Welcome to the Monkey House: The Special Edition (22 page)

·    ·    ·

The group formed again around the jeep, gravely now, watching the sergeant try to coax Joe into letting go.

“I don’t want to get tough, Joe. Come on—take it easy, Joe. Let go, now, Joe, so’s I can drive. See, I can’t steer or nothin’ with you hanging on right there.”

“Papa!”

“Come on, over to my lap, Joe,” said the lieutenant in German.

“Papa!”

“Joe, Joe, looky,” said a soldier. “Chocolate! Want some more chocolate, Joe? See? Whole bar, Joe, all yours. Jus’ leggo the sergeant and move over into the lieutenant’s lap.”

Joe tightened his grip on the sergeant.

“Don’t put the chocolate back in your pocket, man! Give it to Joe anyways,” said a soldier angrily. “Somebody go get a case of D bars off the truck, and throw ’em in the back for Joe. Give that boy chocolate enough for the nex’ twenny years.”

“Look, Joe,” said another soldier, “ever see a wristwatch? Look at the wristwatch, Joe. See it glow, boy? Move over in the lieutenant’s lap, and I’ll let you listen to it tick. Tick, tick, tick, Joe. Come on, want to listen?”

Joe didn’t move.

The soldier handed the watch to him. “Here, Joe, you take it anyway. It’s yours.” He walked away quickly.

“Man,” somebody called after him, “you crazy? You paid fifty dollars for that watch. What business a little boy got with any fifty-dollar watch?”

“No—I ain’t crazy. Are you?”

“Naw, I ain’t crazy. Neither one of us crazy, I guess. Joe—want a knife? You got to promise to be careful with it, now. Always cut
away
from yourself. Hear? Lieutenant, when you get back, you tell him always cut
away
from hisself.”

“I don’t want to go back. I want to stay with
papa
,” said Joe tearfully.

“Soldiers can’t take little boys with them, Joe,” said the lieutenant in German. “And we’re leaving early in the morning.”

“Will you come back for me?” said Joe.

“We’ll come back if we can, Joe. Soldiers never know where they’ll be from one day to the next. We’ll come back for a visit, if we can.”

“Can we give old Joe this case of D bars, lieutenant?” said a soldier carrying a cardboard carton of chocolate bars.

·    ·    ·

“Don’t ask me,” said the lieutenant. “I don’t know anything about it. I never saw anything of any case of D bars, never heard anything about it.”

“Yessir.” The soldier laid his burden down on the jeep’s back seat.

“He ain’t gonna let go,” said the sergeant miserably. “You drive, lieutenant, and me and Joe’ll sit over there.”

The lieutenant and the sergeant changed places, and the jeep began to move.

“ ’By, Joe!”

“You be a good boy, Joe!”

“Don’t you eat all that chocolate at once, you hear?”

“Don’t cry, Joe. Give us a smile.”

“Wider, boy—that’s the stuff!”

·    ·    ·

“Joe, Joe, wake up, Joe.” The voice was that of Peter, the oldest boy in the orphanage, and it echoed damply from the stone walls.

Joe sat up, startled. All around his cot were the other orphans, jostling one another for a glimpse of Joe and the treasures by his pillow.

“Where did you get the hat, Joe—and the watch, and knife?” said Peter. “And what’s in the box under your bed?”

Joe felt his head, and found a soldier’s wool knit cap there. “Papa,” he mumbled sleepily.

“Papa!” mocked Peter, laughing.

“Yes,” said Joe. “Last night I went to see my papa, Peter.”

“Could he speak German, Joe?” said a little girl wonderingly.

“No, but his friend could,” said Joe.

“He didn’t see his father,” said Peter. “Your father is far, far away, and will never come back. He probably doesn’t even know you’re alive.”

“What did he look like?” said the girl.

Joe glanced thoughtfully around the room. “Papa is as high as this ceiling,” he said at last. “He is wider than that door.” Triumphantly, he took a bar of chocolate from under his pillow. “And as brown as that!” He held out the bar to the others. “Go on, have some. There is plenty more.”

“He doesn’t look anything like that,” said Peter. “You aren’t telling the truth, Joe.”

