The Second Randall Garrett Megapack Page 42

  “On the other hand, we can save lives by using the technique we have now. We don’t dare not use it.

  “When they chopped off those hands, centuries ago, the stumps were cauterized by putting them in boiling oil. It looked like another injury piled on top of the first, but the chirurgeons, not knowing why it worked, still knew that a lot more ex-pickpockets lived through their ordeal if the boiling oil was used afterward.

  “And that’s what we’re doing with this technique right here and now. We’re using it because it saves lives, lives that may potentially or actually be a great deal more valuable than the warped personality that might have taken such a life.

  “But the one thing that I am working for right now and will continue to work for is a real cure, if that’s possible. A real, genuine, usable kind of psychotherapy; one which is at least on a par with the science of cake-baking when it comes to the percentages of successes and failures.”

  His Grace thought that over for a minute. Then he leaned back and looked at me through narrowed eyes. There was a half smile on his lips “Royall, old man, let’s admit one thing, just between ourselves,” His voice became very slow and very deliberate. “Both you and I know that this process, whatever it is, is not psychotherapy.”

  “Why do you say that?” I wasn’t trying to deny anything; I just wanted to know the reasoning behind his conclusions.

  “Because I know what psychotherapy can and can’t do. And I know that psychotherapy can not do the sort of thing we’ve been discussing.

  “It’s as if you’d taken me out on a rifle range, to a target two thousand yards from the shooter and let me watch that marksman put fifty shots out of fifty into a six-inch bull’s-eye. I might not know what the shooter is using, but I would know beyond any shadow of doubt that it was not an ordinary revolver. More, I would know that it could not be any possible improvement upon the revolver. It simply would have to be an instrument of an entirely different order.

  “If, in 1945, any intelligent military man had been told that the Japanese city of Hiroshima had been totally destroyed by a bomber dropping a single bomb, he would be certain that the bomb was a new and different kind from any ever known before. He would know that, mind you, without necessarily knowing a great deal about chemistry.

  “I don’t need to know a devil of a lot about psychotherapy to know that the process you’ve been describing is as far beyond the limits of psychotherapy as the Hiroshima bomb was beyond the limits of chemistry. Ditto for hypnosis and/or Pavlov’s ‘conditioned reflex’, by the way.

  “Now, just to clear the air, what is it?”

  “It has no official name yet,” I told him. “To keep within the law, we have been calling it psychotherapy. If we called it something else, and admitted that it isn’t psychotherapy, the courts couldn’t turn the zanies over to us. But you’re right—it is as impossible to produce the effect by psychotherapy as it is to produce an atomic explosion by a chemical reaction.

  “I’ve got a hunch that, just as chemistry and nucleonics are both really branches of physics, so psychotherapy and Brownlee’s process are branches of some higher, more inclusive science—but that doesn’t have a name, either.”

  “That’s as may be,” the Duke said, “but I’m happy to know that you’re not deluding yourself that it’s any kind of psychotherapy.”

  “You know,” I said, “I kind of like your word geas. Because that’s exactly what it seems to be—a geas. A hex, an enchantment, if you wish.

  “Did you know that Brownlee was an anthropologist before he turned to psychology? He has some very interesting stories to tell about hexes and so on.”

  “I’ll have to hear them one day.” His Grace took a pack of cigarettes from his pocket. “Cigarette?”

  “No, thanks. I gave up smoking a few years back.”

  He puffed his alight. “This geas,” he said, “reminds me of the fact that, before the medical profession came up with antibiotics that would destroy the microorganisms that cause gas gangrene, amputation was the only method of preventing the death of the patient. It was crippling, but necessary.”

  “No!” My voice must have been a little too sharp, because he raised one eyebrow. “The analogy,” I went on in a quieter tone, “isn’t good because it gives a distorted picture. Look, Your Grace, you know what’s done to keep a captive wild duck from flying away?”

  “One wing is clipped.”

