Part 17 (1/2)
”We'll level with you, Gifford. Mainly because we aren't sure. Mainly because of that. We aren't sure even you know the truth. So we'll level.”
”Your blast,” I said.
”O.K., here's how it looks from our side of the fence. It looks like this. You killed Rowley. After fifteen years of faithful service, you killed him. Now we know-even if you don't-that Rowley had you psychoimpressed every six months for fifteen years. Or at least he thought he did.”
”He thought he did?” I asked, just to show I was interested.
”Well, yes. He couldn't have, really, you see. He couldn't have. Or at least not lately. A psychoimpressed person can't do things like that. Also, we know that n.o.body broke it, because it takes six weeks of steady, hard therapy to pull a man out of it. And a man's no good after that for a couple more weeks. You weren't out of Rowley's sight for more than four days.” He shrugged. ”You see?”
”I see,” I said. The guy was a little irritating in his manner. I didn't like the choppy way he talked.
”For a while,” he said, ”we thought it might be an impersonation. But we checked your plate”-he gestured at my arm-”and it's O.K. The genuine article. So it's Gifford's plate, all right. And we know it couldn't have been taken out of Gifford's arm and transferred to another arm in four days.
”If there were any way to check fingerprints and eye patterns, we might be able to be absolutely sure, but the Privacy Act forbids that, so we have to go on what evidence we have in our possession now.
”Anyway, we're convinced that you are Gifford. So that means somebody has been tampering with your mind. We want to know who it is. Do you know?”
”No,” I said, quite honestly.
”You didn't do it yourself, did you?”
”No.”
”Somebody's behind you?”
”Yes.”
”Do you know who?”
”No. And hold those questions a minute. You said you'd level with me. Who are you working for?”
The two of them looked at each other for a second, then the colonel said: ”Senator Quintell.”
I propped myself up on one elbow and held out the other hand, fingers extended. ”All right, figure for yourself. Rowley's out of the picture; that eliminates him.” I pulled my thumb in. ”You work for Quintell; that eliminates him.” I dropped my little finger and held it with my thumb. ”That leaves three Immortals. Grendon, La.s.ser, and Waterford. La.s.ser has the Western Sector; Waterford, the Southern. Neither borders on Northwestern, so that eliminates them. Not definitely, but probably. They wouldn't be tempted to get rid of Rowley as much as they would Quintell.
”So that leaves Grendon. And if you read the papers, you'll know that he's pus.h.i.+ng in already.”
They looked at each other again. I knew they weren't necessarily working for Quintell; I was pretty sure it was Grendon. On the other hand, they might have told the truth so that I'd be sure to think it was Grendon. I didn't know how deep their subtlety went, and I didn't care. It didn't matter to me who they were working for.
”That sounds logical,” said the colonel. ”Very logical.”
”But we have to know,” added Mutton Chops. ”We were fairly sure you'd head back toward the city; that's why we set up guards at the various street entrances. Since that part of our prediction worked out, we want to see if the rest of it will.”
”The rest of it?”
”Yeah. You're expendable. We know that. The organization that sent you doesn't care what happens to you now, otherwise they wouldn't have let you loose like that. They don't care what happens to Eddie Gifford.
”So they must have known you'd get caught. Therefore, they've got you hypnoed to a fare-thee-well. And we probably won't find anything under the hypno, either. But we've got to look; there may be some little thing you'll remember. Some little thing that will give us the key to the whole organization.”
I nodded. That was logical, very logical, as the colonel had said. They were going to break me. They could have done it gently, removed every bit of blocking and covering that the hypnoes had put in without hurting me a bit. But that would take time; I knew better than to think they were going to be gentle. They were going to peel my mind like a banana and then slice it up and look at it.
And if they were working for any of the Immortals, I had no doubt that they could do what they were planning. It took equipment, and it took an expert psychometrician, and a couple of good therapists-but that was no job at all if you had money.
The only trouble was that I had a few little hidden tricks that they'd never get around. If they started fiddling too much with my mind, a nice little psychosomatic heart condition would suddenly manifest itself. I'd be dead before they could do anything about it. Oh, I was expendable, all right.
”Do you want to say anything before we start?” the colonel asked.
”No.” I didn't see any reason for giving them information they didn't earn.
”O.K.” He stood up, and so did the mutton-chopper. ”I'm sorry we have to do this, Gifford. It'll be hard on you, but you'll be in good condition inside of six or eight months. So long.”
They walked out and carefully locked the door behind them.
I sat up for the first time and looked around. I didn't know where I was; in an hour, I could have been taken a long ways away from the city.
I hadn't been, though. The engraving on the bed said:
DELLFIELD SANATORIUM.
I was on Riverside Drive, less than eight blocks from the rendezvous spot.
I walked over to the window and looked out. I could see the roof of the tenth level about eight floors beneath me. The window itself was a heavy sheet of transite welded into the wall. There was a polarizer control to the left to shut out the light, but there was no way to open the window. The door was sealed, too. When a patient got violent, they could pump gas in through the ventilators without getting it into the corridor.
They'd taken all my armament away, and, incidentally, washed off the thin plastic film on my hands and face. I didn't look so old any more. I walked over to the mirror in the wall, another sheet of transite with a reflecting back, and looked at myself. I was a sad-looking sight. The white hair was all scraggly, the whiskers were ditto, and my face looked worried. Small wonder.
I sat back down on the bed and started to think.
It must have been a good two hours later when the therapist came in. She entered by herself, but I noticed that the colonel was standing outside the door.
She was in her mid-thirties, a calm-faced, determined-looking woman. She started off with the usual questions.
”You have been told you are under some form of hypnotic compulsion. Do you consciously believe this?” I told her I did. There was no sense in resisting.
”Do you have any conscious memory of the process?”
”No.”
”Do you have any conscious knowledge of the ident.i.ty of the therapist?”
I didn't and told her so. She asked a dozen other questions, all standard build-up. When she was through, I tried to ask her a couple of questions, but she cut me off and walked out of the room before I could more than open my yap.
The whole sanatorium was, and probably had been for a long time, in the pay of Quintell or Grendon-or, possibly, one of the other Immortals. It had been here for years, a neat little spy setup nestled deep in the heart of Rowley's territory.
Leaving the hospital without outside help was strictly out. I'd seen the inside of these places before, and I had a healthy respect for their impregnability. An unarmed man was in to stay.