I abandoned all thought of going for a walk!
Silently I withdrew to my room.
I closed and double-barred my bedroom door.
I opened the passage to Faht's office and went tearing down it as fast as I could run.
Somewhat out of breath, I burst in upon Faht.
"There's a man in my front yard!" I said without preamble.
Faht Bey was going over some accounts. He looked up tiredly. "Probably it's part of this mess with the American consul." He saw I didn't understand. "The shooting," he explained. "The one you got the alibi for. Things were very calm here before you arrived."
"What American consul?" I shouted at him.
"Don't you know about American consuls? They got two main duties. One of them is to claim the bodies of dead Americans. The other is to protect live Americans from justice and make sure they get thrown in any foreign jail that's handy. And of course, there's the other secret duty of running the CIA."
"What's going on?" I screamed at him.
"There's no use to pretend you don't know," he said.
"Couple of days ago, there was a shooting in a local rooming house. A guy named Jimmy 'The Gutter' Tavilnasty went into a room and got shot to pieces. A man named Gunsalmo Silva was arrested. He's been on our lines, Gris. He came in on the Blixo and you know it. You ordered us to deliver him to that rooming house and we did. And he killed this Tavilnasty."
"What happened?" I pleaded.
"The police arrested this Silva and threw him in the jug. The American consul from Ankara came in here to claim the body and ship it home and Silva heard there was an American consul in town and he insisted on seeing him, claiming to be an American citizen. We got scared they would take Silva and maybe interrogate him but that didn't happen. The American consul verified Silva was an American citizen, so of course they demanded the court put him in prison on bread and water. But the local police said it was self-defense and they let Silva go. They don't like foreign interference. The consul was awfully mad at the lack of international cooperation but he left on the morning plane with the body of Tavilnasty. Now do you understand?" He didn't really want to know. "If the man on your front lawn is squat, very muscular, black hair, black eyes, swarthy complexion, then that's Gunsalmo Silva. But it's all handled." He fixed a beady eye on me. "How is it there always seems to be trouble where you've been and how come you always show up later when everything is handled?"
Handled? "My Gods, what do you mean, handled? He's sitting on my front lawn with a sawed-off shotgun!"
"Oh, well," said Faht Bey. "Details, details."
I saw I wasn't going to get any help there. I turned to leave and I swear I heard Faht Bey mutter, "And good luck to him." But I was shaking too hard to take it up at that moment.
Going back through the long, long tunnel, I regained my room.
A thousand plans began to race through my head and tangle with each other.
I half-loaded a ten-gauge shotgun and then left it. I couldn't splatter Silva all over the front lawn. It would leave evidence. And besides, if I stuck my head out that yard door, he might shoot first!
I could not cower here in my room for weeks. I had to work this out!
Sitting down, I took a piece of paper and a pen. I began to write down everything I knew about Gunsalmo Silva. It is a last-ditch sort of exercise. Out of it can come a masterstroke.
The first thing that hit me was that I didn't have to pay Tavilnasty any commissions. That was on the good side of the ledger.
The next thing was that Gunsalmo Silva was sitting on my front lawn. That was not on the good side of the ledger.
What did I really know about this gangster? He had been "Holy Joe" Corleone's bodyguard but had acted as the triggerman in wasting him. He had had some trifling information that the Spiteos interrogator had gotten out of him about senators in the pay of organized crime. Ah. And he didn't have very good sense: he had called for an American consul.
But there was something else. It was eluding me. Then I had it. He was now hypnotrained in Apparatus techniques! A graduate of that school! Yikes! He was deadly!
I cursed Bawtch for having delayed his execution order to be stamped. Leave it to Bawtch to mess things up. But then, Bawtch was cared for.
That was all I could come up with. I paced. I went back and forth. There wasn't much space to pace in and I barked my shins.
Hypnotraining! That was it! I knew I could come up with something masterly!
Right there in that very room were sixteen hypnohelmets. If I could get some guards to shoot a paralysis dart into him from a distance, I could get a helmet on him and untrain him!
Now, let's see. What did I know about hypnosis? Actually, I had never studied it very much. I wanted to be very sure of what I was doing.
I got out my Earth psychology textbooks. I looked the subject up. Psychologists on Earth use hypnotism all the time. They are the masters.
It said that hypnotism was known to most primitive races and that it was used by priests in ancient times, which proved religion was no good—psychologists don't like religion, it is a threat to their racket.
But hypnotism, it continued, was of great use to the psychologist. You could use it to seduce girls. As that was its primary use, it got me off on another track. It opened some new vistas. Thoughts of Utanc were never far away and I began to wonder if maybe I couldn't hypnotize Utanc and make her be sensible, which is to say, get into my bed.
Then my attention fell upon something awful. The text said that hypnotism was of very limited use because only about 22 percent of the people were potential hypnotic subjects and the rest couldn't be hypnotized. And as the psychologist had as his goal the mastery and puppetizing of ALL the people, the tool was in disrepute.
It was a sad blow. Even if I mastered spinning spirals in front of Utanc's face or got her to look at a swinging bright object, she might be one of the 78 percent. And I doubted I could make her stand still that long.