“My papa has a pistol as big as this bed, almost, Peter,” said Joe happily, “and a cannon as big as this house. And there were hundreds and hundreds like him.”

“Somebody played a joke on you, Joe,” said Peter. “He wasn’t your father. How do you know he wasn’t fooling you?”

“Because he cried when he left me,” said Joe simply.
“And he promised to take me back home across the water as fast as he could.” He smiled airily. “Not like the river, Peter—across more water than you’ve
ever
seen. He promised, and then I let him go.”

(1953)

L
ET ME BEGIN
by saying that I don’t know any more about where Professor Arthur Barnhouse is hiding than anyone else does. Save for one short, enigmatic message left in my mailbox on Christmas Eve, I have not heard from him since his disappearance a year and a half ago.

What’s more, readers of this article will be disappointed if they expect to learn how
they
can bring about the so-called “Barnhouse Effect.” If I were able and willing to give away that secret, I would certainly be something more important than a psychology instructor.

I have been urged to write this report because I did research under the professor’s direction and because I was the first to learn of his astonishing discovery. But while I was his student I was never entrusted with knowledge of how the mental forces could be released and directed. He was unwilling to trust anyone with that information.

I would like to point out that the term “Barnhouse Effect” is a creation of the popular press, and was never used by Professor Barnhouse. The name he chose for the phenomenon was
“dynamopsychism,”
or
force of the mind
.

I cannot believe that there is a civilized person yet to be convinced that such a force exists, what with its destructive effects on display in every national capital. I think humanity has always had an inkling that this sort of force does exist. It has been common knowledge that some people are luckier than
others with inanimate objects like dice. What Professor Barnhouse did was to show that such “luck” was a measurable force, which in his case could be enormous.

By my calculations, the professor was about fifty-five times more powerful than a Nagasaki-type atomic bomb at the time he went into hiding. He was not bluffing when, on the eve of “Operation Brainstorm,” he told General Honus Barker: “Sitting here at the dinner table, I’m pretty sure I can flatten anything on earth—from Joe Louis to the Great Wall of China.”

There is an understandable tendency to look upon Professor Barnhouse as a supernatural visitation. The First Church of Barnhouse in Los Angeles has a congregation numbering in the thousands. He is godlike in neither appearance nor intellect. The man who disarms the world is single, shorter than the average American male, stout, and averse to exercise. His I.Q. is 143, which is good but certainly not sensational. He is quite mortal, about to celebrate his fortieth birthday, and in good health. If he is alone now, the isolation won’t bother him too much. He was quiet and shy when I knew him, and seemed to find more companionship in books and music than in his associations at the college.

Neither he nor his powers fall outside the sphere of Nature. His dynamopsychic radiations are subject to many known physical laws that apply in the field of radio. Hardly a person has not now heard the snarl of “Barnhouse static” on his home receiver. The radiations are affected by sunspots and variations in the ionosphere.

However, they differ from ordinary broadcast waves in several important ways. Their total energy can be brought to bear on any single point the professor chooses, and that energy is undiminished by distance. As a weapon, then, dynamopsychism has an impressive advantage over bacteria and atomic bombs, beyond the fact that it costs nothing to use: it enables the professor to single out critical individuals and objects instead
of slaughtering whole populations in the process of maintaining international equilibrium.

As General Honus Barker told the House Military Affairs Committee: “Until someone finds Barnhouse, there is no defense against the Barnhouse Effect.” Efforts to “jam” or block the radiations have failed. Premier Slezak could have saved himself the fantastic expense of his “Barnhouseproof” shelter. Despite the shelter’s twelve-foot-thick lead armor, the premier has been floored twice while in it.

There is talk of screening the population for men potentially as powerful dynamopsychically as the professor. Senator Warren Foust demanded funds for this purpose last month, with the passionate declaration: “He who rules the Barnhouse Effect rules the world!” Commissar Kropotnik said much the same thing, so another costly armaments race, with a new twist, has begun.

This race at least has its comical aspects. The world’s best gamblers are being coddled by governments like so many nuclear physicists. There may be several hundred persons with dynamopsychic talent on earth, myself included. But, without knowledge of the professor’s technique, they can never be anything but dice-table despots. With the secret, it would probably take them ten years to become dangerous weapons. It took the professor that long. He who rules the Barnhouse Effect is Barnhouse and will be for some time.

