Last Night at the Brain Thieves Ball

by Scott Spencer

  I ripped open the communication from Mr. Worthington as soon as Tom closed the door behind him. In fact, the click of the closing door coincided exactly with my first attempts to claw open the envelope. And do you know what? It wasn’t bad news at all. There was an American Express money order for one thousand dollars—that’s a lot of swell pens, a lot of blue hats. And a note, which I noticed a full minute later. It said: “Please be in my office at 10:00 A.M.” No signature. None necessary. I looked at my watch—not the most expensive watch in the world but eminently reliable. 9:48 A.M.

  By the time I reached Mr. Worthington’s office I was once again approaching a state of uncontrollable anxiety. I realize you must be getting weary of me describing my blood pressure, my heartbeats, and all the awful internal feelings by which I am plagued. I will try to stop wrapping every third sentence around my upper arm, stop my prose from taking my pulse, as it were …

  I checked in with Mr. Worthington’s secretary, whom I won’t, for the sake of charity, describe further, save to say that she is an obese young woman, the fattest person in NESTER, weighing as much as three pounds per inch. After a brief wait in the outer office I was asked to step in—just as the clock reached 10:00 A.M.—and Mr. Worthington was standing, smiling, his eyes bright, welcoming me, and asking me to sit, be comfortable, have a mint.

  “How’s it going?” he asked as I popped the mint into my mouth.

  Stalling for time I concentrated on the white candy. “Good mint,” I said.

  “Isn’t it? It’s a new kind, Belgian. Takes away that morning staleness from your mouth, doesn’t it? A remarkable freshening effect.” He put one in his mouth and waited for his question to be answered. He would never repeat himself.

  “Well,” I said, “I haven’t been able to work on some things that have been particularly interesting to me, mostly because of that furniture-and-posture study and the mop-up on the eating behavior experiments.”

  “Yes. I meant to tell you. Your work on the ventor medium thing was very nice. Snappy. I mean that.”

  I colored slightly. “Thanks,” I said in a voice softened by praise. “That’s, ummm, ventromedial, by the way.”

  Mr. W.’s features were blank for a moment. Then he smiled and brought his hands together soundlessly. “I know that,” he said. “I know that. But that’s not why I called you here.” His eyes narrowed. He leaned forward.

  “Oh,” I said. “I was wondering.” I straightened myself in the leather seat and fixed my vacant eyes just below his shoulders, where he prefers us to cast our gaze, according to Tom Simon.

  Worthington swung around in his chair. “NESTER is a team,” he said. “Not an ordinary team, but an all-star team. It lives as a team and it dies as a team. Eats, sleeps, drinks, plays, laughs, and—yes!—weeps as a team. We are a megabody, infinitely complex and interdependent.”

  I promised there’d be no more health reports, but you must realize at this point my palms were dampening, rapid electrical waves of fear were rippling through my dura mater, just skimming my most sensitive centers, and I felt my blood being deprived of oxygen.

  “And if anything would destroy us,” he went on, “it would be the dying of this team spirit. As you know, NESTER has her share of enemies. Jealous fools, old- fashioned demagogues, spies, competitors, even an ambassador from a northern European country who somehow learned too much. And who must be taken care of, unfortunately. A scrupulous Dane, you know how boring they can be. Anyhow, we are always being attacked from without. It’s so ironic. We are industry’s final key to success and government’s last chance for real power. Yet they attack us. So stupid. So unutterably stupid. Not that this is the case with the majority of them. Most of them know and deeply respect our work. They pay us, they need us, they come back to us. And they protect us, to an extent. But only to an extent. We cannot be at all open about our presence in this very compound, for instance, because certain congressmen and public-spirited boobs would make a fuss. Oh, how I loathe and detest this secrecy. How I look forward to the day when it is no longer necessary. When we can all lead normal lives, be listed on the New York Stock Exchange, teach, grow. If they’d only let us be.” His voice was becoming more and more emotional, and he was clapping and squeezing his hands. He paused and put a hand onto his throat, as if searching for a new tone of voice. He took a half- dissolved mint from his mouth and tossed it into a pewter ashtray in front of him. He began again in a quiet, world-weary voice. “And so we go on. Discovering, daring, redefining. We are very alone and very fragile. Though in three days I will be lunching with the Vice- President of the United States. Still, we are alone. I have no illusions. Our friends are fair-weather friends. If ever there were a real crisis they would abandon us.