  “Right. Certain of the feathers are trimmed, which throws the duck off balance every time he tries to fly. He’s crippled, right? But if you clip the other wing, what happens? He’s in balance again. He can’t fly as well as he could before his wings were clipped—but he can fly!

  “That’s what Brownlee’s geas does—restore the balance by clipping the other wing.”

  His Grace smiled. There was an odd sort of twinkle in his eyes. “Let me carry your analogy somewhat farther. If the one wing is too severely clipped, clipping the other won’t help. Our duck wouldn’t have enough lift to get off the ground, even if he’s balanced.

  “Now, a zany who was that badly crippled—?”

  I grinned back at him. “Right. It would be so obvious that he would have been put away very quickly. He would not be just psychopathic, but completely psychotic—and demonstrably so.”

  “Then,” the Duke said, still pursuing the same track, “the only way to ‘cure’ that kind would be to find a method to…ah…‘grow the feathers back’, wouldn’t it? And where does that put today’s psychotherapy? Providing, of course, that the analogy follows.”

  “It does,” I said. “The real cure that I want to find would do just that—’grow the feathers back’. And that’s beyond the limits of psychotherapy, too. That’s why Dr. Brownlee and his boys want to study every zany we bring in, whether he can be helped or not. They’re looking for a cure, not a stopgap.”

  “Let me drag that analogy out just a tiny bit more,” said His Grace. “Suppose there is a genetic defect in the duck which makes it impossible—absolutely impossible—to grow feathers on that wing. Will your cure work?”

  I was very quiet for a long time. At least, it seemed long. The question had occurred to me before, and I didn’t even like to think about it. Now, I had to face it again for a short while.

  “Frankly,” I said as evenly as I could, “I doubt that anything could be done. But that’s only an opinion. We don’t know enough yet to make any such predictions. It is my hope that some day we’ll find a method of restoring every human being to his or her full potential—but I’m not at all certain of what the source of that potential is.

  “But when we do get our cure,” I went on, “then our first move must be to abolish the geas. And I wish that day were coming tomorrow.”

  * * * *

  There seemed to be a sudden silence in the room. I hadn’t realized that I’d been talking so loudly or so vehemently.

  The Duke broke it by saying: “Look here, Royall; I’m going to stay on here until I’ve learned all about every phase of this thing. It may sound a bit conceited, but I’m going to try to learn in a few weeks everything you have learned in a year. So you’ll have to teach me, if you will. And then I’d like to borrow one or two of your therapists, your hexperts, to teach the technique in England.

  “Allowing people like that to kill and maim when it can be prevented is unthinkable in a civilized society. I’ve got to learn how to stop it in England. Will you teach me?”

  “On one condition,” I said.

  “What’s that?”

  “That you teach me how to use a walking stick.”

  He laughed. “You’re on!”

  The officer stuck his head in the waiting room again. “Pardon me. Inspector Acrington? The District Attorney would like to see you.”

  “Surely.”

  After he had left, I sat there for a minute or two, just thinking. Then Brownlee came back from his conference with the D.A. and sat down beside me.

  “I met your noble friend heading fo
r the D.A.’s office,” he said with a smile. “He said that any man who was as determined to find a better method in order to replace a merely workable method is a remarkable man and therefore worth studying under. I just told him I agreed with him.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “Thanks a lot.”

  Because Brownlee knows why I’m looking for a cure to replace the stopgap. Brownlee knows why I gave up smoking three years ago, why I don’t have any matches or lighters in the house, why I keep the ashtrays for guests only, and why, for that reason, I don’t have many guests. Brownlee knows why there are only electric stoves in my apartment—never gas.

  Brownlee knows why my son quivers and turns his head away from a match flame. Brownlee knows why he had to put the geas on Stevie.

  And I even think Brownlee suspects that I concealed some of the evidence in the fire that killed Stevie’s mother—my wife.

  Yes, I’m looking for a cure. But until then, I’ll be thankful for the stopgap.

  UNWISE CHILD (1962)

  With sincere appreciation, this book is dedicated to TIM and NATALIE who waited…and waited… and waited…and waited for it.

