“You think this lady scientist is making these calls?”
“Never! It’s not her style. It must be a coincidence that the calls started so soon after our final conversation.”
“Did your women also hear the phone?”
Lane smiled and said, “Audiohallucinations? No. They heard the phone ringing, too. One of them solved the problem by tearing her phone out. But I solved mine by putting in a phone jack and disconnecting the phone when I had in mind another sort of connection.”
“That’s all very interesting, but I fail to see what it has to do with your skin problem.”
“Phone calls aside,” Lane said, “could the tingling, the peeling and blistering, and the mild erotic reaction be psychosomatic?”
“I’m not qualified to say,” Mills said. “I can, however, give you the name of a doctor whose specialty is recommending various specialists.”
Lane looked at his wristwatch. Rhoda should be about done with her hairdresser. He said, “So far, I’m convinced I need a dermatologist, not a shrink. I was told you’re the best skin doctor in Washington and perhaps the best on the East Coast.”
“The world, actually,” Dr. Mills said. “I’m sorry. I can do nothing for you at this time. But I do hope you’ll inform me of new developments. I’ve never had such a puzzling, and, therefore, interesting, case.”
Lane used the phone in the ground-floor lobby to call his fiancée’s hairdresser. He was told that Rhoda had just left but that she would pick him up across the street from the doctor’s building.
He got out of the building just in time to see Rhoda drive his MG around the corner, through a stoplight, and into the path of a pickup truck. Rhoda, thrown out by the impact (she was careless about using her safety belt), landed in front of a Cadillac. Despite its locked brakes, it slid on over her stomach.
Lane had seen much as an adviser in Vietnam and as a member of the San Francisco and Brooklyn Police Departments. He thought he was tough, but the violent and bloody deaths of Leona and Rhoda within four months was too much. He stood motionless, noting only that the tingling was getting warmer and spreading over his body. There was no erotic reaction, or, if there were, he was too numb to feel it. He stood there until a policeman got the nearest doctor, who happened to be Mills, to come out and look at him. Mills gave Lane a mild sedative, and the cop sent him home in a taxi. But Lane was at the morgue an hour later, identified Rhoda, and then went to the precinct station to answer some questions.
He went home prepared to drink himself to sleep, but he found two CACO agents, Daniels and Lyons, waiting for him. They seemed to have known about Rhoda’s death almost as quickly as he, and so he knew that they had been shadowing him or Rhoda. He answered some of their questions and then told them that the idea that Leona and Rhoda might be spies was not worth a second’s consideration. Besides, if they were working for SKIZO, or some other outfit, why would SKIZO, or whoever, kill their own agents?
“Or did CACO kill them?” Lane said.
The two looked at him as if he were unspeakably stupid.
“All right,” Lane said. “But there’s absolutely no evidence to indicate that their deaths were caused by anything but pure accident. I know it’s quite a coincidence...”
Daniels said, “CACO had both under surveillance, of course. But CACO saw nothing significant in the two women’s behavior. However, that in itself is suspicious, you know. Negative evidence demands a positive inquiry.”
“That maxim demands the investigation of the entire world,” Lane said.
“Nevertheless,” Lyons said, “SKIZO must’ve spotted you by now. They’d have to be blind not to. Why in hell don’t you stay out from under sunlamps?”
“It’s a skin problem,” Lane said. “As you must know, since you’ve undoubtedly bugged Dr. Mills’ office.”
“Yeah, we know,” Daniels said. “Frankly, Lane, we got two tough alternatives to consider. Either you’re going psycho, or else SKIZO is on to you. Either way...”
“You’re thinking in two-valued terms only,” Lane said. “Have you considered that a third party, one with no connection at all with SKIZO, has entered the picture?”
Daniels cracked his huge knuckles and said, “Like who?”
“Like whom, you mean. How would I know? But you’ll have to admit that it’s not only possible but highly probable.”