  “With so much pressure from the outside, any pressure from the inside would be intolerable. If any of our team was guilty of disloyalty it would be—would be, well, very sad.” (Think of me, friends. My heart, my brain, the oxygen in my blood.) “That’s why I’ve called you here. Not because we doubt your loyalty—quite the contrary. But because we doubt the loyalty of one of your colleagues. I won’t mince words. His name is Carl Stein; I’m sure you’ve heard of him. We think he is selling out. We have put information-gathering devices in his office and living quarters but have gained no real evidence. There is some talk about going straight into his brain and I would like to avoid that, if possible. Perhaps he is as innocent as you or me. This whole thing could conceivably be a huge and ugly misunderstanding. He’s been with us since the old days when you thought you were doing a job if you tapped somebody’s phone. Before things became so complicated. When one didn’t care about custom-made suits and a raise every six months. Yes, Carl has been with us for nearly thirty years. And he has been given great responsibility. It is particularly distressing. I hope you will find that our suspicions are misplaced. But we have reasons to believe. I’m not telling you what to do and I’m not telling you how to do it. But anything you can find out for us will be appreciated. We are putting him at your dinner table. Such changes are common and no suspicions will be excited. In one week, again at ten o’clock, come to this office and tell me what you have found.”

  So far nothing on Carl Stein. The investigation proceeds with difficulty. For several reasons, some having to do with him and others having to do with me. He is very quiet during dinners and more than a little unfriendly. He has consistently refused my invitations. I have suggested he come to my room and play a little chess. I have invited him to play squash with me in the health rooms and take a before-dinner dip in the pool. He is simply not interested. But there are certain ethical blocks that hamper my pursuance of the investigation. I’m the kind of brain thief, you see, who’d rather not even know how and under what nasty circumstances the electrode was first introduced into his subject’s brain. I’m a picky kind of brain thief in that way. A hands-clean brain thief.

  There are other complications: what if Carl Stein is being disloyal—perhaps he is just the friend I need, my ally, my Other. Perhaps Carl Stein wants to expose this monstrous power as much as I do. So I am torn between loyalty to who he might be and loyalty to Mr. Worthington, who has trusted me and who, when you get right down to it, is a pretty nice guy.

  What’s worse, though, what’s ten times worse than all that is the suspicion that this whole story about Carl Stein is a ruse, a way of warning me that I’m being watched or, worse yet, a way of entrapping me. What brutal, banal cleverness. Subject A thinks he is testing Subject B when in actuality Subject B is testing Subject A. I am, therefore, taking all precautions, I am becoming a baron of the second thought, a king of the calculated risk. I tread lightly from hour to hour, furious and restrained. They’ll never get me. At this very moment, as I write these very words, my mind is occupied with other things, other words. Just in case someone is listening in, peeking in my brain. I don’t want them to operate on me.

  I suppose what whips up the gustiest storms of hysteria in me is knowing that one is no
t really aware of what has happened to one after the implantation. Let me open my files. Look. My treat.

  For Subject #44-9-c it started at nine-thirty one Hartford morning. Her well-to-do neighborhood was not often visited by peddlers and when a young (well, he looked young) magazine salesman came calling in a Robert Hall blue suit, with his hot eyes and long fingers, his glistening hair and impossibly tight collar (these are facts, friends, not my fevered imagination), and he talked about working his way back to veterinarian school somewhere in New Hampshire, and his voice was soft, and promising, and then, again, there were those eyes, as brown as eyes can ever be, perhaps a bit browner … I’ve lost control of this sentence. She asked him in is what happened. He was selling interesting magazines. Special deals. Bonuses. We have no internal reports on her for this time—she was not yet ours—but we have pictures. Pictures of her, a woman of thirty-eight, in her blue and gold housecoat and spangled slippers, with her long brownish hair tied in a pigtail that swung over her thin, curved back like a pendulum as she nodded and smiled. As she thumbed through the copies of Redbook, Harper’s Bazaar, and Argosy, wondering how she could help this gentle young man in his silly blue suit realize his dream. It was ascertained that she was alone. The boy walked to the window and made a signal she didn’t notice and … well, it was all over for her, in terms of peace and autonomy. The Force Recruiters were down on her like gangbusters. With chloroform, in her case. One hour later she was returned to her home, no wiser. The Connecticut branch is particularly adept at postoperative reconditioning. She had no memory of the boy or his eyes, of the magazines, nothing. She got up from her couch a few minutes before eleven, scolding herself for being so lazy, for not doing last night’s dishes, for missing “The Dick Van Dyke Show.” It was pure guesswork on the part of the reconditioners, that bit about “The Dick Van Dyke Show.” But it was inspired guesswork, since it turns out that is her favorite daytime television show. It has always been a show I rather enjoyed too.

