The Terrorizers (7 page)

She studied me carefully for a moment. I’d made a small impression. Maybe I’d even implanted a seed of doubt. It was all I could hope for.

“Who’s Helm?”

The question caught me by surprise. “What?”

The woman was leaning forward across the desk, still watching me closely. “You just said you’d give me all the answers you had. Somebody called you at the hospital and used that name. Tell me about it.”

I grimaced. “So my room and phone were bugged? That explains a few things.” I shrugged. “I can’t tell you who Helm is, but I’m Helm.”

“Explain.”

“Let’s put it this way,” I said carefully. “A bit of ancient history returned, maybe as a direct result of hearing that name. I now know that I was a kid named Matthew Helm going to school during the week and hunting with his daddy on weekends. That I remember. Then I remember being a young fellow named Helm taking pictures for various newspapers. Then there’s a long hiatus. Then I woke up in a hospital and was told that I’m now a dedicated nature photographer named Madden recuperating from a terrible flying accident. I don’t remember anything about that. Aside from minor details, which I’ll happily supply without coercion, that’s all you’re going to get if you work on me a week, because that’s all there is to get, Doctor.”

She asked flatly, as if she hadn’t really been listening: “Where’s Walters?”

There it was, the bad news Dugan had hinted at, confirmed. If they were interested in Pilot Walters’ last flight, if that was what the whole thing was all about, I was in for a very unhappy time.

I said, “I was told that Herbert Walters, known as Herb, worked for an outfit known as North-Air. I was told that he’d flown me north in a DeHavilland Beaver. I was told that I’d flown with him before. I was told that he’s still missing, along with his plane. Presumably, he sank with the plane, but of course he could have parachuted clear, earlier, and left me to crash alone. I simply don’t know.”

“Walters is very important to us. We have to know what happened to Mr. Herbert Henry Walters.”

She didn’t say who had to know and it didn’t seem diplomatic to ask. I just shrugged helplessly. “If I knew I’d tell you.”

“You do know.”

I said, “Well, okay, maybe I do know, in the technical sense. Maybe it’s up there somewhere with the stored memory tapes. But I can’t get at it.”

She nodded slowly. “We’ll see, Mr. Madden. We’ll see what you can get at.” She looked towards Dugan. “All right, take him to Hyacinth. Tell Tommy Trask maximum security at all times… Oh, just a minute. Mr. Madden, let me show you something before you go. In here.”

I rose and followed her through the examining room I’d already seen. She opened a heavy, sound-proof door beyond, and there it was again: more bad news I’d been expecting. I won’t even bother to describe it, except to say that this was a modern installation with no racks or thumbscrews or Iron Maidens on display. I gathered that the work was done largely by electricity. There was a chair into which you could be strapped, or they could stretch you out on a table for better accessibility. Body-belts. Wrist and ankle straps. There was a faint odor. I could be fancy and call it the smell of pain, but actually the joint smelled more like a public john.

“So this is the fun room,” I said.

Dr. Somerset let the heavy door hiss closed behind us. “The rules are now in force, Mr. Madden, so consider your future answers very carefully… All right, Dugan. Take him to Hyacinth and turn him over to Tommy.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Dugan gave me a shove. “Not that way. The back door, over in the corner…”

There was Aster, Buttercup, Columbine, Dahlia, and so on down to Goldenrod and Hyacinth. I mean, so help me, that’s what the damned, barred, loony-bin cottages were named. I found that almost as frightening as the room I’d just seen.

Actually, it wasn’t so bad, or maybe I should say it was bad but I wasn’t in good enough shape to appreciate it. You’d think a sick man—well, a man just recovering from sickness—would be easier to break down than a well one, but this time, at least, it worked the other way. I still hadn’t come back to full reality after my recent brush with death. This was just one more chapter in a long, hazy, continuing hospital nightmare, and I was getting pretty hardened to hazy hospital nightmares.

They let me think it over for a whole night and day, plus one more night. I spent most of that time in bed, mostly sleeping. Any fool could figure out what was going to happen when they started asking me urgent questions about an airplane jockey I couldn’t remember. Why borrow trouble by brooding about it in advance?

