Travis McGee 02 - Nightmare In Pink

“It’s just a little friendly curiosity Rossa.”

“Please, dear, with you I have been feeling that it is really a date. Let me keep pretending.”

“You mean we’re different, you and I?”

“Don’t you feel that way about it too, darling?”

It was very skilled. As standard practice it would inflate the man’s ego. Every man could be led to believe he was special. And at the end, with a great faked galloping climax, she would make him believe it forever. Every customer is unique.

“Perhaps. But I want to talk about it.”

She pouted in a rather pretty way, and said, “How did a lovely girl like you get into anything like this? Isn’t that a very trite question, Trav? Aren’t you and I worth better conversation than that?”

“Do you know that old joke, what the lovely girl answers?”

“Surely. Just lucky, I guess. Darling, it is really very adolescent of you to want to pry. Just accept me. As if I was born an hour ago, just for you.”

“All clean and fresh and sweet and virginal.” She looked down at her hand. She examined the nails. It reminded me of Bonita Hersch’s hand, except that the nails were longer. She looked across at me. This time the whore look was frank and apparent.

Under all that tasty trimming was a basic coarseness which would gag a goat. I didn’t have to know how she got into the business. It had been invented for her.

“If you can wait here an hour, someone will come who might suit you better. One of the newer ones, I think. Younger and possibly a little nervous about everything.”

“I wasn’t trying to offend you, Rossa.”

“My dear fellow, it would stagger the imagination to think of any way you could possibly offend me. I was merely thinking of making things more agreeable for you.”

“You are agreeable.”

Suddenly her smile was dazzling. She was a fashion model facing into an imaginary spring breeze in a professional studio. “I will suit you very very well. Never fear. You are an exciting man, Trav. I shouldn’t want to give you up at this point. Now we can forget all that and this will be a date for us. You came in to buy a ticket. You asked me to have a drink with you after work. I am a very proper girl and I am wondering if you are going to make me feel too reckless.” She reached with a small gold lighter and lit my cigarette and then, as she started to hold the flame to her own, fumbled with it and it dropped into her lap and clattered onto the floor. She laughed and said, “See? You are actually making me a little bit nervous, darling.”

I sat on my heels beside our small blue booth and peered under the table for the lighter. I saw the glint of it back against the wall and reached and picked it up, sat back in the booth, lit her cigarette with it and handed it to her.

“Thank you, dear,” she said, with a splendid imitation of fondness.

We finished our drinks, ordered another.

I felt incomparably shrewd. I would take her to the Plaza. I would take her up to Terry’s suite and suddenly Rossa Hendit would discover that it was not the sort of evening she had anticipated. All we wanted from her was conversation about Charlie, and Terry was set up to pay well for it. The tape would furnish Terry’s very good lawyer with enough background to enable him to go after a court order to get Charles McKewn Armister hospitalized for observation, with Joanna Armister signing the commitment papers. After they had taken him off whatever they had him on, Charlie would be able to blow the whole scheme sky high.

My date began to seem slightly absent minded. It was a quiet bar, and thinning out. She went to the ladies’ room and seemed to be gone a long time.

Reality is a curious convention. It is the special norm for each of us. Based upon the evidences of our own senses, we have each established our own version of reality. We are constantly rechecking it with all sensory equipment. In the summer of 1958 I was in Acapulco when a major earthquake struck that area. I was awakened by the grating of roof tiles and a thousand dogs howling. I went barefoot to the window. There was a cool tile floor under my bare feet. Suddenly I realized that the tile floor was rippling. There were waves in the solid tile, throwing me off balance. Such a thing could not be. Tile floors were solid. To have such a floor rippling in such a way destroyed the validity of all sensory impressions, and gave me a feeling of black and primitive terror I had never felt before. I could no longer depend upon my evidences of reality.

She came back from the ladies’ room. She sat and smiled at me. I said, “Let’s get another drink up at the Plaza.”

That is what my mind told my mouth to say. But the fit of the words in my mouth felt strange. I heard, like an after-echo, what I had said. “Let’s get a down with the ending ever.

She was leaning toward me, with a narrow and curious avidity. “Darling,” she said. “Darling, darling.” It had an echo-chamber quality. She opened her mouth wide enough so that I could see the pink curl of her tongue as she formed the d.

I saw a tiny mark appear at her hairline, right in the center of her forehead. It moved slowly down her forehead, and as it did so the two flaps of flesh folded away at either side, bloody pink where they were exposed, displaying the hard white shine of ivory bone. The moving line parted her brows, bisected her nose and lips and chin, and the halved damp soft flesh fell away leaving the white skull, the black sockets where the eyes had been. The jaws and teeth were exposed in a white death grin, but the jaw still worked and the pink tongue was still moist within that sepulchral dryness, curling, saying, “Darling, darling.”

I closed my eyes tightly, both hands clamped on the edge of the table. Under my hands the table edge turned wet and soft and full of roundnesses. I squinted down, fighting for control, and with vision it turned back into a table edge. But as I closed my eyes again all the softness was under my hands. This was the earthquake terror again, roaring through my mind like a black wind. In some far corner of my mind I was trying to make an appraisal. She had dropped the lighter and kicked it over against the wall. It gave her time enough.

I tried to hang onto a tiny edge of reality. I knew the words. I wanted the whole room to hear the words. Call the police.

I heard the words come out. A wet, brutish howling. “Can Paul bury shit anything.” My muscles were knotted. I risked a glance at the skull. She was gone. She seemed gone. I could not be sure she was gone. I could not be sure of anything.

Then the room tilted abruptly, thudding my shoulder against the wall. I tried to see them. They were in a half-circle standing on that steep slant, looking down into the booth, the tallest narrowest people I had ever seen, with tiny little heads no bigger than oranges. One of them was a policeman. “Hadda!” I yelled at him. “Hassa hadda,” and began to vomit with fright. A snake looked at me out of a door in the cop’s narrow belly.

Then there were white things, white grunting things, running at me and pulling, and I fought them in a dream, and was yanked and mashed face down and felt a little stinging bite in my buttock.

I rolled under a night sky and saw a thousand tiny peering faces at either side, atop tall in-leaning bodies. There was a thump, a sliding, a bang of doors. Motor roar. High city lights moving by. A sinking deepness, somebody close by and fingers on my wrist. The thing I was in turned on its side and we went off into dark country, scraping swiftly along on the side, leaving a shower of sparks…

* * *

For a long time I could not tell whether I was awake or asleep. I was in a bed in a white room. Daylight came through a window screened with heavy mesh. I could move my head, and that was all. I could see a white wall. Things kept happening to that wall. For a long time I could not stop them from happening. In sleep you cannot stop things from happening. Places would open in the wall. I could see into horrid places and see horrid things. Grotesque copulations. Huge rotting bugs. Ghastly things eating each other. Things would open the wall from the other side and come through and disappear as they got too close to the bed, and I would go rigid waiting for them to get me. Once hundreds of people started laughing at me. They were behind the bed where I could not see them. It was deafening.

After an interval of time I could not measure, I began to be able to exert control over the wall. I could close it up and make it white and blank. It was like making a fist with my mind. If I let the fist relax, the things would come again. After a long time I began to be able to relax the fist little by little without anything appearing. I became convinced that I was awake. Later I was able to make ghastly things appear only by an effort of will, a kind of reaching to make them happen. They lost color and solidity. Finally I could make nothing happen. I was in a white room. I was in bed. I could move only my head.

Two men came in. They stood by the bed and looked down at me. One was in a business suit. He had a bald head and a young face. The other was tall, young and husky, dressed in white.

The one in the business suit said, “How do you feel?”

“Who are you?”

“I am Doctor Varn. I’d like to know if you are still hallucinating.”

My mind seemed to take a long time to grasp the question and find the answer. “No. There aren’t any things in the wall any more.”

“Do you hear any strange sounds?”

“Not any more. Where am I?”

“Toll Valley Hospital, Mr. McGee, just south of New Paltz, New York. It is a private institution for the treatment of mental and nervous disorders.”

“Why am I here?”

“Because you are ill, Mr. McGee. Jerry, please go tell Dr. Moore we can schedule Mr. McGee for hypnotherapy at two o’clock.”

The one in white left. I heard the door close. “I’m not sick.”

“You were very ill, Mr. McGee. You were irrational and violent in front of witnesses, including an officer of the law. In New York State any officer of the law can commit you for observation if he is a witness to dangerous and irrational behavior, if, in his opinion you are endangering public safety.”

I wished my brain did not feel so slow and tired and muddy. “Then… wouldn’t I go to a public hospital?”

“Usually, yes. But I have been treating you for some time now, Mr. McGee. When you began to behave oddly, your friend, Miss Hendit, became alarmed and phoned me. I arranged to have you brought out here.”

“You have been treating me for some time?”

“According to my office files. My nurse can verify it, of course.” He shook his head. “Until last evening, I really thought we were making progress.”

He was so plausible it frightened me as badly as the things in the wall. I forced myself back toward reality. “What did that whore put into my drink?”

“That’s an irrational question, Mr. McGee.”

“So give me an irrational answer. Humor me.

“In the past several years we’ve made some very interesting discoveries regarding the relationship between blood chemistry and mental disorders. In order to get the extreme reaction you experienced, she would have had to give you quite a dangerous dosage of a complex chemical compound which can, in a normal human being, temporarily duplicate all the physical and mental and sensory symptoms of violent schizophrenia.”

“But she didn’t have to do that because I was already nuts.”

He looked down at me with mild surprise and a certain amount of approval. “Mr. McGee, you have astonishing recuperative powers, mental and physical. You broke the arm of a very highly-trained attendant.”

“Good.”

“I expected you to be slightly incoherent, but your word choice seems controlled. We can schedule you sooner than I expected.”

“For that therapy you told him about?”

“Dr. Moore uses a combination of mild hypnotic drugs and hypnotic technique. You see, we need to know a great deal more about you, Mr. McGee. We are particularly interested in all of your activities during the past several days.”

“I won’t tell you a damned thing.”

“That is an irrational statement. But perhaps I made an inaccurate statement. We are not particularly interested in your activities. We have a request for an accurate report of your activities. We are far more interested in your responses to the psychotomimetic drugs.”

“The what?”

“Our resident organic chemist, Doctor Daska, had been achieving some interesting variations in the Hofmann formulae, creating more directive compounds in the psilocybin and D-lysergic acid diethylamide areas. The experimental compound the girl gave you has the lab designation of Daska-15. A single odorless tasteless drop. Approximately three-millionths of an ounce, actually, in a distilled-water suspension. Harvard University’s Center for Research in Personality has done some basic work in this area, but Daska can achieve more predictability. Daska-15 gives consistently ugly hallucinations, and mimics highly psychotic disturbances of the sensory areas, communication and so on.” He seemed to have forgotten he was talking to me. His enthusiasm and dedication were apparent.

“What the hell kind of a place is this?” I demanded.

His young face firmed as he brought his attention back from the misty distances of research.

“Eh? Oh, this is the Mental Research Wing of Toll Valley Hospital, Mr. McGee. We’re concerned with psychotomimetic techniques, surgical techniques, electrical and chemical stimulation of areas of the brain-in fact the whole range of the mechanical rather than the psychiatric approach to mental disorder.”

“What the hell kind of a doctor are you? You know I don’t belong here.”

“We’re making significant progress in several directions. Important progress.” He seemed strangely apologetic, and anxious for me to understand.

“So what?”

