Chapter II

Dr. Morris Wolf leaned back in his chair after Jim Britten was wheeled, asleep, from the therapy room. In a random fashion he let his mind wander over the story he had just heard, savoring not only the facts, but the feelings behind them and the intuitions which they built up in his own mind.

"Well, Alma, what do you think?" he said, swiveling his chair to look at the other doctor across his desk.

She hesitated. "The story seems satisfactory, up to a point. That is, we've broken through the memory block and have determined that Glover's death was not really an accident--which of course we suspected all along. And we have a motive--of a sort."

Wolf sighed. "Yes--the motive. The boy feels that Glover is cutting him out of the credit for an important experiment, so in a burst of anger he disposes of the professor. There are just two things that bother me about that. Look."

He switched on his desk projector and ran through the microfilm card of Britten's record until he came to the examinations which Britten had taken to get the post on the space station.

"Here we have the standard Jameson test for paranoid personality. Obviously an important item in an examination of this sort. You wouldn't send even an incipient paranoid into close quarters with a group of people for two years. And so in the case of Jim Britten the Jameson test gives a negative result--no evidence of any paranoia, and in fact no evidence of any neurosis except the drive to do research."

Alma Heller lit a cigarette thoughtfully. "I see. No paranoia predicted, yet the story he tells us now is a typical textbook example of persecution psychosis. Of course...." She paused for a moment. "He might be making up this story to hide his real motive."

Wolf shook his head vigorously. "No dice. Not under deep therapy. He has to tell us the truth."

"So we have a paradox." Dr. Heller's methodical mind ticked off the possibilities systematically. "Either the early exam was wrong, in which case he was paranoid all the time, or the exam was right and he turned paranoid later. Neither of which things are supposed to happen."

"Or," Wolf presented the third possibility, "he is withholding information while in deep therapy. Also something that is not supposed to happen. So this leads us to the second point that bothers me. Britten talks about sitting up all night trying to figure out what his experiment was leading to. Yet he never mentioned what conclusion he came to. Apparently this is a crucial point which is buried in his mind so deeply that we didn't touch it with our first try."

"Could be." Alma Heller seemed skeptical. "There are a lot of very iffy questions running around in my head which could be settled simply if we could get some concrete information. Do you think you could buzz the AEC and ask them why Britten's project became classified? That would settle a number of obscure points and at the same time give us a handle with which to pry Jim open a little more."

Wolf shrugged. "We might get our heads chopped off, but we can try. My contact at the AEC is Charles Wilford. He's the one who was so anxious to know what Britten did the night of the 15th. Maybe he can trade us some information."

Wolf pushed the button for an outside line and asked for the Atomic Energy Commission, extension 5972. Wilford's image appeared on the phone screen, the picture of a large, powerful face with a great mass of gray hair. Wolf knew him only as someone high up in the personnel department of the AEC.

"Good morning, Dr. Wolf," he said. "Find anything out?"

Wolf shrugged. "Britten killed Glover, if that's what you want to know. But why? That's what really interests us. You can tell us one thing that will help us find out. And that is--did Glover really take Britten off his project for security reasons? If so, what were those reasons?"

Wilford's face froze slightly. "Obviously, Dr. Wolf, if security were involved, it is a matter I cannot discuss with you, especially over the phone. You may write me a full, confidential report, and we will consider what is to be done."

Wolf cut the connection in exasperation and pushed his chair away from the desk.

"Well, there's a bureaucratic mind for you!" he exclaimed. "He wants a problem solved and then refuses to give you the information necessary to solve the problem."

Slowly he filled his thinking pipe and lit it. "The hell with them," he said, finally. "We'll see this thing through ourselves. We'll have another session with Britten tomorrow and get to the bottom of his story."

"I hope," Alma Heller added, "that there is a bottom to be found."

* * * * *

As the attendants strapped Jim Britten on the table, the next morning, Dr. Wolf thought how often the formula for murder repeated itself in this psychiatric age. Knock off the victim, prepare a real sick motive, and be sure you'll go to a hospital for treatment, to be released after a "cure." Under these circumstances the psychiatrist must become a detective--required to dig deep for the real motive, which generally resolved itself into the classical ones to love-hate-money.