But wait! Hypnohelmets! Hadn't I seen some literature? I opened the vault. I fished around in the box of the one I'd used on Too-Too. When I had made the strip, I had just done what I had seen Krak do. There was probably more to this.
Aha! A little manual! I opened it.
Hypnotism, it said, was a tool applicable in the reenforcement or eradication of memory, or the substitution of false memories for actual ones. Now we were getting somewhere!
It said any emotion could be suppressed or heightened. Aha! I could order Utanc to love me!
Then it said that primitive hypnotism only worked on about 18 percent of the subjects. This was a discrepancy and it bothered me. Earth psychologists never lie. At least not about statistics.
However, the manual plunged on. It seemed that the mind had several wavelengths. The helmet approximated two of these. First was the sleep wave, and by parallelling this, one could produce a trance state. The second wave the helmet employed was the thought wave. Anything carried along on this wave—from a recorded strip or direct speech to the helmeted subject—was accepted by the subject as his own thought and was retained. Thus, hypnotism became effective on 100 percent of the subjects. Subjects were at the total effect of the helmet. You could do anything with the helmet that could be done in any hypnotism. However, its primary use was speed-training. Any skill or language... I had learned my languages with such a helmet under Krak....
Suddenly, with a wave of horror, I recalled the terrible experience I had had after Krak had put a helmet on me and told me I would feel sick if I harmed Heller! What agony!
I dropped the manual as though it were spouting fire!
These helmets were DANGEROUS!
I had ordered Krak to arrive.
Supposing she put another helmet on me!
The thought was so awful that I almost ran out of the room to get away from the helmets.
I checked myself in time. I must not go out on that lawn!
I made m
yself sit down on the other side of the room from the helmets. I had to think.
Maybe I should destroy them. I could get a disintegrator from the hangar shops.... No, wait! These helmets were valuable. I could use them to seduce any girl I wanted. I could get the staff to bow and slaver whenever I appeared. I could make Utanc love me and that was the important thing.
Oh, yes. And I could untrain Gunsalmo Silva and make him get the idea he was needed at the North Pole. Under the ice.
No, I mustn't destroy these helmets. Maybe I'd never get out of this room unless I used them. Gunsalmo had gotten Tavilnasty. Apparatus trained, maybe he'd get me no matter what I did.
Obviously, the right answer was to hit him with a paralysis dart, get a helmet on him and send him off to burrow in the ice.
Good.
But under no circumstances did I want to take any chance of MY getting a helmet put on me by Krak or anybody else!
I got nerve enough to examine a helmet again. There was a little light in front that showed it was on.
Wait! That light was not part of the mind-wave circuit.
INSPIRATION!
I would be able to get out of this room through the yard, seduce all the girls I wanted, make people bow to me and make Utanc love me with devotion!
With no risk to myself!
Chapter 2
Using the communicator system to the hangar, I sent for the technician who had installed the new emergency-alarm system. He soon came in through the hangar tunnel.
He was a cocky, self-confident type, a little runt named Flip, product of Wiggo, one of the Voltar planets. Nobody had ever persuaded him to comb his hair Earth style: it stood up in two spirals, like twin antennae.
"Alarm system don't work?" he said.
I sat him down. I handed him the hypnohelmet and the box it came in. "There is a grave emergency," I said. "These just came in on the Blixo. They work on everybody."
He looked the hypnohelmet over. Count on a technician. They never look on the outside of anything. He instantly began to look inside and open up the guts. Then he paused. "If they work, what am I doing fixing it?"
"You don't understand," I said patiently. "I've got sixteen of these. I want them fixed so that they only work when I want them to work. I want them fixed so that on some people, they appear to be working when they are not working at all."
He probed around in it. "Well, that's easy. The light on the front that shows the operator it is working isn't part of the main circuit. It can go on independently. So we just put a switch on it and it goes on but the main circuit doesn't."
"It's more complicated than that," I said. "I want the operator to turn the helmet on and think that it is working but on some people it works and some it doesn't. Now, I thought if you could put some kind of a secret switch inside the helmet that only the one it is put on can turn off, it would solve the problem."
"Oh, you mean the guy inside the helmet should be able to turn it off while the operator thinks it is still on. Right?"
"Right. Now, I was thinking that very few people can wiggle their ears. I can wiggle my ears. It is a talent I have. So if the operator put a helmet on me and I wiggled my ears—let's say three times—the helmet would be off when the operator thought it was still on."
"I can't wiggle my ears," said Flip.
"Precisely," I said. "So the helmet would work on you but, as I can wiggle my ears, it would not work on me."
"Can't be done," he said. "Not with the state of the art. There are no ear-wiggling switches."
"Not even a tip of an ear?" I pleaded.
He saw I was pretty desperate. He thought. Then he looked at the little manual I had been reading. "Huh," he snorted disparagingly, "a scaled-down operator's manual. Worthless." He reached down to the bottom of the carton and he brought out a huge, thick manual, enough to break a man's arm: Design, Theory, Maintenance and Repair Manual for Technicians.
In a moment he was absorbed in huge, spread-out schematics. "Aha!" said Flip. "A multimanifold, bypass-input, shunt circuit!" He put a finger on it impressively. "Right there!"