Daniels stood up. Lyons jumped up. Daniels said, “We don’t have to admit anything. Come along with us, Lane.”
If CACO thought he was lying, CACO would see to it that he was never seen again. CACO was mistaken about him, of course, but CACO, like doctors, buried mistakes.
On leaving the apartment building, Lane immediately felt the warm tingling on his face and hands and, a few seconds later, the spreading of the warmth to his crotch. He forgot about that a moment later when Daniels shoved him as he started to get into the back seat of the CACO automobile. He turned and said, “Keep your dirty hands off me, Daniels! Push me, and I may just walk off. You might have to shoot me to stop me, and you wouldn’t want to do that in broad daylight, would you?”
“Try it and find out,” Daniels said. “Now shut up and get in or get knocked in. You know we’re being observed. Maybe that’s why you’re making a scene.”
Lane got into the back seat with Lyons, and Daniels drove them away. It was a hot June afternoon, and evidently the CACO budget did not provide for cars with air-conditioning. They rode with the windows down while Lyons and Daniels asked him questions. Lane answered all truthfully, if not fully, but he was not concentrating on his replies. He noticed that when he hung his hand out of the window, it felt warm and tingling.
Fifteen minutes later, the big steel doors of an underground garage clanged shut behind him. He was interrogated in a small room below the garage. Electrodes were attached to his head and body, and various machines with large staring lenses were fixed on him while he was asked a series of questions. He never found out what the interpreters of the machines’ graphs and meters thought about his reactions to the questions. Just as the electrodes were being detached, Smith, the man who had hired Lane for CACO, entered. Smith had a peculiar expression. He called the interrogators to one side and spoke to them in a low voice. Lane caught something about “a telephone call.” A minute later, he was told he could go home. But he was to keep in touch, or, rather, keep himself available for CACO. For the time being, he was suspended from service.
Lane wanted to tell Smith that he was quitting CACO, but he had no desire to be “detained” again. Nobody quit CACO; it let its employees go only when it felt like it.
Lane went home in a taxi and had just started to pour himself a drink when the doorman called up.
“Feds, Mr. Lane. They got proper IDs.”
Lane sighed, downed his Scotch and, a few minutes later, opened the door. Lyons and two others, all holding .45 automatic pistols, were in the hall.
Lyons had a bandage around his head and some Band Aids on one cheek and his chin. Both eyes were bloodshot.
“You’re under arrest, Lane,” Lyons said.
In the chair in the interrogation room, attached once again to various machines, Lane answered everything a dozen times over. Smith personally conducted the questioning, perhaps because he wanted to make sure that Lyons did not attack Lane.
It took Lane ten hours to piece together what had happened from occasional comments by Smith and Lyons. Daniels and Lyons had followed Lane when he had been released from CACO HQ. Trailing Lane by a block, Daniels had driven through a stoplight and into the path of a hot rod doing fifty miles an hour. Daniels had been killed. Lyons had escaped with minor injuries to the body but a large one to the psyche. For no logical reason, he blamed Lane for the accident.
After the interrogation, Lane was taken to a small padded room, given a TV dinner, and locked in. Naked, he lay down on the padded floor and slept. Three hours later, two men woke him up and handed him his clothes and then conducted him to Smith’s office.
“I don’t know what to do with you,” Smith said. “Apparently, you’re not lying. Or else you’ve been conditioned somehow to give the proper—or perhaps I should say, improper—responses and reactions. It’s possible, you know, to fool the machines, what with all the conscious control of brain waves, blood pressure, and so on being taught at universities and by private individuals.”
“Yes, but you know that I haven’t had any such training,” Lane said. “Your security checks show that.”
Smith grunted and looked sour.
“I can only conclude,” he said, “from the data that I have, that you are involved in counter-espionage activity.”
Lane opened his mouth to protest, but Smith continued, “Innocently, however. For some reason, you have become the object of interest, perhaps even concern, to some foreign outfit, probably Commie, most probably SKIZO, CACO’s worst enemy. Or else you are the focus of some wildly improbable coincidences.”
