obvious solution to the technical problem.”
“But does the thing really work?”
Bernstein shrugged. “At least it does something” he said.
“After all, thought is an electronic phenomenon in the brain, so in theory such a device should be possible.”
“In theory? You mean the brainwave monitor is a phony?” Strangely Bernstein didn’t slip back into his Monitor paranoia. Somehow Weller had gotten him onto his professional program. “The brainwave monitor does give us data on what’s going on inside the brain,” he said. “Interpreting it coherently is the problem. We don’t yet know enough to judge whether the thing does what we say it does or not. ”
“You mean not even you know whether it’s real or a phony?”
“Precisely, my dear Mr. Weller,” Bernstein said, putting his hand on the knob of the heavy steel door. “That’s why we’re running many of our projects here on determining relationships between brainwaves and mental states. On John’s direct orders. We don’t know what we have ourselves.” Something ironic came into his attitude. “Now in here,” he said, “we have something else that’s eating up a lot of time and money at Johns direct order.” Was Bernstein trying to say something to Steinhardt through what he supposed was a Monitor ove
rseer? That he himself thought that Steinhardt was wasting his time on crackpot schemes? That Steinhardt should realize that it was after all his own money he was wasting, along with the time of busy scientists?
Bernstein led him into a small, stark cubicle like a projectionist’s booth. One whole wall of the room was a heavy window overlooking a larger room where, of all things, some land of unreal concert was going on. A piano player, a saxophonist, a drummer, and a guitarist were jamming silently behind the soundproof glass. Each of them wore a brainwave monitor headband, trailing a long wire which was plugged into a bank of electronic consoles lined up behind them like monster amps. The consoles had four oscilloscopes wired into them. Four white-smocked technicians were studying them intently, fiddling with controls. A fifth technician was supervising the group—not the musicians but the control technicians. “What on God’s green Earth is that?” Weller exclaimed.
“That,” Bernstein said, “is our latest project. An attempt to reverse the brainwave monitor. If specific brainwave patterns correlate with specific mental states, why can’t you induce specific mental states by transmitting their electronic patterns into the brain? So here we have a group of jazz musicians improvising. Each one is receiving controlled electronic input into his brain, and the patterns of various mental state models are tried. Can we make the saxophone player more creative? Can we give the piano a depressive chord structure? Can we make the drummer pound out an angry beat?”
“Push-button brainwashing,” Weller whispered. “A goddamn mind-fucking machine!”
“I suppose it might be,” Bernstein said dryly. “If it worked.”
“It doesn’t work? Then why are you doing it?”
“This project is being pushed forward on John’s direct orders,” Bernstein said, making the last two words a disclaimer of any responsibility of his own. “He thought of the idea, and he believes in it. This isn’t all of it either; we’re doing the same thing with other areas of creative work, among other things. It’s quite an extensive series of projects.”
“Which you, I gather, think are a wasted effort.”
Bernstein snapped back into his official shell, as if he were addressing Steinhardt through a supposed Monitor but was determined to get his displeasure through without crossing some invisible line. “The idea has merit and possibilities, but it’s about twenty years premature. We don’t even know to what extent the brainwave monitor works, and here we are trying to program thought processes through electronic wave patterns. It’s like trying to do chemistry before you’ve figured out the nature of the atom.
“But then, John was a science-fiction writer, not a scientist. He could brilliantly visualize an inevitable scientific development long before the state of knowledge necessary to bring it about. Ten or twenty years from now this kind of thing will be possible here at the Institute, and then this work will have to all be done over again anyway. Right now. …”
He shrugged. “John is as entitled to his obsessions as I am to mine,” he said. “After all, he’s paying for both.”
With that he opened the door and ushered Weller back into the hallway. “And that concludes the time I have to spare, Mr. Weller,” he said. “I’ll drive you to Institute Central, where, I understand, there is a temporary room waiting for you. I hope I’ve been informative.”
“Oh, you have, Dr. Bernstein, you have,” Weller said. Bernstein gave him another nervous look, and they walked back to the golf cart in uneasy silence.
“There’s just one thing,” Weller said, as he climbed into the cart beside Bernstein. “A while back you told me John had no reason to question your loyalty. Yet apparently you think his pet project here is wasting your time. I mean, what kind of loyalty is that?”
Bernstein stared at Weller. His eyes flashed through anger and then seemed to glide upward onto some plane of oceanic calm, beyond Monitor paranoia. “The only kind of loyalty that’s worth anything,” he said. “Honest loyalty.
“Mr. Weller,” he said, starting the golf cart, “awhile back you also asked me about my moral position on where my funding came from. Well, now I’ll tell you. Before I met John Steinhardt, I had a vision of transforming human consciousness, and no hope of bringing it about.”
