Trilling sent out night crews to clean the walls, and bided his time. One afternoon there was a food fight in a cafeteria, and the manager phoned for assistance. Trilling refused to send anyone, and he persuaded the Maintenance director not to let his people clean up the room. After two days the detainees cleaned it up themselves. Then things went a little better, but morale among the Wackenhuts was not what it had been.
9
Christmas cards and packages for Dr. Owen had been piling up in her secretary’s office for a week—hundreds of them; at least a tenth of the detainee families on CV must have given her something, in addition to the staff. That was heartening, and it was evidence that the morale problems were being dealt with. On Christmas morning Corcoran said, “Dr. Owen, your presents have all been through X-ray. Would you like me to open them now?”
“Yes, that would be fine. Keep a list, of course.”
Half an hour later he called again. “Doctor, I think you should see this.” On his desk was an opened package and a strip of heavy plastic about the size of a ruler. Both were smeared with some green substance, and there were splatters on the desk, the keyboard, the wall, and Corcoran himself; there was even a faint green smear on the holo pickup, like a film of algae.
“My goodness, Jim, are you hurt? What is that?”
“My guess is green jello,” Corcoran said. “This”—he touched the strip of plastic—“was folded up inside like a flat spring. It didn’t show on the X-ray, of course.”
“Let me see the wrapping.”
Corcoran held it up. It was one of the standard Christmas wraps available in the stores—green, with little Santa Clauses and reindeer.
“Of course I don’t want you to open any more,” Owen said. “I’m terribly sorry this has happened.”
“It could have been something corrosive, or poisonous,” Corcoran said. His voice shook a little.
“Well, just to make sure, I think you’d better wash thoroughly, and change your clothes, don’t you? And call security to pick up the rest of the presents. Take the day off, Jim, and try to have a merry Christmas.”
The exploding present had been meant for her, of course; the donor had not known that Corcoran would open it instead. Probably there were others like it somewhere in the stack; possibly there was something worse.
What a cowardly thing to do; how unfair and contemptible!
“Mitzi,” she said to the computer, “someone on CV has been playing jokes of a kind calculated to disrupt our routines and make it difficult for us to carry on our work. Can you interpret personality profiles of the detainees in order to determine who would be most likely to do such a thing?”
“Can you explain the jokes, Dr. Owen?”
“He paints over the lenses of closed-circuit vision cameras, using green paint, and writes on the wall, ‘The Green Hornet Strikes Again.’ We believe other people have begun copying him, but there was one person who began it.”
“Can you explain ‘The Green Hornet Strikes Again’?”
“I believe it’s a reference to an old radio program dealing with a masked hero called the Green Hornet.”
“What does a masked hero do, Dr. Owen?”
“He conceals his identity and pops up in unexpected places to capture criminals and rescue innocent people.” “Does this imply that the person you are looking for regards the non-detainees as criminals, and the detainees as innocent people who should be rescued?”
“Yes, I think so. The campaign is effective because people think it’s humorous. He’s making fun of us, in fact, and that diminishes our authority.”
“I won’t ask you to explain humor, Dr. Owen, but can you say how this campaign differs from other kinds of humor?”
“It’s a little offbeat, I’d say.”
“Unusual, that is?”
“Yes.”
“Would you say that the person you are looking for shows an unusual degree of hostility toward the nondetainees?”
“Yes, certainly.”
“And that he would be likely to have expressed it before in an offbeat fashion?”
“That seems likely.”
“One moment. In the scores of Thematic Apperception Tests of current detainees I find the following comment or a similar one on seventeen cases: ‘Subject’s narratives show attempted humor masking hostility toward the experimenter.’ ”
“Who are these detainees? Put them on the flatscreen.”
The names appeared in alphabetical order: Abrams, Alfred R.; Denmore, Tina Marie; Geller, Randall-. . .
“Geller!” she said. At that moment she really knew, but she had to make sure. “What do you have on the TATs, Mitzi—transcripts, voice recordings?”
“I have complete voice recordings.”
“Let me hear Geller’s.”
There was a scraping sound, then a voice. “Hello, Mr. Geller. Feeling all right today?”
“Peachy.”
“Fine. Just sit down there at the terminal, if you would. Now this morning I’m going to show you some pictures, and I want you to look at them and make up a story about each one. Here’s the first picture.”
A long silence followed. “Just anything that comes to mind,” said the’ voice.
“Okay. You want me to just say anything that comes to my mind, right?”
“That’s right. Just make up a story.”
“Well, this kid, his name is Ralph, he lives in Michigan with his father and his stepmother. The old man is okay, but he drinks a lot and when he drinks he likes to set fire to schoolhouses, so you can imagine the home life is not too great.”
Owen watched her hands curl into fists.
“Now the stepmother, Imogene, is a frustrated ballet dancer who keeps leaping around the house all day in her tutu. The only thing the kid has going for him is his dog, Spot. They call him Spot because he loses his bladder control whenever he sits on the furniture. Well, one day in the early summer, a Wednesday, Ralph takes good old Spot out for a walk in the woods. Now Spot is blind in one eye, but he’s a hell of a hunter, and when he sees a rabbit in the bushes he takes off and he’s gone. The rabbit gets on his blind side and runs away, but Spot won’t give up, and the kid is running after him, yelling, ‘Pot! Pot!’ Kid can’t say his S’s, so he’s yelling, ‘Pot! Pot!”’
Owen said, “That’s enough, Mitzi. Thank you.” She sat for a while holding her hands quite still on the desk, but her anger did not abate.
She knew, of course, what Geller was up to. He was trying to make CV ungovernable, in the hope that the detainees would be discharged either at Manila or at some later port of call. Her impulse was to punish him, and she thought of incarceration, posting to the experimental section, public humiliation . . . but that was emotion, not logic. What was best to be done? Once she had asked the question, the answer was clear.
Three weeks later CV docked at Manila after midnight. At four o’clock three security people entered Geller and Barlow’s bedroom and turned on the light.
Geller sat up. “Now what?”
“Get up and get dressed, please,” said the tallest of the three. “Dress the child, too, and pack anything you want to take with you. You’re leaving CV.”
Dizzy with sleep, Geller looked at the bedside clock. “Good Christ, it’s four o’clock in the morning. Can’t it wait?”
“Shut up, Randy,” said Yvonne. She was out of bed already, reaching for her robe.
“We’ll wait in the living room,” said the security man. “Please don’t take more than twenty minutes, and don’t make any unnecessary noise.” The three of them left the room.