Popularly, the “Age of Barnhouse” is said to have begun a year and a half ago, on the day of Operation Brainstorm. That was when dynamopsychism became significant politically. Actually, the phenomenon was discovered in May, 1942, shortly after the professor turned down a direct commission in the Army and enlisted as an artillery private. Like X-rays and vulcanized rubber, dynamopsychism was discovered by accident.

·    ·    ·

From time to time Private Barnhouse was invited to take part in games of chance by his barrack mates. He knew nothing
about the games, and usually begged off. But one evening, out of social grace, he agreed to shoot craps. It was either terrible or wonderful that he played, depending upon whether or not you like the world as it now is.

“Shoot sevens, Pop,” someone said.

So “Pop” shot sevens—ten in a row to bankrupt the barracks. He retired to his bunk and, as a mathematical exercise, calculated the odds against his feat on the back of a laundry slip. His chances of doing it, he found, were one in almost ten million! Bewildered, he borrowed a pair of dice from the man in the bunk next to his. He tried to roll sevens again, but got only the usual assortment of numbers. He lay back for a moment, then resumed his toying with the dice. He rolled ten more sevens in a row.

He might have dismissed the phenomenon with a low whistle. But the professor instead mulled over the circumstances surrounding his two lucky streaks. There was one single factor in common: on both occasions,
the same thought train had flashed through his mind just before he threw the dice
. It was that thought train which aligned the professor’s brain cells into what has since become the most powerful weapon on earth.

·    ·    ·

The soldier in the next bunk gave dynamopsychism its first token of respect. In an understatement certain to bring wry smiles to the faces of the world’s dejected demagogues, the soldier said, “You’re hotter’n a two-dollar pistol, Pop.” Professor Barnhouse was all of that. The dice that did his bidding weighed but a few grams, so the forces involved were minute; but the unmistakable fact that there were such forces was earth-shaking.

Professional caution kept him from revealing his discovery immediately. He wanted more facts and a body of theory to go with them. Later, when the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, it was fear that made him hold his peace. At no time were his experiments, as Premier Slezak called them, “a bourgeois
plot to shackle the true democracies of the world.” The professor didn’t know where they were leading.

In time, he came to recognize another startling feature of dynamopsychism:
its strength increased with use
. Within six months, he was able to govern dice thrown by men the length of a barracks distant. By the time of his discharge in 1945, he could knock bricks loose from chimneys three miles away.

Charges that Professor Barnhouse could have won the last war in a minute, but did not care to do so, are perfectly senseless. When the war ended, he had the range and power of a 37-millimeter cannon, perhaps—certainly no more. His dynamopsychic powers graduated from the small-arms class only after his discharge and return to Wyandotte College.

I enrolled in the Wyandotte Graduate School two years after the professor had rejoined the faculty. By chance, he was assigned as my thesis adviser. I was unhappy about the assignment, for the professor was, in the eyes of both colleagues and students, a somewhat ridiculous figure. He missed classes or had lapses of memory during lectures. When I arrived, in fact, his shortcomings had passed from the ridiculous to the intolerable.

“We’re assigning you to Barnhouse as a sort of temporary thing,” the dean of social studies told me. He looked apologetic and perplexed. “Brilliant man, Barnhouse, I guess. Difficult to know since his return, perhaps, but his work before the war brought a great deal of credit to our little school.”

When I reported to the professor’s laboratory for the first time, what I saw was more distressing than the gossip. Every surface in the room was covered with dust; books and apparatus had not been disturbed for months. The professor sat napping at his desk when I entered. The only signs of recent activity were three overflowing ashtrays, a pair of scissors, and a morning paper with several items clipped from its front page.

As he raised his head to look at me, I saw that his eyes were clouded with fatigue. “Hi,” he said, “just can’t seem to get my sleeping done at night.” He lighted a cigarette, his
hands trembling slightly. “You the young man I’m supposed to help with a thesis?”

“Yes, sir,” I said. In minutes he converted my misgivings to alarm.