Psychomech (18 page)

But what of this tramp? A subject for Psychomech? The perfect subject? Possibly. What drives a man to the road in the first place? What reduces a man to that position of penury, seemingly satisfied merely to exist, but outside of society?
Something
must have driven this man out, had set his feet to wandering, to escaping. And if that something could be found… would that give him back the spark? Would it return him whole to the world of men?

That was what Psychomech was all about: a mechanical psychoanalyst, designed to seek out the fear in a man’s mind and crush it—but the fear, not the mind! And that was where Psychomech had so far failed. Wyatt blamed the machine’s designer and operator, Hans Maas, or Otto Krippner as he had been when his master was Hitler; but within himself Wyatt knew that this was an injustice, that without Maas his fortune would have failed long ago. For more than twenty-five years they had been together; and Wyatt’s reputation (if somewhat jaded or tarnished now) had been built on the Nazi’s knowledge. Why, Maas had forgotten more of psychoanalysis and the allied sciences than Wyatt could ever hope to learn.

If only the man’s damned machine could be made to function! But even in that respect Wyatt knew that he must blame himself. He had not allowed the German the money he had needed to build the thing. Maas had worked quite literally to a shoe string budget. And like all projects built on shaky foundations, the machine had let them down. That had been six months ago, since when Maas had made several adjustments and alterations, but—

Still Wyatt shuddered when he thought about it.

The subject (Wyatt knew his name but could no longer think of him as having a name, or of needing one) had been middle-aged, middle-income, middling in every respect—except for one. His rampant, runaway, and rapidly accelerating neuroses. The man had been riddled with minor mental disorders, complexes, neurotic imaginings and fancies and fears of all sorts and natures. Frightened of his own wife, his very children, even afraid of Wyatt’s treatment (and as it happened with good cause), he had been a wreck.

At first it appeared that there was hope, a certain slow response to Wyatt’s orthodox psychiatry. The subject had seemed to improve. Then—

Maas had suggested that they use Psychomech, that they task the machine with its first real problem. And again there was a positive response, an improvement in the subject. Of course he had been sworn to secrecy: Wyatt had impressed upon his all too receptive mind the machine’s experimental nature and the fact that its use was vastly expensive—which in fact it was not. Their agreement had been simple: the subject would be, to all intents and purposes, a guinea pig, and his treatment would be the substance of his reward. Mental stability in return for lending his mind to Psychomech. That was how it was supposed to have been…

And at first it had seemed to work. One by one Psychomech had discovered and destroyed the subject’s innermost terrors, functioning perfectly and rapidly as it ferreted out his fears and gave him mastery over them. Wyatt and Maas grew over-confident; the profits to be made through Psychomech were enormous; the pair could no longer afford to waste such potential on people like the subject. Moreover, Maas now desired to test the machine to its full capacity.

Condensing what should have been a long course of visits into one last weekend, they had strapped the subject into Psychomech for the last time and Maas had set the controls. Then, leaving the anaesthetized man and humming machine alone together, they had gone about their normal business, confident that within two short days the machine would make of the subject a new, better man. Instead—

Inside six hours Psychomech had turned him into a gibbering, raving idiot!

Something had failed within the machine. A fuse blown, a wire snapped, a valve filament shorted, something as simple as that. And Psychomech, its function reversed, had pumped the subject so full of fear as to crack his mind wide open.

Wyatt had managed to get away with it, had somehow managed to keep it quiet (the subject had been half-mad already, and something outside the psychiatrist’s sphere of knowledge had—finally driven him over the brink), but it was a close thing. And somehow Psychomech escaped detection; no mention was ever made of any mechanical device or aid as used in the subject’s treatment.

Maas had not even suffered an investigation, of course, for what was he but Wyatt’s gardener and handyman? No more than a dozen or so people even knew that he existed, and less cared. And if he suddenly ceased to exist… who would miss him?

Just like the tramp. Who would miss a tramp?

For now Wyatt put everything from his mind and turned to the girl. He touched her, and again, insistently, and her blue eyes sluggishly opened. ‘Darling,’ she whispered, her white arms twining round his neck. She made to cradle him between her legs but he drew back, roughly turning her over on to her face.

