Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 77, No. 4. Whole No. 451, March 25, 1981

Wonder Cure by Reg Bretnor

John Vennah had murdered at least three young girls and two small boys. It was an open-and-shut case — but would his politically powerful family be able to get him off?...

When the police finally tracked John Vennah down and arrested him, half the city where his family was so well known reacted with shocked disbelief. The other half either felt a load of fear lift from them, especially if they were parents, or else grunted grimly and said they’d always thought the guy was weird. Dear little old ladies shook their heads, murmuring, “I simply can’t believe it — he always seemed like such a nice young man. How terrible it must be for his poor mother!”

Men of his own age who’d been to school with him, and one or two of his old teachers, and certain former neighbors of the Vennahs recalled the things they’d caught — or almost caught — him doing years ago. But that had been before the Vennahs started sending him to boarding schools, getting him out of town in one way or another.

There was no doubt about one thing. John Vennah had murdered at least three young girls, after torturing and abusing them in a variety of ways; similarly, he had abused and murdered at least two small boys. The police had found their violated bodies buried near a mountain cabin of his father’s, and he had, surprisingly, not even denied the crimes.

It was an open-and-shut case — or would have been if his father had not been the city’s most important lawyer and his grandfather its most prestigious judge, with enormous political clout locally and on a state and national level.

Even that, of course, could not engineer his release on bail. But his maximum-security cell in the county jail was made more comfortable than it would otherwise have been, and there he granted interviews to avid media men eager to make him a celebrity, sitting in an easy chair completely self-possessed, his light-brown hair combed neatly back from his narrow forehead, his strange blue eyes peering through rather old-fashioned silver spectacles. He smiled at the newsmen with perfect, expensively straightened teeth; he answered their questions in a soft, almost coaxing voice; he kept turning the conversation from the crimes of which he was accused, discussing psychiatric theory, and why some people were superior and destined to survive and dominate, while other, lesser, weaker beings were born only to be victims.

The media men decided that he was either crazy or crazy like a fox, and they said as much. It made him angry, and in subsequent interviews he stated baldly that he was not insane, that it was society that was off the beam. The media ate it up.

In the meantime his grandfather and his father had hired the state’s leading criminal lawyer to defend him, and the three of them had reviewed his situation very carefully. There was his history to consider — the history his family had done its best to cover up, sometimes buying the silence of the injured or of witnesses, sometimes using the sort of pressure only great political clout makes possible. It went back to his early boyhood, when they had discovered that he could not be given pets. What he had done to a cocker spaniel puppy had sent his mother running out wildly, pale and sick.

The episode was still vivid in their minds; and so were those that followed it, involving neighbors’ animals at first, then finally an occasion when a truckdriver had found him in a normally deserted shed, starting to use a razor blade on a much smaller boy.

They had sent him to military schools, to three of them. Twice he had been badly beaten up and had run away; the third time he had been expelled, with the recommendation that he have psychotherapy. They had sent him to a long succession of psychiatrists and psychiatric hospitals, and all had given up, urging his parents to have him permanently institutionalized. Mrs. Vennah, weeping, would have none of that, arguing that there had never been insanity in her family or her husband’s, and that certainly John would grow out of it as he matured.

Strangely, in his last year in high school, and for the three years before he dropped out of college, he seemed to stabilize. He was quiet, withdrawn, very much a loner; his smile was too cold, too much like a sneer, to make others warm to him. He watched the tube a lot; he read oddly and sporadically; he went off on long solitary wanderings. But nothing happened — or at least nothing surfaced. “He isn’t getting any place,” his father said, “but he’s straightened out, thank God!”

And then—

There had been disappearances. Rewards were being offered, mounting up. The city seethed with fear and anger. The press demanded action.

He had been careful, oh, so very careful. But the wrong person had seen the girl get in his car, had wondered, had copied down his license number. The police had come. They had gone out to the cabin with their dogs...

John Vennah’s father and grandfather met with the out-of-town attorney. They went over the whole business point by point, his grandfather still towering, huge and bushy-browed, over his desk; his father lean, tight-lipped, taciturn; his counsel beautifully barbered and tailored for the courtroom.

“He’s guilty as all hell!” his grandfather declared. He looked at them. “We’re agreed on that?”

They nodded.

“And I suppose we also all agree that, the way the MacNaughton Rule is being interpreted these days here in this state and in the Federal courts, he won’t have even a prayer pleading insanity?”

Again they nodded.

His grandfather’s brows drew down. “Finally, because here we have no death penalty, he’s certain to draw life without hope of parole.” He glared at his son. “That, Willard, means he’ll be a ready weapon for any enemy to use against us — the press will always help. That’s something we can not afford.”

“Then what the hell can we do?”

The old man sat back in his chair. “We can put him in cold storage,” he said.

“What do you mean by that, Judge Vennah?”