“We have chimps and monkeys and rodents who didn’t ask to come here either, Mr. McGee.”

My mind was quickening a little. “Are you trying to tell me I’m some kind of an experimental animal?”

“All this work is generously supported by foundation money.”

Were I a character in a funnypaper, a lightbulb would have appeared over my head. “One of the Armister foundations?”

He looked sad and apologetic. “Crash programs are essential in this area, Mr. McGee. It is… a very difficult thing to weigh a few isolated instances of… questionable ethical behavior against the greatest good for the greatest number. Also…” His voice trailed off into a troubled silence.

“Also what?”

“It would be illegal to attempt to solicit healthy volunteers. And the few cases we can get from the main hospital, with all necessary permissions, are generally so hopeless we can’t accurately appraise results.” He shrugged a mild sadness away and smiled down at me, his features clean and remarkably handsome under the sheen of his hairless head. “We’re not monsters, Mr. McGee. There won’t be anything as unpleasant as what you have already been through. Many of the Daska compounds have extremely pleasant side effects. This will merely be a case of taking you through the experimental series, and then, under hypnosis, getting your detailed verbal report of the experience and sensations. You’ll be physically checked and checked against the electroencephalograph and given a detailed multiphasic personality inventory test between each segment of the series to determine any area of deterioration.”

“You are so comforting, Doctor. Was Charles Armister here?”

He hesitated and said, “He was with us for ten weeks.” He looked at his watch. “I’ll send in some medication, and some people to get you cleaned up and fed, Mr. McGee.”

“You want to keep me healthy.”

“Yes, of course,” he said, and smiled and nodded and went out.

I had ten minutes alone. McGee, the suave shrewd operator. In retrospect I could marvel at the heights of blundering stupidity I had reached. It was as if a team of experts were systematically looting a bank, and I had come bumbling onto the scene to ask them how they were making out.

Certainly Mrs. Smith of Arts and Talents had checked with the other account. It gave them the time, place and opportunity to get me out of their hair. Probably before that they had become aware of my buzzing around, drinking with Bonita, leaving her a note at the office, getting in contact with Terry Drummond, talking to the law about Howard Plummer, getting close to Plummer’s fiancй. So when my buzzing became a little too annoying, they had swatted me. And I hadn’t even taken the very elementary precaution of leaving some record of what I had learned, where it could get into the hands of the law.

Suddenly I felt a fear quite different from the terror of any distortion of reality. I was afraid for Nina Gibson and what they could do to her if she tried to do anything about my inexplicable disappearance.

A square sandy woman in white came in, bared my shoulder, held a hypo up io the light, then injected me in the shoulder muscle. She did not speak when spoken to. She swabbed the spot with alcohol before and after the injection and went away. In a little while I chuckled. I felt very very good. What the hell, let them have their fun. It was for the good of mankind. Way down in my mind a little lizard-head of fright kept opening its cupboard and looking out, but I kept shoving it back. I locked the cupboard door.

Two husky attendants came in. They got me up, took me out of the canvas jacket. I wanted to apologize for mussing my bed. I didn’t want to be a burden to anybody. They were arguing with each other about the season bets they were going to make on profootball. I wanted to tell them a joke to make them laugh with me, but I couldn’t think of one. They took me into an adjoining tiled bath. I stripped on request and they put me into a shower and gave me soap and a brush. I hummed as I showered.

When I came out they gave me a coverall suit to wear, a lightgreen garment zippered from throat to crotch. It seemed the most wonderfully practical and comfortable thing I had ever worn. I couldn’t understand why everyone didn’t wear exactly the same thing. They gave me straw slippers. Instead of telling me what to do, they tended to give me a shove in the direction they wanted me to go. I didn’t mind. They were busy talking to each other. One of them thought the Packers could do it again.

I sat on the bed. They put the wheeled tray in front of me. I had to eat everything with a hard rubber spoon. Everything was delicious. They stood by the screened window and talked. Whenever one would glance toward me, I would smile. But they didn’t seem to notice the smile or want to be friends. That was all right too. When I was finished, one of them took me back into the bathroom and produced an electric razor. He watched me until he was certain I could use it properly. I was anxious to use it properly, to please him.

They took me down a hall. It was a gray hall, like ships I had been on. I had a quick look out one window and saw a nice place of lawns and trees, flowers and a parking lot far away, and some people strolling on the paths. It was a very nice place.

They took me to a room. Dr. Varn was there. I was glad to see him again. His friend was named Dr. Moore. He was a nice fellow, too, a middle-sized man like Doctor Varn, but swarthy. They had me get into a lounging chair and then they fixed it so that I was very very comfortable. They darkened the room. Dr. Moore started a tiny light swinging in a circle above me. I watched the light. Dr. Moore told me I was very comfortable. He had a nice voice. Friendly. He was interested in me. I was very anxious to please him.

In all that comfort I closed my eyes and folded back into myself, as if looking down into the blackness inside my head. I could hear my voice and his voice, and they were a little bit apart from me. I could tell Dr. Moore everything. It is good to have someone you can tell everything to. It is good to have someone who is concerned about you. I told him all my troubles, but they did not really seem very important any more. If anything was wrong, he would fix it.

Ten

IT was night again. Lights came on in my room. Dr. Varn shook me, and I came awake suddenly. I rolled out of bed and came to my feet. Varn backed away. He had two attendants with him. A different pair. They looked wary and competent.

“Oh, you bastards,” I said. “You sick dirty bastards.”

“Mr. McGee, you can be reasonable or you can be unreasonable. If you are unreasonable, we’ll put you under restraint. There is someone here to talk to you. There is something he wants you to do. And you have to be alert and awake to do what he wants. He is certain you will want to do it.”

I slowly brought myself under control. I had nothing to gain by getting my hands on Varn. “I’ll be reasonable,” I said. It was an effort.

“Come with me, please.”

The attendants came too. There were small lights in the corridors, like battle lamps. We went down narrow concrete stairs. I was trying to learn as much as I could about the layout.

We went to a small visiting room. They herded me into a metal chair. It was bolted to the floor. They pulled a wide strap like a seat belt across my thighs, and made it fast. When they started to fasten my arms to the arms of the chair, Varn told them not to bother. He sent one away. He told one to watch me. He went out and came back in a few moments with the same man I had seen getting into the Lincoln with Armister and Bonita Hersch.

He had a long face and a long neck. At first glance he looked frail. But sloping shoulders packed the fabric of the tailored suit, and his hands were big and knuckly, his wrists heavy. His white hair was curly, fitting the long skull closely-a dramatic cap of silver. He had a look of cool intelligence. Of importance.

He stood, and without taking his eyes off me, said, “Doctor, if you and your man would wait outside the door, please. I’ll sing out if we have any difficulty in here. I don’t think we will.”

Varn and the attendant went out. The man said, “You do know who I am, of course.”

“Baynard Mulligan.”

He hitched himself onto a steel table and sat facing me, long legs swinging. “I will have to take Varn’s word that you are highly intelligent. You’ve made belief a little difficult, McGee.”

“I’m not used to such rarified atmosphere, Mr. Mulligan.”

“You could have figured certain things out for yourself, certain obvious equations. This venture is about ten times as profitable as anything you have ever heard of before. So it was planned for ten times as long, is conducted with ten times the care, and has ten times as many safeguards against interference. Fortunately there are not ten times as many people involved. That would increase the risk and diminish the return.”

“How many are involved?”

“Nine of us, to a greater or lesser degree. Say five principals and four assistants. It’s very complex.”

“How are you making out?”

“We’re on schedule. Not too much greed and not too little. A proper amalgam of boldness and caution. In addition to all operating expenses, we’ve diverted six millions of dollars to established number accounts in Zurich. We’re under continuous tax audit of course, which you might call the official seal of approval. Another eighteen months should see us home free-target twenty millions. That is just about the maximum amount we can cover with the faked portfolios and fictitious holdings. Not the maximum, actually. I always insist upon a safety factor. Our Mr. Penerra advises me that it will take years to discover through audit all the ways we managed it and covered our tracks. By then, of course, all five principals will be happily and comfortably distributed in extradition-proof areas. You see, when an applecart gets so big, McGee, one man is a fool to expect to tip it over. What’s the matter? You look upset.”

“You’re telling me a lot.”

“Yes, I guess you are reasonably bright. I wouldn’t be telling you this if there was the slightest possible chance of your telling anyone else. I assure you, there is not the slightest possible chance. So, if you care to ask questions?”

“If this is such a careful, cautious, brilliant operation, how come you handled Plummer so stupidly? That’s what brought me into it.”

“I know. Bitter, heartbroken girl, and your duty to poor Mike and so on. Quite touching, actually. But you see, McGee, it was just a curious kind of irony. There was a slight lack of judgment involved. Plummer had a good head. He was becoming troublesome. I tried to talk him into resigning. Simplifying of our operations, no future and so forth. Finally he agreed. I had offered him a five-thousand-dollar bonus at termination. He asked for ten. It seemed strange. He wanted it in cash. That was easily arranged. I thought I knew what he had in mind. Childish, really, but it could have worked. He planned to go to the tax people with it, claim something funny was going on but that he had no proof, and drop the cash on a desk and ask them why he could ask for and get a cash bonus in that amount if his suspicions were incorrect. We had him followed. We found out that he had arranged an appointment. We could not let him keep it, of course. We were set up to have him brought here, under very plausible circumstances. But before it could be finalized that same evening, the poor fellow was actually mugged. By person or persons unknown.”

“You didn’t have him killed?”

“Don’t be a fool. It was an ironic accident. We’re too bright and too civilized to be murderous, McGee. This is a business operation. If you have been thinking you would be killed, allow me to ease your mind.”

“Do you expect to keep me here forever?”

“That would be too awkward and too expensive. McGee, we are actually in your debt. Things were going so smoothly that we became slightly careless. It was good for us to have you arrive on the scene. Through your efforts we have learned that Olan Harris-the chauffeur, and one of our assistants in this project-has been dangerously stupid. Searching those apartments is unforgivable. For ten thousand dollars he endangered a project concerned with two thousand times that amount. He said he just kept thinking about that money. He is already in residence in this wing. Varn is delighted to get him. He is as hardy a physical specimen as you are, McGee. Poor Varn keeps deploring the fact he can’t publish his test findings.”

“And is Miss Hersch here too?”

“You are quick, aren’t you? She is not subject to that sort of disposal. Or, to be a little more accurate, perhaps, not subject to disposal until the operation is terminated. She is essential. Mr. Armister is dependent upon her. She handles him nicely. Miss Hersch is not exactly a principal, though she believes herself to be. Her behavior in this matter has been very regrettable. She is a snob, of course. She went running when Mrs. Drummond summoned her. She took you at face value. She got drunk. She told you too much, far too much. She admitted all this, admitted she had been foolish, and promised it would never happen again. She did not admit her attempt to arrange to have intercourse with you. But it became quite obvious from what you told Dr. Moore. She is contrite. But I think we can arrange a very suitable discipline for her. Very suitable. It should quiet any random urges she might have been feeling.”

“What’s going to happen to me?”

“Nothing, until we can be certain no one is going to make a fuss about you, McGee. Varn and Moore and Daska will run tests on you. You shouldn’t suffer any damage from those. And when the time seems appropriate, you will be treated and released.”

The very casualness of his tone made me feel chilled.

“That word `treated‘ intrigues me.”

“It has made Mr. Armister a very contented man, McGee.”