  CHAPTER 1

  The kids who tried to jump Mike the Angel were bright enough in a lot of ways, but they made a bad mistake when they tangled with Mike the Angel.

  They’d done their preliminary work well enough. They had cased the job thoroughly, and they had built the equipment to take care of it. Their mistake was not in their planning; it was in not taking Mike the Angel into account.

  There is a section of New York’s Manhattan Island, down on the lower West Side, that has been known, for over a century, as “Radio Row.” All through this section are stores, large and small, where every kind of electronic and sub-electronic device can be bought, ordered, or designed to order. There is even an old antique shop, known as Ye Quainte Olde Elecktronicks Shoppe, where you can buy such oddities as vacuum-tube FM radios and twenty-four-inch cathode-ray television sets. And, if you want them, transmitters to match, so you can watch the antiques work.

  Mike the Angel had an uptown office in the heart of the business district, near West 112th Street—a very posh suite of rooms on the fiftieth floor of the half-mile-high Timmins Building, overlooking the two-hundred-year-old Gothic edifice of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. The glowing sign on the door of the suite said, very simply:

  M. R. GABRIEL

  POWER DESIGN

  But, once or twice a week, Mike the Angel liked to take off and prowl around Radio Row, just shopping around. Usually, he didn’t work too late, but, on this particular afternoon, he’d been in his office until after six o’clock, working on some papers for the Interstellar Commission. So, by the time he got down to Radio Row, the only shop left open was Harry MacDougal’s.

  That didn’t matter much to Mike the Angel, since Harry’s was the place he had intended to go, anyway. Harry MacDougal’s establishment was hardly more than a hole in the wall—a narrow, long hallway between two larger stores. Although not a specialist, like the proprietor of Ye Quainte Olde Elecktronicks Shoppe, Harry did carry equipment of every vintage and every make. If you wanted something that hadn’t been manufactured in decades, and perhaps never made in quantity, Harry’s was the place to go. The walls were lined with bins, all unlabeled, filled helter-skelter with every imaginable kind of gadget, most of which would have been hard to recognize unless you were both an expert and a historian.

  Old Harry didn’t need labels or a system. He was a small, lean, bony, sharp-nosed Scot who had fled Scotland during the Panic of ’37, landed in New York, and stopped. He solemnly declared that he had never been west of the Hudson River nor north of 181st Street in the more than fifty years he had been in the country. He had a mind like that of a robot filing cabinet. Ask him for a particular piece of equipment, and he’d squint one eye closed, stare at the end of his nose with the other, and say:

  “An M-1993 thermodyne hexode, eh? Ah. Um. Aye, I got one. Picked it up a couple years back. Put it— Let me see, now.…”

  And he’d go to his wall ladder, push it along that narrow hallway, moving boxes aside as he went, and stop somewhere along the wall. Then he’d scramble up the ladder, pull out a bin, fumble around in it, and come out with the article in question. He’d blow the dust off it, polish it with a rag, scramble down the ladder, and say: “Here ’tis. Thought I had one. Let’s go back in the back and give her a test.”

  On the other hand, if he didn’t have what you wanted, he’d shake his head just a trifle, then squint up at you and say: “What d’ye want it for?” And if you could tell him what you planned to do with the piece you wanted, nine times out of ten he could come up with something else that would do the job as well or better.

  In either case, he always insisted that the piece be tested. He refused either to buy or sell something that didn’t work. So you’d follow him down that long hallway to the lab in the rear, where all the testing equipment was. The lab, too, was cluttered, but in a different way. Out front, the stuff was dead; back here, there was power coursing through the ionic veins and metallic nerves of the half-living machines. Things were labeled in neat, accurate script—not for Old Harry’s benefit, but for the edification of his customers, so they wouldn’t put their fingers in the wrong places. He never had to worry about whether his customers knew enough to fend for themselves; a few minutes spent in talking was enough to tell Harry whether a man knew enough about the science and art of electronics and sub-electronics to be trusted in the lab. If you didn’t measure up, you didn’t get invited to the lab, even to watch a test.

