I went about my business, and Dr. Horn picked up the phone in his house and demanded the Pentagon, to complain about our being there. When he finally realized he was talking to our intercept monitor, and that no calls would go out on his line without authorization from me, he yelled up another storm.
But that wasn’t going to get him anywhere, of course. Not when General Follansbee himself had signed the orders.
About oh-eight-hundred the next morning I ran a surprise fullscale inspection and simulated infiltration to keep the detachment on its toes. It all checked out perfectly. I had detailed Sergeant O’Hare to try to sneak in from the marshland south of the old man’s place, and he was spotted fifty yards from the perimeter. When he reported to me he was covered with mud and shaking. ‘Those trigger-happy ba - Those guards, sir, nearly blew my head off. If the officer of the day hadn’t happened by I think they would have done it, only he recognized me.’
‘All right, Sergeant.’ I dismissed him and went in to breakfast. The wire-stringing detail had worked all night, and we were now surrounded with triple-strand electrified barbwire, with an outer line of barbwire chevaux-de-frise. There were guard-towers every fifty yards and at the corners, and a construction detail was clearing the brush for an additional twenty yards outside the wire. I thought briefly of bulldozing a jeep path in the cleared area for permanent rotating patrols, but it didn’t really seem necessary.
I was rather hungry, and a little sleepy - that wire-stringing detail had made quite a lot of noise. But on the whole I was pleased, if a little irritable.
The O.D. phoned in for instructions while I was breakfasting; Van Pelt had arrived from town and the O.D. wouldn’t let him in without my approval. I authorized it, and in a moment Van Pelt turned up in my private mess, looking simultaneously worried and jubilant. ‘How’d he take it, Colonel?’ he asked. ‘Is he - I mean, is he sore?’
‘Very.’
‘Oh.’ Van Pelt shook slightly, then shrugged. ‘Well, you’re here. I guess he won’t try anything.’ He looked hungrily at my buckwheat cakes and sausages. ‘I, uh, I didn’t get a chance to have breakfast on the way down -’
‘Be my guest, Dr. Van Pelt.’ I ordered another place set, and extra portions of everything. He ate it all, God knows how. Looking at him, you’d think he could march two hundred miles on the stored fat he already had. He wasn’t much over five-six, perhaps five-seven, and I’d guess two hundred and eighty pounds at the least. He was about as unlike Dr. Horn as you could imagine. I wondered how they had got along, working together - but of course I knew the answer. They got along badly. Else Van Pelt never would have gone running to the Pentagon. I tried to keep an open mind about that, of course. I mean, General Follansbee thought it was important to national defence, and so on - But I couldn’t help thinking how I would feel if some junior went over my head in that way. Of course, military discipline is one thing, and civilian affairs, as I understand it, ere something else. But all the same...
Anyway, he had done it; and here we were. Not much like a fighting command for me. But orders are orders.
At fourteen hundred I paid a call on Dr. Horn.
He looked up as the clerk-typist corporal and I came in. He didn’t say anything, just stood up and pointed to the door.
I said, ‘Good afternoon, Dr. Horn. If this is an inconvenient time for you to make your daily progress report, just say the word. I’m here to help you, you know. Would from twelve to thirteen hundred hours every day be more satisfactory? Or in the morning? Or -’
‘Every day?’
‘That’s right, sir. Perhaps you didn’t notice Paragraph Eight of my orders. General Follansbee’s orders were to -’
He interrupted me with an irrelevant comment on General Follansbee, but I pretended not to hear. Besides, he might have been right. I said, ‘As a starter, sir, perhaps you’ll be good enough to show us around the laboratories. I think that you’ll find that Corporal McCabe will be able to take your words down at normal speed.’
‘Take what words down?’
‘Your progress report, sir. What you’ve accomplished in the past twenty-four hours. Only this time, of course, we’d better have a fill-in on everything to date.’
He roared: ‘No. I won’t -’
I was prepared for that. I let him roar. When he was through roaring I put it to him very simply. I said, ‘That’s the way it’s going to be.’
He stuttered and gagged. ‘Why, you stinking little two-bit Army - Listen, what’s the idea -’
He stopped and looked at me, frowning. I was glad that he stopped, since in the confidential section of my orders - the paragraphs I didn’t show Dr. Horn, as he was not cleared for access to that material - there had been a paragraph which was relevant here. Van Pelt had told the General that Horn’s health was not good. Apoplexy, I believe - perhaps cancer, I am not very familiar with medical terms. At any rate, Van Pelt, while being debriefed by the General’s intelligence section, had reported that the old man might drop dead at any minute. Well, he looked it, when he was mad at least. I certainly didn’t want him to drop dead before I had made a proper Situation Analysis, for which I needed his report.
Horn sat down. He said, with rusty craft: ‘You’re going to stick to what you say?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Then,’ he said, with a pathetic, senile cunning, ‘I suppose I must reconcile myself to the situation. Exactly what is it you want, Lieutenant?’
‘The report, sir.’
He nodded briefly. ‘Just so.’
Ah-ha, I thought - to myself, of course - this will prove interesting. Do you suppose he will try to win my confidence so that he can phone his congressman? Or merely get me to turn my back so he can clobber me over the head?
‘Yes, yes, the report. Just so,’ he said, staring thoughtfully at a machine of some kind - it rather resembled an SCR-784, the Mark XII model; the one that has something to do with radar, or radio, or something or other. I leave that sort of thing to the Signal Corpsmen, naturally. Anyway, it was something electrical. ‘Just so,’ he repeated. ‘Well, Captain, I shall have to do as you wish. Observe,’ he said, rising, ‘My polycloid quasitron. As you see -’
There was a strangling noise from Corporal McCabe. I looked at him; he was in difficulties.
‘Sir,’ I interrupted the doctor, ‘Will you spell that, please?’
He chuckled, rather grimly. ‘Just so. P-O-L-Y-C-L-O-I-D Q-U-A-S-I-T-R-O-N. Well, Lieutenant, you’re familiar with the various potentiometric studies of the brain which - Perhaps I should begin farther back. The brain, you must realize, is essentially an electrical device. Potentiometer studies have shown -’
He went on. Every thirty to fifty seconds he glanced at me, and turned his head half to one side, and waited. And I said, ‘I see,’ and he said, ‘Just so,’ and he went on. Corporal McCabe was in acute distress, of course, but I rather enjoyed the exposition; it was restful. One learns to make these things restful, you see. One doesn’t spend much time in staff meetings without learning a few lessons in survival tactics.
When he had entirely finished (McCabe was sobbing softly to himself), I summed it all up for him.
‘In other words, sir, you’ve perfected a method of electronically killing a man without touching him.’
For some reason that rocked him.
He stared at me. ‘Electronically,’ he said after a moment. ‘Killing. A man. Without. Touching. Him.’
‘That’s what I said, sir,’ I agreed.