High said, “Dunwoodie, you are feeling sick and you can’t hold it,” and Dunwoodie retched and a great gush of liquid came from him. I glanced at Flair. She looked spellbound, really transfixed. Dunwoodie lay down and rolled over on his face, flat out, limbs dangling limp and loose over the sides of the bed. “You’re better now,” High said suddenly. “You feel fine. Sing a folksy song, and dance for us.”
At once Dunwoodie sprang to life, leapt from the bed, and started jiggling inexpertly about the room, his heavy stomach flopping up and down and doing a dance on its own. If I’d had his hangover it would have just about killed me, but then of course he hadn’t really got a hangover at all, I had to remember. He started to bellow out a bawdy song.
“That’s fine,” High said when the song ended. “Get back to sleep now. When you wake again, you’ll remember nothing of this but you’ll still have the hangover and the lack of knowledge as to how you’ve spent the time.” While Dunwoodie stretched out on the bed High switched off the screen and went back again to his desk and rolled the wall back to normal. “Now, Shaw. D’you find that answers any questions?”
“Maybe it does,” I said. “How did you do it?”
Once again that tiny sliver of metal took the centre of the stage. “With this,” High answered.
“I didn’t see you use it.”
“Of course not. A similar cylinder has been placed inside Dunwoodie’s brain by what is really a very simple operation with no rejection problem and one that has practically nothing in the way of after-effects. And another little cylinder is in Tracy Learoyd’s brain already.”
“So he came here too, when he disappeared?”
High nodded. “Yes. And a number of others, mainly men on leave from Lifeforce. I knew that if I could get them while they were on leave, the chances of questions being asked about their absence would be so much the less.” He grinned. “I admit I slipped up a bit over your husband, Mrs Dunwoodie. He was suddenly wanted in Canberra, some conference or other it was, after I’d got him here — so of course his disappearance came out and they sent for you, Shaw. Still — not to worry! It hasn’t done any harm.” He rubbed his hands briskly together. “Where was I? Oh yes — the complex. The island is pretty well infiltrated with men I’ve put computer-linked brain-control units into. They’ll all do as I tell them when the time comes. Their thoughts and actions will be controlled by my computers. The fully programmed orders for the destruction of Lifeforce from within, by her own loyal and entirely innocent personnel, will go out from this very room, just as soon as I have word from WUSWIPP that they’re ready. The programmes, one for each of the controlled brains, will have been fed into the computers, operating on the normal punched-card system, and all that has to be done is for the computers to pass their messages to the brain-control units.”
“And my husband?” Flair asked. “What happens to him?”
“He’s leaving Kimbau tonight, Mrs Dunwoodie. He’s absolutely fit now and he’ll be taken to Brisbane where he’ll wake up in a certain lodging house and wonder how in heaven’s name he ever got there. And from now on, he’s my man. My very useful man. Remember — he’s the minister responsible for Lifeforce! My electronic brain-control unit — which can operate independently of the computers when necessary, I might add — in effect transmutes my voice, my verbal instructions, when in independent control, directly into the proper brain reflex responses to make the host brain do what I want of it. This unit will ensure that any suspicions that might be entertained in Canberra as to the possibility of there having been sabotage by enemy agents will immediately be allayed and stifled — by the minister himself. Those suspicions, if indeed they ever do arise at all, will be allayed until it’s far too late for any action to be taken.”
“Clever,” I said. It was, too.
*
We were taken back to our rooms and locked up alone again, which gave me plenty of time to think and worry and once again to hear that oddly disturbing zrrrm, zrrrm sound from the passage.
I didn’t see any hope at all of Flair and I being able to get away from Kimbau and pass a hot warning to Canberra. In my conducted tours around High’s establishment I’d met no-one in the corridors, it was true — no armed guards on anti-escape patrol; this wasn’t the sort of outfit that would expect escapees — none of the inmates I’d seen would be capable of escape. But I didn’t allow the absence of guards to fool me. Even if he didn’t expect escapes, High wouldn’t be leaving his exits wide open. So far as I knew, the only way out was the way we had been brought in — the tunnel cut through the rock from the valley, and the lift that led down to it. I hadn’t seen a staircase anywhere. And I would have taken any bet that lift was under constant watch from the ground floor and the moment anyone stepped out of it who shouldn’t, his number would be up.