  The Hartford mother of three became ours four months ago. She has given us some valuable clues. We’ve sold some of her data, for $50,000, to a Democratic congressman who wants to run better in upper- middle-class communities. We have noticed increased irritability on her part but cannot link that with the taps we’ve had out on her brain—though some theorize that even the undetected little transmitter affects certain “nonintellectual” parts of the brain. (Others, and I try to agree with them, say our detectors don’t affect the brain any more than a smile can affect the Atlantic Ocean.) Still, she is none the wiser, and, so far, none the worse. The future is not mine to know. If when they were teaching me everything else, someone had taught me to pray, I would say a prayer for the well-being of Subject #44-9-c. Or would I?

  What I’m saying—pull up a chair, lads—is I don’t want anything like that to happen to me. It’s not only that I don’t want my dura mater debauched, my rhinal sulcus raped, but I couldn’t stand NOT KNOWING. I don’t want to be like the hundreds upon hundreds of NESTER-ized men, women, and—yes!—children who know nothing of their extracted contribution to progress.

  But they will know. I’ve promised you that I won’t back out. They will know. When all this becomes public. When you are reading this poor jittery journal as a footnote to an awful moment in history. When all you human-interest fiends and inside-dope addicts are gleaning from me a participant’s view on the scandal that rocked the Western world, including Paraguay, where we have affiliates. Including Denver, where we’ve always been strong. Including Honolulu, Tampa, Toronto, and Dover. Including your own hometown, where it has been revealed that the County Clerk’s brain has been our switchboard for years and the reason Mrs. Rogers gained all that weight was that she was a part of one of my experiments. Oh, the lost, ugly years, the sadness of revelations. Robbed dreams. Why can’t we keep our brains in as safe a place as we keep our money?

  In the meantime I must hold my peace. My own situation is not secure. Picture me: the lonely genius trapped behind pulsating radioactive bars of intrigue and sorrow. I must hold my peace. My own situation is far from a secure one. If it were sixty times more secure than it is I would still be living from minute to minute. As it is, I live from tick to tock.

  4

  EVENINGS MAY BE SPENT in a variety of pursuits. Television is common, chess is possible, snacking and table tennis are both rather popular. There is the gymnasium, the pool, where competitive water games are often played, as well as your steam and sauna baths. Visiting with assigned social partners is possible theoretically, though it occurs only minimally. Sexing is possible. NESTER is strict but not naive, never prudish. Someone suffering from the mindless misery of sexual tension is not likely to work very creatively—though I realize this is debatable. Nazi sexologists waxed ecstatic, you may recall, over the virtues of retaining the semen and the vital protein energy therein. But at the same time, the Nazi party was virtually a traveling sexual roadshow, so we can dismiss such nonsense as cruel rhetoric, produced for the comfort of castrati.

  It is possible to have a sex partner sent to your room. It is deducted from your salary. The cost is quite reasonable and the partners are great fun, all very clean and clever and from good families. Still, as the Boys Upstairs undoubtedly predicted, the use of the partners becomes more and more infrequent. These antiseptic surroundings absorb sexuality, suck it out of your marrow and beam it back into you as ambition and work. This has been true in most cases, but not in mine. My previous life had not been very carnal, and now as I trudge toward my middle years I am, at times, consumed by the thought that I have a lot of catching up to do. So I spend almost two hundred dollars a month on sexing. I realize this sounds shoddy and cheap, but for me tawdriness represents a goal, a wild ambition. Also, I want to stress the fact that the girls are wonderful. I haven’t had too much pleasant to say about this place as a whole, so I want to make very sure that that yet to be convened committee of congressmen and clerics won’t think I’m painting these girls with the same brush. Not only are they courteous and witty, but, as a group, they are extremely pretty. They make you feel like a brave, war-weary soldier. I dedicate this paragraph to the girls and to high-minded hookers wherever they may be. I’d never be so proud as to shun the back door to love.

