He sank into a chair facing Gordon. Jane Gordon had sat on the arm of her father’s chair and Caquer’s eyes feasted on her. How could a girl with lips as soft and kissable as hers insist on regarding marriage only as an academic subject? How could a girl with—
“I don’t see offhand how it could be a cause of his death, Rod, but Willem Deem rented out political books,” said Gordon. “There’s no harm in my telling that, since the poor chap is dead.”
Almost the same words, Caquer remembered, that Perry Peters had used in telling him the same thing.
Caquer nodded.
“We’ve searched his shop and his apartment and haven’t found any, Professor,” he said. “You wouldn’t know, of course, what kind—”
Professor Gordon smiled. “I’m afraid I would, Rod. Off the record—and I take it you haven’t a recorder on our conversation—I’ve read quite a few of them.”
“You?” There was frank surprise in Caquer’s voice.
“Never underestimate the curiosity of an educator, my boy. I fear the reading of Graydex books is a more prevalent vice among the instructors in universities than among any other class. Oh, I know it’s wrong to encourage the trade, but the reading of such books can’t possibly harm a balanced, judicious mind.”
“And Father certainly has a balanced, judicious mind, Rod,” said Jane, a bit defiantly. “Only—darn him—he wouldn’t let me read those books.”
Caquer grinned at her. The professor’s use of the word “Graydex” had reassured him.
Renting Graydex books was only a misdemeanor, after all.
“Ever read any Graydex books, Rod?” the professor asked. Caquer shook his head.
“Then you’ve probably never heard of hypnotism. Some of the circumstances in the Deem case—Well, I’ve wondered whether hypnotism might have been used.”
“I’m afraid I don’t even know what it is, Professor.”
The frail little man sighed.
“That’s because you’ve never read illicit books, Rod,” said Gordon. “Hypnotism is the control of one mind by another, and it reached a pretty high state of development before it was outlawed. You’ve never heard of the Kaprelian Order or the Vargas Wheel?”
Caquer shook his head.
“The history of the subject is in Graydex books, in several of them,” said the professor. “The actual methods, and how a Vargas Wheel is constructed would be Blackdex, high on the roster of lawlessness. Of course I haven’t read that, but I have read the history.”
“A man by the name of Mesmer, way back in the Eighteenth Century, was one of the first practitioners, if not the discoverer, of hypnotism. At any rate, he put it on a more or less scientific basis. By the Twentieth Century, quite a bit had been learned about it—and it became extensively used in medicine.”
“A hundred years later, doctors were treating almost as many patients through hypnotism as through drugs and surgery. True, there were cases of its misuse, but they were relatively few.”
“But another hundred years brought a big change. Mesmerism had developed too far for the public safety. Any criminal or selfish politician who had a smattering of the art could operate with impunity. He could fool all the people all the time, and get away with it.”
“You mean he could really make people think anything he wanted them to?” Caquer asked.
“Not only that, he could make them do anything he wanted. With the use of television one speaker could visibly and directly talk to millions of people.”
“But couldn’t the government have regulated the art?”
Professor Gordon smiled thinly “How, when legislators were human, too, and as subject to hypnotism as the people under them? And then, to complicate things almost hopelessly, came the invention of the Vargas Wheel.”
“It had been known, back as far as the Nineteenth Century, that an arrangement of moving mirrors could throw anyone who watched it into a state of hypnotic submission. And thought transmission had been experimented with in the Twenty-first Century. It was in the following one that Vargas combined and perfected the two into the Vargas Wheel. A sort of helmet affair, really, with a revolving wheel of specially constructed tricky mirrors on top of it.”
“How did it work, Professor?” asked Caquer.
“The wearer of a Vargas Wheel helmet had immediate and automatic control over anyone who saw him—directly, or in a television screen,” said Gordon. The mirrors in the small turning wheel produced instantaneous hypnosis and the helmet—somehow—brought thoughts of its wearer to bear through the wheel and impressed upon his subjects any thoughts he wished to transmit.
“In fact, the helmet itself—or the wheel—could be set to produce certain fixed illusions without the necessity of the operator speaking, or even concentrating, on those points. Or the control could be direct, from his mind.”
“Ouch,” said Caquer. “A thing like that would—I can certainly see why instructions in making a Vargas Wheel would be Blackdexed. Suffering Asteroids! A man with one of these could—”
“Could do almost anything. Including killing a man and making the manner of his death appear five different ways to five different observers.”
Caquer whistled softly. “And including playing nine man Morris with soapbox radicals—or they wouldn’t even have to be radicals, but just ordinary orthodox citizens.”
“Nine men?” Jane Gordon demanded. “What’s this about nine men, Rod?”
“I hadn’t heard about it.”
But Rod was already standing up.
“Haven’t time to explain, Icicle,” he said. “Tell you tomorrow, but I must get down to—Wait a minute, Professor, is that all you know about the Vargas Wheel business?”
“Absolutely all, my boy. It just occurred to me as a possibility. There were only five or six of them ever made, and finally the government got hold of them and destroyed them, one by one. It cost millions of lives to do it.”
“When they finally got everything cleaned up, colonization of the planets was starting, and an international council had been started with control over all governments. They decided that the whole field of hypnotism was too dangerous, and they made it a forbidden subject. It took quite a few centuries to wipe out all knowledge of it, but they succeeded. The proof is that you’d never heard of it.”
“But how about the beneficial aspects of it?” Jane Gordon asked. “Were they lost?”
“Of course,” said her father. “But the science of medicine had progressed so far by that time that it wasn’t too much of a loss. Today the medicos can cure, by physical treatment, anything that hypnotism could handle.”
Caquer, who had halted at the door, now turned back.
“Professor, do you think it possible that someone could have rented a Blackdex book from Deem, and learned all those secrets?” he inquired.
Professor Gordon shrugged. “It’s possible,” he said. “Deem might have handled occasional Blackdex books, but he knew better than try to sell or rent any to me. So I wouldn’t have heard of it.”
At the station, Lieutenant Caquer found Lieutenant Borgesen on the verge of apoplexy.
He looked at Caquer.
“You!” he said. And then, plaintively, “The world’s gone nuts. Listen, Brager discovered Willem Deem, didn’t he? At ten o’clock yesterday morning? And stayed there on guard while Skidder and you and the clearance men were there?”
“Yes, why?” asked Caquer.
Borgesen’s expression showed how much he was upset by developments.
“Nothing, not a thing, except that Brager was in the emergency hospital yesterday morning, from nine until after eleven, getting a sprained ankle treated. He couldn’t have been at Deems. Seven doctors and attendants and nurses swear up and down he was in the hospital at that time.”