The Best Laid Plans

by Troy Conway

  “Put your hands where mine are,” said Thayer.

  Walrus-moustache did as told. After his fingers felt her skull for a few moments, he nodded, and his face was ashen. His hard glance raked me, and then the doctor.

  “We’ll need the utmost secrecy,” he muttered.

  “Naturally, naturally. I know Doctor Holmes of the Caldwell Neurosurgical Clinic.” Thayer turned to me. “May I use your phone?”

  Rhea swung about with half a laugh on her lips. “I do appreciate your secrecy, but it isn’t necessary to——” Walrus-moustache bowed. “Mrs. Carson, you are the victim of a plot that is aimed not only at compelling you to kill yourself, but possibly at control of the entire world.”

  I knew it was going to happen some day. Old Handlebars had finally done it. He had flipped his wig. Rhea cried out in rejection of his ominous words too.

  “Have you been in the hospital—any hospital—during the past three months, Mrs. Carson?”

  “Certainly not! I’m—or was—as healthy as a horse! I’ve had no need of medication for—ohhh!”

  She sat there, staring blankly. After a moment she lifted her eyes to the chief. “How did you know?” she asked softly.

  “It was Doctor Thayer who told me there might be a possibility of it, on our way over here. I was merely asking a question he is certain to ask you.”

  “But I was in that hospital for a touch of food poisoning. It happened in Paris! There’s a small, private hospital just outside Dampierre, where an ambulance brought me. Food poisoning! Certainly that could never affect my head or my brain!”

  “You were under sedatives for a while?”

  “Yes. For about two days, I believe.”

  “It happened then.”

  I interrupted. “Don’t be so mysterious. What happened then? And why should some two-bit hospital in Paris want to harm Rhea Carson?”

  “Let me answer that,” said Doctor Thayer, emerging from my bedroom where he had been phoning. “First of all, it isn’t any two-bit hospital that treated her. Secondly, they want Rhea Carson dead because her diplomatic abilities might bring peace to Israeli and Arabs, and the men who own and operate that hospital don’t want anything like that to happen. So—they tell Rhea Carson to kill herself.”

  I was gaping, my mouth open. I asked, “But how could anybody compel her to do that?”

  “That,” said Walrus-moustache, “is exactly what we are going to find out.”

  He gestured and Rhea Carson got to her feet.

  Like a trained animal, like a robot.

  CHAPTER TWO

  She lay beneath a sheet in the Operation room of the Caldwell Neurosurgical Clinic under sedation. Her head was shaven clean. I had been watching behind a surgical mask, completely sterilized and in a baggy wraparound as, one by one, Doctor Clinton Thayer, under the keen eyes of Doctor Lawrence Holmes, had delicately removed three tiny stimulators from her scalp.

  I saw the three little buttons, and shivered, as each was lifted out of place. They were more than buttons, of course; they were highly developed, miniaturized radio receivers capable of receiving radio impulses from long distances. Just as electrodes could receive and act upon electricity, so these stimulators could act upon radio signals.

  Doctor Thayer nodded, his eyes dark and brilliant above his surgeon mask. “Take over, nurse,” he murmured, and began stripping off his gloves. At the same moment he gestured at Walrus-moustache and me where we were elbow to elbow near the far wall of the room, just to one side of the oxygenator machine.

  As we went out into the hall, Doctor Thayer said, “It’s what I expected. You saw for yourselves. There were three stimulators. Each one affected a different section of the brain. The thalamus, which serves the brain as a memory bank; the hypothalamus, which controls the breathing, heartbeat, thirst, appetite; and the amygdala, which may be said to be concerned with suicidal tendencies, since it regulates the emotional factors of the human body.”

  I took out a pack of cigarettes, passed it around, and lighted everybody up. Then I asked, “Do you mean to tell me that a man could have sent out a radio signal that would make Rhea kill herself?”

  “Of course, Professor Damon. That’s what this is all about.” Doctor Thayer smiled grimly. “It has scary implications, doesn’t it? There’s a theory that President Kennedy was assassinated by a man under such control, you know.”

  Walrus-moustache grunted. “Let’s give him the course.”

