In The House Of Secret Enemies

It stayed dark. Something was rapping on the inside of my head, not hard or painfully, but persistently, with a sound like a pencil eraser on soft wood. Then I realized it was only the blood pulsing through my veins. I listened for a few moments, and then it was gone, replaced by a voice.

'Dr. Frederickson. Robert. This is Dr. Kee.' The voice came from everywhere and nowhere. It started from somewhere back of my eyes and undulated out, filling my head-or what I thought was my head. There was simply no more head, no toes, no fingers, no body. There was only my mind, and I wondered how long that was going to last; all things disappear when you end up in one of Smathers' fish tanks.

'I am your friend,' the voice continued. 'There has been a very great misunderstanding on your part. That will be corrected. You will learn to love my voice-and then you will learn to love me. My voice will be your only contact with reality, and you will look forward to hearing it. Soon you will pay careful attention to what I have to say.'

I waited for more. There wasn't any more. After a while, I wished there were, just as Kee had predicted. I cursed, slowly, methodically. My voice came back to me muffled, as from a great distance.

I tried to visualize myself: I would be floating in one of the tanks, the saline water warmed exactly to body temperature. My arms and legs would be strapped together, loose enough to allow for circulation, but tight enough to restrict any kind of movement. I imagined my head was encased in some kind of black hood into which oxygen was pumped; naturally, the hood had earphones. There were probably tubes stuck in my body through which I was being fed intravenously.

The next thought that occurred to me was that I'd be there forever, living in absolute darkness. Smathers and Kee would never take me out; they would go away and lock the steel door behind them. I would be left floating. . floating forever, until I died, and rotted, and my bones sank to the bottom of the tank.

I found I was crying. I could just barely feel the tears sliding down my cheeks. I thought of my mother, a beautiful woman who had loved me as I was and who, with my brother, had kept me whole during the nightmare years of my childhood and adolescence.

I tried to sleep. Maybe I did. It was impossible to tell; sleeping and waking were all the same. Then the voice came again.

'Hello, Robert.'

'Go to hell,' I said; or maybe I only thought I said it.

'You've been with us for twenty-four hours now, Robert, I know you've missed my voice. I hope you've had time to think about your mistakes, your bad thinking.'

I tried to match the voice to the face I'd seen in Smathers' office. The voice was like the face, smooth, unemotional, capable of sudden, unexpected violence.

'You should give some thought to-'

The voice broke off in midsentence. I strained, listening for the rest, but then I realized that the sudden break was all part of the game. The voice would be my only link with reality, and soon I would be willing to do anything it asked of me. My mind screamed, and I backed away from the terrible need, backed down into myself.

I found myself on a plain, stretching off to nothing. There was no horizon, only a black pit directly in front of me. I backed up, and the pit moved forward. It yawned before me like a dark hole on a silent planet.

There were sounds in die hole, wailing winds, screams, groans; and the hole was myself, the deepest part of me. That was where Kee wanted to push me, to trap me-and then remake me.

I was losing my mind.

The torment ended simply, even ludicrously, with a mouthful of water. My first reaction was that they'd decided to scrap the whole brainwashing business and just drown me. I didn't care; anything was better than the terrible silence. Then somebody was holding my head above the surface, ripping off the black rubber mask. The light hit my eyes like razor blades. I screwed them shut and turned my head away. Hands reached down and loosened the straps on my arms and legs. Needles were pulled from my body. Still keeping my eyes closed, I planted my feet on the bottom of the tank and pushed, propelling myself over the side. I landed hard on my back and the breath whistled out of me. The hands reached down and grabbed me under the armpits.

'Get up, Dr. Frederickson!'

I opened my eyes a crack and the blurred image of Smathers flooded in. He pulled me to my feet and I promptly fell down again. After being held absolutely motionless for twenty-four hours, my legs weren't working, but now my eyes were growing accustomed to the light.

'What's the matter? You have a change of heart?' I asked Smathers.

He was white. His flesh trembled.

'I … I must have been out of my mind. I don't know what … I just couldn't let him do this to you. Can you walk?'

'No. Did you have anything to do with the killings of Manning and Haley?'

'No. I swear to you I knew nothing about them.'

'But you let Kee talk you into this.'

'I saw everything I'd worked for crumbling around me. If you only knew how close I am to controlling the reactions! Dr. Kee convinced me that you could be made to forget everything, perhaps even be made to work for us.'

'You were willing to work with a murderer?'

Smathers dropped his eyes. 'My work is. . very important to me. It is possible that many men's lives could be salvaged.'

'At the cost of turning me into a vegetable. Forget it, pal. You're no Albert Schweitzer. The first thing you have to learn is that one man's life is the most important thing; one life, many lives, it's all the same thing. It wouldn't have worked anyway. My brother would have eventually tracked me down. He might have been too late, but he'd have been here. And my brother isn't exactly used to hearing me talk like a robot.' My legs were beginning to feel slightly more solid than a plate of mashed potatoes. I tried getting up on them. They still weren't ready to carry me to a world record in the hundred-yard dash, but they worked.

I looked around for something to cover my nakedness, didn't see anything, decided that modesty was not an appropriate concern at the moment. 'Let's get out of here.'

Smathers grabbed my arm and I shook his hand off. I felt almost normal. We started toward the door. A huge electronic monitoring machine off to the right blinked, as if welcoming me back to the real world at last.

I should have taken it as a warning. Kee suddenly appeared in the door. Behind him was the healthy half of the Tong Twins. Kee didn't take long to size up the situation; his eyes flicked back and forth between Smathers and me. Then he made a sound in his throat and put his hand back in the direction of his helper; the helper put a.38 in it. Kee flicked his wrist and fired a bullet through Smathers' forehead. Smathers flipped backward and landed on the floor with the sound that only heavy sacks and dead men make. The bullet continued on through his skull and shattered the tank behind him. A few hundred gallons of water roared out through the ruptured glass and hit me full in the back, sweeping me across the floor and bringing me up hard against the monitor. I cringed, waiting for the next bullet. It didn't come.

Kee had other plans for me-like framing me for Smathers' murder. In a way, it made sense; if he could knock me unconscious and place the gun in my hand, it might just confuse the issue long enough for him to slip back over whatever border he'd crossed in the first place. At least Kee seemed to have it figured that way. He was half smiling as he advanced on me. Brother Tong was waiting in back of him, his hands on his hips like a referee.

In my present condition I was no match for either of them.

Still, it was time to do something-like jump up on the monitor and pull some wires. That's what I did.

The machine whirred and popped, sending up clouds of black, acrid smoke. The live wires in my hand sputtered like Fourth of July sparklers. I spun a mental prayer wheel, something concerning proper insulation in the machine I was standing on, then threw the wires into the water on the floor.

Kee had good reflexes; he leaped at the same time I dropped the wires and managed to land on a dry spot near the wall at the opposite side of the room. Brother Tong wasn't so lucky. He tried walking on water and didn't get far. The scream was burned out of his throat by a few hundred thousand volts of electricity. Already dead, he danced around for a few seconds, then fell on his face. His body gradually stopped twitching as the electricity locked his joints and muscles. There was a smell in the air like fried pork.

The gun had fallen in the middle of the floor, out of everybody's reach. That was fine with me, because Kee had problems of his own; the water was gradually working its way over to his tiny island of dry wood. He was backed up against the wall, his arms stretched out to either side of him, as though trying to claw holes in the