‘No, not that way,’ he told her, his cultured voice guttural with lust. ‘That was last time. This time we do it this way…’

And in a nearby room whose door was triple-padlocked, Psychomech stood in idle silence, dead, inert, switched off. Psychomech: a mechanical mishmash, a potential God-maker…

‘Oh, I know what did it,’ the tramp told them. ‘What does it every time. Rape!’

‘Rape?’ Wyatt half-filled the tramps glass with sherry. ‘I’m not sure I follow you.’

‘Rape, yes—my wife was raped. Since then, well, it just went from bad to worse. I can’t keep it from my mind, d’you see? Booze is the only solution. The soft blackness deep in the heart of a bottle.’

Maas and Wyatt looked meaningfully at each other as the tramp reached out for the decanter and filled his glass to its brim. The German glanced at the ragged, seated figure out of the corner of his eye, saw that he was staring into his glass and took the opportunity to nod a slow affirmative at Wyatt. In return, the psychiatrist pursed his lips for a moment, and finally nodded his agreement. George Hammond Esq, of no fixed abode, was to be the new subject, test material for the rebuilt Psychomech.

With or without Wyatt’s agreement, Maas had already decided as much. That is to say, he had set his black heart on it. He needed the machine tested, and not for Wyatt’s purely selfish or avaricious reasons. Wyatt was no technician, no engineer; he understood only half of Psychomech’s components. The rest of the machine was a mystery; meant nothing to him. But it meant everything to Maas, its builder. For when at last that secret part of the machine was brought into play, then there would be a wonder. Wyatt saw Psychomech as some sort of panacea for mental maladies and morbid imaginings—which in part it was or could be—but Maas had built it for an entirely different purpose. Psychomech was the booster which might multiply Man’s latent psychic powers to the very limits of the ESP Universe!

Last night, after speaking to Wyatt, Maas had gone out and quietly dropped the latch on the garden shed. ‘If he’s still there in the morning,’ Wyatt had said, and so Maas had ensured that he would be. And early this morning, when he had heard the girl’s tiny car start up and saw it coining down the drive from the big house, turning out past the gatehouse and away towards London, he had waked no longer but unlatched the shed and shaken the tramp awake. Then, with promises of food and strong drink, he had led him to the house.

Strangely, the man had seemed normal in almost every respect—with the one exception that he was a tramp. And finally the questioning and the drink had produced the desired result, and now Wyatt had his answer, rape. Rape had driven this man from society, had reduced him to his present condition. The rape of his wife.

‘And before that you were, well—’ the psychiatrist shrugged offhandedly, as if in casual conversation,’—you were a perfectly ordinary member of society.’ He stated it simply, skillfully avoiding making it a different question.

‘Society? Ordinary? Normal, d’you mean? Huh! Stuff your society!’ George Hammond retorted vehemently. ‘You know what society is? A zoo, that’s what. An open zoo with wild animals on the loose.’ He looked up, his mouth slack behind beard and stained moustache, slitted his eyes and winked half-stupidly. But his voice was clear and his words direct: ‘Listen, Boss, whoever you are. You want to know something? Last night, within twenty, twenty-five miles of this very house/there were two rapes and two more attempted rapes! And of the actual rapes, one was a gang-bang. You know what a gang-bang is? Well, that’s what happened to my wife. Turned her into a cabbage and me into… into this. And you talk about “society” to me?’

‘Two rapes and two attempted?’ Wyatt’s eyebrows lifted. ‘Are you quoting statistics? Is that the average for an English county?”

‘Shit, statistics—I state facts!’ the tramp’ answered. ‘Check your morning papers. You’ll find I’m right.’

‘You’ve read the papers, then?’ Maas asked.

‘Eh? Come on, Chief! You know as well as I do that I’ve been locked up fast asleep in your shed all night. I mean, it was you came and let me out! I heard you lift the latch.’

Wyatt sighed. ‘Then how do you know what’s in the papers?’

‘I
always
know, that’s how!’ The tramp turned his red-rimmed, suddenly wild eyes on Wyatt and Maas. ‘Christ, I see it, don’t I?’

‘You see it?’ Maas’s interest matched Wyatt’s scepticism.

‘Right. I see it in my dreams. All the rape in the world. All those vile bastards sticking those poor girls. Oh, some of ‘em ask for it, right enough—but what of the poor little innocents who don’t, eh? And what of me, who suffers it all?’

