“And while you were watching that, your Master just faded away?”
“Yes. If he’d kept at me much longer, he’d have learned everything he was looking for. I couldn’t have stood out against him. So why did he go?”
“One more question: what did you feel about that frog? Precisely.”
“It was ugly. I felt… disgusted.”
“Was it anything like the way you felt at the fight tonight?”
“The fight was worse in a way. The snake was worse another way.”
“But both induced similar feelings: a sense of ugliness, then disgust and nausea?”
“Yes.”
“Then those are the weapons we’ll fight them with. Dennis, my boy, before this night is over, you will be a hero of the revolution.”
“Don’t I deserve an explanation? Or does the revolution require ignorant heroes?”
“When you left the fight earlier you looked so distressed that I was a bit amused. Dennis is such an esthete still, I thought. And then I remembered the old saw: Like master, like man. Turn it around, and it’s the formula for our weapon. Like man, like Master. The Masters are nothing but their own pets, writ large. They’re esthetes, every last one of them. And we’re their favorite art-form. A human brain is the clay they work in. They order our minds just the way they order the Northern Lights. That’s why they prefer an intelligent, educated pet to an undeveloped Dingo. The Dingoes are lumpy clay, warped canvas, faulty marble, verse that doesn’t scan.”
“They must feel about Dingoes the way I do about Salvador Dali,” Julie said. She always wanted to argue about Dali with me, since she knows I like him despite my better judgment.
“Or the way I feel about prize fights,” I suggested.
“Or any experience,” Daddy concluded, “that offends the esthetic sensibilities. They can’t stand ugliness.”
We were silent for a while, considering this. Except Bruno. “Give yourself time, Dennis. You’ll get so you enjoy the fights. Kelly just wasn’t in form tonight, that’s all.”
Before I could answer, the limousine was sailing down a concrete ramp into a brightly-lit garage. “The hospital,” Bruno announced.
A man in a white robe approached us. “Everything is in readiness, Mr White. As soon as we received your call, we set to work.”
“The radiomen are here too?”
“They’re working with our own technicians already. And Mrs Schwarzkopf said she’d join her husband directly.”
A terrible light suddenly kindled the night sky outside the garage.
“The Masters!” I cried in terror.
“Damnation, the bombs!” Daddy exclaimed. “I forgot all about them. Dennis, go with the doctor and do what he says. I have to call up RIC headquarters and tell them to stop the bombings.”
“What are they trying to hit?”
“They’re trying to land one in the Van Allen belt. I tried to tell them it wouldn’t do any good. They tried that in 1972, and it didn’t accomplish a thing. But they were getting desperate, and I couldn’t suggest any better plan. But now it would knock out radio communications, and we’re going to be needing them. Bruno, Julie—wait in the car for me.”
A team of doctors led me down the long enamel-white corridors to a room filled with a complicated array of electronic and surgical equipment. The doctor-in-chief indicated that I was to lie down on an uncomfortable metal pallet. When I had done so, two steel bars were clamped on either side of my head. The doctor held a rubber mask over my mouth and nose.
“Breathe deeply,” he commanded.
The anesthetic worked quickly.
Daddy was yelling at the doctor when I woke up. “Did you have to use an anesthetic? We don’t have time to waste on daintinesses.”
“The placement of the electrodes is a very delicate operation. He should be awake in any moment.”
“He is awake,” I said.
The doctor rushed over to my pallet. “Don’t move your head,” he warned. Rather unnecessarily, it seemed, for my head was still clamped in the steel vice, although I was now propped up into a sitting position.
“How are you feeling?” Daddy asked.
“Miserable.”
“That’s fine. Now, listen—the machine behind you…” (“Don’t look,” the doctor interrupted.) “…is an electroencephalograph. It records brain waves.”
The doctor broke in again: “There are electrodes in six different areas. I’ve tried to explain to your father that we’re uncertain where perceptions of an esthetic nature are centered. What is the relationship between pleasure and beauty, for instance? Little work has been done since…”
“Later, doctor, later. Now what I want Dennis to do is suffer. Actually, it’s White Fang who must do the suffering. White Fang must drown in misery. I’ve already arranged some suitable entertainments, but you should tell me right now if there’s anything especially distasteful to you that we might send off for. Some little phobia all your own.”
“Please—explain what this is all about.”
“Your electroencephalograms are being taken to every radio station in the city. The wave patterns will be amplified and broadcast over AM and FM, radio and TV. Every station in the country—in the world is standing by to pick them up. Tomorrow night we’ll give the Masters a concert like they’ve never heard before.”
A man in workclothes brought in a blackboard and handed it to Daddy.
“Doctor, you have better fingernails than I do. Rub them over this slate.” It made an intolerable noise, which the doctor kept up for a solid minute.
“How does the graph look?” Daddy asked.
“Largest responses in the sensory areas. But fairly generalized elsewhere, especially during the first twenty seconds.”
“Well, there’s lots more coming. Look at these pictures, Dennis. Examine the details.” He showed me illustrations from an encyclopedia of pathology that I will refrain from describing here. The people in the pictures were beyond the reach of medicine. Beyond the reach, even, of sympathy. They were ordered in an ascending degree of horribleness, concluding with a large colorplate of… “Take these away!”
“The response is stronger now and well sustained. Good definition.”
Daddy passed a vial of formaldehyde beneath my nose. It smelt awfully. Actually, it was more of a bottle than a vial. In it—
I screamed.
“Excellent,” the doctor said. “Really alarming curves for that.”
“Bring in the band,” said Daddy.
A crew of four men with musical instruments I was unfamiliar with (they were, I’ve since learned, electric guitar, musical saw, accordion and tuba) entered the room. They were dressed in outlandish costumes: glorified working-clothes in garish colors garnished with all sorts of leather and metal accessories. On their heads were ridiculous, flaring bonnets.
“Extraordinary!” the doctor said. “He’s already responding.”
They began—well, they began to sing. It was like singing. Their untuned instruments blasted out a stupid One-two-three, One-two-three, repeating melody, which they accompanied with strident screams of “Roll out the bare-ul”.
When I thought that this new attack on my sensibilities had reached the threshhold of tolerance, Daddy, who had been watching me intently, leaped up and began to slam his feet on the floor and join them in that awful song.
Daddy has a terrible voice when he sings. It rasps.
But his voice was the least awfulness; it was his behavior that was so mortifying. I wanted to turn my head away, but the vice held it fast. For a man of such natural dignity to so debase himself, and that man my own father!