From his point of view as a doctor, any murder was a sick act, but the authorities were interested only in the legal question of whether the murderer knew what he was doing, and why.

In this case, the question of the motive had a fascination to Wolf even from a purely academic point of view.

"Let's face it," he told Britten. "We both know you killed Glover. You've heard the play-back of yesterday's session, so you can no longer fall back on the old excuse of 'everything went black and when I came to he was dead.' Nobody gets away with that any more."

Britten maintained a sullen silence.

"Just for the record," Wolf continued, "I want to fill in an important gap in the story. You told us that you sat up half the night figuring out what discovery your experiment was aiming at, but you glossed over what you actually decided at that time. Suppose we return to that night and go over the story once more in a little more detail."

Britten continued his silence, and beyond a single hostile glare from beneath half-lidded eyes, gave no expression of emotion. Wolf, as he checked the connections and slipped Britten the hypodermic, was thankful that his technique did not depend upon a friendly rapport between doctor and patient.

Presently Britten began to talk.

* * * * *

"You're being taken off the project because it has become classified secret," Glover had said, and at a blow an entire year of work had been struck out from beneath Jim Britten's feet. As he sat in his room, he picked raucous chords on his guitar and allowed the anger to wash deliciously through his consciousness.

Not for a minute did he believe the security classification story. He knew that the project was beginning to strike gold in an unexpected direction, and he knew what that direction was.

There was a discovery in the making. A discovery so precious that for every diamondlike star out there beyond the porthole there could be a bucket of diamonds accruing to the discoverer.

And Glover was after the profit himself, pushing Britten out of the way. This was the thought that clawed little furrows in his mind. Then, pushing their way into those little furrows came other thoughts such as: "Suppose Glover should have an accident. I'd have his notebooks, and...."

Then he began thinking of returning to Earth, and the vision of spending a life dedicated to research in a laboratory became clouded over; instead there arose a picture of himself riding in an expensive car, with beautiful, expensive women.

He ripped a full chord out of his guitar and began to sing.

In the morning, Glover stopped at Britten's breakfast table, annoyed with word of the ion-source burnout.

"Now how are we going to get it fixed?" he demanded, in exasperation. "Gamp cut his hand yesterday, Williams had his appendix out a week ago, Langsdorf is busy with the kicksorter, and--"

"Why don't we do it ourselves?" Britten interrupted, eagerly. "It'll do us good to get into spacesuits again."

It would do Jim Britten some good, he thought to himself. If genius was measured by the ability to spot an opportunity, then his success was assured. The plan of action was in his mind, completely formed in that instant.

On the outer skin of the satellite, the two of them alone, any one of a number of accidents could occur. Holding them down against the pull of centrifugal force would be only the magnetic shoes and a thin line. From that beginning, his mind went precisely to its conclusion.

* * * * *

"Alma," Morris Wolf said, "I'm beginning to feel very uneasy. What do we have here?"

He poured coffee into the cups on his desk.

Alma Heller looked at him shrewdly, and stirred sugar into her cup.

"I think we have a bear by the tail," she said. "We seem to peel off layers of Jim Britten's mind, and each time there's something different underneath. Every time he tells his story there is something new and contradictory in it. And there is no clue as to whether he is getting nearer or farther from the truth."

Wolf swivelled his chair around and stared out of the window onto the hospital lawn. "We thought that the deep therapy method was something perfect. Something that would make a patient tell the absolute truth as he saw it. But our patient is making hash out of it."

He lifted his coffee cup and tasted the black liquid tentatively.

"Follow it through. The first story he gave us was conscious. He said he couldn't remember exactly what happened to him. Okay. This could be a fabrication. The next story he gave under therapy conditions. He said that he killed Glover in a fit of rage because of an argument. Okay again. We could have accepted that at face value, and he would have gotten away with it, except that we got curious about a couple of things. We wondered how the paranoid tinge got into his thoughts, and we wondered exactly what it was that he and Glover were on the verge of discovering. So we tried again. Now we find that he deliberately plotted to kill Glover, and the paranoid symptoms are now so intense that he gives us a completely phony story about making millions of dollars out of the discovery, when everybody knows that you can't patent anything for personal profit when you invent it in a government laboratory."