Lane couldn’t think of anything to say to that. Smith said, “You were released the first time because I got a phone call from a high authority, a very high authority, telling me to let you go. By telling, I mean ordering. No reasons given. That authority doesn’t have to give reasons.
“But I made the routine checkback, and I found out that the authority was fake. Somebody had pretended to be him. And the code words and the voice were exactly right. So, somehow, somebody, probably SKIZO, has cracked our code and can duplicate voices so exactly that even a voiceprint check can’t tell the difference between the fake and the genuine. That’s scary, Lane.”
Lane nodded to indicate that he agreed it was scary. He said, “Whoever is doing this must have a damn good reason to reveal that he knows all this stuff. Why would a foreign agent show such a good hand just to get me out of your clutches—uh, custody? I can’t do anyone, foreign agent or not, any good. And by revealing that they know the code words and can duplicate voices, they lose a lot. Now the code words will be changed, and the voices will be double-checked.”
Smith drummed his fingers on the desktop and then said, “Yes, we know. But this extraordinary dermal sensitivity... these automobile accidents...”
“What did Lyons report about his accident?”
“He was unaware of anything wrong until Daniels failed to slow down on approaching the stoplight. He hesitated to say anything, because Daniels did not like backseat drivers, although Lyons was, as a matter of fact, in the front seat. Finally, he was unable to keep silent, but it was too late. Daniels looked up at the signal and said, ‘What in hell you talking about?’ and then the other car hit them.”
Lane said, “Apparently Daniels thought the signal was green.”
“Possibly. But I believe that there is some connection between the phone calls you got while with your women and the one I got from the supposed high authority.”
“How could there be?” Lane said. “Why would this, this person, call me up just to ruin my lovemaking?”
Smith’s face was as smooth as the face on a painting, but his fingers drummed a tattoo of desperation. No wonder. A case which could not even give birth to a hypothesis, let alone a theory, was the ultimate in frustration.
“I’m letting you go again, only this time you’ll be covered with my agents like the North Pole is with snow in January,” Smith said.
Lane did not thank him. He took a taxi back to his apartment, again feeling the tingling and warmth and mildly erotic sensations on the way to the taxi and on the way out of it.
In his rooms, he contemplated his future. He was no longer drawing pay from CACO, and CACO would not permit him to go to work for anybody else until this case was cleared up. In fact, Smith did not want him to leave his apartment unless it was absolutely necessary. Lane was to stay in it and force the unknown agency to come to him. So how was he to support himself? He had enough money to pay the rent for another month and buy food for two weeks. Then he would be eligible for welfare. He could defy Smith and get a job at nondetective work, say, a carryout boy at a grocery store or a car salesman. He had experience in both fields. But times were bad, and jobs of any kind were scarce.
Lane became angry. If CACO was keeping him from working, then it should be paying him. He phoned Smith, and, after a twelve-minute delay, during which Smith was undoubtedly checking back that it was really Lane phoning, Smith answered.
“I should pay you for doing nothing? How could I justify that on the budget I got?”
“That’s your problem.”
Lane looked up, because he had carried the phone under the skylight and his neck started tingling. Whoever was observing him at this moment had to be doing it from the Parmenter Building. He called Smith back and, after a ten-minute delay, got him.
“Whoever’s laying a tap-in beam on me is doing it from any of the floors above the tenth. I don’t think he could angle in from a lower floor.”
“I know,” Smith said. “I’ve had men in the Parmenter Building since yesterday. I don’t overlook anything, Lane.”
Lane had intended to ask him why he had overlooked the fact that they were undoubtedly being overheard at this moment. He did not do so because it struck him that Smith wanted their conversations to be bugged. He was keen to appear overconfident so that SKIZO, or whoever it was, would move again. Lane was the cheese in the trap. However, anybody who threatened Lane seemed to get hurt or killed, and Smith, from Lane’s viewpoint, was threatening him.