“You’ve heard about cryonics, haven’t you? People getting themselves into deep-freeze the moment they’re dead, hoping they can be brought to life again when the world’s found cures for what they died of? Well, it got a big boost in ’88 when they proved that higher mammals can be frozen and revived, and even more when the Russians actually woke up that baby mammoth in Siberia.”

“I think... I see,” said Willard Vennah slowly. “That means we’d not be killing him.”

“A good point,” put in the counsel. “A very good point. Of course, it would have to be entirely voluntary.”

A few hours later the three of them visited John Vennah in his cell. They laid it out for him, coldly and legalistically, examining each of his hopeless options, saying nothing of their own motives in the matter.

He was intelligent. He stared at them for a long time with his strange eyes. He told himself that, when those people in the future woke him up, they’d find a problem more difficult than they expected; he had defeated every headshrinker he had encountered. He smiled. Then he agreed.

Three weeks later his counsel presented the Vennah family’s offer at a pre-trial hearing, arguing eloquently that they would defray all expenses — that the taxpayers would be spared the enormous costs of keeping this mentally ill, dangerous man in high-security confinement for forty or fifty or more years. And justice would ally with mercy; perhaps years from now a more advanced society with psychiatric wonder cures could bring him back to life, a useful citizen.

The judge agreed. Though there had been no enabling legislation, he declared, there quite clearly had been none prohibiting. The prosecution, who had good reason to keep Judge Vennah happy, agreed not to pursue the case. The media had a field day.

Ten days later, in the prison hospital, John Vennah was prepared for cryonic storage. He was given the necessary shots to slow down his life processes. He was wrapped in the winding sheet the treatment called for. He was taken away to the cold crypt where he was to lie for generations.

The awakening was much slower than he had expected, much slower and much more painful. For a long time he could see nothing; no sounds reached him. He was aware simply that he was.

Then there were vague lights and shadows, voices he could not locate, somewhere in the air. He felt a touch against his neck; he slept. When finally he awoke, it was to see four people standing over him, staring at him silently. They wore curiously cut clothing, yellow and white smocks like Nehru jackets. Their faces were utterly expressionless, extremely smooth, uniformly handsome.

He found that he could move his head. He looked around. The architecture was foreign to him — glowing walls decorated with vivid blots of color like Rohrshach tests, arched doorways, vaulted ceilings. The blots drew his gaze disturbingly. He looked again at the attendants. He was not curious about how the world had changed; his only thought was how he might contend with it. He tried to move his arms, and found that they had not removed his cerements.

“What... what year is this?” he asked.

They did not answer.

“How long have I been — asleep?”

One of the men spoke. His English was — the only word was mutated, its vowels and consonants hard to recognize. “You frozen, yes, now two hunder-thirry-and — yes, three years.”

John Vennah peered at them. They did not look advanced. They did not even look intelligent. Suddenly the feeling welled within him that he would have no trouble in this society — that he could bring them plenty of it. He fought his laughter back.

“And I suppose you’ve found a cure?” he asked. “You know — for what they said was wrong with me?”

The man nodded heavily. “Yes,” he replied. “We did not waken you until. We have the records; we know you. We have the cure, yes.”

“That’s great!” John Vennah told him. “And when’re you going to take these mummy wrappings off?”

“They will be removed,” the man promised him, “but after you have cured.”

“Which will be when?”

“Soon, soon,” the man said.

Minutes passed. John Vennah told himself that they must certainly work fast if they thought they could cure him before he even was unwrapped, and momentarily he was apprehensive. Was it possible? Could they have developed a technique that would do to him what lobotomy might have done in his own day? Then another look at their dull, impassive faces reassured him.

Fifteen more minutes passed. No word was said.

“Well?” he asked. “When do we start?”

“They come now,” the spokesman told him.

There was sound. He looked around. A door had opened, and two more men had entered. One was tall and dark, hawk-nosed, professionally serene, dressed like the others but in white and pale blue; his companion wore a recognizable cassock, but black and saffron, with a sort of Roman collar; a string of votive beads hung from his wrist. They walked in total silence; their feet were bare.

Well, look at that! he thought, trying not to sneer. Religious bunk!

They came to him. “John Vennah?” the tall one said.

“Yes.”

The man read from a paper — the record of his life before the freezing.

“So. All this is true? It is needful for us to know, for the cure. From you, yourself.”

“It’s true,” John Vennah told him.

“Then we need not delay.” The tall man nodded to the others. They took the four corners of the gurney. They started moving it toward the door. The man in the cassock, counting his beads, murmuring unintelligibly, followed behind them.

“How long is this going to take?” John Vennah asked.

“It takes a moment only.”

“Well, I guess you’re the doctor,” John Vennah said.

The tall man stopped. He frowned. “You do not understand. True it is we have a cure for those like you. Yes, we have rediscovered it. The only cure. The cure that sets you free as you deserve, to where you belong.”

He gestured. The door slid open.

“But I am not a doctor,” the tall man told John Vennah humbly, pointing to the open courtyard where the scaffold stood. “I am the common hangman.”