Handled? "My Gods, what do you mean, handled? He's sitting on my front lawn with a sawed-off shotgun!"
"Oh, well," said Faht Bey. "Details, details."
I saw I wasn't going to get any help there. I turned to leave and I swear I heard Faht Bey mutter, "And good luck to him." But I was shaking too hard to take it up at that moment.
Going back through the long, long tunnel, I regained my room.
A thousand plans began to race through my head and tangle with each other.
I half-loaded a ten-gauge shotgun and then left it. I couldn't splatter Silva all over the front lawn. It would leave evidence. And besides, if I stuck my head out that yard door, he might shoot first!
I could not cower here in my room for weeks. I had to work this out!
Sitting down, I took a piece of paper and a pen. I began to write down everything I knew about Gunsalmo Silva. It is a last-ditch sort of exercise. Out of it can come a masterstroke.
The first thing that hit me was that I didn't have to pay Tavilnasty any commissions. That was on the good side of the ledger.
The next thing was that Gunsalmo Silva was sitting on my front lawn. That was not on the good side of the ledger.
What did I really know about this gangster? He had been "Holy Joe" Corleone's bodyguard but had acted as the triggerman in wasting him. He had had some trifling information that the Spiteos interrogator had gotten out of him about senators in the pay of organized crime. Ah. And he didn't have very good sense: he had called for an American consul.
But there was something else. It was eluding me. Then I had it. He was now hypnotrained in Apparatus techniques! A graduate of that school! Yikes! He was deadly!
I cursed Bawtch for having delayed his execution order to be stamped. Leave it to Bawtch to mess things up. But then, Bawtch was cared for.
That was all I could come up with. I paced. I went back and forth. There wasn't much space to pace in and I barked my shins.
Hypnotraining! That was it! I knew I could come up with something masterly!
Right there in that very room were sixteen hypnohelmets. If I could get some guards to shoot a paralysis dart into him from a distance, I could get a helmet on him and untrain him!
Now, let's see. What did I know about hypnosis? Actually, I had never studied it very much. I wanted to be very sure of what I was doing.
I got out my Earth psychology textbooks. I looked the subject up. Psychologists on Earth use hypnotism all the time. They are the masters.
It said that hypnotism was known to most primitive races and that it was used by priests in ancient times, which proved religion was no good—psychologists don't like religion, it is a threat to their racket.
But hypnotism, it continued, was of great use to the psychologist. You could use it to seduce girls. As that was its primary use, it got me off on another track. It opened some new vistas. Thoughts of Utanc were never far away and I began to wonder if maybe I couldn't hypnotize Utanc and make her be sensible, which is to say, get into my bed.
Then my attention fell upon something awful. The text said that hypnotism was of very limited use because only about 22 percent of the people were potential hypnotic subjects and the rest couldn't be hypnotized. And as the psychologist had as his goal the mastery and puppetizing of ALL the people, the tool was in disrepute.
It was a sad blow. Even if I mastered spinning spirals in front of Utanc's face or got her to look at a swinging bright object, she might be one of the 78 percent. And I doubted I could make her stand still that long.
But wait! Hypnohelmets! Hadn't I seen some literature? I opened the vault. I fished around in the box of the one I'd used on Too-Too. When I had made the strip, I had just done what I had seen Krak do. There was probably more to this.
Aha! A little manual! I opened it.
Hypnotism, it said, was a tool applicable in the reenforcement or eradication of memory, or the substitution of false memories for actual ones. Now we were getting somewhere!
It said any emotion could be suppressed or heightened. Aha! I could order Utanc to love me!
Then it said that primitive hypnotism only worked on about 18 percent of the subjects. This was a discrepancy and it bothered me. Earth psychologists never lie. At least not about statistics.
However, the manual plunged on. It seemed that the mind had several wavelengths. The helmet approximated two of these. First was the sleep wave, and by parallelling this, one could produce a trance state. The second wave the helmet employed was the thought wave. Anything carried along on this wave—from a recorded strip or direct speech to the helmeted subject—was accepted by the subject as his own thought and was retained. Thus, hypnotism became effective on 100 percent of the subjects. Subjects were at the total effect of the helmet. You could do anything with the helmet that could be done in any hypnotism. However, its primary use was speed-training. Any skill or language... I had learned my languages with such a helmet under Krak....
Suddenly, with a wave of horror, I recalled the terrible experience I had had after Krak had put a helmet on me and told me I would feel sick if I harmed Heller! What agony!
I dropped the manual as though it were spouting fire!
These helmets were DANGEROUS!
I had ordered Krak to arrive.
Supposing she put another helmet on me!
The thought was so awful that I almost ran out of the room to get away from the helmets.
I checked myself in time. I must not go out on that lawn!
I made myself sit down on the other side of the room from the helmets. I had to think.
Maybe I should destroy them. I could get a disintegrator from the hangar shops.... No, wait! These helmets were valuable. I could use them to seduce any girl I wanted. I could get the staff to bow and slaver whenever I appeared. I could make Utanc love me and that was the important thing.
Oh, yes. And I could untrain Gunsalmo Silva and make him get the idea he was needed at the North Pole. Under the ice.
No, I mustn't destroy these helmets. Maybe I'd never get out of this room unless I used them. Gunsalmo had gotten Tavilnasty. Apparatus trained, maybe he'd get me no matter what I did.
Obviously, the right answer was to hit him with a paralysis dart, get a helmet on him and send him off to burrow in the ice.
Good.
But under no circumstances did I want to take any chance of MY getting a helmet put on me by Krak or anybody else!
I got nerve enough to examine a helmet again. There was a little light in front that showed it was on.
Wait! That light was not part of the mind-wave circuit.
INSPIRATION!
I would be able to get out of this room through the yard, seduce all the girls I wanted, make people bow to me and make Utanc love me with devotion!
With no risk to myself!
Using the communicator system to the hangar, I sent for the technician who had installed the new emergency-alarm system. He soon came in through the hangar tunnel.
He was a cocky, self-confident type, a little runt named Flip, product of Wiggo, one of the Voltar planets. Nobody had ever persuaded him to comb his hair Earth style: it stood up in two spirals, like twin antennae.
"Alarm system don't work?" he said.
I sat him down. I handed him the hypnohelmet and the box it came in. "There is a grave emergency," I said. "These just came in on the Blixo. They work on everybody."
He looked the hypnohelmet over. Count on a technician. They never look on the outside of anything. He instantly began to look inside and open up the guts. Then he paused. "If they work, what am I doing fixing it?"
"You don't understand," I said patiently. "I've got sixteen of these. I want them fixed so that they only work when I want them to work. I want them fixed so that on some people, they appear to be working when they are not working at all."
He probed around in it. "Well, that's easy. The light on the front that shows the operator it is working isn't part of the main circuit. It can go on independently. So we just put a switch on it and it goes on but the main circuit doesn't."