The stranger said, “I’ve no more questions, Dr. Troutman, but I do have some orders for you. When you hang up your receiver, you will instantly wipe all memory of our conversation from your mind. Do you understand?”
“Yes. Perfectly.”
“You’ll forget every word we’ve exchanged. You’ll erase this memory from both your conscious and subconscious, so that it can never be recalled no matter how much you might wish to recall it. Understood?”
Troutman nodded somberly. “Yes.”
“When you hang up your receiver, you will remember only that the phone rang — and that it was a wrong number. Is that clear?”
“A wrong number. Yes, that’s clear.”
“Very well. Hang up, Doctor.”
Carelessness, Troutman thought, a bit irritably, as he put down the receiver. If people paid attention to what they were doing, they wouldn’t dial so many wrong numbers or make one-tenth of the other mistakes that peppered their lives. How many patients, badly cut or burned, had he treated who had been injured only because they were inattentive, careless? Scores. Hundreds. Thousands! Sometimes, when he opened the door of his waiting room and peered inside, he had the feeling that he had just pulled a pan from the oven and was staring not at people but at a row of wall-eyed trout with gaping mouths. And now, tying up a doctor’s line with a wrong number, even for half a minute or so — well, that could be damned serious.
He shook his head, dismayed by the ineptitude and inefficiency of his fellow citizens.
Then he grabbed the roast beef sandwich and took an enormous bite from it.
At 11:45 Paul Annendale stepped into Sam Edison’s study on the second floor of the house, just above the general store. “Squire Edison, I wish to arrange to take your daughter to lunch.”
Sam was standing in front of a bookcase. A large volume lay open in his left hand, and he was paging through it with his right. “Sit down, vassal,” he said without looking up. “The squire will be with you in just a minute.”
If Sam had chosen to refer to this place as his library rather than his study, he would have been justified. Two lushly cushioned, somewhat tattered armchairs and two matching footstools stood in the center of the room, facing the only window. Two yellow-shaded floor lamps, one behind each chair, provided adequate but restful light, and a small rectangular table lay between the chairs. A pipe was turned upside down in a large ash tray on the table, and the air was redolent with the cherry scent of Sam’s tobacco. The room was only twelve feet by fifteen feet; but two entire walls, from floor to ceiling, were lined with thousands of books and hundreds of issues of various psychology journals.
Paul sat down and put his feet up on a stool.
He didn’t know the title of the volume that the other man was looking through, but he did know that ninety percent of these books dealt with Hitler, Nazism, and anything else that was even remotely related to that philosophical-political nightmare. Sam’s interest in the subject had been unwavering for thirty-two years.
In April of 1945, as a member of an American intelligence unit, Sam went into Berlin less than twenty-four hours behind the first Allied troops. He was shocked by the extent of the destruction. In addition to the ruin caused by Allied bombers, mortars, and tank fire, there was damage directly attributable to the Führer’s scorch-the-earth policy. In the final days of the war, the madman had decreed that the victors must be allowed to seize nothing of value, that Germany must be transformed into a barren plain of rubble, that not even one house could be left standing to come under foreign domination. Of course, most Germans were not prepared to take this final step into oblivion — although many of them were. It seemed to Sam that the Germans he saw in the devastated streets were survivors not merely of the war but also of the frenzied suicide of an entire nation.
On May 8, 1945, he was transferred to an intelligence unit that was collecting data on the Nazi death camps. As the full story of the holocaust became known, as it was discovered that millions of men and women and children had passed through the gas chambers and that hundreds of thousands of others had been shot in the back and buried in trenches, Sam Edison, a young man from the backwoods of Maine, found nothing within his experience to explain such mind-numbing horror. Why had so many once-rational, basically good people committed themselves to fulfilling the evil fantasies of an obvious lunatic and a handful of subordinate madmen? Why had one of the most professional armies in the world disgraced itself by fighting to protect the SS murderers? Why had millions of people gone with so little protest to the concentration camps and gas chambers? What did Adolf Hitler know about the psychology of the masses that had helped him to achieve such absolute power? The ruin of the German cities and the death camp data raised all of these questions but provided answers to none of them.
He was sent back to the States and mustered out of the service in October of 1945, and as soon as he was home he began to buy books about Hitler, the Nazis, and the war. He read everything of value he could find. Bits and pieces of explanations, theories and arguments seemed valid to him. But the complete answer that he sought eluded him; therefore, he extended his area of study and began collecting books on totalitarianism, militarism, war games, battle strategy, German history, German philosophy, bigotry, racism, paranoia, mob psychology, behavior modification, and mind control. His undiminishable fascination with Hitler did not have its roots in morbid curiosity, but came instead from a fearful certainty that the German people were not at all unique and that his own neighbors in Maine, given the right set of circumstances, would be capable of the same atrocities.
Sam suddenly closed the book through which he’d been paging for the past few minutes and returned it to the shelf. “Dammit, I know they’re here somewhere.”
From his armchair Paul said, “What are you looking for?”
His head tilted slightly to the right, Sam continued to read the titles on the bindings. “We’ve got a sociologist doing research in town. I know I’ve got several of his articles in my collection, but I’ll be damned if I can find them.”
“Sociologist? What sort of research?”
“I don’t know exactly. He came into the store early this morning. Had dozens of questions to ask. Said he was a sociologist, come all the way up from Washington, and was making a study of Black River. Said he’d rented a room at Pauline Vicker’s place and would be here for three weeks or so. According to him, Black River’s pretty special.”
“In what way?”
“For one thing, it’s a prosperous company town in an age when company towns have supposedly fallen into decay or vanished altogether. And because we’re geographically isolated, it’ll be easier for him to analyze the effects of television on our social patterns. Oh, he had at least half a dozen good reasons why we’re ripe material for sociological research, but I don’t think he got around to explaining his main thesis, whatever it is he’s trying to prove or disprove.” He took another book from the shelf, opened it to the table of contents, closed it almost at once, and put it back where he’d gotten it.
“Do you know his name?”
“Introduced himself as Albert Deighton,” Sam said. “The name didn’t ring a bell. But the face did. Meek-looking man. Thin lips. Receding hairline. Glasses as thick as the lenses on a telescope. Those glasses make his eyes look like they’re popping right out of his head. I know I’ve seen his picture several times in books or magazines, alongside articles he’s written.” He sighed and turned away from the bookshelves for the first time since Paul came into the room. With one hand he smoothed his white beard. “I can spend all evening up here picking through these books. Right now you want me to take over the counter downstairs so you can escort my daughter to the elegant, incomparable Ultman’s Cafe for lunch.”