  We followed the medico into a big electronics laboratory, filled with banks of controls all along the walls. Counters were thick with toys and gadgets. I watched as Thayer lifted off one such gadget and put it on the floor. He turned to one of the electronic switchboards and began throwing a couple of the switches.

  The gadget he had put on the floor was a kind of six wheeled vacuum cleaner. It began buzzing, moving as it buzzed. A dirt bag that had been folded flat on its metal back filled with air and stood straight up. The bug-cleaner ran all around, sucking in dirt.

  “A simple mechanism, designed to function on a single motive-track,” Thayer murmured. “A machine, controlled by an electronic brain built inside it. Nothing more. A scientist named Berkeley has built a number of such gadgets, including a tick-tack-toe machine that cannot be beaten, as well as a number of other fascinating gadgets.

  “But this is only the beginning. Operational control of a mechanical brain. The frightening thing is, what can be done to a mechanical brain can also be done to a human brain, since the mechanical brain is always patterned after the human one.”

  I murmured, “In other words, Rhea Carson was something like that electronic vacumm cleaner, only on a higher scale.”

  Thayer nodded grimly. “She was conditioned to self-destruct, Professor.”

  His hand waved us forward to another section of the laboratory. There were two flat tables set almost side by side. Behind them were a number of metal boxes piled one upon the other, each with a series of dials and switches.

  “We can test compatability between a man and a woman with these, or between two men who might be picked to spend months on the moon in the space program. The wave analyzer picks out the alpha patterns and matches them up. All brains give off electrical impulses. The analyzer studies them.

  “The wave analyzer is sometimes called a ‘love machine,’ since the man and woman whose alpha patterns match exactly—as so many of them do—are said to be psychologically capable of falling in love with each other.

  “As with people, so with animals. Come.”

  We left that laboratory and and went downstairs to another room, filled with cats, mice, monkeys, rats and such creatures. From one cage Thayer lifted a cat; from the other, a mouse. He set them in a single large cage.

  Instantly the cat leaped for the mouse, pinning it under a paw. But Thayer was at a control bank, working the electronic impulses which would affect the behavior of both animals. Suddenly the cat leaped back, its back arched, its tail bushy. It was obviously terrified.

  The mouse chased the cat—I got the feeling the mouse thought the cat was a chunk of cheese with legs—and the cat fled as if the mouse were the devil himself.

  “Impossible behavior, you may say,” said Thayer, shutting off his machine and putting the animals back in their cages. “No cat in the world is afraid of a mouse. This cat was, because the normal functions of its brain have been interfered with. Electronic impulses make it afraid. Electronic impulses make the mouse fierce.”

  “I’m getting the picture,” I announced.

  The doctor smiled. “It isn’t a picture we can take with any sang-froid. We can look ahead, being reasoning men, to a situation such as that in which Rhea Carson found herself. She was never herself since she left Paris. She was nothing more than a robot, existing only at the will of the men who put those receivers in her head.”

  “Is she safe now?”

  “Oh, yes. There aren’t any more receiving sets in her to trigger off her emotions. We took them all out.�
��

  Old Walrus-moustache spoke for the first time from the shadows where he bulked large. “How is this accomplished, Doctor? What do those impulses do in the human brain?”

  Thayer crushed out his cigarette. “Well, we know first of all, that the human brain is the seat for all human behavior. The brain sends out the commands that move the body, sometimes in reaction to a message it has received from—say, a hand too near a fire. Nerve relays send the heat message to the brain, the brain sends back the command to yank the hand away. All done in a fraction of a second. The force activating this system of nerve relays, brain and body, is electricity.

  “Electroshock therapy can help cure certain mental disorders. Physicians can now locate brain tumors that cause certain types of human behavior, by the use of the electroencephalograph. Today we have what we doctors call ESB—electrical stimulation of the brain. You’ve seen it demonstrated in animals with the cat and the mouse. We’ve shied away from using it with human beings.

  “Others are not so reluctant, as witness Rhea Carson.”

  A thought touched my mind. “You can cause an animal to hate and attack another. You could make the animal equally love the other animal, couldn’t you?”

