For a little while, out of his usually mild eyes, came the solemn but mischievous glance of another self, Tiger.
“Now how many fingers?” said Dyhard, raising two.
“Six,” said Jan.
Dyhard blinked and came alive. There was a quiver of eagerness to him now. “What time is it?”
“Twenty-six bells!” said Jan. “Beat it, Doc. You’re wasting county time.”
“Aha!” said Dyhard. “You’re beginning to feel persecuted! I can tell! Your autoerotic libido is converting! Now how many fingers?”
“You better stow it and scram,” said Jan, “or I might decide to gnaw them off. Where’s the guard? I’m hungry!”
“Hah!” said Dyhard. “Definite malfunction of the libido! I can detect it! A classic paranoid schizophrenic! I knew it!”
“Doc, you’re going to be a classic wreck if you don’t beat it. Send in my lunch and we’ll take this up someday when you’re a little more sane.”
“Hah! You believe you are being persecuted, don’t you? You believe psychiatrists are after you, don’t you? Answer me!”
“No, I don’t!” said Jan, getting annoyed and feeling stronger.
“That’s it, that’s it!” said Dyhard. “All you patients think we psychiatrists are after you. You are plotting to kill me now, aren’t you? All you patients get these plots!”
“I’m not so damned patient as you’d think!” said Jan, getting angry.
“Hah! Typical. You want to murder psychiatrists, don’t you? You’re all after us, you patients. But we’ve got your number! We know what you are plotting against us! It won’t do you any good!” He wrote furiously on his pad.
“How old are you?” said Dyhard, looking intensely at Jan.
“Before I’m much older,” said Jan, “I am going to enjoy kicking you the hell out of here, Doc. Now git!”
“Hah! Persecution complex. A classic paranoid schizophrenic! Now tell me honestly, have you ever believed you were God?”
“Have you?” said Jan.
“Defensive and secretive,” muttered Dyhard as he scribbled.
“Look, are you going to ring that bell for lunch and get out or am I going to have to—” he started to get up as he spoke.
Dyhard instantly leaped to the bars. “Guard! Guard! I’m caught! I’m trapped! Let me out of here, let me out! He’s a maniac! Let me out!”
The guard instantly unlocked the door and Dyhard vanished.
“Calm down, buddy,” said the guard at Jan.
“Calm down, sonny,” said Jan, “and bring me some lunch. I’m three hours overdue.”
But lunch did not come. Instead Dyhard arrived back with his friend Sharpington who, though not a psychiatrist, owned Balmy Springs.
“There he is,” said Dyhard. “See that scowl? All classic paranoid schizophrenics have that scowl. All of them.”
“Hmmm, yes,” said Sharpington, hoping that Dyhard wouldn’t kill this patient on the operating table. Patients were getting scarce since Dianetics. Only the electric shock and surgical failures of the yesterdays were taken to private and public institutions now and this Palmer was worth two hundred a week for the time he was here. Of course, on the brighter side, if whatever neurosurgery Dyhard tried came out with the usual lack of success, Palmer would be here for the rest of his life, a zombie without will or coordination, a drooling thing which would have to be fed like a baby and wear diapers.
“You see how he is crouched there to spring?” said Dyhard.
Sharpington watched Jan light a cigarette. “Indeed so,” he said.
“Psst!” said Dyhard, wriggling his fingers through the bars at Jan. “How many fingers?”
“Go soak your skull,” said Jan. “Where’s my lunch?”
“Abnormal preoccupation with self,” said Dyhard. “You notice that?”
“Hmmm, yes,” said Sharpington.
“Good, good, good,” said Dyhard, dragging Sharpington away. “Then you can certify as to his irrational conduct.”
“Well—” said Sharpington.
“For ten percent, of course,” said Dyhard.
“Naturally,” said Sharpington.
“Good,” said Dyhard, “we operate tomorrow.”
At five they brought Jan his dinner, served without crockery, knives or forks. The guard shoved it under the door and took a second tray across the hall. There a man was leaping up and down, screaming and raving.