Alma Heller lifted her hand, making a one with her forefinger. "So, our friend Jim Britten is doing two things--both of which we did not believe him capable of doing. First, he is lying and inventing stories under deep therapy. Second, he is withholding information. For notice that he is still avoiding specific mention of the result which his experiment was aiming at."

Her voice became flat, precise, and probing.

"Now, could our young physicist, Jim Britten, do this thing? No. Not unless he is an unsuspected superman type. Or--unless he has had special training and conditioning for resistance against deep therapy. How does a young physics student obtain such training? And where?"

She looked across the desk at Morris Wolf, who chewed savagely on his pipe bit.

"If I had any sense," he growled, "I'd call up the AEC and throw Jim Britten right back in their faces. If they give me a problem to solve they should at least tell me how hot they think it is. And my viscera are beginning to tell me that this is going to be a very, very warm baby. Maybe I should holler for help. I have a wife and two kids at home. I don't want to get hurt."

"Who you kidding?" Alma wanted to know. "You wouldn't let a juicy problem like this escape you just when you have it clutched about the middle. Besides, our two undercover friends from the FBI will be keeping their eyes on things. Let them earn their pay."

"Okay." Wolf came to a decision. "We'll give it one more try, and then we'll call for help. First thing tomorrow morning. In the meantime, there are two things I want. First I want Britten to have a complete physical examination. The works. Inside and outside. Blood tests, electro-encephalograph, tissue specimens, complete x-rays--everything they can think of. Then I'll spend tonight keeping company with Britten while the technicians pull down some overtime pay analyzing the examination results."

"You have an idea?"

He nodded. "At least one idea. But it needs feeding."

* * * * *

That evening Morris Wolf walked down the hospital corridor past the door of Britten's room. He entered the next door and found himself in a tiny chamber already occupied by Bill Grady. This was no surprise, for he knew that Grady and Jones kept Britten under constant surveillance. He motioned for Grady to keep his seat, and made himself comfortable in another chair, which he placed so that he could watch Britten through the one-way window set in the wall. Through this window he could see every move which Britten made, and through a loudspeaker he could hear every sound.

It was not clear in Wolf's mind precisely what he expected to find by watching Britten, but he knew that if he was to unravel his puzzle, he must know everything about the boy, including the way he walked and talked and combed his hair.

For a time Britten sat and read, then paced the floor restlessly, as if waiting for something. Finally he picked his guitar up from the bed and sat down on his chair, tuning the instrument. When he began to sing, it was quietly, as though to himself. Wolf had heard him sing before, generally folk songs from the Southern and Midwestern states.

Now there intruded into Wolf's mind a thought which had previously been on the edge of consciousness, and simultaneously his hand reached out to touch the start button on his tape recorder. The manner in which a person sings should reveal a great deal about his early life--about the kind of language he grew up with, down to the very vocal structure which has developed in his body since childhood.

As a result there are many types of voices: French voices, Tennessee voices, Italian voices, Texas voices, each with its own flavor caused by the way in which the vocal muscles have been trained by the native language, and also by the way in which people are accustomed to singing in those places.

When Wolf went home that night he carried a tape of Britten's song with him. It was convenient that he did not have to go far for an expert opinion to corroborate what he had already decided as an amateur.

He entered his house, the pleasant place with the warm colors, the rows of books, the grand piano, and of course his wife.

"Sorry I had to stay late, dear, but there's something important going on. Something really important. And you can be a big help to me right now."

"Me?" asked Lynne. "You're going back to musical therapy?"

"Not exactly," he said, dryly. "More like musical detection. I'm going to play a tape recording of a song or two, and I want your professional opinion as to what part of the world the singer came from."

He walked over to the recorder and began threading the tape. "Now pay no attention to the song itself," he instructed. "I'm interested only in the voice quality."

The tape spool unrolled slowly, and Britten's voice filled the room.

"Not bad for an amateur," Lynne commented, listening closely. For several minutes she remained silent, until finally the tape was completed.

"Well," she said, finally, "I don't think it's an American. A bit too rich. It doesn't have the French quality, nor the Italian. More chesty, kind of ripe and fruity. Central European. Hungarian, Russian, or something of that order."

Wolf kissed her solemnly. "You win first prize, girl. That's the answer I wanted, and that's the answer that fits."