They drove past the computer complex and out onto a main pathway, past labs and bungalows and guard-dog kennels and who knew what else. “I dreamed of a facility like this and the freedom to use it,” Bernstein said. “But what I was actually doing was pitiful and frustrating. I spent years working in inadequate laboratories niggardly financed by poverty-stricken universities. I spent years working for military psychological-warfare units. For a time I was even reduced to doing motivational research for an advertising agency. ”
He waved an arm as if to embrace the entire Institute. “And then John came along,” he said. “A man who also had a vision of the further evolution of human consciousness, maybe not the same vision, but at least a vision. But John wasn’t like me. Somehow he knew how to apply his vision to the real world. He knew how to make money. He already had vast financial resources. And he was willing to use them.”
Around a gentle bend in the path the brick main building became visible behind a low copse of trees. “Mr. Weller, have you ever heard of a government or a corporation spending millions of dollars to advance scientific development purely out of a desire to advance the course of knowledge and better the human condition? I haven’t. Only John B. Steinhardt is doing that without any foreseeable hope of turning a profit.” They reached the front of Institute Central. Bernstein stopped the golf cart and turned to Weller. “And you can doubt my real loyalty to John?” he said contemptuously. “I don’t have to agree with all his methods to be loyal to him, I don’t have to believe that he always knows what he’s talking about, and I don’t even have to understand his motives. Because I don’t care if he’s doing it to feed his ego or leave a monument to posterity or achieve scientific respectability by validating his own pet crackpot theories or make himself more powerful or all of them. My loyalty to John is based entirely on the fact that we share a common goal which both of us believe is of transcendent importance.”
He looked Weller full in the face but seemed to speak through him to someone else, to Steinhardt. “As far as I’m concerned, that makes any other differences irrelevant. And I trust John still feels the same way. ”
“Oh, I’m sure he does,” Weller said, climbing down from the golf cart. “I don’t think you have anything to worry about.”
“I’m glad to hear that,” Bernstein said. He turned on the golf cart’s electric engine. “I hope I’ve helped you with your film,” he said. “I will see you again when you’re ready to shoot this film, won’t I, Mr. Weller? You will be shooting a film, won’t you?”
“You’ll have to ask John that,” Weller said. “He’s the boss.”
“I understand the message,” Bernstein said peculiarly, and he drove off leaving Weller to wonder what message he had just transmitted from the ectoplasmic Steinhardt.
Seventeen
After having dropped out of an airplane in a drugged stupor directly into a guided tour by the director of the Institute himself, Weller was abruptly left dangling in limbo for a night and day and a night again. Perhaps it was some kind of Transformational lesson or perhaps a bureaucratic screw-up or perhaps just sheer indifference.
His room here was a far cry from his crummy hole at the Los Angeles Transformation Center. Pine paneling, thick green carpeting, a comfortable bed, even a color television set which not only brought in all the New York stations, but gave call-up access to a library of Transformationalist tapes. The closet and chest had even been filled with new clothing, and what was more, the stuff fitted him. If he were a prisoner, this was the Alcatraz Hilton.
That night Weller ate Beef Wellington and Peach Melba in the Institute Central commissary, laid out much like the grim dining room at the center, but with white tablecloths, softer fighting, a gourmet menu, and a small choice of wines.
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This was definitely a more clannish crowd, the favored few at the Institute. Nobody tried to force themselves on Weller here. Far from it. There were tables of middle-aged people in white smocks, a blue-jean crowd, hard-noses who might be Monitors or security guards, and they didn’t even seem to mix much with each other.
Eating in isolation, Weller had the feeling that he was totally cut off from the internal lines of communication of the Institute and would be until some word came down from the Man. People weren’t going to talk to strangers here unless they were officially introduced.
And when he went back to his room, he realized that he was totally cut off from the world outside as well. There was no phone in the room. He hadn’t noticed that before. In fact, when he thought about it, he realized that he hadn’t seen a phone anywhere in Institute Central. Well, that figured. With barbed-wire fences, guard dogs, body searches, and security guards, the Institute could hardly be expected to have pay phones to the rest of the world for its inmates. The Alcatraz Hilton was exactly what it was.
Enough was enough for one day, and he fell asleep almost before he hit the pillow. He would face tomorrow when it came.
But the next morning, after a late breakfast in the nearly empty commissary, what he found he had to face was nothing and lots of it. There was something called the “Directive Desk” in what had been the lobby of the hotel and behind it was an earnest young girl in white, with bright young eyes and a slightly ravaged complexion.
“Is this where someone might leave a message for me?” Weller asked her.
“A message?”
The Mind Game Page 32