In answer to which, Maas and Wyatt could only shake their heads…

Then there was more probing to be done: questions about family, friends, the police; people who might know or want to know where George Hammond was; all seemingly innocent, casual, and all answered in an encouraging negative. Only George himself knew where George was, and as for family and friends: they no longer existed. The police? Oh, no—he’d always steered clear and had never had any trouble with them. No, George was no trouble to anyone—except himself. It was the dreams, you see? The dreams of rape. Which could only ever be drowned out in a bottle of decent booze.

By which time he had all but finished off an entire decanter of good sherry!

The sherry did for him, however, and he went down for the day; which was all to the good. It allowed Wyatt and Maas time to prepare for the night. Neither one of them had thought to check the morning papers, where they might easily have verified what Hammond had related to them about certain events of last night. Or to be more exact, Maas
had
considered checking—only to put the idea from his mind. It would be too much of a coincidence, too much to hope for. Later he would remember and check out of sheer curiosity—but by then it would be too late and Hammond already on the machine.

For scattered throughout the newsprint were the usual brutalities, of which not a few dealt with sexual attacks on lone females. Seven miles away in Chichester an elderly spinster had been raped by a burglar. In Winchester a girl had been threatened obscenely but had managed to frighten off her attacker. In Bognor Regis two girls had been dragged into a van, driven away and attacked in nearby woods. One of them had escaped but the other had been raped repeatedly by three drunken bullies, until police officers had caught them in the woods, still taking their terrible pleasures of the by then unconscious girl. And all within twenty-five miles of Wyatt’s house…

For all Psychomech’s electronic and mechanical intricacy, the theory behind the machine was simplicity itself. The majority of human minds harbour certain fears, each of them specific to the individual. When these are common-place they are easily recognized and named—such as claustrophobia and agoraphobia, to name two of the commonest. But fear is a much more complicated thing than that, and its sources are far more diverse than enclosed or wide-open spaces.

Psychomech’s purpose (as explained by Maas to Wyatt long ago when first he started to build the machine) was this: first of all to excite the subconscious fear areas of the subject’s psyche, then to feed both body and mind with the strength necessary to overcome the fear, the while gradually removing the fear stimulus. A dream would be the result, induced and controlled, a dream in which the subject would come face to face with his own worst nightmares—those things he most feared, the demons of his mind—which he would then overcome and destroy. Which was in effect the entire foundation of psychiatric theory and practice: to make a mind face up to and gain mastery over its own deep-seated fears. And all to be performed through the magic of Psychomech.

But Wyatt knew nothing of the machine’s principal function, which could only come into play after these initial exorcisms had taken place; knew nothing of the theory that an entirely liberated fear-free mind would realize its full ESP potential, would in fact turn man into superman. Maas, however—Maas could read the machine’s charts and graphs and so learn the full scope of its success or failure—he did know. And whereas Wyatt had agreed that George Hammond should become a guinea pig, only Maas knew how far the experiment would go. Last time there had been failure, true, when the subject’s fear-centres had been overstimulated without back-up or relief from the machine; but this time… And what if Hammond really did have this ESP power he had mentioned, this mental apparatus for remote viewing, which allowed him to see distant occurrences ‘in his dreams’, as he had it?

… In the evening Hammond came briefly awake, and was immediately subdued with a little food and several large glasses of brandy; which saw him safely out of the way until around 10.30 that night. When next he started to recover but before he could fully rouse himself, Maas gave him a mild general anaesthetic and with Wyatt’s help wheeled him into the machine room where they attached him to Psychomech. And there at last, with the many monitors taped securely into place on Hammond’s head and body and with the machine fully programmed, the experiment was ready to begin.

It was 11.10 P.M. when Maas administered the required drug, an opium derivative, and switched the machine on. The preliminary phase of dream-inducement, fear stimulation, confrontation, battle and victory would take between two—and two and a half hours to complete, but Maas had told Wyatt that it would take six. He required the extra time to check Psychomech’s secret but primary function: to supply Hammond’s mind with an extrasensory” boost which Maas should be able to monitor on his screens and graphs. In this way he hoped to develop a finer measure of control over the input calibration.