So I needed to dream up other ways. Maybe some sort of disturbance right here where the WUSWIPP plan would be controlled from. A nice little electrical fire, say, something to muck up High’s generating plant, or some sizeable object slung through that control panel in his office. But that would no doubt be repairable; obviously they would carry plenty of spares.
It was all easier said than done. And the doctor just might get the idea of placing one of his little cylinders in my brain and after that I would in any case be ticking to his clock …
I was left alone for a long while, several days in fact, so long I began to feel I’d been forgotten. Meals were brought at intervals, pappy stuff mostly, fit for an invalid. I had also by now been provided with hospital clothing — striped pyjamas, slippers and a thin dressing-gown, and I really began to fancy I was an invalid. Then one day after the broadcast morning devotions High himself came into my room and said he had something to show me.
“What is it?” I asked.
He said, “I thought you might like to see an operation for the placing of a brain-control unit.”
“Who on?”
“In,” he corrected me, “not on. The answer is — just a patient. I want to build up as many people as possible with these inset controls, so that through them, through people in Australia who will take over at the appropriate time, WUSWIPP can exercise authority over the continent while Eastern forces are consolidating their position. It’s all part of the plan — it may turn out to be unnecessary, but we don’t want any loopholes anywhere.”
“Let me recap,” I said sardonically, “just to get things dead straight. You get your orders through from your WUSWIPP bosses, and you transmit these orders to your controlled persons via the computer-linked brain-control units?”
“Right. I —”
“How long do the units last?”
“Indefinitely,” High said. “They don’t wear out — there’s nothing to cause wear. And they have a built-in self-operative capacity to function — that’s to say, I don’t need to exercise constant minute-by-minute control over every facet of the hosts’ lives. I don’t need to say, Now get up, wash, shave, eat breakfast, go to work, tea-break, lunch … that sort of thing! So, you see, they appear absolutely normal, except for the memory-gap covering the period of absence. This self-operative capacity is, when necessary, tripped and overridden by means of the broadcasts from the control panel you’ve seen. I can use either direct voice control or computer-linked electronic-impulse control, as a matter of fact. Each recipient brain has an individual frequency, so that whenever necessary he can be directed in all his movements and actions via this frequency.”
“And that can’t be tapped, picked up elsewhere in Australia?”
“Give me credit for a little intelligence, old man,” he protested. “Of course it can’t. It’s possible the actual signal, the transmission as such, could be picked up, though I’d doubt it considering my frequencies. Anyway, so what? It could be the signal of any ham operator anywhere, and we won’t be transmitting long enough for anyone to get a useful fix. Certainly the messages can’t be understood. They go out in a garbled form — rather like a scrambler, you know. All that’
s very well taken care of.” He yawned and glanced at his watch. “The whole thing’s really very simple indeed when you’re trained in its use.”
“Train me,” I suggested. “Just for the hell of it.”
He laughed. “Well, well,” he said. Then he added jocularly, “Just for the hell of it — why not?”
*
The operating theatre was reached through one of the doors on the next floor down from my room. Once inside the lobby I was taken over by an orderly and ushered through another door, one that led into the spectators’ gallery, while High went off to scrub up. The operation was to take place under cover of a great glass dome. The table stood ready beneath this dome, with the anaesthetist sitting by his machine. There was a full theatre staff, including two other surgeons to assist High. I looked all around the theatre. Out here where I was, there were seats for about fifty people, but only a few were occupied — there were four nurses and three youngish men in white coats who talked together in a language that I believed to be Swedish. Under the dome itself was enough equipment to make a National Health Service surgeon gasp. High wasn’t short of anything. This place was bang up to date, antiseptically clean, well ordered, no pinching and scraping and making do. Finance had never been a problem to WUSWIPP; they had command of immense sums of money in all the world’s currencies.