  “Yes, indeed. No trouble at all. The amygdala is the seat of love and hate in the brain. It is that area of the brain located between the spetal region and the thalamus. Its role in human behavior is very sexual, Professor. If it is destroyed in a woman, she becomes a nymphomaniac. In a man, he becomes subject to satyrism.

  “An electrical stimulation of the feline amygdala can make a cat grow affectionate, or savage. It can do the same thing in a woman, or a man. The pleasure centers of the brain can be electrically stimulated until a rat, for instance, will live only for that utter delight.”

  “Fascinating,” I murmured. “Why, one of those buttons in the right brain might do away with marriage counselors.”

  The doctor was serious about it. “In time, we may come to that, Professor. In your studies as head of the Leauge for Sexual Dynamics, you might well consider the future of our ‘love machine,’ or even electronic controls of the human libido.”

  “I shall, indeed,” I murmured.

  “What about the receivers you removed from Rhea Carson?” asked Walrus-moustache.

  “They are transistor-timed stimulators. With the advent of the tiny transistor, there was no need to plug in wires to feed electricity to the brain. It can be done now on a timing basis or by broadcast of radio signals. An animal can be made to do almost anything by the proper stimulation of its motor cortex. Stop eating. Freeze into position without moving. You name it, the animal will do it. Like a robot responding to an electronic command.”

  Sweat broke out on my forehead. “Can you imagine an army of men with those buttons inside their skulls? They wouldn’t feel pain. They would go on battling until they couldn’t move. Then they would destroy themselves.”

  “This is what we’re up against, Professor,” murmured Thayer, with a wave of the hand. “Oh, we’ve known—or suspected—that certain forces in the world have been performing what we consider illicit operations upon human beings. If you want to dispose of someone, you plant a stimulator-receiver in his or her head. You don’t have to hire an assassin. Your victim will conveniently commit suicide for you.”

  I shivered. “They wanted Rhea to kill herself so she wouldn’t bollix up plans the opposition has for a renewed war in the Middle East between Israel and the Arab countries. And maybe even World War three. Alive, she might talk both sides into a peaceful settlement of the issues.”

  “Right on target,” growled Walrus-moustache, moving out of the shadows where he had hidden himself. “And now to zero in on the bull’s-eye. Damon, you’re going to Paris.”

  “Whaaat?” I howled.

  “You must recognize the necessity of flushing these birds from covert. We can’t have them controlling the lives of people like Rhea Carson. Or anybody eise, for that matter. You go to Paris, you let them operate on you ——”

  “Not on your moustache wax!”

  Doctor Thayer grinned, “We would take precautions, Professor.”

  “What precautions?”

  “We would plant an electronic pulsator in your body. It would break up the radio signals which would otherwise control you. You would feel an urge to do what the stimulator willed you to do—but you could overcome that urge by sheer will power.”

  “That’s only theory,” I pointed out.

  “It was only theory that led to all the great discoveries in the world. Columbus had a theory. So did Edison, Marconi, Newton.”

  “Yeah. Well . . .”

  Walrus-moustache chuckled. “It won’t interfere with your love life, you know. It will be there to protect you from blind obedience to the opposition. No more, no less.”

  “You make it sound like I’m just going to take a birth control pill,” I growled. I fidgeted, feeling helpless. I knew damn well I was going to agree to their plan for me. It was only a matter of time.

  I threw up my hands. “Why argue? I never got anywhere arguing with you, anyhow. What do I have to do?”

  Doctor Thayer became all business. “I will simply make a small incision somewhere in your body—I won’t tell you where for fear you might inadvertently betray its whereabouts—and implant a time-transistor that will enable you to fight off the otherwise compulsive effects of any stimulator they put in your head.”

  “You’re sure it’ll work?”

  “I guarantee it, Professor Damon.”

  “Okay, okay. Let’s go get it over with.”

  I undressed in a little cubicle in the ward section of the Clinic. When I was naked, I rang a bell and a nurse brought in the wraparound I was to wear while on the table.