“What has?”

“It’s a minor surgery. It used to be used frequently in cases of acute anxiety, but it has been discredited these past few years. I can only give you my layman’s idea of it, of course. Varn used to do a lot of them. They go in at the temples, I believe, with a long thin scalpel and stir up the frontal lobes. It breaks the old behavior patterns in the brain. With a normal adult it has very specific effects. It will drop your intelligence quotient about forty points, permanently. It will make you incontinent at first. They’ll shift you over to one of the regular rooms for special care-toilet training, dressing and feeding yourself, that sort of thing. You will have a short attention span, but you will be able to make a living doing some kind of routine task under supervision. It does cure all repressions and inhibitions, McGee. You will become a very friendly earthy fellow. Very strong but quite casual sex impulses. You will eat well and sleep well, and you will have no tendency to fret or worry about anything. If somebody annoys you, you may react a little too violently, but other than that you should have no trouble with society. It will be a pleasant life, believe me. Mr. Armister is quite content. We keep him well-dressed and tanned and healthy, and see that he has a chance to satisfy all random desires. In return he signs his name wherever he is asked to. And he creates a nice impression. He isn’t very rewarding to talk to for any great length of time, but he passes muster when he sits in on signings and conferences. Most important of all, McGee, you will have just small disorganized memories of all this, and no urge to do anything about anything you do happen to remember clearly. Mr. Armister remembers his wife and children, but has no urge to see them.”

I could not speak. There were no words to convey my horror at what they had done to him. And wanted to do to me.

“Charlie is a powerful man,” he said quietly. “He led a life of sexual repression and torment. Now he is extremely active, but without what Miss Hersch terms finesse. In the beginning we thought she could provide everything he would need. But after a month she begged off, and we agreed to supply Charlie with girls he could use. It’s a minor expense compared with the return which comes from keeping him content. But now, I think, that as a sort of continuous act of contrition, Miss Hersch will assume her prior duties and functions. At any rate, there is something I wish you to do. We have checked you out of the hotel. I want you to write two letters. Varn will bring the necessary materials. You will write to Florida and arrange to have your boat sold and the money and your personal possessions shipped here.”

“You’re crazy as hell.”

“And you will write to Miss Nina Gibson and tell her that you are not interested in pursuing this further, and wish her well, and quiet her suspicions. A nice pleasant and rather chilly brush-off. Actually, a note to Mike Gibson might be in order too. And one to Terry Drumond? I don’t know. I’ll have to think about it. She is just a little too important and well known to tangle with. Personally I think she’ll get bored and say the hell with it and go back to Greece.”

“I will not write a damned word to anybody.”

“Varn!”

The door burst open so quickly I knew my chances of trying anything were slim. And I had the feeling that in the last twenty-four hours I had lost a small edge of physical coordination. When Varn and the attendant saw nothing was wrong, the attendant stepped back into the hall and the door swung shut.

There was a flavor of wariness in Doctor Varn’s approach toward Baynard Mulligan. “Doctor, I would like you to brief Mr. McGee on the Doris Wrightson case.”

“I don’t believe that would be advisable,” Varn said.

Mulligan ignored him. Looking at me, he said, “I can give you a layman’s appraisal of her condition when she was brought in. She was a thirty-one-year-old spinster, shy, frail and introverted, an office worker in poor physical condition. Chronic migraine headaches, a susceptibility to infections of the urinary tract, pains in the lower back. Her pulse was rapid and irregular. Emotionally she was tense, anxious, with poor social and emotional adjustments. She became very upset when office routine was disturbed. Though she was a good worker, she tired easily, and she would weep when spoken to harshly. And she had the strange idea that she was sent here for treatment merely because she had stumbled across some irregularity in the accounting system and had come to me, snuffling and wringing her hands, to accuse our Mr. Penerra of peculation.” He turned to Varn. “Certainly, Doctor, she had many physical and emotional problems?”

“Yes. Of course.”

“But Doctor Varn is obviously reluctant to discuss the experimental treatment, even though it was astonishingly successful.”

“I do not believe we should…”

“Experimentations along this line have been conducted in the USSR for some years, didn’t you tell me, Doctor?”

But…“

“Everything else that is done here, McGee, can be classified as acceptable therapy. But in this country we have such a sentimental approach to the value of the human animal, that if this line of inquiry became known, mobs would probably appear to burn this place to the ground. It makes Doctor Varn nervous. Please tell Mr. McGee how Doris Wrightson was treated, Doctor.”

The two men stared at each other in silent conflict. I saw a gleam of sweat on Varn’s bald head. Suddenly Varn gave a small shrug of acceptance. In a perfectly flat voice he said, “After a complete series of tests, an electrode in the form of a very fine alloy wire was inserted into that area of the patient’s brain-that deep area which can loosely be defined as the pleasure area. Proper location was achieved through trial and error. A transistorized field-current setup was then adjusted as to the volume of the signal to give a maximum stimulus. In effect this resulted in an intensified pleasure rensation, a simultaneous experiencing of all pleasures, emotional and physical. The patient was given physical tasks, within the limits of her capacities, with the equipment set up in such a manner that the completion of the task would close a contact and give a ten-second stimulus. It was discovered that once the patient had been started on such a cycle, she would continue of her own volition until totally exhausted. Following these procedures, we have made detailed observations of muscle generation, the psychology and physiology of sleep, nutrition, the pleasure phenomenon and related matters.”

“Could we see the patient, Doctor?” Mulligan said.

“She’s resting now.”

“Doctor, I can remain more convinced of the value of your programs here when I can be given a chance to observe results. Right now there is a list of equipment purchases on my desk for approval.”

Varn went to the door and spoke to the man outside. Doris Wrightson was brought in a few minutes later. There was a scarf tied around her head. She wore a gray denim hospital dress that looked too small for her-loose at the waist, but tight across breasts and hips. She moved with a ponderous litheness-that odd gait of the perfectly-conditioned athlete. Musculature squared her jaw. Her shoulders and neck were solid and heavy, packing the fabric of the dress. In repose her arms and legs had the roundness and illusion of softness of a woman, but at the slightest move, the slabbed muscles distorted contour, as explicit as an anatomical drawing.

For a moment I could not think what she reminded me of, and then I saw it. She was precisely like one of the circus girls: one of those hard, chunky, quiet, amiable fliers - narrow-waisted, flat-bellied, with thighs like a warmed layer of thin foam rubber stretched over granite, and with such pectoral development that even the high round breasts are muscular. This was no sedentary office worker, nor could I imagine her as ever having been one.

She said, “Hello, Doctor. Hello, Mr. Mulligan,” and then stood off to one side, placid and incurious as a good dog. Though she was very pale, her skin had the moist luminous glow of perfect health, and the whites of her mild brown eyes were blue-white.

Varn said, “She’s now at the point where, with a rig designed on the basis of a rowing machine, she will expend forty-eight hundred foot pounds of energy a minute-fifty foot tons an hour-and maintain that rate for eight hours in two four-hour segments. It requires a five-thousand calory intake to keep her weight stabilized on that basis. As we keep increasing effort required, we alter the specific physical motions in order to avoid over development of any specific muscle areas.”

“How do you feel, Doris?” Mulligan asked.

“I feel very good, thank you.”

“All of her physical problems have disappeared,” Varn said. “Her normal heartbeat at rest is approximately fifty.”

“Can you explain her emotional adjustment?”

“Only by inference,” Varn said. “As you can, see, she is placid and amiable and cooperative. Social interractions and interrelations no longer concern her. She is not anxious about how people react to her. She is totally unselfconscious. Her desire to please is based upon our ability to provide her with that pleasure stimulus which forms a compulsion so complete nothing else is of any particular concern to her. She takes pride in doing the hard tasks we set her, though, a pride a little apart from the reward of the pleasure stimulus.”

“How about intelligence?” Mulligan asked.

“That’s difficult. The conventions we use to measure intelligence are conditioned emotional factors. The tests imply a wide range of emotional responses. She has one single emotional compulsion. My guess is that intelligence is unimpaired. But her indifference to anything other than the pleasure stimulus makes it difficult to measure. There seems to be an impairment of memory regarding everything which ever happened to her before she came here. Her skills seem unimpaired.”

“What’s your appraisal of the future?”

“I don’t believe we’re anywhere near the top limit of physical capability, even though her physical strength is astonishing right now. We’re trying to keep her at that point of stasis where strength increases without any breakdown of muscle tissue. I would guess that the end point will be reached when the bone structure cannot take the stress involved.”

“What will happen when you stop the experiment?”

‘’No!“ Doris Wrightson cried, her face vivid with dismay.

Varn went quickly to her and said, “We’re not going to stop, Doris. Don’t be upset.” He patted her shoulder. It was a gentling gesture, the way one pats the bulging shoulder of a nervous horse. She quieted quickly, less of the whites of her eyes showing, and he guided her to the door, turned her over to someone waiting there for her.

Varn came back and said, “That’s the special problem, as you can see. When we have tried stopping for one day, she becomes very restless and anxious and difficult to manage. It is, in a sense, a very strong addiction. But, unlike other addictions, there is no change in the tolerance level. The exact same percentage increase in the strength of the stimulus now will cause her to faint as it did in the beginning. There is the same effect from an increase in duration.”

“What are you going to do with her?”

“We’ll face that when we come to it, Mr. Mulligan. Dr. Moore has several suggestions. We’ll try the least radical ones first.”

“Would you be interested in another female?”

The quickening of interest in Varn’s handsome face turned my heart to ice. “It improves the validity of any experimental procedure to have another subject to use as a control,” he said. “But… we would want to be very certain that… there would be no one on the outside to insist on visiting…”

“Just like miss Wrightson? I think I can guarantee that.”

“Wilkerson is very interested in setting up an experiment for agility rather than strength. He has the idea of a plate which the subject would have to touch to close the contact, and then he could put it a little higher each day…”

His patient impersonal explanation was lost in the roar of blood in my ears. In a little cold white tall room in the back of my mind, my Nina, in gray denim, with a wire in her head, with all of her world and her life focused down to a single recurrent ecstasy-crouched and sprang, crouched and sprang…

Varn was gone. Mulligan studied me. “At a lunch counter, McGee, somebody can reach across her to get a paper napkin. It would be that simple. Moore’s report says that you have a strong sexual-emotional attachment for the girl-a protective instinct, with a slight overtone of moralistic guilt. That last astonished me somewhat.”

“You are a bastard, Mulligan.”

“Dr. Varn’s most bitter disappointment is that he cannot publish. But the fellow is endlessly curious. There are certain unpleasantly immoral implications in turning people into hopelessly dependent compulsives, but who are we to say that a hundred years from now history might acclaim the good doctor as the one who found the way of turning man into superman. From a beginning of rewarding strength or solidity, why not reward the problem-solving ability, or artistic effort, or mind-reading? Or maybe it will be a world where all the dutiful plods wear their little wires, and men of high intelligence and ambition push the buttons. Our bald little doctor is properly nervous about this field of investigation, but he is carefuI about his security measures. He is inquisitive, not monstrous. And I am not without compassion.”

“You are a legitimate maniac, Mulligan. You are the one they should lock up.”

