As soon as her right hand was free, the waitress tried to get to the handle of the fork. She clawed at Paul’s fist.
Jenny took hold of the spoon.
Pressing down on the waitress’s wounded hand, Paul jerked up on the fork, which was sunk into the wood perhaps half an inch past her flesh, and pulled the tines from her in one sudden, clean movement. He dropped the fork and slipped an arm around her waist to keep her from falling. Her knees had begun to buckle; he had thought they might.
As he stretched the woman out on the floor, Jenny said, “She must be in awful pain.”
Those words seemed to shatter the waitress’s terror. She stopped screaming and began to cry.
“I don’t see how she did it,” Paul said as he tended to her. “She put that fork through her hand with incredible force. She was pinned to the board.”
Weeping, trembling, the waitress said, “Accident.” She gasped and groaned and shook her head. “Terrible… accident. ”
6
Fourteen Months Earlier: Thursday, June 10, 1976
Naked, the dead man lay on his back in the center of the slightly tilted autopsy table, framed by blood gutters on all sides.
“Who was he?” Klinger asked.
Salsbury said, “He worked for Leonard.”
The room in which the three men stood was illuminated only in the center by two hooded lamps above the autopsy table. Three walls were lined with computer housings, consoles, and monitor boards; and the tiny systems bulbs and glowing scopes made ghostly patches of green, blue, yellow, and pale red light in the surrounding shadows. Nine TV display screens — cathode-ray tubes — were set high on three walls, and four other screens were suspended from the ceiling; and all of them emitted a thin bluish-green light.
In that eerie glow the corpse looked less like a real body than like a prop in a horror film.
Somber, almost reverent, Dawson said, “His name was Brian Kingman. He was on my personal staff.”
“For very long?” Klinger asked.
“Five years.”
The dead man had been in his late twenties and in good condition. Now, circulation having ceased seven hours ago, lividity had set in; the blood had settled into his calves, the backs of his thighs, his buttocks, and his lower back, and in these places the flesh was purple and a bit distended. His face was white and deeply lined. His hands were at his sides, his palms up, the fingers curled.
“Was he married?” Klinger asked.
Dawson shook his head: no.
“Family?”
“Grandparents dead. No brother or sisters. His mother died when he was born, and his father was killed in an auto accident last year.”
“Aunts and uncles?”
“None close.”
“Girlfriends?”
“None that he was serious about or that were serious about him,” Dawson said. “That’s why we chose him. If he disappears, there’s no one to waste a lot of time and energy looking for him.”
Klinger considered that for a few seconds. Then he said, “You expected the experiment to kill him?”
“We thought there was a chance of it,” Ogden said.
Smiling grimly, Klinger said, “You were right.”
Something about the general’s tone angered Salsbury. “You knew the stakes when you came in with Leonard and me.”
“Of course I did,” Klinger said.
“Then don’t act as if Kingman’s death is entirely my fault. The blame belongs to all of us.”
Frowning, the general said, “Ogden, you misunderstand me. I don’t believe that you and Leonard and I are to blame for anything. This man was a machine that broke down. Nothing more. We can always get another machine. You’re too sensitive, Ogden.”
“Poor boy,” Dawson said, regarding the corpse sadly. “He would have done anything for me.”
“He did,” the general said. He stared thoughtfully at the dead man. “Leonard, you’ve got seven servants in this house. Did any of them know Kingman was here?”
“That’s highly unlikely. We brought him in secretly.” For thirteen months, this wing of the Greenwich house had been sealed off from the other twenty rooms. It had been provided with a new private entrance, and all of the locks had been changed. The servants were told that experiments, none of them dangerous, were being conducted for a subsidiary of Futurex, and that the security precautions were needed to protect the operation’s files and discoveries from industrial espionage.
“Is the household staff still curious about what goes on here?” Klinger asked.
“No,” Dawson said. “So far as they can see, nothing’s happened in the past year. The sealed wing has lost its mystery. ”
“Then I think we can bury Kingman on the estate without too much risk.” He faced Salsbury. “What happened? How did he die?”
Salsbury sat on a high, white stool at the head of the autopsy table, hooked his heels around one of its rungs, and spoke to them across the corpse. “We brought Kingman here for the first time in early February. He thought he was helping us with some sociological research that had important business applications for Futurex. During forty hours of interviews with him, I learned everything I wanted to know about the man’s likes, dislikes, prejudices, personality quirks, desires, and basic thought processes. Later, at the end of February, I went through the transcripts of those interviews and selected five test points, five of Kingman’s attitudes and/or opinions that I would try to reverse with a series of subliminals.”
He had chosen three simple test points and two complex ones. Kingman craved chocolate candy, chocolate cake, chocolate in every form; and Salsbury wanted to make him ill at the first taste of chocolate. He couldn’t and wouldn’t eat broccoli; but Salsbury wanted to make him like it. Kingman had an ingrained fear of dogs; an attempt to transform that fear into affection would constitute the third of the simple test points. The remaining two indices presented Salsbury with a far greater chance of failure, for to deal with them he would have to design subliminal commands that bored especially deeply into Kingman’s psyche. First of all, Kingman was an atheist, a fact he had hidden successfully from Dawson for five years. Secondly, he was extremely prejudiced against blacks. Making him over into a God-loving, prayer-saying champion of the Negro would be far more difficult than twisting his taste for chocolate into a loathing of it.
By the second week of April, Salsbury completed the subliminal program.
Kingman was brought back to the Greenwich house on the fifteenth of that month — ostensibly to participate in additional sociological research for Futurex. Although he wasn’t aware of it, he was fed the subliminal primer, the drug, on April 15. Salsbury put him under close medical observation and ran tests on him for three days, but he could find no indications of a temporary toxic state, permanent tissue damage, a change in blood chemistry, noticeable psychological damage, or any other deleterious side-effects attributable to the drug.
At the end of those three days, on April 19, still in excellent health, Kingman took part in what he thought was an experiment in visual perception. He was shown two feature-length motion pictures in one afternoon, and at the conclusion of each film he was required to answer a hundred questions that dealt with what he had just seen. His answers were unimportant, and they were filed only because Salsbury habitually filed every scrap of paper in his laboratory. The experiment actually had only one purpose: while Kingman was watching the films, he was also unwittingly absorbing three hours of subliminal programming that was meant to change five of his attitudes.