The second evening, the buildup started. They prepared me as if for an operation: the clean-you-out-pills, the nothing-to-eat-and-drink edict, and in the morning, further unpleasant precautions against my messing up their pretty torture chamber under stress, followed by a shot. In a real hospital, it would have been a preliminary sedative or anesthetic, but here I thought it was probably a cooperation injection of some kind. Scopolamine? The word popped into my mind from somewhere, but I rejected it. It was my impression—gained where, I didn’t know—that scopolamine was considered pretty corny and old-fashioned nowadays. A place like this probably had better truth juices available.

Dr. Caine administered the injection. I was put into a wheelchair—the blond orderly named Trask did the honors here—and rolled to the main building, where Dugan opened the back door to admit us to the Torquemada room. I’d seen a few people, well bundled up, strolling aimlessly under the trees of the big fenced estate. They’d paid no attention to me. Maybe I wasn’t really there at all, I reflected; maybe I was back in the Prince Rupert Hospital having a highly colored dream. Here I was being transported quite openly to the chamber of horrors, and none of my fellow-patients would even acknowledge my existence by a glance. Actually, I had a hunch they were quite aware of me; they simply didn’t want to seem rudely curious about the poor violent case locked up in high-security Hyacinth, now scheduled for desperate treatments to restore his sanity. I mean, it would have been impolite to stare, don’t you know?

Trask turned me over to Dugan, who rolled me inside to where the horror lady herself awaited me. Dr. Albert had faded at the door; apparently he was okay with the needle but he had no stomach for the heavy work with the electrodes and rheostat. We started in the chair with questions. We continued in the chair with electricity. Then the electric treatments were continued on the table, with interesting variations. As I said, I was pretty used to institutional nightmares by now. I knew how to escape them. All I had to do was move off into a corner of the room and watch the fun. I was acquainted with the guy in the chair, or on the table, and I thought they were treating him badly and it was a real shame, but when you came right down to it he wasn’t a fellow who meant a great deal to me…

I was a little startled, maybe even a little scared, when I suddenly realized somewhere along the line that this was no longer the first day of intermittent questioning, it was the second. I’d lost a day. Well, it seemed to be something I was getting good at mislaying memories. I didn’t think the ones I’d misplaced inside that room were anything I’d miss. I stopped worrying about it once I decided that the mental circuit breakers, the ones that cut out during psychic overloads like airplane crashes, were simply doing their protective stuff once more, shutting out a lot of stuff I didn’t really want.

I did worry a bit about the Observer, as I called him. He was a small fat man with a surgeon’s mask and cap and gown who stayed in the corner so unobtrusively it had taken me a while to realize he was there. He didn’t act much like a surgeon. In fact he didn’t act at all. Elsie carried out the treatments, with the help of Dugan’s muscle when required. The Observer simply observed. Once in a very long while he’d make a comment. He had a pleasant enough voice, in spite of a Germanic accent, and sometimes what he said was pleasant, too. At least I found it so.

“No, no,” he’d say, “We can’t have him dead or permanently damaged, Dr. Somerset. You’d better let him rest a bit now,
hein?
”

In a way, however, I resented his presence. Somehow it wouldn’t have been so bad with just me and Elsie—and Dugan, but he didn’t really count, he was just the eunuch at the harem door. We worked out a very satisfactory love-hate relationship as the inquisition progressed, Elsie and I. I was her pet toy, and she was somebody I was going to kill very slowly, very deliberately, very painfully, when
my
time came. The ingenious torments I devised for her—to hell with simple electricity—kept me going during the times when the drugs wore thin and the disinterested-spectator technique didn’t quite work any longer. But having an observer present during our intimate orgies of pain wasn’t right, I felt. It was like making love in public, dammit.

“That’s enough, I think,” said the Observer one day, coming forward. It was the first time he’d left his corner station while I was in the room. He went on, “That is enough, Madame Doctor. I think we can take it as established that the man has actually lost his memory,
nicht wahr?
Furthermore it’s becoming quite obvious that we won’t break through to the information we need by these methods. There is nothing to be gained by proceeding further.”