“Don’t be childish. Years ago, when I was looking for exactly the right angle of approach, I realized it would be stupid to try to contrive enough fatal accidents to take care of people who might get in the way of a long-range, large-scale project. This has worked well. After these people were bribed and coerced into their first illegal, unethical, unprofessional act, they’ve had no choice but to be cooperative. I don’t actually give a damn about their rationalizations. Charlie was their first project, you are the sixth, Olan Harris is the seventh, and Miss Gibson can be the eighth. I think you will write the letters, McGee. I think you will make every effort to make them plausible and convincing. I do not think you will try to be clever or tricky. As soon as you have written them, you are no longer a problem to me, and I shall probably never see you again. I may see you after your personality has been surgically adjusted, and you will probably remember me and feel a sense of antagonism. But you won’t be dangerous.”

“I’ll be a very happy man.”

“That’s everybody’s goal, isn’t it?”

“Let them treat you, Mulligan.”

“I am a happy man, my friend. I’m getting my gratification from finding a way past all the rules and restrictions and conventions of a dull and orderly society. I’m performing a theft of such dimensions, it will be legend rather than theft. And, like our Doctor Varn, I am slightly bitter because I will never be able to publish the details of it. But books will be written about it. From the look of you, I think you are ready to write those letters.”

I was, and I did.

Eleven

I WAS WOVEN into delicious clouds, high and ecstatic on softened hilltops, taking the slow, sweet, aching suffusions of the warm slow rift of great masses of pure color, which moved across me and through me and changed in almost imperceptible ways. I was one, united to pure sensation, everything about me becoming a part of me, a fabulous unity, so that I knew at last the ultimate fact of alI existence, knew it and knew that there were no words with which it could be expressed because it was beyond words. I rolled over and stretched my arms into a strange grass, more like hair than grass, metallic blue-green in coIor, springing out of the soft white earth-flesh; hair-grass thick as pencils, half as tall as a man, making a strange electric tingling wherever it touched my flesh. I rolled and saw leaning to me a golden reaching softness of limbs of ancient Martian trees-reaching, grasping, gently curling, caressing, taking me up and through brightness and then into a dusky feathery hollow between enormous breasts, into a stroking and fitting and long long gentle never-ending orgasm…

Tiny bright light swinging and my voice in a darkened room.

Brush and soap and shower. “He was never worth a goddam until they moved him to linebacker.”

Light in the room at night. Face at the grill in the door.

Pasty feel of electrodes at the temples, pen scratching a rhythmic line on a chart.

“Now, Travis, run in position until I tell you to stop.”

Indifferent face in the night. Needle fang in my arm. Cool wipe of alcohol. Medicine smell. Off into drifting…

They wanted a manageable patient, a mild eagerness to cooperate. There were times when I felt I was fighting my way to the surface and then I would be pushed down again, down into the drifting. No problem to anybody. When I got close to the surface I would know that some terrible thing was going to happen, but I did not know what it was.

I do not know how they slipped up, or why they slipped up. Perhaps it was one of those little errors in routine, somebody skipping a medication indicated on the chart. But suddenly I came awake in the night. I did not know what night it was, or how much time had passed. I knew only that I was alert and terrified. Wisps of strange dreams and visions clotted the corners of my mind. The night-light was sealed into the baseboard, guarded with a heavy grill. I looked out the door grill into a segment of empty gray corridor.

I paced the room, and, at the first rattle of the latch, got quickly into bed. It was the square sandy nurse. She fixed the hypo in the dim light. When she bared my arm and leaned over it, I hit her sharply on the shelf of the jaw, near the chin. She fell across me without a sound. I found the hypo when I shifted her cautiously. I got up and straightened her out and looked in her pockets. I found the little vial from which she filled the hypo. I injected her in the arm with what was in the hypo, then drew off more from the vial, sticking the needle through the soft rubber top, and gave her that. She had a split ring with two keys on it. I did not know what they fitted. She had left my door wedged open a few inches. She was on the floor on her back. Her mouth hung open. She began to snore. I rolled her onto her face. She stopped snoring. I shoved her under the bed. She slid easily on the gray vinyl flooring.

I was in the short hospital gown I wore at night. They would bring me clean coveralls each morning. The door to the tiled bath was locked. I did not dare go out into the hallway. This might be the only chance I would have. They would know how to handle patients who got out into the corridors. They would have safe, practical, effective methods. They would never give me a second chance. There would be nothing left but the dreams and visions until they had finished their series, and then there would be a tiny blade shoved into my head, and after that I would never worry very much about anything.

The room door opened inward. It was held open by a rubber wedge. I listened. I heard nothing. I pulled the door halfway open and wedged it. The night-light made a fairly bright area just inside the door. I had to bait it with something. I used her keys. They caught the light. They would catch the eye of anyone passing. The normal reaction would be to pick them up. I waited alongside the door, where I could not be seen through the grill. I waited a long time. I heard someone coming. Scuff of a shoe. Faint rustle of clothing. I clenched my hands together. I heard a soft exclamation.

The instant I saw a hand reaching for the keys, I jumped out and brought my clenched hands down on the nape of a neck, as hard as I could. He made too much noise tumbling onto the floor. I pulled him inside, wedged the door open an inch or so. I dragged him over beside the bed. I was going to inject him. But as I touched him, he gave a prolonged shudder and died. I worked his clothing off him and put it on. The legs and sleeves were short. I was worried about the shoes. I wanted shoes. But they were just big enough.

I put him into the bed and covered him over. I felt in the pockets. There was a wallet. I took it to the light. He was Donald Swane. He had three keys. One of them was identical to one of the nurse’s keys. I felt sorry for the poor dead son-of-a-bitch. He had no way of knowing that some of the patients didn’t belong there. Which ones do you believe?

He had eleven dollars, half a pack of Camels, a Zippo lighter, three keys, half a roll of clove Life Savers, and no weapon at all. Once upon a time I had tried to memorize the layout of the building. I couldn’t remember much of it.

I didn’t want to walk out of the room. It seemed like a safe place. I didn’t know what was waiting outside. His shoes were quiet. They had rubber soles. I carried the hypo and vial in the pocket of the white jacket. I opened the door and looked up and down the corridor. It was empty. To my left I saw a red bulb burning over a doorway. I remembered there were stairs there. I walked swiftly, letting the door close behind me. I went through the stairway door. I had left his watch on his wrist.

It was after four in the morning. I wanted to go down the stairs. As I started to go down, a door opened on the next flight down, and somebody started coming up. I went up. There was only one more flight. I waited until I was certain they were coming all the way up. I went out into a corridor very like the one on my floor below. I pulled a door open. It was a lab. A blue night-light shone on tubing and retorts, zinc benches, bottle racks. I made certain the door could be opened from the inside, and let it shut.

I crouched against the door, straining my ears to hear any sound in the corridor. The door was too thick. I waited at least five minutes. Then I looked around the lab. The windows were steel casement windows, rigidly braced. They did not open far enough for me to get out. I was on the third floor. I could have risked a drop from that height.

I wanted a weapon. I searched the small lab. I found a short heavy length of pipe. I tied it into a towel. I looked into a big refrigerator. It was full of racks of small vials containing colorless fluid. They were marked in a D series. D-1 to D-17. Many of them had sub-numerals in parentheses. I took vials of D-15, three of them, and some of the other numbers. They were small. I had the idea that if I could get out of there, the vials would be some proof of what was being done there, provided they were the Daska compounds. Somehow I saw all the doctors I had not met as looking exactly like Varn, all handsome little bald fellows.

It felt reassuring to have a club in my hand. I expected alarm bells to go off at any moment. I thought they would have some way of sounding an alarm when a patient was loose. Perhaps a siren. The corridor was empty. I ran to the stairs and went racing down. I got down to the ground floor level. The corridor there was much wider. I remembered a time, a lifetime ago, when I had been taken down to talk to Baynard Mulligan. It seemed a longer corridor than the ones upstairs.

In the far distance I saw two nurses standing and talking. If I could not see their faces, they could not see mine. There had to be an exit in that direction, perhaps halfway between me and the nurses. I walked toward them, trying to move casually. Suddenly a man came out of a doorway forty feet in front of me and started walking toward me, looking at a piece of paper he held in his hand.

I pushed open the first door I came to and went in. I was in a kitchen area. Two men were working slowly and sleepily at a big range. A dull-looking girl stood at a work table yawning and slicing grapefruit into halves. There was a lot of stainless steel and steam racks. They all looked at me questioningly.

“You seen Don?” I asked.

“What the hell would he be doing in here? Go look in the dining room.”

There was a long pass-through area at one end of the room. I could look through there into a big institutional dining area. I saw the swinging doors with push plates which had to lead there. I walked toward the doors.

“Don who?” the girl asked.

“Skip it.”

The dining area was empty. There was a long counter with low stools and beyond it, a cafeteria area adjacent to the pass-through. A busty redheaded girl in a blue nylon uniform stood at the work area behind the counter, slicing small boxes of dry cereal and placing the boxes into white bowls.

She glanced at me and said, “You want coffee, it’s about three more minutes. I threw out the old, it tasted like battery acid, man.” She gestured toward a huge gleaming urn that stood on the counter.

As I started to turn away. she said, “You new?”

“Brand new.”

“Didn’t take you long to get the coffee habit. It’s like my husband says it’s that way in the navy.”

Find a door and walk out, I thought. And then what? Are there walls, gates, guards? Is it way out in the country? Any way to get a car?

“Rest yourself while you wait, man.”

I needed a diversion. I needed everybody looking in some other direction. I sat on a stool. The vials in my pocket clinked. I stared at the long distortion of my face in the shining urn. Why the hell not?

“Mind if I look in the top of that thing?”

“What for? You look at those tube things and you can tell, it’s when they get dark enough.”

“I was wondering how they make them now,” I said. I got up onto the counter and pulled the lid.

“Hey!” she said.

“This is very interesting.”

“Climb in and have a swim. You a nut or something?”

She turned back to her cereal. I thumbed the rubber tops off the vials of D compound and dumped them in. Maybe they were harmless. Maybe they were cholera germs. Maybe heat changed them. It was too late to wonder about it. Scores slain in coffee poisoning. I wiped the counter with a paper napkin. I sat on a stool. She looked at me and her face was losing form, sliding and loosening like melting candy. I heard a strange prolonged chord of music in a minor key. The walls of the big room tilted-inward toward me, and the edges of reality had turned pink.

“You feel okay?” she asked, out of a mouth that was sliding down her throat into the top of her uniform.

“Just a little residual hallucination.”

“Huh? Oh.”

“I’ll be back for some of your delicious coffee, angel.”

“You do that.”

“Don’t melt while I’m gone.”

“Melt? It isn’t hot in here, man.”

The door kept receding as I walked toward it. It took me three or four hours to reach it. I went into the corridor. I found a storage room. I folded myself into a cement corner behind huge cartons of toilet paper, and held my fists against my eyes and tried to keep the whole world from melting away into a pink eternal nothing.

In seven or eight months the world began to refocus and solidify. The musical chord died away, and I could hear clattering, shouts, a bell ringing.

I got up and walked out into a vast confusion. I heard glass breaking. Two men were trying to hold a third man. He was screaming, spasming, throwing them all over the corridor. I edged by them. A woman stood braced with her back against the wall, eyes closed, expression dreamy, slowly driving her nails into her cheeks and yanking them out again, blood running onto her beige blouse. I walked by her. I reached the main entrance.

The world was out there, beyond tall glass, a bright cool morning. A man on all fours was in a corner, trying to ram his way through, backing up and lunging forward like a big stubborn turtle trapped in a box. A girl sat spraddled on the floor. Her blouse was ripped to rags. Her empty eyes looked at me. She was sucking her thumb and slowly massaging her small loose breasts.

