“Hunh,” Bloch grunted. “Finally talked him into it, did you?”
Alex looked up, laying the catalog aside. “Talked him into what?”
Bloch made a sour face, then shrugged. “Never mind. But if you don’t like what happens today, don’t blame me. Blame yourself and Dr. Brilliant. Come on, let’s get started.”
Twenty minutes later Alex was strapped securely to the table, and the electrodes had all been connected to his skull. “Hope you don’t decide you want to change your mind,” Bloch said. “I don’t have any idea what’s going to happen to you, but I can practically guarantee you it isn’t going to be pleasant.” Leaving Alex’s side, he stepped to the panel and began adjusting its myriad controls.
The first thing Alex noticed was a strange odor in the room. At first it was like vanilla, sweet and pleasant, but slowly it began mutating into something else. The sweetness faded away, and was replaced by an acrid odor, and Alex’s first thought was that something in the lab must be burning. Then the smoky scent turned sour, and Alex’s nostrils suddenly seemed to fill with the stench of rotting garbage.
It’s in my mind, Alex told himself. It’s all in my mind, and I’m not really smelling anything.
And then the sounds began, and with them the physical sensations.
The room was heating up, and he could feel himself beginning to sweat as a shrill screaming noise cut through his eardrums and slashed into his mind.
The heat increased, and suddenly centered in his groin.
A hot poker.
Someone was pressing into his genitalia with a white-hot poker.
He could smell the sickly sweetness of burning flesh, and he writhed helplessly against the bonds that held him to the table.
The sound in his mind was his own voice screaming in agony.
The burning stopped, and he was suddenly cold. Slowly, reluctantly, he opened his eyes, but saw nothing except the blinding whiteness of snowflakes swirling around him, while the wind whistled and moaned in his ears.
Suddenly there was pressure on his left leg.
It was gentle at first, as if something were there, touching him every few seconds.
Then, its yellow eyes glaring at him through the blizzard, its fangs dripping saliva, he saw the face of the wolf.
The image disappeared, and as the beast’s hungry snarl drifted high over the wailings of the wind, he felt its jaws close on his leg.
His flesh was being torn to shreds, and in the strength of the wolf’s jaws, his bones gave way. His lower leg went numb, but he could sense his blood spurting from the severed artery below his knee.
All around him, the blizzard shrieked.
Suddenly the sounds began fading away, and with it the pain. The blinding whiteness of the blizzard began taking on tinges of color, and soon he was surrounded by a sea of soft blue. He felt the warm waters laving his skin, and a cool breeze wafted over his face.
He floated peacefully, rocked gently by the motion of the water, and then began to feel something else in the back reaches of his mind.
It was indistinct at first, but as he began to focus on it, it became clearer.
Energy.
It was as if pure energy were flowing directly into his mind.
And then it stopped, and the cool breezes died out. The waters around him were no longer moving, and the blueness in front of his eyes gave way slowly until he was once more staring at the ceiling of the laboratory. Peter Bloch loomed over him.
“I almost shut you down,” the technician said. “You started screaming, and twisting around until I was afraid you were going to hurt yourself.”
Alex said nothing for a moment, but kept his eyes anchored steadily on the lamp above his head as he fixed everything that had happened in his memory.
“Nothing happened,” he said at last.
“Horseshit,” Peter Bloch replied. “You damned near went crazy! What the hell’s Torres trying to prove now?”
“Nothing,” Alex repeated. “Nothing happened to me, and he’s not trying to prove anything.”
Bloch shook his head doubtfully. “Maybe nothing happened, but I’ll bet you thought something was happening. Want to tell me about it?”
Alex’s eyes finally shifted to the lab technician. “Don’t you know?”
“You think Torres tells me anything?” Peter countered. “I know we’re stimulating your brain. But what it’s all about, I don’t know.”
“But that is what it’s about,” Alex said quietly. “It’s about what gets into my brain, and how my brain reacts.” Then his expression twisted into a strange smile. “Except that it’s not my brain anymore, is it?” When Peter Bloch made no answer, Alex answered his own question.
“It’s not my brain anymore. Ever since I woke up from the operation, it’s been Dr. Torres’s brain.”
Raymond Torres wordlessly took Alex’s test reports from Peter Bloch’s hands and began flipping through them. He frowned slightly, then the frown deepened into a scowl.
“You must have made a mistake,” he said finally, tossing the thin sheaf of papers onto the desk as he faced his head technician. “None of these results make any sense at all. These are what you’d get from a brain that was awake, not asleep.”
“Then there’s no mistake,” Bloch replied, his face set into a mask of forced unconcern, As always when dealing with Raymond Torres, he would have preferred to roll the test results up tight and shove them down the man’s arrogant throat. But the money was too good and the work too light to throw it away over something as trivial as his dislike of his employer, who, he noticed, was now glowering at him.
“What do you mean, no mistake? Are you telling me that Alex Lonsdale was awake during this?”
Peter Bloch felt as if the floor had just tilted. “Of course he was,” he said as forcefully as he could, though he was suddenly certain he knew exactly what had happened. “You wrote the order yourself.”
“Indeed I did,” Torres replied. “And I have a copy of it right here.” He opened his bottom desk drawer and pulled out a sheet of pink paper, which he silently handed to Bloch. There, near the bottom of the page, were the words: “Anesthesia: SPTL.”
Once more, Peter pictured Alex Lonsdale, his face impassive, sitting thumbing through a catalog.
And watching him.
How long had he been there? Apparently, long enough.
“I thought … I thought it was highly unusual, sir,” he mumbled.
“Unusual?” Torres demanded, his voice crackling with harsh sarcasm. “You thought it was unusual to put a patient out with Sodium Pentothal while inducing hallucinations in his brain?”
“No, sir,” the technician muttered, thoroughly cowed. “I thought it was unusual not to. I should … well, I should have called.”
Torres was fairly trembling with rage now. “What, exactly, are you talking about?”
Exactly three minutes and twenty-two seconds later, when Bloch had returned to his office, Torres knew. His eyes fixed on the altered anesthesia prescription for several long seconds, then shifted slowly to the technician.
“And you didn’t think you ought to call me about this?” he asked, his voice deceptively low.
“I … well, the kid told me a long time ago he wanted to take the test without the Pentothal. I thought he’d finally talked you into letting him try.”
Raymond Torres rose to his feet, and leaned across the desk so that his face was close to Peter Bloch’s. When he spoke, he made no attempt to keep his fury under control. “Talked me into it?” he shouted. “We never even discussed such a thing! Do you have any idea of exactly what goes on in those tests?”