“If you’d only let me—”

Elsie’s voice was even hoarser than usual with disappointment. She was an ugly, lonely little girl being told to stop playing with her favorite doll. I almost felt sorry for her.

“No. He must live and he must recover, those are my instructions.” The masked little man’s voice was sharp. “The name he gave you, the name spoken over the telephone, has been traced. We have some very interesting, but rather disturbing, information about this man and the organization for which he works. He is really a very interesting person. It’s too bad he had to get involved in our affairs. In his business—his real business, which is not photography—occasional interrogations are expected, so I think we need fear no retribution for what we have done so far. There are, however, people behind him who may take action if we go much farther; people it’s considered advisable not to antagonize. That telephone call was as much to us as to him. It was a warning. We feel it should be heeded. Let’s wrap it up, as the Yankees say. Lock him up and keep him safe until you get further instructions from the council. We’ll have to try to learn about Walters some other way.”

When the Observer had gone, Elsie herself came forward to release me, although that was normally Dugan’s job. She looked at me for a long time, fondly, sadly, before tackling the straps and buckles. I was tempted to congratulate her. Even when it’s checked, as seemed to be the case with her, acromegaly usually has unfortunate sexual side effects; but she had obviously made a wonderful adjustment and found a very satisfactory substitute. However, looking up at the intelligent eyes in the gargoyle face, I managed to keep my mouth shut. I’d survived. I knew, at least in part by not fighting or talking back. My profile was nice and low again. No sense in spoiling things by getting smartalecky at the last moment.

Dugan was almost as disappointed as Elsie, I think. He yanked me out of there angrily, rolled me roughly back to Hyacinth, and practically threw me at Tommy Trask.

“The skinny bastard beat them!” Dugan said bitterly. “Him and his phony amnesia! If they’d just let me at that rheostat, I’d have got it out of him in a hurry.”

“Or burned out his transistors,” Trask said. “Vegetables don’t talk… Come on, Mr. Madden, it’s time for beddy-bye.”

“The orders are to keep him
safe
,” Dugan said.

“We’re safe, aren’t we, Mr. Madden,” Trask said. “Safe as a baby in a crib, we are…”

I went to sleep, smiling like a baby in a crib. Phase one had been concluded in a reasonably satisfactory manner, everything considered. It was time for phase two, but there was no hurry, no hurry at all. A little strength and good sense would be required. I slept all the next day, therefore, except for meals. I’d been kept on very short, bland, and unsatisfying rations for obvious reasons connected with sanitation. Now Trask started bringing me real food, and I made up for lost time and calories. Between meals, I slept some more. Gradually, the drugs I’d been given wore off and the haze of pain, illness, and weariness began to clear.

I hadn’t paid much attention to the room before, since I wasn’t planning to do much about it. I wasn’t the Count of Monte Cristo planning to dig his way out of the Chateau d’lf; and as I recalled, in the end the guy hadn’t made it with a shovel after all. But a little geography wouldn’t hurt, and as sharp reality came back to me, I studied my surroundings carefully—it was actually quite a comfortable little suite—determined the way the door locked, and examined the view from the barred windows of the two rooms and adjacent bathroom. I got a pretty good idea of the lay of the land outside: how the cover was located and which way the paved walks ran under the trees.

Trask was a different matter. He was important. I’d been making fuzzy mental notes about Tommy Trask ever since I understood that he’d been assigned to me for the duration. Now I clarified and completed my research on the subject. He was almost six feet tall and he weighed well over two hundred muscular pounds. Even in good health, I would have hesitated to test my strength against his. Like Kitty Davidson, he spoke with that kind of half-British-sounding Canadian accent I could never track to its source. He had longish blond hair and a heavy face that, as I’ve already indicated, had a hint of handsome boyishness. He wasn’t very bright but he wasn’t a bad guy…

I didn’t know what I was waiting for, really, until that evening came. It felt right, somehow. I wasn’t going to get any stronger or smarter cooped up here. If I stalled much longer, something might happen to change my situation for the worse. I heard Trask coming, whistling to himself. It was a roast-beef night, I realized, and he liked being able to bring his private patient something good, unlike last night when the dinner menu had consisted of a mixed-up Chinese-type mess that no self-respecting Oriental would have fed to his cat.