A man lay quite still just outside the main doors. I stepped over him. I heard sirens. I saw ambulances. People were running toward the building. They ignored me. I saw the parking lot and walked steadily toward it.

Off to my right I saw a fat woman running in a big circle as though she were running an imaginary base path. A big car came into the lot just as I got there. A man slammed the brakes on and piled out. “What the hell is going on?” he demanded. “What’s happening in there?”

I turned him around and rapped him behind the ear with my length of pipe. When he fell, his car keys spilled out of his hand. I peeled his topcoat off and put it on. I took his car and drove away from there. Fifteen minutes later I was on the Thruway, heading south toward the city.

Twenty minutes later the sides of the highway began to curl upward and turn pink and the musical sound began again. I had to pull off. It took twenty minutes to get from my lane to the shoulder. The car was barely moving. But when it reached the shoulder it began to leap up and down.

I stopped it short of a tree and lay down on the seat with my arms wrapped around my head. My own face was melting off. I could feel it. I could hear it drip onto the seat upholstery.

Several months later the world resolidified and I drove on.

I drove down off the parkway at Forty-sixth. I drove over Forty-fourth and abandoned the car a couple of blocks short of Times Square. I walked south and found a sleazy hotel and paid five-fifty for a small sour room.

I stretched out on the bed, still in the stolen topcoat, and waited for the edges of everything to start to turn pink again.

I had noticed the clock in the lobby. It was quarter after ten. I wondered what year it was.

Twelve

WE ARE supposed to learn from our mistakes. I had walked into the Armister situation with all the jaunty confidence of a myopic mouse looking for a piece of cheese in the cobra cage.

But by the narrowest margin possible I had escaped spending the rest of my life as a very happy fellow working, perhaps, in a shoe factory over in Jersey.

I had to make some kind of a move now, but everything I could think of scared me. The Mulligan group had all kinds of weight and pressure. I was an escaped nut. A demonstrably murderous nut. And I had no proof of anything.

Charlie was my walking proof. Charlie was my boy. But I didn’t see how I could get to within a thousand yards of him.

But maybe somebody else could, if they knew enough… Like a loving wife?

I picked my phone up. A thin and adenoidal voice said, “You wanna make any outside calls, you got to leave the money at the desk. Twenny cents each, local calls.”

I found my apprehensive way down and left a dollar and got back to safe refuge. Then I realized how stupid I was being. I had made all the mistakes I was permitted. I rubbed cold water on my face and studied my mirror image. The eyes looked strange. With the topcoat buttoned, the white jacket did not show. I had a crust of one-day beard. Noticeable, but not too bad.

I went down again and got change for my dollar and found the phone booths in the dim back of the stale lobby.

I tried the Plaza. Mrs. Drummond was not registered. They gave me a forwarding address in Athens.

I leaned against the phone for a little while. I got information. She looked up the Long Island number for Mr. Charles Armister, told me how to dial it and how much to feed the coin slots.

I got a soft-voiced. woman with a pronounced accent. She told me Mrs. Armister was in the city. At the apartment. She gave me the phone number. I checked the book. It was the number listed for the other apartment, the one further uptown.

I dialed that one. Terry Drummond answered. That brassy sardonic voice was one of the world’s better sounds.

“McGee! They bought you off, obviously. What’s the matter, ducks? You want to see if you can get a better price from me? How’d you find me?”

“Nobody bought me off.”

“Sweetie, it was perfectly obvious to me from your note that…”

“Shut up! I have something important to tell you, Terry. I don’t know how much time I have. I wasn’t bought off. They had me in a mental hospital.”

“In a what?”

“Get a pencil and paper so you can write things down. I don’t know how long I can last. I’ll try to give you the cold facts.”

“Hold on just a minute, Trav.”

I waited. A softer voice came on the line and gave a cautious, “Hello?”

It had a little of the quality of Terry’s voice, but was far more subdued.

“Trav? Joanna is on the extension.”

“This isn’t the sort of thing she should hear, Terry.”

“If it has anything to do with my husband, I want to hear it,” Mrs. Armister said firmly.

“All right. I don’t know how you can check these things out, but if you get good lawyers and get the authorities in on it, maybe you can move. Baynard Mulligan heads up a group which has stolen six million dollars so far from Charles Armister. There are nine of them. Mulligan, Penerra and Bonita Hersch, those are the only names I know. They plan to work at it for another eighteen months and build it up to twenty million and then skip. When anybody gets troublesome, they get put in the Mental Research Wing of the Toll Valley Hospital up across the river from Poughkeepsie. Write these things down. They’ve got people up there now who got in the way. Olan Harris, who was the chauffeur. A secretary named Doris Wrightson. And others whose names I don’t know. They get them legally committed. They did that to me too. I escaped this morning. I killed a man getting out of there.”

“Dear God,” Terry rumbled.

“That’s where Charles went when he…”

“Shut up, Joanna,” Terry said.

“When Charlie was up there,” I said, “they operated on him. They stuck a knife in his head. I think it’s called a lobotomy. That made him easy to manage. They keep him happy, and he signs anything. But anybody who didn’t know him before would think he was perfectly all right.”

I heard a soft, weak wailing cry of despair and Terry said sharply, “Pull yourself together, Jo!”

“Write down these names of doctors. God knows where they came from, or how they ever got licenses. Mulligan has them in the palm of his hand. He supports the experimental program. Varn, Moore, Daska and Wilkerson. And listen. Don’t go flying off in all directions. There’s a hell of a mess out there right now, but if they can get it quieted down fast enough, and if you get in the way, you both could end up out there with little wires in your heads, and electric currents making you jump around like monkeys on a stick.”

“Can this be true?” Joanna wailed.

“Sister, dear, I will vouch for McGee. He is a very rough type, and he sounds angry, and what he says explains a lot of very curious things. McGee, where are you? Can I help you? What do you need?”

“Money.”

“Sweetie, I have the thousand dollars I was going to use to bribe that tart who never showed up. Will that help?”

“A lot. But get moving on this other stuff first. Listen. This is important for both of you. Don’t eat out. Don’t drink anything anywhere. Fix your own food and drink right there and don’t let anybody near it. Don’t even let anybody buy it for you.”

“But why?”

“One drop of a tasteless, odorless substance can turn you into something they come after with a net. They worked it on me, maybe on Charlie and probably on the others. It imitates insanity.”

“Sweetie, this is priceless. I used to adore Fu Man Chu.”

“You have a great sense of humor, Terry. You are as funny as a crutch.”

“I’m sorry Trav. It’s just my image speaking.”

“By now Mulligan knows I’m loose, I would imagine. He is going to be very anxious to find me and shut my mouth. And he can afford a lot of help. I need money, and then I need a place to go, a place for two people to go, if I can…”

“Sweetie, where are you?”

I drew such a blank I had to look at the tag on my room key. “The Harbon Hotel on West 41st. Room 303.”

“You wait right there,” she said and hung up. But I was in a horrid haste to find the next number and fumble the next dime into the slot. I had thought the best thing to do would be to protect Nina by staying out of touch with her. But in telling Terry what Mulligan might do, I had realized Nina was the best possible weapon for him to use against me. He had proved that point once.

The cool British accent of the receptionist was an implacable barrier. She was teddibly sorry, Miss Gibson was in conference and could not be disturbed. I said it was life and death. She said that if I would leave my name and number, she would have Miss Gibson call me. I cursed her and she sighed and broke the connection. With my last dime I called back.

With great gentleness I stressed the urgency of the situation. I begged her to have Miss Gibson phone Mr. Jones in Room 303 at the Harbon Hotel as soon as possible. I stressed the room number. I was certain the place was full of Joneses, miss and mister.

I bought a paper. The stairs tilted sideways. The railing felt like a wet snake. I shoved seven keys at seven keyholes and they all fitted and all turned, and I stumbled into a pink room and curled up on the bed, my knees against my chest.

As I fought it, I thought with a sickening remorse of the people out there at Toll Valley-the man butting his head into a corner, the woman pulling bits of meat out of her face, the thumb sucker, the base runner-all of them so ruthlessly tumbled into that horrible place where reality was warped, where things came out of the wall. They were all innocents. They could not know that the private hospital was being used in a vicious way. They were staff, visitors, ambulatory patients, anybody entitled to go into the dining room and have a cup of nightmare.

It dwindled away. All the pink unstable edges turned back to normal hue and I straightened myself out, in post-hallucination depression. For the ultimate in depressive experiences, try a little jolt of induced insanity while wearing a dead man’s clothing in a cheap hotel room.

Cold air-shaft light came into the room, shining on the dusty sour rug, on a blonde bureau with missing knobs, on places on the headboard of the bed where brown paint had been chipped and gouged away. Ten thousand people had left a stink of loneliness in this room. Here they had paced, coughed, snapped their knuckle bones, spilled their drinks, taken their pills, belched, sighed, wept, scratched, dreamed, vomited, smoked, bragged, cursed and groaned. In this room each had endured his or her own special kind of sickness, felt despair, and either accepted or inflicted something they called love.

I saw the paper where I had dropped it, just inside the door. I went over and got it and took it back to the bed. While I had been in the blurry world of induced dreams and visions, the other world had trudged its way along to a November Tuesday. Education bill returned to committee. Three injured in Birmingham bomb attack. Actress beats narcotics rap. Seven dead in Freeway collision. Park lands sold to campaign contributor. Truck strike in eighth week. Thirty-nine dead in jet crash. Model claims fractured jaw in divorce action. Disarmament talks stalled. Teacher accused of teen slayings. Earthquake in Peru. Launching failure. Tax cut stymied…

… I was back in the sane, reasonable, plausible world.

* * *

Terry Drummond rapped at my door and I let her in. She wore fifteen thousand dollars worth of glossy fur coat. Her brown simian face wrinkled with distaste as she looked around. “God, what a scrimey hole!” The coat swung open. The body of eternal girl was clad in gray slacks and a wine-red cardigan. She stared at me. “And you look worn around the edges, dear. And thinner. And where did you get that grim grubby clothing?”

“Off the boy I had to kill to get out of there.”

She swallowed and sat down quickly. “You do get damned explicit. Maybe I’m not as used to the facts of life as I thought I was. But we did hear Toll Valley Hospital very prominently mentioned over the noon news broadcast.”

“What did they say?”

“Something about mysterious poisoning, four dead in violent and unpleasant ways, and dozens injured, and dozens out of their mind, patients escaping and so on; and apparently the first batch of people who got there to quiet things down suddenly began to go just as mad as the rest of them. They said something about experimental drugs getting out of hand. It seems that there is still a state of horrible confusion up there, and all kinds of investigations being started, and experts roaring in from all over, and reporters and police and television and everything. Did you do all that, darling boy?”

I did not answer. Four dead. Four innocents.

“Trav?” she said in the softest voice I had ever heard her use. I lifted my head and looked at her.

“Please don’t look so terribly agonized. You did what you had to do. I’m sure of that. I’ve started things going. I believe what you said about them doing something terrible to Charlie out at that place. From the news report, it sounds as if you managed to destroy it. I’m not going to let anything happen to you on account of that, believe me. They were giving you drugs, weren’t they?”

“They were giving me drugs.”

“Then you cannot be held responsible. Which is worse, Trav, some deaths and injuries, or that place going on and on… doing things to people?”

“I can devise my own rationalizations, thanks.”