  But he had very few people like that; nobody came into Harry MacDougal’s place unless he was pretty sure of what he wanted and how he wanted to use it.

  On the other hand, there were very few men whom Harry would allow into the lab unescorted. Mike the Angel was one of them.

  Meet Mike the Angel. Full name: Michael Raphael Gabriel. (His mother had tagged that on him at the time of his baptism, which had made his father wince in anticipated compassion, but there had been nothing for him to say—not in the middle of the ceremony.)

  Naturally, he had been tagged “Mike the Angel.” Six feet seven. Two hundred sixty pounds. Thirty-four years of age. Hair: golden yellow. Eyes: deep blue. Cash value of holdings: well into eight figures. Credit: almost unlimited. Marital status: highly eligible, if the right woman could tackle him.

  Mike the Angel pushed open the door to Harry MacDougal’s shop and took off his hat to brush the raindrops from it. Farther uptown, the streets were covered with clear plastic roofing, but that kind of comfort stopped at Fifty-third Street.

  There was no one in sight in the long, narrow store, so Mike the Angel looked up at the ceiling, where he knew the eye was hidden.

  “Harry?” he said.

  “I see you, lad,” said a voice from the air. “You got here just in time. I’m closin’ up. Lock the door, would ye?”

  “Sure, Harry.” Mike turned around, pressed the locking switch, and heard it snap satisfactorily.

  “Okay, Mike,” said Harry MacDougal’s voice. “Come on back. I hope ye brought that bottle of scotch I asked for.”

  Mike the Angel made his way back between the towering tiers of bins as he answered. “Sure did, Harry. When did I ever forget you?”

  And, as he moved toward the rear of the store, Mike the Angel casually reached into his coat pocket and triggered the switch of a small but fantastically powerful mechanism that he always carried when he walked the streets of New York at night.

  He was headed straight into trouble, and he knew it. And he hoped he was ready for it.

  CHAPTER 2

  Mike the Angel kept his hand in his pocket, his thumb on a little plate that was set in the side of the small mechanism that was concealed therein. As he neared the door, the little plate began to vibrate, making a buzz which could only be felt, not heard. Mike sighed to himself. Vibroblades were all the rage this season.

  He push
ed open the rear door rapidly and stepped inside. It was just what he’d expected. His eyes saw and his brain recorded the whole scene in the fraction of a second before he moved. In that fraction of a second, he took in the situation, appraised it, planned his strategy, and launched into his plan of action.

  Harry MacDougal was sitting at his workbench, near the controls of the eye that watched the shop when he was in the lab. He was hunched over a little, his small, bright eyes peering steadily at Mike the Angel from beneath shaggy, silvered brows. There was no pleading in those eyes—only confidence.

  Next to Old Harry was a kid—sixteen, maybe seventeen. He had the JD stamp on his face: a look of cold, hard arrogance that barely concealed the uncertainty and fear beneath. One hand was at Harry’s back, and Mike knew that the kid was holding a vibroblade at the old man’s spine.

  At the same time, the buzzing against his thumb told Mike the Angel something else. There was a vibroblade much nearer his body than the one in the kid’s hand.

  That meant that there was another young punk behind him.

  All this took Mike the Angel about one quarter of a second to assimilate. Then he jumped.

  Had the intruders been adults, Mike would have handled the entire situation in a completely different way. Adults, unless they are mentally or emotionally retarded, do not usually react or behave like children. Adolescents can, do, and must—for the very simple reason that they have not yet had time to learn to react as adults.

  Had the intruders been adults, and had Mike the Angel behaved the way he did, he might conceivably have died that night. As it was, the kids never had a chance.

  Mike didn’t even bother to acknowledge the existence of the punk behind him. He leaped, instead, straight for the kid in the dead-black suède zipsuit who was holding the vibroblade against Harry MacDougal’s spine. And the kid reacted exactly as Mike the Angel had hoped, prayed, and predicted he would.

  The kid defended himself.