Jan ate as best he could and the guard presently came back for the tray.
“What’s the matter with him?” said Jan, indicating his neighbor across the hall.
“Him?” grunted the guard. “He ain’t got good sense or gratitude. They give him the best neurosurgery in the business, a first-rate prefrontal lobotomy, and he starts raving as soon as he recovers. The ignorant boob’s been screaming like that for two weeks now.”
“Do they all scream when they get prefrontals?” said Jan.
“Naw. Usually they’re quiet. They just sit and stare. But him, he ain’t got good sense.”
“Does anybody ever recover from a prefrontal lobotomy?” said Jan.
“Naw, but it’s the best modern science can offer. That’s what they say. But what the hell am I doin’ talkin’ to you?”
“You’re talking to me,” said Jan, “because you can make a thousand dollars.” He had tried five hundred that morning.
“Whatcha think I am, dishonest? Get back there!”
“Taking five thousand dollars just to carry a message isn’t dishonest,” said Jan.
“What message?”
“Phone my wife and tell her to bring me the diamond I had.”
The guard hesitated. “You loops! I’ll do it for twenty dollars cash if you’ve got it on you.”
Jan didn’t have.
“All the same. Brother, I’ve collected a couple million in checks and notes that wouldn’t pay off. I don’t get sucked in again. Besides, you’ll be operated on tomorrow and after that you won’t never know what you’re doin’, not never.”
He took himself off.
Jan sat down on the edge of the bed. For a while that afternoon he had felt brave. It had seemed as if he had contacted some part of himself he had not before known existed. And yet somehow he knew that he had been more complete a short while ago.
A horrible thought hit him. Perhaps he had already had an electric shock! They gave them to people without their knowledge and with only a relative’s consent. And they made the treatment look so attractive that relatives almost never disagreed. Perhaps he’d been treated. Perhaps that was why he was feeling so reduced.
The man across the hall was still screaming. Over and over he said, “I’m caught, I’m trapped! Let me out! Let me out! I’m caught, I’m trapped. They’ll never believe me. My husband will kill me. I’m caught, I’m trapped. Let me out! Let me out!—”
Jan glanced across at him. The fellow had not been bad-looking. But now his eyes were red-shot and horrible and somehow dead. The screaming was not real. It was automatic, without feeling. It was as if a record had been turned on behind his mouth and was running, over and over.
Up to this instant Jan had not believed that such a thing could happen to a man in these United States. But now the evidence deluged him. By the mere statement that he was insane, made by one man, Jan had instantly been thrust outside the pale of all civil rights. A murderer stood a trial before a jury. Only when convicted was he subjected to physical punishment—and his death was quick; it was not the subtotal euthanasia of neurosurgery. The murderer was killed quickly and wholly in an electric chair or a gas chamber. His body was not left to live after his mind had been killed. And perhaps, below the level of that zombiism, trapped somewhere inside but no longer in control, the “I” of the individual remained, shuddering with repugnance at the drooling shell it had once commanded.
Dyhard held authority beyond the authority of mere courts. Draped crazily and unfittingly with the mask of “science,” Dyhard could and did ex
ecute sentences of subtotal death even when his shocks and operations were successful beyond the highest hopes of the originators of those barbaric techniques which disgraced the name of medicine and polluted the records of surgery.
Jan was beyond any hope of rescue, he suddenly understood. Before that, as a private citizen, he had read of the “marvelous techniques” of neurosurgery. He had read elaborate praises of methods which took out large sections of the brain or withered the neurons with raw shocks. Because the actual results had been masked by the title of “progressive science” and “medicine” he had not questioned figures which he now knew to be utterly fictitious and optimistic beyond madness itself. He understood dimly that these techniques derived from the abreaction of the hostilities of certain psychiatrists, themselves beyond the pale in their own professions.
What happened to the human soul in such an operation? What happened to the personality? Where was the gain, if after the most successful operation possible, a patient was incapable of affection, lost to initiative and adjusted on the order that one would adjust a marionette?