I watched High come in a few minutes later, capped, gowned, masked, gloved. Then the body was wheeled in, swathed from head to foot in purest white. It was lifted by orderlies on to the table. The anaesthetist got busy and when he gave the okay to High, the surgeon — as High had now become — nodded at the theatre sister who handed him an instrument and at once he got to work on the left-hand side of the patient’s forehead, just below the hairline. High seemed to be boring a tiny hole, just big enough, presumably, to admit that electronic control device. When he had got through the bone he reached out for a long, thin wire which he pushed up slowly and gently with infinite patience. When this was far enough in, one of his assistants attached to its end a carrot-shaped instrument with an eyepiece, and High spent a couple of minutes gazing up this. Then he nodded, said something to the sister, and carefully withdrew the wire and examined it. It looked to me as if it were covered with blood and some sort of whitish matter, but this may have been imagination since I didn’t get a very good view of it. Anyway, after this something else was pushed up and then the control cylinder was inserted, something else again went in behind it, and then the hole was plugged. When the tiny channel was filled High held out a hand and the sister passed him a small brush which she had dipped into a bottle and he spent the next five minutes painting the minute hole with whatever was in the bottle. Then he stood back, looked through the dome at me, and gestured me to approach the glass.
I did so. High indicated the patient’s forehead and stuck a thumb up at me, grinning happily. Certainly I could see no scar, no hole, nothing. I think that was what he wanted to show me. It was very neat indeed.
That was the end of the operation. I was kept where I was until High had got out of his operating gear and had a wash, then I was taken out to the lobby where High had a word with me. “Easy, eh?” he said. “In three days’ time the patient’ll be up and about and none the worse — and he won’t know a thing about it, of course. Well — what d’you think of it, old man?”
I shrugged.
He gave me a disappointed look and said, “Well, of course, I’ve already said there’s nothing much in it. Actually, compared to other operations I’ve perfected here on Kimbau, it’s chicken feed.”
“Go ahead and boast if you want to,” I said. “You have a literally captive audience, after all.”
He chuckled. “I’ll take you at your word, if I may. I’ve already told you about my brain transplants, haven’t I? That’s not all, either. I’ve actually removed the natural brain and replaced it with one of my own specification — an electronic, artificial brain. It functions in every detail as efficiently, as effortlessly, as the normal human one.”
“My God,” I said. I remembered that steel-and-plastic horror attached to the headless neck in the storehouse ward. And then I thought about those men who’d captured Flair and me in the native village — so long ago it seemed, that it might have been in another existence — and those I’d seen around the hospital too, and I said, “Except in one particular — the ability to give a man a human expression.”
He seemed puzzled. “How d’you mean? What d’you know about that, Shaw?”
“Do I take it your orderlies have had electronic-brain implants, Doctor?”
“Oh — yes, that’s true, they have. Yes, I see what you mean, the faces are a trifle unemotional, but I think I can overcome that, given time.” He added, “It was from the experiments on my orderlies that I evolved the cylinder control, you know. But that’s not the only thing about the orderlies that’s unusual.”
“No,” I said. “You don’t imagine I’ve missed their arms and legs, do you?”
He shook his head. “It’s not that either. Or not entirely. The new growth plays its part in the whole, of course. But what I’m getting at is this: my orderlies are compomen.”
“They’re what?”
“Compomen — composite men. Built up from spares, my dear chap.” He took me by the arm and walked me out into the corridor, chatting away animatedly. “They’re of composite construction. Only the skulls and the outer layers of the trunks — the shells, really — are what one might call original. The brains, as I’ve said, are electronic implants — or in some cases straightforward transplants of normal brains — and the limbs are fresh growth. The organs, all of them, are from donors, each organ being from a different donor, all very precisely welded together to form a complete function-worthy man. Any one of those compo orderlies could have, say, the heart of an English aristocrat, the blood of a Greek schoolmaster, the lungs of an Italian street-sweeper, the liver of an opera singer, and so on and so on. Actually, it’d be damn difficult to give any of them a nationality or a calling.” He laughed. “But they do make good orderlies.” He seemed highly amused.