  Despite a heavy hypothalamic heat that generated itself in a slow undulating throb through my arms, loins, and legs, and despite the fact that I felt tonight it would be Karen, crazy crazy little Karen, who would be sent to me, I decided to spend my evening social period talking to Carl Stein. Again, reason splintered itself upon situation and I didn’t know if my decision came out of loyalty to myself and my safe well-being, or whether I was trying to earn the $1000, trying to please Mr. Worthington, or trying to make contact with an ally. As it happened I did none of these.

  Since Carl Stein is one of my quartet of assigned companions, it wasn’t necessary to clear the visit with the Personnel Coordinator or to call Carl’s room in advance of my arrival. As a bit of suburban informality and high-level repression, it is commonly agreed that members of the same social sphere can enter each other’s living quarters without so much as knocking, any time of the day or night. Real friendly, like. Real scary. But that aspect, of course, no one mentions.

  I walked into Carl’s room a little after nine. He was sitting in a yoga position before a tiny Sony television set, his old yet muscular legs fantastically contorted, his features totally enthralled with what was transpiring on the small screen. He wore a green velvet smoking jacket and a huge, yellow bow tie. He made no sign of noticing me as I let myself into his small room—which, I was glad to see, was no nicer than mine despite his superior position and seniority.

  The show he was watching was “You Be the Judge.” It belongs to the domestic-catharsis genre of television entertainment. Someone from the lower middle-class tells a bit of strife in his or her family, usually involving two opposing points of view. Then a panel of fading celebrities discusses the points involved, casting their votes
either for or against the plaintiff. The defendant (a sister-in-law, a neighbor, et cetera) sits in an isolated part of the studio and through a split screen we can gauge his or her reactions to what is being said—the grimaces, the smirks, the rolling eyes, the peppy forehead slaps, the sighs of utter exasperation.

  If the panel of four can’t come to a majority opinion, the moderator—an ex-sportscaster—turns to the studio audience and says, “Well, it’s time for the People to speak. Folks: You Be the Judge.” And the studio audience howls “Guilty” or chants “Innocent,” depending both on the case and their mood. Then the m.c. passes sentence. As I walked in, the show was mounting nicely. The m.c. threw it open to the audience and, in near perfect unison, they cheered, “Guilty, guilty, guilty.” The screen split in two, showing on one side the ebullient missis, jumping up and down and clapping her hands. She looked like Hubert Humphrey in drag. On the other side of the screen her husband sank into his chair, running his hand through his thinning brown hair and chewing violently on a pink mass I took to be bubble gum. “All right, Mr. Watkins,” the m.c. chortled, “you’ve heard the verdict. And now … It’s Judgment Time.” The band played a burlesque of the old “Dragnet” theme. “I sentence you to take Mrs. Watkins”—the camera cut to her—“out to dinner every night this week.” The audience laughed and cheered. Someone in the audience shouted, “What about next week?” and his friends howled louder yet. “That’s not all, that’s not all,” the m.c. screamed over the mounting cacophony. A quick cut to Mr. Watkins, stuffing his mouth with three more pieces of bubble gum. Then the camera settled on the dreamy-eyed Mrs. Watkins. The camera stayed there as the m.c. went on. “Not only will you raise Mrs. Watkins’ allowance ten dollars a week”—an oooh wafted up from the ecstatic spectators and tears popped up in Mrs. Watkins’ pale eyes—“but you are hereby sentenced—are you ready for this, folks? are you ready for this?—you, Harold Watkins, are hereby sentenced to spend the rest of the month sleeping on the couch.” The studio exploded into applause and screams. The camera swung quickly toward the audience. People were stomping their feet in the aisles and toward the left it seemed a minor fight had broken out. Two young ushers pulled a man and a woman apart. The m.c.’s voice rose above the swell. “And I don’t mean the couch in the living room. THE ONE IN THE DEN.” Mrs. Watkins was crying, swaying hypnotically in her seat. A quick cut to the panel of fading celebrities, who stared impassively into space.