And that this could happen because his wife, ignorant and blindly trusting because medical doctors were trustworthy, had been convinced that it would be a wonderful thing, that he would be a better man, that he would return to society much more tractable and competent. On these assurances, as false as a Russian news release and quite as generally released, she had consented to leave all to Dr. Dyhard. Where was Jan’s say? Jan, why, he had been branded with the indelible brand, the brand that none could erase—a psychiatrist had pronounced him insane!
What would happen to him now if he survived the dangerous operation? What would happen if luck decreed him to be one of the few who succeeded to the point of being only half unmanned?
The thought of it made his wits rock in earnest. Was this how unscrupulous psychiatrists made their diagnoses? Badgering a man to disgust and then using what he said to condemn him? He knew now that it was and he knew that if he did not come out of here before operation time tomorrow, he would be better off dead, much better off.
He grabbed the bars and began to examine the locks. But they were sound. And as he stood there a stretcher was wheeled by. On it was a young girl. Blood had spilled and caked from her swollen eyes. Her temples had been scorched by electrodes. Her mouth was slack and one arm dangled rigidly. A transorbital leukotomy, on its way to a cell, a woman, made a zombie forever, her analytical mind torn to shreds, ruined beyond repair.
Jan became sick at his stomach.
At about the time Dr. Dyhard was writing up his operation orders about Jan, that day, Alice sat with teacup balanced on her knee and talked about hats and other vital matters with her friends Julie Breen and Stephanie Gorse. The visitors had more or less exhausted general topics when Julie, desiring gossip for the dinner party she would later attend, led into a topic which should yield it.
“And your poor, dear husband. I understand he was victimized by some labor leaders and taken to a sanitarium,” said Julie, all sympathy.
Stephanie delicately nibbled a biscuit. “Ah, what trouble we do have with these unions,” said Stephanie sweetly. “Somebody ought to machine-gun such people, my husband says. Mere laborers, entirely lower class, and they cause so much trouble.”
“Jan never had any trouble with unions,” said Alice. “The unions were glad when he became head of Bering Steam. It’s Communists, he says, who make the unions look bad. I always believed unions were an advance—”
But Julie wouldn’t let her steer away from this tidbit. “No wonder your poor, dear husband had a nervous breakdown. What are they doing for him?”
“He’s in excellent hands,” said Alice crisply. “Dr. Dyhard called me a little while ago and said he was going to give him the best treatment available. It’s a little operation. A minor thing, Dr. Dyhard said. A prefronted something. Really, they only give them to people they can trust, you know. It sometimes uninhibits people. But it makes them better adjusted, too. And Jan has been so badly adjusted lately. It has been quite a worry. He was actually quite rough to me.”
“Oh, yes,” said Stephanie. “I know the treatment. I read all about it in a medical magazine while I was waiting for my psychoanalyst one day. One has one done and then doesn’t worry anymore. It said so right in the magazine. I asked my analyst why he didn’t do marvelous things like that and he wouldn’t even talk about it with me.”
“Oh, psychoanalysts are always fighting with the psychiatrists. They’re not real doctors, you know—the psychoanalysts, I mean. The law wouldn’t permit them to operate,” said Julie, as learnedly as could be expected from one who read Woman’s Day exclusively.
“Did they try electric shock?” said Stephanie, hastily keeping her lead as the authority present. “My cousin went—had a nervous breakdown and they gave her twenty-one electric shocks. And really, she never knew a thing about it until she was all sane again. It made her well as can be, too. Wonderful, modern science. She used to quarrel with her husband incessantly about his drinking and now she rarely says a thing to anyone.”
“I thought electric shocks didn’t always work,” said Julie, on the other side of the fence now, challenging authority.
“Oh, my dear. Of course they always work. All these operations they use today work or they wouldn’t use them, of course,” said Stephanie practically. “Of course, she does have trouble—my cousin, I mean—lying down now. Her heart races or something when she tries to sleep. But really she is so changed. She isn’t a bit quarrelsome about anything. Tell me, Alice, dear, will your husband be home soon?”