“Are they computer-programmed too?” I asked.
He laughed again. “Good heavens no,” he said. “It hasn’t been necessary to use up my programming capacity on them. They’re my creatures as it is, wholly obedient to me.”
I said, “You make me vomit.” Once again I remembered old Pomfret-Hopton’s words: God-man. I’ll say!
13
After that it was back to my room again in solitary confinement, but that same afternoon High had me out again, this time with Flair. He took us along to a room furnished like a hotel lounge, thickly carpeted and with plenty of big, comfortable chairs. A touch of England and the local pub was added by the presence of a dartboard and a couple of pin tables and a one-armed bandit yielding tokens. A number of patients, men and women, sat around reading or sleeping or talking; some were playing card games. All of them seemed happy enough, content with their lot; probably they had no memory of what their previous lives had been. I wondered if any of them were compomen or compowomen. One of the men was being something of a nuisance to the others. He was zooming round the room, panting like a steam-engine, with his arms held out stiffly sideways from the shoulders and making zrrrm, zrrrm noises in between the panting breaths. I recognized that noise; one mystery at least was explained. He was a fat, bald man of around forty and his antics seemed a trifle weird to say the least.
The doctor saw the way I was looking and said, “Ah, that’s Harry. Harry Carzac. He’s being an aeroplane.”
“I’d got that far,” I said. “Has he always been like this?”
“Oh, no, no. He’s the one I mentioned to you briefly a few days ago, if you remember. The one who looks very much like proving that there can be a transference of personality and reason in toto, as a result of a brain transplant. Harry’s an Englishman, a barrister from London. He’s handled many important cases in that capacity and he was strongly tipped for the bench
.”
“And now?”
“Now he has the brain of a six-year-old boy, the son of a worker in a Luton car factory. This boy, the donor boy, disappeared whilst on an errand for his mother a little over a year ago … naturally, the police were never able to discover what had happened to him. It was a while before I found a use for that boy’s brain, actually — and then Harry Carzac came to me. I thought the experiment might prove unusually interesting. Come and meet him.”
He took my arm and led me across the carpet towards the bald man. “Harry,” he said, stopping him before he started on another flight. “Harry old fellow, I want you to meet some good friends of mine … Commander Shaw and Mrs Dunwoodie.”
We both murmured something that seemed vaguely appropriate to the circumstances. Harry wiped the back of a blue-veined hand across his nose and said sheepishly, “Hullo.”
High asked, “Enjoying yourself, Harry?”
“You bet,” Harry answered with enthusiasm. The voice was on the high side but it was still a man’s. He looked at me, hopefully. “I’m a good jet, aren’t I?”
“Fine,” I said, though it had sounded to me as though he had the sound wrong. “Do you … like aircraft?”
“Yes,” Harry stated firmly.
“Better than cars?” High said.
“Course I do,” Harry said. He giggled, and gestured rudely towards the other patients. “Jets make more noise … makes those old cows cross, silly lot of nits.”
I felt my stomach turn over. I looked at High, feeling one hell of an urge to smash that complacent face to jelly. High gave a kindly smile but uttered a mild rebuke. “Now, now, Harry. You really mustn’t upset the others, you know that, don’t you?”
“Yes, Doctor.”
“It’s not as though we don’t indulge you, is it, Harry?”
Harry looked puzzled. “How d’you mean?” he asked suspiciously.
“I mean,” High explained with a patient smile on his face, “we do give you quite a lot of freedom, don’t we, Harry?”
The All-Purpose Bodies: A Fast-Paced Thriller (Commander Shaw Book 11) Page 13
