The events of the following day, April 20, proved the effectiveness of Salsbury’s drug and subliminal programs. At breakfast, Kingman tried to eat a chocolate doughnut, dropped it after one bite, quickly excused himself from the table, went to the nearest bathroom, and threw up. At lunch he ate four portions of broccoli in butter sauce with his pork chops. That afternoon, when Dawson took him on a tour of the estate, Kingman spent fifteen minutes playing with several of the guard dogs in the kennel. After dinner, when Ogden and Dawson began to discuss the continuing efforts to integrate the public schools in the North, Kingman came on like a life-long liberal, an ardent advocate of equal rights. And finally, unaware of the two videotape cameras that monitored his bedroom in the sealed wing, he had said his prayers before going to sleep.
Standing now beside the corpse, smiling beatifically, Dawson said to Klinger, “You should have seen it, Ernst! It was terribly inspiring. Ogden took an atheist, a soul condemned to burn in Hell, and converted him into a faithful disciple of Jesus. And all on one day!”
Salsbury was uneasy. He shifted on the stool. Ignoring Dawson, staring at the middle of the general’s forehead, he said, “Kingman left the estate on April twenty-first. I set to work immediately to design the ultimate series of subliminals, the one we three have discussed a hundred times, the program that would give me total and permanent control of the subject’s mind through the use of a code phrase. I finished it on the fifth of June. We brought Kingman back here on the eighth, two days ago.”
“He wasn’t suspicious?” Klinger asked. “Or upset about all of this travel he was asked to do?”
“To the contrary,” Dawson said. “He was pleased that I]was using him for such a special project, even if he didn’t fully understand what it was. He saw it as a sign of my faith in him. And he thought that, if he made himself available for Ogden’s work, he would be promoted much sooner than he might have been otherwise. His behavior wasn’t peculiar. I’ve seen it in every ambitious young executive and management trainee I’ve ever known.”
Tired of standing, the general went to the nearest computer console, swiveled the command chair away from the keyboard, and sat down. He was almost entirely in the shadows. Green light from a display screen washed across his right shoulder and that side of his brutal face. He looked like a troll. “Okay. You finished the program on the fifth. Kingman came up here again on the eighth. You fed him the primer—”
“No,” Salsbury said. “Once the drug has been administered to a subject, there’s no need to give him a booster dose, not even years later. When Kingman arrived, I began at once with the subliminal program. I ran two films for him during the evening. That night, the night before last, he had a very bad dream. He woke up, sweating, chilled, shaking, dazed, and nauseated. He had trouble getting his breath. He vomited beside the bed.”
“Fever?” Klinger asked.
“No.”
“Do you think he had a delayed reaction to the drug — a month and a half delayed?”
“Maybe,” Salsbury said. But he obviously didn’t think that was the case. He got off the stool, went to his desk in a dark corner of the room, and came back with a computer print-out. “This is a record of Kingman’s sleep patterns between one o’clock and three o’clock this morning. That’s the crucial period.” He handed it to Dawson. “Yesterday, I showed Kingman two more films. That completed the program. Last night — he died in bed.”
The general joined Dawson and Salsbury in the oval of light at the autopsy table and began to read the two-yard-long sheet of computer paper.
Klinger said, “You had Kingman hooked up to a lot of machines while he slept?”
“Nearly every night he was here, right from the beginning,” Salsbury said. “The first few times there really wasn’t any reason for it. But by the time it was necessary for me to keep a close watch on him, he was accustomed to the machines and had learned to sleep tangled up with all those wires.”
Indicating the print-out, the general said, “I’m not quite sure what I’m reading here.”
“Likewise,” Dawson said.
Salsbury suppressed a smile. Months ago he had decided that his best defense against these two sharks was his highly specialized education. He never missed an opportunity to display it for them — and to impress them with the fact that, if they should dispose of him, neither of them could carry on his research and development or deal with an unexpected scientific crisis after the research and development was finished.
Pointing to the first several lines of the print-out, he said, “The fourth stage of sleep is the deepest. It tends to occur early in the night. Kingman went to bed at midnight and fell asleep at twenty minutes of one. As you can see here, he achieved the fourth level twenty-two minutes later.”
“What’s the importance of that?” Dawson asked.
“The fourth level is more like a coma than any other stage of sleep,” Salsbury said. “The electroencephalogram shows irregular large waves of just a few cycles per second. There is no bodily movement on the part of the sleeper. It’s in stage four, with the outer mind virtually comatose and with all sensory input shut down tight, that the inner mind becomes the only truly operative part of the mind. Remember, unlike the conscious mind, it never sleeps. But because there isn’t any sensory input, the subconscious can’t do anything during stage four sleep except play with itself. Now, Kingman’s subconscious had something unique to play with.”
The general said, “The key-lock program you implanted in him yesterday and the day before.”
“That’s right,” Salsbury said. “And look here, farther down the print-out.”
“All night long,” Salsbury said, “we rise and fall and rise and fall through the stages of sleep. Almost without exception, we descend into sleep in steps and ascend from it in steps as well, spending some time at each level along the way. In this case, however, Kingman soared straight up from deep sleep to light sleep — as if a noise in the bedroom had startled him.”
“Was there a noise?” Dawson asked.
“No.”
“What’s this REM?” Klinger asked.
Salsbury said, “That means rapid eye movement is taking place under the eyelids — which is a highly reliable indication that Kingman was dreaming in stage one.”
“Dreaming?” Dawson asked. “About what?”
“There’s no way of telling.”
The general scratched the shadow of a beard that shaded his blunt chin even when he was freshly shaved. “But you think that the dream was caused by his subconscious playing around with the key-lock implant.”
“Yes.”
“And that the dream might have been about the subliminals. ”
“Yes. I can’t come up with an explanation that makes more sense. Something about the key-lock program so shocked his subconscious that he was propelled straight up into a dream.”
“A nightmare?”
“At this point, just a dream. But over the next two hours his sleep patterns became increasingly unusual, erratic.”
“The alpha waves mean Kingman was awake here for two minutes,” Salsbury said. “Not wide awake. His eyes were probably still closed. He was hovering on the edge of the first level of sleep.”
“The dream woke him,” Klinger said.
“Probably.”
“The first time he entered deep sleep,” Salsbury said, “he stayed there for eight minutes. This time it lasted only six minutes. That’s the start of an interesting pattern.”