“Don’t be cold and cruel. Sweetie, I brought the money, but after I got Joanna calmed down, we had another idea. You want a safe place for two people? The other one would be your little Gibson girl you told me about? My dear Roger King is alerting all the legal troops. I am certain he can erect some sort of protective throng around the apartment at East Seventy-ninth. It’s really quite vast, and Joanna brought in some of the staff from the Island. I don’t think we’d need extra protection, but it would probably make you happier. So let’s go on back to the apartment, and then I can go gather up your little friend, and we can all sit there and plan the utter destruction of creepy Baynard.”

“How did you get here?”

“By taxi. He’s sitting down there with his meter clicking.”

“You just walked out of the apartment and took a cab.”

“Of course,” she said blankly.

“And nobody followed you?”

“My word, aren’t we getting a bit paranoiac?” My phone rang.

“Hello?”

“Trav! Oh, Tray, darling, thank God!”

“That letter I wrote you…”

“Was the most complete nonsense ever written. It was a cry for help. I was going out of my mind with worry The moment I got it I went at once to…”

“We better do our talking later. Do exactly as I say, Nina. It’s very important. Get out of there as soon as you can. if there is any kind of back exit or side exit, use it.”

“But…”

“That place where we went, near your office, that first day. Go there. Wait for me there. Don’t have a drink. Just wait for me. Don’t talk to anybody. Just wait there alone.”

“Trav, I…”

“Please!”

She agreed. I hung up, and turned and looked at Terry Drummond. Her odd-green eyes looked damp. “It’s important with that one?”

“Very.”

“That makes me feel such a wistful old bag, ducks. Hold me a minute? I have a case of the horrors.”

She came to me. I put my arms around the resiliency, the warmth of girl under that fur coat and held her close. She tucked her brown puckered face into my neck and sighed.

“Well, hell,” she said. “Let’s go. Let’s go pick up your young stuff and run for cover.”

I shoved the sheaf of large bills into the wallet of the dead Donald Swane. I said, “We are going to cheat your cabby, Terry.”

“We can’t. I gave him a ten to hold him there. But I’ll play your games, dear. We sneak out another way?”

“If you can bear it.”

“I can.”

“Terry, every once in a while I go off. I hallucinate. I have to fold. I don’t know how long it lasts. But don’t be scared. I come out of it. It seems to be a little bit less each time. If it happens in public, just keep people away from me and give me time to come out of it.”

Her mouth looked pale. “All right, Trav.” There was no other way to leave. We went out the main entrance and turned away from the waiting cab. That coat was too damned conspicuous. “Lady! Hey, lady!” We walked swiftly to the corner.

The panting driver caught up to us. “Hey, lady! You coming back to the cab?”

“Keep the change, my good man.”

“But that guy is waiting for you in the cab.”

“What guy?” she demanded.

“The one come out of the hotel after you went in, the one you told he should wait in my cab, lady.”

He turned and pointed. We looked. A man was walking diagonally across 41st, heading in the opposite direction, moving swiftly.

“Hey, there he goes!” the driver said.

I grabbed Terry’s arm and hustled her around the corner and walked her as fast as she could go. “Hey!” she said. “Hey, I apologize. For everything.”

At the next corner I saw a cab discharging passengers. I ran her over to it and we piled in. He pulled his flag down. I said, “Make some turns here and there, driver. A very busy process server is trying to hand the lady a paper.”

He started up and said, “You looked in a hurry. But the way I see it, what’s the use? Sooner or later you get nailed.”

“I’d like to make it later,” Terry said.

The driver was good. He judged the lights so as to be the last car around each corner as the light changed. He angled crosstown and downtown, and said, “Unless he rented a whirlybird, friend, he’s nowhere.”

I gave him the block on Park I wanted. Terry said in a low voice, “I never saw that man before in my life. What was he going to do to me?”

I made a grim joke. “Process you,” I said. She put her hand on her throat. “And they’ll have to process Charlie too. If he’s dead, nobody can prove what was done to him. Nobody can test him.”

Her eyes looked like green glass. “You can’t be serious.”

“He’s part of the proof.”

She waited in the cab. I went in to get Nina. She was on the left of the entrance. There was a man sitting on either side of her. She looked pale and strained. The two men looked deft and deadly and competent. I paused. The men’s trim shaven faces began to turn into bristly dog faces, dogs in dark suits, in pink light, with a white kitten between them.

Dimly I realized that it was emotional stress which was bringing this on, time after time. I could curl up on the floor and hold my fists against my eyes. I staggered, and launched myself through the pink light, straining toward the nearest dog, yelling to Nina in a great cracked, croaking voice, “Run! Run!” I could give her that much. She had not asked for any part of this. I didn’t want her in gray denim with wires in her head. I would rather be eaten by the dogs.

I caught a dog throat, hurled a dog body wide and far, whirled in pinkness to dive past the kitten, was cracked, and foundered, and was dwindled down to black flow, to a dark puddled sinking nothing…

Thirteen

I AWOKE naked between crisp sheets in a big shadowy bedroom. There was a lamp with a blue shade in a far corner. The blue light made little gleamings of richness on the corners and edges of things. I could hear a faint whisper of night traffic. I turned my head slowly. A far door was ajar. There was a brighter light beyond it. My head felt strange. I lifted my hand and touched my head and felt gauze and tape.

I wondered if I was now a very happy fellow. This would be the lion’s den, of course. The quiet and spacious luxury of the inner sanctum, where Mulligan and Hersch kept a pet named Charlie Armister. Marvelous talent for organization.

I lay and wondered how happy I was. How uninhibited. Maybe Mulligan could use me as chauffeur, replacing the greedy and unreliable Harris. But a job like that would require initiative. I would need supervision. Maybe they had gathered us all up and made us all very happy. Terry and Joanna. And Nina.

Then I knew I was not happy at all. I could remember every fraction of every instant with her, every kiss and contour.

No matter what the bastards did, McGee would keep trying. He would keep on clattering on in there, banging the rusty armor, spurring the spavined old steed, waving the mad crooked lance. I rolled up and sat on the edge of the bed. The rug was thick and soft against bare feet. I could see a dressing table, a faint gleam of bottles and jars aligned against the mirrors. I saw a small white fireplace, stood up, swayed for a moment and tottered over to it. There was a rack of shiny fireplace tools. Brass. I selected the poker. As I turned, I saw myself in a mirrored door. Big brown spook with a surgical turban. I tottered and brandished my weapon and whispered, “Tally ho.”

I prowled silently to the door that was ajar. It was a bathroom done in pink, gold and white. It was empty. I wrapped a big towel around my waist and knotted it. I went back through the bedroom and put my ear against the closed door. I could hear a low distant murmur of voices.

I opened the door cautiously. It opened onto a dim carpeted hallway. At the end of the hallway was a living room. I could see a segment of it, a drift of smoke, a tailored male shoulder. Several men seemed to be talking at once. Plotting. I heard the rattle of ice in a glass.

The hell with them. I would burst among them and see how many skulls I could crack before they wore me out. I took the brass poker in both hands. I took a deep breath. I headed for that big room, and just as I got there, I let out the war cry of a thousand disreputable years of McGees.

As I yelled, the towel knot came undone. The towel slipped and wrapped around my ankles. I plunged free and went stumbling across the room in wild, head-down run.

I ran into the glass doors of a huge break-front desk loaded with porcelains, crashed, rebounded, cracked myself across the mouth with the handle of the poker, lay dazed and sprawling and looked up into the frozen astonishment on the faces of a dozen men, and on the face of Terry Drummond, and on the face of Nina Gibson, and on the old, worn, dignified face of Constance Trimble Thatcher.

“Whose apartment is this?” I managed to ask In a humble voice.

* * *

The man in charge sat by my bed and gave small guarded explanations. He did not want to say anything he did not have to say. His name was Beggs. His face was almost entirely nose, with a little mouth tucked under the bottom edge of it, and little eyes crowded up against each side of it.

“We had been making a quiet investigation for some time,” he said.

“Who is we?”

“A cooperative venture between interested agencies. Certain small irregularities came to our attention. When Miss Gibson went to the Bureau with your letter, they turned her over to us and she told us what she knew. It… uh… became a matter of greater urgency. We decided she should have protection at all times. The two men with her were the two you assaulted.”

“How did I do?”

“Splendidly, until you fell and hit your head on the edge of the table. Mrs. Drummond insisted you be brought here.”

“Now what?”

“What do you mean?”

“What are you doing about all this great urgency?”

“Everything is going reasonably well.”

“Don’t I have the right to know what’s going on?”

“What right? For blundering around endangering people?”

“The inherent, God-given right of every total damned fool, Mr. Beggs.”

A little smile curled in the deep shadow of the nose.

“What particularly concerns you?”

“What about Charlie?”

“You do have rather a nice instinct for these things. Mrs. Drummond conveyed to me your fears about Mr. Armister, and so we dated our blank warrants and went in two hours ago. We had to break in. There was a suicide note, in his handwriting, beside him, and an empty bottle which had contained sleeping pills. There was no one else there. They pumped him out and gave him stimulants and began walking him. He’s quite confused about what happened. He is at the hospital now. His wife is with him.”

“What about Mulligan?”

“We believe we will locate him.”

“And Bonita Hersch?”

“Apparently Miss Hersch and Mr. Penerra are in the company of Mr. Mulligan. We have two other men in custody, and they seem to have the feeling that the others ran out on them. They may give us some excellent suggestions as to where to look. We believe that Mulligan and company delayed a little too long before trying to leave. Over confidence, probably”

I hesitated before asking the next question. “Toll Valley?”

“What about it?”

“Is it out of business?”

“Hardly. It is a perfectly reliable place. But their Mental Research Wing has been closed down, and all staff persons, those who are well enough at the moment, charged with illegal practices, administering unauthorized medicines, performing unnecessary operations, that sort of thing. I imagine it will be a very lengthy investigation, and public interest may well die down before it is settled one way or another.”

“Doctor Varn?”

“Killed himself at two o’clock this afternoon.”

“There were some other people out there…”

He took out a small black pocket notebook. “Olan Harris, George Raub, John Benjamin and Doris Wrightson. Yes. They have been moved to other institutions for intensive care. They were all employed by Armister interests in one way or another. I’m in hopes they can be made well enough to testify. If you have no other questions…”

“What about what happened out there?”

The little eyes sighted along that nose. They were as unreadable as raisins. “Apparently there was some sort of mixup where experimental compounds were accidentally used in their commissary department. There was such confusion I doubt if we will ever know exactly what happened. It is even possible that Doctor Varn did it purposely, on an experimental basis.”

“There were deaths?”

“Four. One was apparently from heart disease. One fell into a fountain and drowned. One woman stabbed herself with a serving fork. And an attendant apparently died of a fall.”

“Is there any record of… my escaping from out there?”

“I don’t know what you are talking about. There is no record of your ever having been out there, Mr. McGee. Mrs. Thatcher, who is, by the way, an old friend, assures me that there would certainly never be any reason for you to have been sent to such a place. She thinks you are unstable, but not in any particularly mental way”

“Testimony?”

“From you, Mr. McGee? I think not. I think we can struggle along without you. When we organize these matters, we like to be able to call upon witnesses who will stay within the areas we propose to prosecute.”

It puzzled me for a moment, and then I said, “Oh! Charlie.”