  Her penciled eyebrows rose admiringly at sight of the Damon physique. I am proud of my body. I keep it in perfect muscular trim with judo, karate, savate exercises, as well as swimming, weight lifting and rowing. I have to be a perfect male specimen to stay alive when Walrus-moustache sends me off on those Coxeman activities he dreams up for me. I am six feet tall and I weigh a hundred and eighty pounds of solid muscle.

  “Well, hello here,” the redhead caroled.

  I grinned. “I hope you’re around when I come out of the ether. We could have things to talk about.”

  “I’ll make it my business,” she laughed, eyeing my loins.

  “Come back when I come out of the ether, and we’ll talk about it. I’ll want to make sure they haven’t made a eunuch out of me.”

  Her glowing brown eyes told me they had better not.

  Walrus-moustache was with the orderly who wheeled the transfer table into my room. His thumb dismissed the nurse.

  “Just stay easy, Damon,” he growled at me. “This won’t hurt you at all. In a day or two, you’ll be up and about without any ill effects.”

  “Yeah, hey,” I muttered, getting on the table.

  The orderly wheeled me down the hall and into an elevator. The elevator delivered me to the operating room floor. The orderly delivered me to the operating table itself. Doctor Thayer was there behind his mask, slipping his hands into rubber gloves held by a pert nurse. I relaxed my muscles. For better or worse, I was committed. There was no getting out of it now, especially since the anesthetist was fitting a cup down over my nose and mouth.

  I woke up in a dark room. I was very sleepy. I felt no pain, nothing but that desire to sleep. So I slept, just by closing my eyelids.

  Three more times I came back to consciousness in an empty room. Each time I was sleepy as all hell. I have a vague recollection of somebody sticking a needle into my arm on one of these occasions. It made no nevermind to me.

  The next time I opened the Damon eyelids, my redheaded nurse was standing beside the bed. So was Walrus-moustache.

  “He’s ready to leave, sir,” Redhead murmured.

  “Good. It’s about time. You’ve been lying there four days, Damon. Under sedation. You won’t be able
to feel where Doctor Thayer inserted the transistor.”

  I wriggled around under the covers. He was right. I didn’t feel the slightest twinge. So I glared at old Walrus-moustache. “If I’m going to get dressed, you might as well leave, Chief.”

  His chuckle was very understanding. Too much so. “Indeed I shall, but I’m going to take Miss Noren with me. We don’t want you wasting your strength, now do we?”

  The redhead pouted, but she went out into the hall.

  I got dressed, cursing Walrus-moustache under my breath. He could have spared me a couple of hours to test my motor responses. I could have recouped my strength on my flight plane to Paris.

  I must say the Coxe Foundation does things up brown. My luggage was packed, there was a ticket for Flight 23 on an Air France jet to Paris laid on top of the attache case which held my passport and a deadly, blued-steel Luger automatic with a leather holster harness that would fit under my left armpit.

  I was set to trot.

  A limousine took me to the airport after an hour-long briefing mission with Walrus-moustache in his traveling van. My job was simple. I was to be the guinea pig to be picked up and operated on by the opposition. While that was happening, I was to study the layout, make plans for its destruction and the capture of the opposition personnel.

  The opposition was called HECATE, as near as the chief could judge. Rumors and bits of gossip had been gathered up by our boys in Paris and elsewhere, then sent home for appraisal. The pattern was beginning to emerge. HECATE was an organization dedicated to the proposition that anything justified the making of money. It was ready to operate on a man or a woman and get him or her to do anything from betray a trust to overthrowing a government, or even to killing herself.

  It charged enormous fees, but its work was worth every penny, franc or shilling of them. In these days when so much power is concentrated in one or two men in various governments, it would be relatively simple, were an organization to take over those one or two men, to take over the governments themselves.

  Paying a fee to HECATE was a hell of a lot cheaper than paying for a war, or even a revolution. One way or another, a HECATE agent could cause an accident—as witness Rhea Carson—then cause that accident victim to become whatever HECATE and the people paying the fee wanted him or her to become. Look around the world, decide how fast governments have been rising and falling. Greece. Indonesia. And others. Four or five men in high places can make a lot of trouble.