I sat hoping.
He looked into the helmet. He unfastened a small cover and looked in. "These are Yippee-Zip Manufacturing Company components. You're lucky. They're standard in computers. We got their stuff by the ton."
"You can do something?" I said breathlessly.
"If I put a mutual-proximity breaker switch in this circuit right here, and if it is activated, the front light will go on but the helmet will be null and void."
Although the chart was huge, the part he was pointing at—and the whole setup in there actually—was no bigger than my thumbnail. I said, "But I can't get the tip of my ear in there! It would be too risky!"
"No, no, no. A mutual-proximity breaker switch is in two parts. They use them on spaceships. When one spaceship gets too close to another spaceship, it trips a switch in the other's computers and shunts in an avoidance direction."
"I don't understand."
"Look, I put Part A of the switch in the helmet circuit. The subject it isn't supposed to work on wears Part B in his hair. When they come together, Part B interacts with Part A and the helmet, she don't work but she looks like she is working." He saw I was befuddled. "I'll get some," he said and rushed out.
In about ten minutes he came back up through the tunnel. He had sixteen cartons. They were small but heavy.
"You can't wear anything too big in your hair," I protested.
He laughed. He opened one carton. There were two little lead boxes in it, each marked differently. "This one," said Flip, "goes in the helmet. This one the guy puts in his hair."
"They'd be noticed!" I protested.
"No, no, no," he said. "You don't get it." He opened up the box for the helmet side. In it, carefully positioned by tiny prongs, was the tiniest speck I have seen in some time. He opened up the other one. Same thing. "Mini-micro circuitry components," he said.
"But why the heavy lead boxes?" I said. "Are they radioactive?"
"Oh, no, no, no," said Flip. "If you keep them in the parts store unshielded, they activate other components around them. Computers won't work that have these in them. The computer field hits one of these in the parts store and all it will register is collision! So they put sets of them in shielded boxes."
He got right to work. He put the helmet part of the switch into the helmet. It was very delicate work, done with a huge magnifier and a little screw-adjustable set of prongs and snips. Indeed, it never would be detected! It was like working with molecules.
It took him a long time. Finally he had it. "Now, I will show you," he said.
He put the helmet on a chair. He put one of his innumerable meters under it. He turned it on. The meter read like mad. That helmet was really putting out! I shuddered.
Then he opened the little lead box of Part B and with prongs put the tiny bit on the chair. The meter went dead. The front light of the helmet glowed brightly. He hit the helmet switch several times. On and off went the light but the meter did nothing. Then he put the tiny bit back in its lead box, turned the helmet on and the meter went mad!
I had been thinking very hard. I knew what I would have to do. And I also knew what I would have to do with Flip. The secret must not get out.
"Fix them all!" I said.
Happily he went to work.
I dozed and read some comic books. The day wore on. I saw he was getting down to the last helmet. It was sunset.
My original plan had been, when he was finished, to pretend I wanted the illusion inspected on the mountain-top and then push him through it. But Faht Bey was so touchy these days. A dead technician splattered all over the hangar floor might also excite the appetites of the assassin pilots—they earlier had wanted to kill technicians.
No, I had a better plan by far. I excused myself and went into the bedroom. I closed the door. Out of his sight and hearing, I fished a recorder from the vault. I studied the manual o
n how to make a hypnostrip.
I made a strip. I said, "When you are finished with the hypnohelmets you will forget everything about these hypnohelmets being in my room. You will forget you changed them. You will think you were called for to repair the alarm system and that while you were here, that is all you did. When I remove the helmet from your head, you will see nothing and feel nothing until I say 'Thank you.' You will then ask me if the alarm system is all right. Then you will be awake and normal. You will forget you have heard this recording."
I went back in where he was working. I had the strip in my pocket.
He finished the last helmet. "All done," said Flip. He carried the helmets, back in their boxes, to the vault and cleaned everything up.
I brought back the last helmet and one Part B box. "All done but the test," I said.
"The meter tells you that."
"I don't know about meters. Tests should be live. Do you mind?"
"Sure, go ahead," said Flip. "But if it don't work, then spaceships will be crashing all over the place. Those things are reliable."
I opened up the lead Part B box. I took the tiny scrap out and put it in his hair. I put the helmet on his head. I turned on the switch.
He went out like a light! The thing I had put in his hair was a dust speck! The real Part B was doubled in a lead box in the other room!
I slipped the recorded strip into the helmet slot. It went right through, just like it was supposed to.
I took the helmet off his head. He just sat there with his eyes shut. I took the dust speck out of his hair.
I removed the helmet and lead box from the room. I closed the vault. I came back and laid some of his tools beside the trick floor plate in the secret office where he'd been working.
All was ready. I said, "Thank you."
He looked at me, his eyes still kind of glazed, and he said, "Is the alarm system all right?"
"I sure appreciate your coming here to fix it," I said.
"Yeah," said Flip, looking perfectly normal, "there wasn't much wrong with it after all. You got to step on that floor plate real hard and twist your foot to set the alarm off in the hangar. Just remember that."