He nodded his approval. “Of course. What purpose would be gained? We will have enough without that. We don’t seek sensational press coverage in these matters. The courts will appoint trustees to make audits and sort everything out and manage the money henceforth. And we do expect that some recovery of monies will be made. If we can lay hands on Mr. Mulligan, I expect he will be glad to arbitrate the matter.”

“He should be gutted and broiled.”

“You are very savage, but I imagine that disbarment, poverty and total anonymity will be a far more galling fate for Mr. Mulligan.”

Someone knocked on the door. Beggs went to the door. He spoke in low tones to someone for a little while and then came back and stood beside my bed. “We expect to take Penerra off a Mexico City flight when it stops in Houston. And Canadian authorities have the Hersch woman. Apparently Mulligan tricked her and abandoned her in Montreal.”

“How about Mulligan?”

“She may have some useful information for the man I am sending up there. The report says she is very upset.”

“What do you want of me?”.

“Mr. McGee, we would all take it as a great favor to everyone concerned if you would gather your strength and go back to Florida where you came from, and keep your mouth shut. As a matter of fact, if you do not keep your mouth shut, I will subpoena you for every single court action arising from this whole mess, and it may take from three to five years to clean up, and I shall call you every time and let you sit and listen to what my people have to listen to, year after year. I assure you, Mr. McGee, that no one has ever made a more dreadful threat to you, or meant it more sincerely”

He smiled, swiveled the bulk of his nose around, and followed it out of the bedroom. Terry came in and talked. Nina came in and talked. Servants brought dinner on a tray. Terry brought wine. Terry and Nina and I talked. The doctor came back and looked me over. He wanted to know what had happened to my mouth. Terry told him I had engaged in mortal combat with a breakfront desk. And lost. He looked at her with great suspicion, and told me I was ridiculously, impossibly, grotesquely healthy. But to get a lot of rest. He left pills, very small lavender ones. I took two. I washed them down with wine. Terry talked. Nina talked. I began to yawn…

In the stilly depths of night and sleep, came a perfumed silken sliding, a warmth, a closeness and cautious caress. “Nina?” I said.

“Yes darling,” she whispered.

A slow writhing luxurious warmth under shortie wisp of sheerness. Head tucked into my neck. A long slow arousing, coming from the pill-sleep into the needs of love. It was a sweet hypnosis, without haste. When she was shudderingly readied, and I was turning her to take her, too many little things added up to an almost subliminal wrongness.

Something about the scents of her, something about lengths and textures, something about a less springy feel of her hair against my cheek, something about the way she avoided kissings, something about the deep sweep of curves which did not seem right to my hands, even something about the catch of her breath in response. I stopped and pinned her and ran my hand over her hair and her face. My fingertips felt the soft little serrations on her face.

“Terry!” I whispered.

She hitched herself at me frantically. “Never mind,” she said in a gritty whisper. “It’s way too late now. Do it. Come on, damn you!” And she tried in a convulsive grasping to join us. I broke her arms and legs away from me, and struggled away from her and stood up and went over to the other side of the room and sat, trembling, on the bench of the dressing table.

I sat and listened to all the foul growling words she could think of to call me. She raved her low-voiced threats. “Jo was going to be generous, and I’ll make sure you won’t get a dime. And I’ll tell that cheap busty little girl of yours that you laid me. Who the hell do you think you are?”

“Are you through?”

“God, what a priss you are. You don’t deserve an honest-to-God woman. Little shop girls. That’s your speed, McGee. You can be a big hero to them. Come back here and prove you’re a man.”

“Are you through?”

She did not answer. I saw a pale stirring, and then the shape of her, indistinct, sitting on the edge of the bed. In her normal wry mocking tone she said, “Hell, I guess it was worth a try. ”

“I’m sorry Terry.”

“Am I that repulsive to you?”

“You know better than that.”

“Then, just between friends, what put you off?”

“After I knew it was you?”

“After you knew it was me.”

“When I knew it was you, I knew it wasn’t Nina. That’s about the only answer I can give you.”

After a silence she said, “I guess that’s the only answer there is. In some nutty way I guess I have to admire you. You are a strange animal, McGee. I’m not used to your kind. I don’t think I’ve ever bedded another man who could have quit right then and there.”

“It wasn’t exactly easy.”

“Thank you, ducks. That’s some help. But, you know, you have left me in one hell of a condition.”

“Go take a cold shower.”

“There’s romance for you. Well, I got tricky, and it didn’t work, and I have only myself to blame.”

I saw paleness move toward the door. She stopped at the door and said, “I hereby accuse you of probably being a pretty good man.”

“Thank you.”

“And I am not a very nice woman.”

“You are probably nicer than you are willing to admit Teresa.”

“Ho, ho, ho,” she said and went out and the latch clicked as she quietly closed the door.

I went back to the bed. It was scented with her. My heart was still running a little fast. I laughed at myself silently. Mocking and derisive. I had defended my honor. Righteous prig. I knew what I should have done. Once I had suspected who it really was, kept my damned mouth shut. Saved astonishment until later.

How many times do you find yourself in bed with a legend? The three unholy McGees-the one I try not to be, and the one I wish I was, and the one I really am. Going ahead with it would have been the one I guess I try not to be.

But sometimes I wish there was less clown in the one I really am. I go about getting walloped with bladders, and setting my own nose on fire. Maybe I want to be a true hero. But whenever I hear that word, the only hero I can think of is Nelson Eddy, yelling into Jeanette’s face. And wearing his Yogi Bear hat.

While considering a cold shower for myself, I dropped back into sleep.

Fourteen

THOUGH THEIR doctor lauded my health, I was not too content with it. The head wound was not too bad. I had hit the formica edge a slashing glancing blow across the hairline in front, and a four-inch flap of scalp had had to be stitched back into position. A few days later I acquired a pair of black eyes of such a deep hue and generous area that I resembled a large uneasy raccoon.

It wasn’t physical damage which bothered me. It was psychic damage. We are all in a state of precarious balance, and it is difficult to realize how delicate that balance is until it is upset-either by emotions or clever chemistry. You do not quite trust all the perfectly reliable messages of the senses.

I found that I had a bigger emotional swing than I wanted. I would become vastly elated for no reason, and deeply depressed without warning. And sometimes I felt ludicrously close to girlish tears. The governor was out of kilter. I told myself I could not go about reacting like a Smith College sophomore, but I could not shake the feeling of emotional convalescence, of not being entirely certain of what I might do next. Though I stopped hallucinating, the world had lost its stability. It would give a vivid little hitch from time to time, like a brief cosmic hiccup.

I met Charles McKewn Armister and his wife. They were similar physical types-stocky, sandy, fit, outdoor people. Her attitude toward him was gentle and loving, protective and slightly apprehensive. They had employed a husky male chauffeur-nurse-valet-attendant to stay close to him and keep him out of mischief. Had I not known about him, I would have thought him a perfectly normal club-man bore. He had hearty and trivial conversation. He seemed in perpetual good spirits.

He pumped my hand and said, “We’re indebted to you. Yes sir. Pretty ugly mess. Knew old Bay for years. Never thought he’d try any hanky panky. Got some good chaps running the show now. Reliable. Like Jo says, it’s time for me to relax and enjoy myself. Travel, do some sailing, sharpen up the old tennis, hey old girl?” He put his arm around his wife’s waist, gave her a hearty hug, slid his freckled hand down to her matronly rear and gave her such a massive pinch she leapt into the air, eyes bulging.

“Charles!” she said.

He laughed heartily.

He looked at me, smiling, and said, “They won’t let me take a drink. Imagine that? They say I get too noisy. Matter of fact, I don’t miss it. A man doesn’t have to drink to feel good, does he?”

“Charles?”

“What, my dear? What?”

She looked at him with the loving earnest patience of a mother coaching a child. “Weren’t you going to ask Mr. McGee something?”

“What? Oh yes, of course. Why don’t you and little what’s-her-name come stay with us for a bit out at the Island? Rest and recuperation, fellow. And recreation. Glad to have you. Indebted to you.”

And with the smiling, absent-minded unconcern of any minor league outfielder, he reached his hand to the front of his beautifully tailored trousers and scratched his crotch.

“Uh. Thank you very much. But Miss Gibson and I are going down to North Carolina to see her brother. Perhaps some other time.”

“Any time at all, fellow. Give us a ring any time.”

“Charles, dear,” Joanna said, “would you like to go down with Wade now and wait for me in the car?”

“What? Of course, old girl. Certainly.”

Terry said, “I’ll be out day after tomorrow to stay a few days, Charlie.” She stepped to him to kiss him on the cheek. He chuckled, and before she could evade him, put his hands on her breasts and gave them a simultaneous squeeze like a clown honking a pair of rubber horns, and, still chuckling, went out through the door Wade was holding for him.

The moment they were gone, the sisters flew into each other’s arms, and clung and wept, making their small soft sisterly sounds. I went to the windows and stood with my back to them, heard murmurous mutual comfortings, snifflings, nose blowings.

“Mr. McGee?” Joanna said. I turned toward them. They were under control, smiling, eyes slightly reddened. She dug into her purse and took out a folded envelope and held it out to me. As I took it, she said, “This is a token of our appreciation for trying to help my sister and me, and Charles of course, and some small restitution for what you… had to endure at the hands of a man we once loved and trusted.”

“You don’t have to do this.”

“I want to. It’s out of my own funds. They say we won’t be able to touch anything of Charles’s for quite a long time, until it is all straightened out. I talked this over with my attorney and he suggested that for tax purposes we both consider it as a gift. I will send you the same amount next year, and the same amount the year after. He said it would be better for both of us that way.”

“I feel a little strange about this.”

“For God’s sake, why should you?” Terry said rudely. “If it wasn’t for you, Charlie, bless him, would be dead. This broad is loaded and she’s grateful. And you are permanently unemployed by choice, aren’t you, McGee? What’s with this hesitation? You seem to be rejecting all kinds of little gifts lately.” She winked broadly at me.

I put the envelope in my pocket. Nobody had been able to find the stuff they had checked out of my hotel. So I was wearing gift clothing. Gift from Nina. I had given her the measurements-44 extra-long, 35 waist, 35 inseam, shoes 13 C, shirts 17-35 and she had scurried around harassing people to cuff the pants, and had even bought one of Abercrombie’s better suitcases to put the gear in. She bought far more than I had wanted, but aside from slightly hairier fabrics than I would have chosen, everything was fine.

Joanna put her hand in mine. Her eyes were shiny. She said goodby and went down to join her jolly, happy, uncomplicated husband.

“If he wants to keep busy” I said to Terry, “he can always run for office.”

“Oh, you are very very funny. When is the little designer coming after you?”

“Her name is Nina. Three o’clock. What are you going to do?”

“Today, or from now on? Today I am going to go out and buy, buy, buy. Gaudy, expensive, ridiculous things. I am going to bully the clerks, make scenes, and buy, buy, buy. It’s my therapy, darling. As to from now on, I shall get sister settled down, then go back to Athens, then down to Montevideo for Christmas with a flock of other professional house guests, then Mexico in the spring, and summer near Cannes, and from then on plans are a bit vague. I expect I shall go right on being Terry Drummond.”

There was a touching look of vulnerability about her.

“Good luck to Terry Drummond,” I said.

“Sweetie, if you try to feel sorry for me, I shall hit you flush in the mouth.”

I took the envelope out and opened it and looked at the figure on the check. It was a ridiculous figure. It was unreal. I tucked it away, resisting the temptation to take it out for another look to see if I could have misread it.

