The Cray came back with the diamond-shaped prompt that indicated it had successfully loaded. "We"re go on the program," he said to his waiting subject-or patient-or was it victim?
She was lying quietly on the couchette, watching him. "Just don"t mess up my brain, chromedome."
"You"re going to be the chromedome, I"m afraid." He got the helmet. It contained a hundred and twenty-eight pres-sure-sensitive electrodes and was a great improvement over the old method of applying them individually to the skin. But with the ma.s.ses of wires coming out of it, it looked like something that belonged on the head of a robot.
She laughed when she saw it. "We need a camera, I want you to remember me at my most beautiful."
He looked long at her. "I wouldn"t do this if I didn"t have to."
"Never leave me, Jonathan. Never, no matter what." Jonathan fitted the helmet to her head and they laughed together. "I really want a picture," she said. He turned to his instruments. Patricia"s brain-wave patterns were jittering across the screen of the oscilloscope.
"Remember that night? We were together. We had drinks. And?"
"Jonathan, ask about Lourdes instead."
He watched his instruments. "Remember? We were to-gether, we had just had a drink-"
"You left!"
The PV220 wave showed a peak, then settled. The thought was not coming from memory; neither was it quite a lie. It was an implant. To break a hypnotic block, it was necessary to challenge such implants.
This was a fateful moment. If he could break what had been put into her mind to blind it, his next words would do it.
"You don"t remember that."
"That"s what happened."
"Try again. We had drinks. a.s.sume I didn"t leave. What really happened?"
The sound she made was not a scream, it was an eruption. Jonathan lunged toward her. In an instant she had gone a ghastly pale gray color, her eyes almost starting out of her head. Her shriek dropped suddenly from a gla.s.s-shattering pitch to a vibrating groan. Then the computer started beeping. Automatically Jonathan responded to the line-failure signal and pressed the reset b.u.t.ton. The screen flickered to blackness. Even as it was doing that he was leaping to her aid. He thought perhaps a short of some kind was sending voltage into the headset. But even when he tore it from her head she didn"t change. She was convulsing. Her arms went out straight beside her, her legs began to hammer, her head jerked from side to side. He shook her, he yelled at her, finaly he scooped her up into his arms and hugged her to him.
"What have I done? Oh, stop, stop! Oh, G.o.d, G.o.d, please make her stop!"
Chapter Sixteen.
HER HEAD WAS whirling, her ears ringing, the whole room shaking. Jonathan seemed to dart and flicker as if caught in some sort of strobe light. Then his hands slapped against the helmet with a stunning clap and he tore it from her head.
She blacked out. She knew that something was terribly wrong with her. She could feel her body jerking in spasm, her tongue filling the back of her throat. And she was spinning, spinning fast, out of control, falling.
A great bell was booming somewhere.
Then it wasn"t a bell at all, it was Jonathan"s voice. He was crying and screaming, cradling her in his arms.
Quite suddenly, all was quiet.
"Patricia?"
His face was shadowed by the glare of the fluorescent tubes above him. "Jonathan-"
"Darling, darling, darling. I"m so stupid, so d.a.m.n stupid." He embraced her and she let herself be swept up into his arms. They were strong and good and she was glad.
"I feel better. I think I"m going to be okay."
A haunted expression came into his eyes. It alarmed her; it was the expression of somebody with a guilty secret.
"Did you hurt me, honey? Is there something I don"t know?"
"I don"t think so."
Another thought occurred to her. "Did you find out?" Her own voice sounded so small.
She turned her head to avoid the glaring ceiling lights.
He stared down at her.
Love me tonight. . . . She became aware, dimly, of something quick and gleaming that stank of flyblow, chasing her through her dream country. Catching her.
Oh, G.o.d, how horrible! She heard herself gasp. She felt another scream coming. The thing she had glimpsed was so ugly and so utterly cold, the very opposite of all she loved of humanity and life. It was Death coming through the high gra.s.s, Death rising from its hiding place in the soul. "Oh! Oh! No, Jonathan!" She heard herself gasp. She felt another scream coming. The thing she had glimpsed was so ugly and so utterly cold, the very opposite of all she loved of humanity and life. It was Death coming through the high gra.s.s, Death rising from its hiding place in the soul. "Oh! Oh! No, Jonathan!"
"Patricia! Sh! Sh! It"s over, I turned it off. You were right; I won"t ask any more questions. I"m so sorry."
"Oh, darling, it was so ugly!" Were there people in the world who were not quite people? What had that thing been, straddling her, staring down with the blank eyes of a snake?
She was going to throw up. "Jonathan-" Her mouth opened. He grabbed for a wastepaper basket, thrust it beneath her face, and held her. Her stomach seemed to pull off its moorings. For an instant she was sinking in a fast elevator. Then the lights were above her again, glaring, humming tubes of brilliance, and beneath them Jonathan"s face, his lips slack with fear and his eyes still hidden in the dark of his brows.
He bent to her, lifted her in his arms, and embraced her. "I thought it would work out differently."
The world had just changed for her. Her memory of that terrible moment was now clear. She could remember what had raped her, and it was not a human being.
What evil has been wrought in the dark of this world?
"First I heard music, a sort of humming, very low, like a swarm of flies."
"Hush, honey, hush."
"I will not!" She reached out and s.n.a.t.c.hed up the tangled pile of graph paper. "What does this say?"
"I pulled off the helmet."
"Before you did that you asked me what really happened. And I had a vivid image. Was it a memory or wasn"t it?"
"I don"t know. The reading isn"t reliable."
She wouldn"t stand for that. "Jonathan, you opened something up in me and it feels like a memory. Now I"m the one who has to know."
