“Yes!” he said fervently.
“And I can bring the doctors and their assistants here to stay with us.”
“Yes! Yes!”
“And we’ll be together while they help to make you well again.”
“Anything,” Greg sobbed, “as long as we can be together.”
Joanna stroked her son’s midnight dark hair, thinking, That will be the best way. Keep him here, where I can watch him. Bring the medical help to him.
She realized that Greg had fallen asleep with his head cradled in her lap. He probably hasn’t slept for the past couple of days, either, Joanna thought.
I can’t turn him over to the police. What good would that do? It won’t bring Paul back and it will destroy Greg completely. Not the police. No scandal. No one must know what he did.
She sighed. It’ll be difficult, especially when the new baby comes. Douglas. She already had his name picked out. Greg will be insanely jealous of the baby. But I can protect him. I can do it. I can take care of both my sons. I can. I will.
PART II: Hero Time
FILE: GREGORY MASTERSON III
The subject is a twenty-eight-year-old male in good physical health. He is deeply disturbed and potentially violent, although like many schizophrenics he can cloak his misapprehensions and delusions with extremely logical and plausible-sounding rationalizations. He is in private care at the home of his mother. Deep hypnotherapy is recommended, together with chemosuppressants to regulate his mood swings.
After two years of hypnotherapy the inescapable conclusion is that the primary focus for the subject’s neurosis is the morbid fear of losing his mother. Although the Freudian concept of an Oedipus Complex has long been discredited, the subject sees his mother as a symbol of safety and well-being, hence an object of intense desire. While this desire is primarily connected to his fear of loss of maternal protection, there is also decidedly a sexual component involved.
The subject is now thirty-five years old and freely able to admit that he has harbored murderous rages against the men with whom he was forced to share his mother’s affection: i.e., his father and his step-father, both of whom are now deceased. Even in deep hypnotherapy sessions he evades any mention of his seven-year-old half-brother who, quite obviously, has also taken a share of his mother’s attention and affection.
SAN JOSE
“I don’t like the looks of this,” said Kris Cardenas.
She was standing on the roof of the two-story nano-technology building, her chief of security beside her, watching the stream of picketers being whipped up into an angry mob.
At the security chiefs earnest suggestion, she had sent most of the working staff home when the mob began to gather outside the main gate. She hadn’t really believed him when he warned her there was going to be trouble; now, hours later, she realized that she hadn’t wanted to believe.
From up on the roof, with the warm wind at her back, she couldn’t hear what the woman with the bullhorn was telling the picketers, but by the way they surged around her and roared incoherently every few minutes Cardenas knew she was working them up into a frenzy.
And more demonstrators were arriving, cars and minivans and even busloads of them.
“This is organized as all hell,” Cardenas muttered.
Her security chief scanned the growing crowd with electronically-boosted binoculars, his mouth set in a grim line.
“Take a look,” he said, looping the strap of the binoculars around Cardenas’ neck. Then he fished a palm-sized phone out of his shirt pocket.
“Got those fire hoses ready?” he asked into the phone.
Cardenas searched through the placards that bobbed drunk-enly in the sea of bodies. Professionally printed, she saw.
Jesus, she thought, this isn’t just one gang of nut cases. They’ve got organized labor, religious zealots — it’s a coalition of pressure groups.
“Look!” the security chief shouted.
Cardenas lowered the binoculars to see where he was pointing. A black pickup truck was speeding across the nearly empty parking lot, straight for the crowd. The people parted like the Red Sea, on cue she thought, and the truck raced straight up to the main gate of the wire security fence and crashed through. One of the uniformed guards was knocked down as the truck roared by without slowing, jounced over the circular plot of flowers in front of the building’s front entrance and smashed into the glass doors of the building’s lobby.
The crowd poured through the open fence, roaring like a white-water river.
“Get the fire hoses on ’em!” the security chief screamed into his phone.
Cardenas’ legs felt rubbery. If that truck had been filled with explosives it would’ve killed us all!
Streams of high-pressure water were spraying the oncoming crowd, knocking people off their feet, pushing them back away from the shattered entrance to the building. But other groups were skirting around the sides of the building, flanking movements. Cardenas knew that the back doors and the loading gates were not protected as well as the front entrance.
She shook herself. It’s a battle now, she realized. A battle to save the labs.
They lost the battle. Police helicopters eventually arrived to evacuate Cardenas and the few remaining security people from the roof. The building was gutted: lab equipment smashed, computers professionally destroyed by magnetized wipers that jangled disk memories into useless hash, offices torn apart.
The news headlines that evening concentrated on the three demonstrators who were injured by the streams from the fire hoses. Masterson Aerospace was going to be sued for police brutality and excessive force? The security guard who died as a result of being hit by the pickup truck was hardly mentioned at all.
FILE: GREGORY MASTERSON III
It has become possible — and even desirable — to transfer at least part of the subject’s feelings for his mother to a desire for security and self-esteem through success in the world of business and commerce. Therefore he has been encouraged to restart his career in Masterson Aerospace Corporation and to establish his own residence near his place of employment.
At age forty, this sublimation procedure is proceeding with apparent proficiency, although careful watch must be maintained since the subject is intelligent enough to know what his therapists desire and to parrot the responses they wish to observe — even under hypnotherapy.
However, his relationship with his twelve-year-old half-brother has apparently stabilized. The subject spent the Christmas holidays at home with his mother and sibling. Post-holiday interviews and testing showed no outward manifestations of hostility, although latent resentment is of course still present.
It has been four years since the subject’s last hypnotherapy encounter. As expected, his success in the corporate world has enabled him to build a new structure of self-esteem. His sexual feelings for his mother have not been eradicated, of course, but now he is able to usefully channel such feelings into accomplishment and respect from his peers. Although he still has some difficulties in forging relationships with peers, it is recommended that all therapy sessions be discontinued, and the subject merely visit this practitioner on a semi-annual basis.
Two years of semiannual visits have convinced this practitioner that the subject can function adequately in society. He is still something of a ‘loner,’ and will undoubtedly need more time to adjust his feelings toward women who might be sexual partners, but it is apparent that he is now a competent, even quite extraordinarily competent, fully functional adult. His relationship with his mother is, at least outwardly, quite normal. His relationship with his eighteen-year-old half-brother, while strained, is apparently no worse than most family relationships under similar circumstances.