“Oh, in a few days,” said Alice. “Dr. Dyhard assured me that it was nothing very serious. Just exhaustion. Worry or something. This little minor operation will make everything right. Isn’t modern science wonderful? Dr. Dyhard says he won’t worry after the operation. Dear, dear, I almost wish I had one done on me. It’s in all the magazines. Quite fashionable, I understand. And so expensive, too. Ten thousand dollars.”
“My!” said Stephanie, impressed before she could stop herself. But she was saved the effort of asserting afterwards that she was unimpressed by the appearance of the Swede girl.
The Swede girl was desirous of seeing Mrs. Palmer alone. Alice excused herself, a little haughty as became a working girl who had married a millionaire, and demanded in the hall what the servant wanted.
It seemed that Chan Davies had found out that the chauffeur had quit and wanted the chauffeur’s job. Chan Davies had a city license and he was an excellent driver.
Alice interviewed him briefly and hired him, the least she could do after the outrageous accusations her poor demented Jan had made against the fellow who, he was not slow to state, had lost an excellent job because the accusation had been printed in the paper.
Davies thanked her with a bobbing series of writhes which he thought were bows and as she turned to go said, “Oh, Mrs. Palmer. By the way, did they ever give back your husband’s property? I have some connections, minor ones of course, but—”
“Why, yes,” said Alice. “They did. Thank you for your interest, Davies.” And she went back to her tea.
Davies shifted his eyes on and off the Swede girl’s face. “I sure hope it’s put away safe. I’d hate to be accused of stealing it again like both of us were.”
“Yah, it vas safe all right,” said the Swede girl, beaming at him and thinking how nice it would be with him working in the same house.
Adroitly he recovered the data that the diamond now rested in a wall safe behind a picture in the library. Despondently he learned that the wall safe had been holding Palmer documents and valuables for years and wouldn’t surrender to anything short of dynamite.
He appeared reassured but he went out on the back step and gloomed. Then he brightened. There was just a chance that Stokey Joe was out of jail and might be found at the Social Hall. Just a chance—a very slim chance.
“I think,” he told the Swede girl, “that I’ll take a run downtow
n on an errand.”
Followed by her fond smile, he sent Jan’s roadster skittering down the drive.
Chapter Eleven
Through Frying Pan Shoals
At eight bells in the morning, Tiger was yanked from a gloomy breakfast by the cry “Tall sails nor’east by north, ten leagues!”
On deck he glanced at the lookout’s post at the mizzen truck, and then, to confirm it with his own eyes, went hand over hand up a topping lift and swung his feet to rest on a yard. Hugging the mast he stared, keen-eyed, in a northerly direction and soon caught the white gleam of canvas there. Once his glance had picked that out from the tall cumulus on the far northern horizon above the land, he saw another and then another skys’l. It was the fleet from Tarbutón! They were standing out for action. They would have Tombo aboard or in command. The strongest fleet was coming first!
Tiger looked down at the deck far below. The Terror, though much groomed, was a pitiful wreck of a ship at best. The others of the fleet, now five in number since fortunes of war had sent merchantmen into their hands, were still far, far less than twenty ships built and drilled for naval war. Pretty as they were, these buckaroon vessels from this height, white-decked against blue water, ringed with their own spray and lifting in the swell, they were a mouthful for one broadside from the enemy.
Wrapping his headsilk around the lift, Tiger plumped back to the quarterdeck and brought up beside the helm. “Steer for a weather gauge,” he told Ryan, who had the watch. “You get below,” he said to Wanna, who, wind in her filmy raiment, had come bright-eyed up for the sight.
“I won’t!” said Wanna. “I’ve a right—”
Tiger picked her up like a chip and sped down the ladder with her.
Sullenly, she permitted herself to be deposited on the bunk.
“See here,” said Tiger. “There’s going to be more than enough action for all hands. The deck may be swept by grape and chain. Splinters aren’t particular who they hit and I want you whole if I’m to have you at all.”