"Whatever it was sent you into convulsions, I don"t think we should fool with it."
That wasn"t acceptable. "You tell me- dream or memory?" dream or memory?"
He took her hands, pressed them to his lips. "I can"t be sure. There"s something wrong with the readout."
She could smell it, could taste its filthy, rotten kisses. "Jonathan, Jonathan, look at you. You poor man, you"re so innocent. Do you still think you did it?"
He squeezed his eyes shut, he bowed his head. He was slick with sweat. "I know." The words were a bare murmur.
"Don"t be an a.s.s. You didn"t. You couldn"t possibly."
He dropped to the couchette beside her. His hands, hold-ing hers, were cold and wet.
She tossed her head, wishing she could get the image of the thing out of her mind, could somehow replace it forever with Jonathan"s beauty.
But that thing thing existed. existed.
"Darling, we have to take a reading on me as well."
"What? Have you lost your mind, Jonathan Banion?"
"Just a short reading. And you"ll have to run the computer."
"I can"t run a computer, and I wouldn"t even if I could!"
He glanced again at the chart of her own reading, made a sad kind of sighing sound. Suddenly he grabbed her shoul-ders. He brought his face close to hers and she saw him clearly, without shadows. His eyes were staring, fixed, his lips dry. He was trembling steadily, with the frantic rhythm of a small animal. "You get over there and run it!" He picked up the graph and shook it at her. "Do you realize what this-no, you couldn"t possibly." He jumped up, went to the computer terminal with a single stride, began jabbing at keys.
It beeped, the screen came to green life, then he grabbed her by the wrist and dragged her over.
"Once the helmet is on, the computer will want to adjust to the exact frequencies of my thought patterns.
There will be a series of numbers coming across the screen. Each time it pauses, press the key marked"return." Got that?"
"Darling-"
"Got that? Got that?" Got that?"
"Okay! Got it."
"Then it will ask you a question-which measurement? You will type in the answer, "waves by harmonic type." Then press "return" again."
"I"ve got it. "Waves by harmonic type." "
"Then press "return." You see the return key?"
She put her finger on it. "Jonathan, what if something happens to you?"
"Do just what I did-you press this orange key marked "reset," then you pull the helmet off my head. But nothing will will happen because this is a pa.s.sive test. We aren"t fooling with thy hypnotic barriers." happen because this is a pa.s.sive test. We aren"t fooling with thy hypnotic barriers."
"So we are are hypnotized. You know that for certain?" hypnotized. You know that for certain?"
"Oh, yes. And the barriers are powerful. More so than I dreamed possible. One more question, baby, and bang-the next step was brain death."
"Death by hypnosis? I didn"t think-"
"Don"t ask me how it"s done because I don"t know. Now come on, let"s get this over with."
He fitted the silver, cable-strewn helmet onto his own head and lay down on the couchette. After a moment a string of numbers shot across the screen, and she began following her instructions.
Soon the numbers stopped and the machine asked its question. She typed in the reply, then kept one finger hover-ing over the reset b.u.t.ton and the other over "return." She looked at Jonathan. He was lying on the couchette, his eyes closed. He seemed fine. She pressed "return."
Silence. Jonathan didn"t move. She kept her finger over the orange b.u.t.ton, began watching his chest. He was breath-ing steadily.
Soon paper started streaming out of the graph. Then the machine sounded a bell and stopped. "Jonathan, did I do something wrong?"
He sat up, pulled off the helmet. "You were fine," he muttered. "That"s all there was to it." He lunged for the graph paper, ripped it off the roll, studied it almost franti-cally.
When he looked up at her again, his face was pallid with shock. The paper dropped from his hands.
"Jonathan, what is it?"
He shook his head. Then he came to her, almost reverently, and took her head in his hands. "Darling, our brains show an incredible, radical departure from the normal wave pattern."
Was that that all? "Well, are we okay anyway?" She could think of nothing else to ask. all? "Well, are we okay anyway?" She could think of nothing else to ask.
He laughed silently, mirthlessly. "Dearest, we"re fine. But don"t you see what this means? We"ve got eighteen separate waves. Normal people have seven."
"Does it mean-have we got a disease?"
"In a funny kind of way. Our disease is that we aren"t human beings."
"We-what?" She was mystified. "Of course we are!"
"No. We"re too far from the norm. Oh, we"re human stock all right. I mean, the basic pattern-alpha, beta, delta-it"s there. But we are not people. we are not people. We"ve got an alpha high harmonic, a delta parallel, and a whole cl.u.s.ter of little waves down in the low frequencies." We"ve got an alpha high harmonic, a delta parallel, and a whole cl.u.s.ter of little waves down in the low frequencies."
"It must be the hypnosis. It"s got to be!"
"No way. I"m talking about brain structures, structures, not transi-tory effects like that. I mean, we are real first-cla.s.s not transi-tory effects like that. I mean, we are real first-cla.s.s freaks!" freaks!"
That word slashed through her composure and made her shriek. She couldn"t help it; freak is a horrible word. "No, I"m not a freak. I hate it! I am not not a freak!" a freak!"
I was raped by a freak with the skin of a snake and yellow-green reptile eyes. was raped by a freak with the skin of a snake and yellow-green reptile eyes.
"Honey, come on, be quiet."
"I will not be quiet! I am not a freak! Don"t you ever, ever, ever call either of us that, because we are normal. normal. I"m telling you we are normal and we can have a good life! You"ll see, Jonathan Banion, I"ll make a nice home for you, you"ll see!" I"m telling you we are normal and we can have a good life! You"ll see, Jonathan Banion, I"ll make a nice home for you, you"ll see!"