During the next four days, Lane read Volume IV of the Durants’ The Story of Civilization, drank more than he should have, exercised, and spent a half-hour each day, nude, under the skylight. The result of this exposure was that the skin burned and peeled all over his body. But the sexual titillation accompanying the dermal heat made the pain worth it. If the sensations got stronger each day, he’d be embarrassing himself, and possibly his observers, within a week.
He wondered if the men at the other end of the beam (or beams) had any idea of the gratuitous sexuality their subject felt. They probably thought that he was just a horny man with horny thoughts. But he knew that his reaction was unique, a result of something peculiar in his metabolism or his pigment or his whatever. Others, including Smith, had been under the skylight, and none had felt anything unusual.
The men investigating the Parmenter Building had detected nothing suspicious beyond the fact that there was nothing suspicious.
On the seventh day, Lane phoned Smith. “I can’t take this submarine existence any longer. And I have to get a job or starve. So, I’m leaving. If your stormtroopers try to stop me, I’ll resist. And you can’t afford to have a big stink raised.”
In the struggle that followed, Lane and the two CACO agents staggered into the area beneath the skylight. Lane went down, as he knew he would, but he felt that he had to make some resistance or lose his right to call himself a man. He stared up into the skylight while his hands were cuffed. He was not surprised when the phone rang, though he could not have given a reasonable explanation of why he expected it.
A third agent, just entering, answered. He talked for a moment, then turned and said, “Smith says to let him go. And we’re to come on home. Something sure made him change his mind.”
Lane started for the door after his handcuffs were unlocked. The phone rang again. The same man as before answered it. Then he shouted at Lane to stop, but Lane kept on going, only to be halted by two men stationed at the elevator.
Lane’s phone was being monitored by CACO agents in the basement of the apartment building. They had called up to report that Smith had not given that order. In fact, no one had actually called in from outside the building. The call had come from somewhere within the building.
Smith showed up fifteen minutes later to conduct the search throughout the building. Two hours later, the agents were told to quit looking. Whoever had made that call imitating Smith’s voice and giving the new code words had managed, somehow, to get out of the building unobserved.
“SKIZO, or whoever it is, must
be using a machine to simulate my voice,” Smith said. “No human throat could do it well enough to match voiceprints.”
Voices!
Lane straightened up so swiftly that the men on each side of him grabbed his arms.
Dr. Sue Brackwell!
Had he really talked to her that last time, or was someone imitating her voice, too? He could not guess why; the mysterious Whoever could be using her voice to advance whatever plans he had. Sue had said that she just wanted to talk for old times’ sake. Whoever was imitating her might have been trying to get something out of him, something that would be a clue to... to what? He just did not know.
And it was possible that this Whoever had talked to Sue Brackwell, imitating his, Lane’s, voice.
Lane did not want to get her into trouble, but he could not afford to leave any possible avenue of investigation closed. He spoke to Smith about it as they went down the elevator. Smith listened intently, but he only said, “We’ll see.”
Glumly, Lane sat on the back seat between two men, also glum, as the car traveled through the streets of Washington. He looked out the window and through the smog saw a billboard advertising a rerun of The Egg and I. A block later, he saw another billboard, advertising a well-known brand of beer. SKY-BLUE WATERS, the sign said, and he wished he were in the land of sky-blue waters, fishing and drinking beer.
Again, he straightened up so swiftly that the two men grabbed him.
“Take it easy,” he said. He slumped back down, and they removed their hands. The two advertisements had been a sort of free association test, provided only because the car had driven down this route and not some other it might easily have taken. The result of the conjunction of the two billboards might or might not be validly linked up with the other circuits that had been forming in the unconscious part of his mind. But he now had a hypothesis. It could be developed into a theory which could be tested against the facts. That is, it could be if he were given a chance to try it.