After our baggage was checked aboard, and while we waited for the flight to be announced, I told Nina about the envelope at the hotel. I had gone there on the off chance, and found they still had it. I had to sign an affadavit about the loss of the receipt, and then tell them exactly what was in it, so they could check the contents-with my approval.

“It belongs to you,” I said.

“I keep hoping I can have a lot of time with him before they operate, Trav.”

“It’s more cash than I usually carry around, honey.”

“Do you think Mike is scared of the operation?”

He wasn’t scared. The time we spent there was strange. We had a rental car and two rooms in a motel about six miles from the hospital. In the morning we would have breakfast in the motel restaurant and then I would drive her to the hospital. We would both spend a little time with Mike, and then I would leave her there.

It was cold gray November weather, with low clouds and a frequent misty rain. I had the days to myself. I had my own devils to wrestle. I worked at getting myself back into shape. When I forced exercises to the limit of endurance, I would think of the circus-girl look of Doris Wrightson and wonder what they were doing with her, and how they had managed to keep that sensation out of the public press.

At four-thirty I would go back and sit and talk with them for a half-hour and then take Nina back to the motel. We did not talk much. She seemed remote. We were not lovers. I had kissed her, but sensed a flavor of remoteness in her acceptance. She was too focused on her brother and, perhaps, on those evaluations of herself which came from all their talk. He was the only blood-closeness she had left.

Nightmares awoke me. In sleep, the things would come out of the walls again. The worst ones were the shiny ones which rattled.

She had those three days with him, and at the end of the third day, before they began to prep him for the operation scheduled for the following morning, after she had kissed him and wished him luck, he asked me to stay a moment. “Man-talk,” he told her.

“She’s gone?”

“She’s gone, Mike.”

There was a smile on his ruined gaunted face. “Kid sister. We had to break through that. We had to find each other as people. I’m glad there was time for that.”

“So is she.”

“Big brother. Shattered hero. She had to look behind all that and find out who I am. Without the deification impulse. Just a guy. Now we like each other for the right reasons, Trav.”

“These Gibsons are good folks.”

“You’re uneasy. You think I’m going to saddle you with kid sister forever. We talked about you two.”

“Mike, I swear, the way it happened between us wasn’t…”

“Don’t insult me with that crap, Sergeant. She’s a woman. She’s capable of making choices. And neither of you are very effete or bloodless. It got her over that Plummer thing. And over the bitterness. She’s in love with you.”

“Are you sure of that?”

“More sure than she is. She’s suspicious of it. She thinks it might be physical infatuation. But now that I know her, I don’t think she could be a purely physical person in any relationship. There would have to be more, or it wouldn’t work for her. But she knows, just as I know, that it would be a very foolish business to try to permanently halter McGee. You are too much of a maverick, Sergeant. Too roving and restless. Maybe a little too self-involved.”

“I could be getting over that, Mike.”

“Are you volunteering to marry my sister, you cad?”

“What the hell, Mike?”

“Don’t get jumpy, boy. I asked you to stay behind so I could make certain that out of a lot of vague guilts, if I don’t make it through this cutting session, you two idiots won’t make a sentimental and emotional gesture and get yourselves stuck with each other. Marriage makes a lousy memorial. Pack her along with you, with my blessing, boy, and use her well. Otherwise the two of you will be walking around with steam coming out of your ears. Six months from now, if it all still percolates, then make a decision independent of guilt or memorials to me. If it is yes, I shall stare down in disbelief from Valhalla.”

“Twenty years from now, you silly bastard, we will probably be running here to get some advice from you about your teenage nephews and nieces. Bad advice.”

He held his hand out toward me. I took it. “McGee, deserve the girl. And afterwards, be someone for her to run to when she gets bruised. And when she does want to get married, you be my eyes-you take a good long searching look at the son-of-a-bitch, and pry her loose if he can’t cut it.”

* * *

They kept him under the knife for six hours, and sent him back alive. Barely. He lasted for two days, and had a few moments of drugged consciousness, and when he went, there was a gloom around that great big place that you could feel. They said the words and put him in the ground, and I took the pale and hollow-eyed and silent girl down to Lauderdale, to Slip F-18, Bahia Mar, and installed her aboard the Busted Flush, my fifty-two-foot barge-type houseboat, diesel powered, offensively luxurious in all the right areas, and reasonably shipshape topsides.

A frantic phone call had barely kept it from being sold out from under me. I gorged a frail bank account with Joanna’s check. I introduced Nina around to the permanent characters, the Alabama Tiger and Captain Johnny Dow and all the rest of them. She made a good impression. I set her to work keeping house(boat) and as a deck hand. I browned her on the beach, and told her gaudy lies and stories to make her smile, and kept her so active and busy that her slight office softness was trimmed down to firm and lovely flesh.

But all I could do was admire it. She had her own stateroom. She was not morose. She was not brooding. She was just very quiet and thoughtful, a little time of the deadness of the spirit. Sometimes there was an awkwardness between us when something accidental, some physical contact, would remind us that we were, quietly and deliberately, restricting our relationship to a casual basis.

I couldn’t seem to throw off the nightmares. I felt very edgy at times. The Busted Flush never got so much earnest and dedicated maintenance. And I kept worrying about Christmas. It was coming along soon and I knew it would be rough for her.

She was the one who found the small item In the back of the Miami News. Mr. Baynard Mulligan had been given three years for embezzlement and tax evasion. He was appealing. The prosecution’s case had been weakened when Mr. Mulligan had married one of the key witnesses against him, a Bonita Hersch, the secretary who had aided him in his raid on the Armister fortune, and who had been instrumental in his apprehension. Another secretary a Doris Wrightson, had given testimony very damaging to Mulligan.

With the first genuine glint of humor I had seen in a long time, Nina said, “I’ll bet he’ll end up wishing he’d settled for twenty years.”

I studied her. We were in stasis. We both needed to be jolted out of this strange drabness of spirit which was spoiling the game.

I said, “Let’s cruise this thing down to the Keys, honey.”

She looked startled. “Do you know how to run it, all alone?”

“I’ll have you to help.”

“That’s pretty scary. I don’t know anything about ropes and compasses and things.”

“We’ll blunder along.”

I really think it was a fish who brought my love back to me-a fleet, six-pound, goggle-eyed bonefish. Cool wind and weather had cleared away the bugs. We went chugging down Florida Bay. Once she stopped being apprehensive, she became almost nonchalant at taking her trick at the wheel, reading the charts, spotting the markers. And one misty morning partway down, she discovered fish.

She had never fished in her life. She was using one of my spinning outfits. The hard wrench at the line electrified her. It was a new world. She became a very intent, a very beady-eyed, a very dedicated fisherman. She lost some good ones and chewed herself out, and never made the same mistake more than twice. This was the first real sparkle of interest I had seen since Mike had died.

We went down into the Content Keys and found a sheltered cove and established residence. When we needed anything, we would take the dinghy and wind up the little limey outboard and chug on in to Ramrod.

It was a quiet Christmas. I gave her a spinning outfit of her own, with a little pink plastic tackle-box and a gaudy array of lures. She was enchanted. She gave me two bottles of excellent brandy, a superior yachtsman’s hat, and a little transistor radio to replace the one she had managed to drop over the side. Merry Christmas.

Merry Platonic Christmas to all.

On a reasonably warm January afternoon, after we had taken a swim, she took the dinghy out alone to fish the flats. I was having a bad day. I stayed aboard. I had awakened exhausted by nightmares, listless, and without appetite.

I tried to get some sun while she was fishing, but ended up pacing my top deck, wondering if the emotional damage which made me so edgy was permanent. Then I heard her whooping. She was standing up in the dinghy. There was some great commotion going on out there. I ran and got the glasses and put them on her.

She was keeping the rod tip high, and as she circled toward me I could see that her face was practically bulging with intensity, determination and excitement. At about the moment I realized she had a reasonably good bonefish on, she lost her balance and fell out of the dinghy without foundering it. But she didn’t drop the rod. She scrambled up. The water came just below her waist. She turned a grinning face toward the Busted Flush and whooped again.

I watched her work him, and get him close, and move cautiously to the dinghy, make about four false tries, and then swoop up that gleaming silver length with the landing net. She piled aboard, did some bailing, and then came chugging home. I made the dinghy fast and then helped her over the rail. Her little blue sunsuit was sodden.

“Hey, isn’t he glorious! Isn’t he the damnedest thing? He went a thousand miles an hour! Around and around and around. What is he? Can we eat him?”

“He’s a bonefish, and he’s a nice one, and it is early for them around here. We can’t eat him.”

“No?”

“No.”

She bit her lip, dropped to her knees, and worked him out of the net. His gills were working. She grasped him around the middle, lowered him and carefully dropped him into the water. He floated on his side, tail making weak movements. “Hurry along,” she told him. “Go on about your business, Bonefish. You are a nifty fish. Go warn your relatives there’s a girl around here named Gibson who’s going to raise hell with your whole clan.” He slowly righted himself, and gave a more powerful flicker of that tail, and went angling slowly down and away. “Come back yourself, any time,” she called.

And, she spun, joyous, grabbed me with round tan arms and fishy hands, pasted wet sunsuit against me, gave me a happy noisy kiss.

“Congratulations,” I said, and kissed her in return.

She looked at me speculatively. The next kiss was longer. Her face changed and softened. “Bit on a little white dude,” she said dreamily. “Little crabs are better.”

The next kiss, was imperative. I swung her up and took her below. It was all back for us, more than before -a deeper, richer and more demanding hunger.

* * *

February March, and into the loveliness of April.

Sometimes we moved to other coves, other beaches. Always private. We had no need for anyone else. She could sleep in my arms and sense the looming presence of nightmare and waken me, quiet me, soothe me. And little by little they went away. There was laughter aboard. And a vastly diminished laundry problem. Clothes were for when you got cold, or thought you heard a boat coming, or when you had to go ashore.

There were a thousand permutations and combinations of love. By day and by night, very quick and very lengthy, comical and saddened, bawdy and spiritual, simple and complicated, mild and stormy. It seemed that we could never wear away that hard enduring edge of need, that the pace would never slacken.

But at last of course it did. A little less compulsive magic, but more of something else. The product of love and of the ten million words of history and revelation we spoke to each other. One day there was the unspoken awareness that we had to get back to the world.

On a trip to Key West she had purchased, almost apologetically, tools of her trade. She began to do a little more drawing each day. And her lust for bonefish dwindled.

We sat topside one evening, holding hands, watching a vast fiery sunset. She was silent for a long time.

“Trav?”

“Yes, darling.”

“I don’t want you to think… I mean, I don’t want to seem like…”

“Hush,” I told her, and raised that small and valuable hand to my lips, kissed her fingertips and palm. “We’ll take our time getting back to Lauderdale. How about five days?”

“How did you know?”

“The same way you knew it was time.”

“And two days there, and then put me an a plane, darling. And don’t let me look back, because if you do I won’t be able to leave you. You knew I would?”

“When you were ready. Yes.”

“I’ll always love you. Can you understand that?”

“Yes, but don’t ever try to make anyone else understand it, Nina.”

“It will always be too private to tell.”

And so it was an April magic, going back. Hauntingly sweet, because we knew this was the end of it. There was nostalgia in each caress.

Perhaps those weeks of us were, in one sense, a memorial. People have built imposing structures out of far meaner materials. I cherished her and celebrated her, and we restored each other.

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Travis McGee #2 Nightmare In PinkJohn D. MacDonald