'That's right. I found it absolutely fascinating. Normally she was a prudish, dowdy little housewife with a shy, retiring nature, but at times she changed into a gay, bawdy-minded, come-hither girl, bought herself expensive clothes, made herself up fit to kill and went out to hit up the night spots. Then a third individuality emerged when she appeared to be a grave, sensible, responsible woman. And these changes in personality took place not once, but many times actually under the eyes of the men who were examining her; so one can hardly write the whole thing off as a hoax.'
'No, schizophrenia is a mental state now fully accepted by the medical profession. If that's the trouble with this chap Khune, I take it your worry is that while dominated by this new personality he may commit some breach of security?'
'Exactly. When in his normal state we have every reason to believe him to be a patriotic naturalized Briton, but when he has these queer fits he appears to be anything but that. The sort of thing he says is that the only hope for the world is a new deal, starting with the elimination of all the old Imperialist and Capitalist governments; that the United States' oil interests and big business are at the bottom of all the ills that are afflicting mankind, and that true freedom for the individual can only be achieved by complete equality for all.'
'That sounds like the old Communist gags. Do you think he is being got at by the Russians?'
'Maybe, but somehow I don't think it's that. His ideas seem to be more on the old anarchist lines�the complete abolition of all rule with everyone muddling along in little share-and-share alike communities. Anyhow, as he was away this weekend, I decided, on the off-chance that he is in communication with some no-goods and that I might find something that would throw light on the matter, to search his quarters.' Forsby opened his brief-case and taking from it a typescript, added: 'There was nothing of any interest among his correspondence, but in his desk I found a document in his writing, and this is a copy that I took of it.'
Verney put on his spectacles, spread out the paper and read:
I, Otto Helmuth Khune, am making this statement of my free will and while of sound mind in case anything should happen to me, or my sanity later be questioned.
I was born in Chicago on February 8th, 1918, of naturalized American parents who had immigrated from Germany in 1910. They had had six children before the birth of myself and my brother Lothar, we two being my mother's third set of twins. Of the others, three died in infancy, or early childhood, and neither pair of twins was identical, whereas Lothar and I were.
We were the last children born to my parents and the three earlier ones who survived were all girls. One met her death in a fire in 1933, the two others married and live in Detroit and Philadelphia respectively. It is now nearly fifteen years since I have seen either of them and neither plays any part in the matter of which I am about to give an account. Both my parents are now dead.
When I state that Lothar and I are identical twins, I mean that literally. Our physical resemblance was so exact that even people who knew us intimately, at times mistook one of us for the other. Mentally, too, we were extraordinarily alike. We had the same tastes in food, recreations and clothes, and almost invariably shared our likes or dislikes of people. As we grew into our 'teens the latter trait began to show some divergence, but mentally we continued to be remarkably attuned.
Neither of us had any difficulty in reading the other's thoughts and frequently we started to say the same thing at the same moment, so that the similarity of our minds became a joke among our acquaintances. The bond was still closer than that for, if one of us felt ill, the other invariably was, almost at once, subject to the same symptoms. This even extended to the demonstrably physical. On one occasion in a fight at school I had my eye blacked; Lothar felt the blow and soon after his eye also closed and coloured up. On another he fell and broke his ankle, upon which I suffered such acute pain in mine that I had to have the same treatment for such a mishap.
Another thing that we had in common was a highly developed psychic sense. It is said that the seventh child of a seventh child is often endowed in this way; and Lothar and I stood in this relation to my mother, who had been a seventh child. She, too, was psychic to some degree. To a limited extent she could see things in a crystal and tell fortunes by cards, and she had had several death warnings that proved true foreknowledge of the event. But her psychic faculties were not so highly developed as those of Lothar and myself.
We could assess people's characters by the colour of the auras round their heads, which are invisible to the great majority of persons, but were perfectly visible to us. We had hunches about matters which would affect ourselves that invariably proved correct, and could often foretell good or ill fortune that would come to our friends.
We could ''see' things. Our first experience of this was when we were quite young, and was the spirit-form of a dog with which we used to play, without thinking there was anything strange about it, in our bedroom at night. Later we saw several ghosts, and for that reason neither of us would ever pass a cemetery after dark, although in due course we found out that ghosts are more generally pathetic than malignant.
These psychic faculties came to us quite naturally. When young we accepted them as normal and made no special effort to develop them, except in one particular; this was the ability to hypnotize. Both of us possessed it, but Lothar in a much greater degree than myself; perhaps because from the beginning he used to practise on me. To incite me to do ordinary things in this way was, of course, easy, because without any special effort he was able to convey to me his thoughts. But the test of his powers came when he willed me to do things that I was naturally averse to doing. Often he failed, but he was extraordinarily persistent and gradually he gained an ascendancy over me in all things except matters about which I felt particularly strongly.
Lothar and I were both clever and ambitious. We did well at school and later secured degrees with honours in maths and chemistry at the University of Chicago. Our father had been a young professor of mathematics at Leipzig before he decided to emigrate, and afterwards held a post as a senior examiner in the employ of the Chicago Schools Board. In our early days we owed a lot to his private tuition but in due course we entered fields which were beyond his sphere, and after we had taken our finals promising careers were open to both of us.
I secured a well-paid appointment with Weltwerk Schonheim Inc., the big industrial chemists, but Lothar, to most people's surprise -as such posts are not well paid - accepted a junior professorship at the University. His reason for doing so was, however, no secret from me. Beyond all things he loved power; and whereas had he gone into industry he would, for some years at least, have had to knuckle under to his seniors, by becoming a professor he at once achieved a position in which he was able to dominate and mould the minds of a group of mostly intelligent young people.
In the mid-1950s, while still in our 'teens, we had both become members of the Youth Corps of the Deutscher Bund, which was particularly strong in Chicago and was then rapidly expanding there, owing to the vigorous activities of a group of pro-Nazis. Lothar rapidly became prominent among them and by the time the war broke out in Europe, our age then being twenty-one, he was recognized as one of its leaders!
Naturally our sympathies were with Germany, but Lothar felt much more strongly on the matter than I did. He threw himself into a campaign aimed at giving Germany all the help that was possible; whereas my attitude was isolationist, and I maintained that as American citizens we ought to use such influence as we possessed to keep the United States strictly neutral.