The Barons of Behaviour Read online

  They were pulling him out of the chair. He could feel blood running down the side of his face. The hysterical beat of the music was reaching his consciousness through a ringing ear.

  He pointed the finger with the scrambler at the man who was pulling him out of the chair. Confusion and disorientation distorted the man’s face. He screamed and stumbled backward into the people pressing behind him.

  The sec made a strange sound behind him. His drugged mind raced ahead at full speed. The second blow had hit his face only a few seconds ago.

  His fingers wiggled on the buttons of the control panel. Formula eighty-two. Only two digits. Each button had a different texture, a scheme he had worked out to help him use the generator while he was drugged. Two tiny points pricked his finger and he pushed in the eight.

  He waved the scrambler in wide, sweeping arcs. A rabbit punch sent pain shooting up his left arm. Hands grabbed his shoulders and shoved him forward and up. His forefinger slid across the smooth, hemispheric surface of the two button.

  Twenty voices screamed with pleasure. A fist hit him in the stomach. A hand grabbed his arm and spun him around. Pain made him close his eyes. Somebody kicked him in the ankle. He opened his eyes and saw the sec fighting with a strange smile on his face.

  The smell of human vomit filled the summer air.

  A dozen voices gagged simultaneously. The hands gripping his body let him go. He fell back and hit the ground, waving his arms like a baby. All around him people pressed their hands against their faces and stumbled away from the chair with their backs bent double. A girl closed her eyes and fainted. A man old enough to be his father tripped over the edge of the sidewalk and lay on the grass gagging. Retching, swearing people stampeded across the lawns.

  The sec’s big body blocked out the sky. Strong arms pulled him up and shoved him into the wheelchair. Wheels rumbled on the sidewalk. The girl jumped in front of them waving her arms and jumped back when the sec nearly ran her down. Even she looked sick.

  II

  He knew Sue had been worried as soon as he entered the apartment. She had taken off the slacks and blouse outfit she had been wearing when he had left and put on an outfit she usually only wore when she went out: a calf-length, orange version of an African toga, that set off her black hair and fair skin and made her look as dignified as a queen. She could endure almost anything, she claimed, if she could face, it feeling dignified and well-dressed.

  His four-year-old daughter, Nancy, ran across die living room yelling daddee. He squatted on the floor and pulled her into his arms. Clean female hair brushed against the side of his face. His two year old, Ellen, jumped up and down beside him and yelled.

  He picked up Ellen and stood up. She watched him from the kitchen door. His six year old, Lorin, smiled at him from the painting she was working on, and he waved jauntily and smiled back. He couldn’t look at Sue. He could feel every bruise and scratch on his face glowing like a neon sign under all the work the technicians in the cosmetic room at the hospital had done on him during the forty-five minutes they had worked on his face.

  Nancy pulled on his leg. “You have to see the thing I made. Come on, daddy.”

  She ran across the room backward. He bounced Ellen in his arms and followed her. “How did it go?” Sue said.

  “I’ll tell you later.”

  He looked down at the thing Nancy had made with her latest construction set. It looked like a square tower with a dome on top and some kind of walled area around it.

  “That looks very interesting, love. Is there any chance you can tell me what it is?”

  Nancy squatted on the floor. She turned a gear and the dome started turning. A plastic fish shape slid out of a door and circled the walled area and she looked up. She had her mother’s glossy hair and her mother’s bright, intelligent eyes, and he had a feeling she was going to be more like her mother than any of them. They were all slender, intelligent girls but Nancy already had that extra little liveliness that had made him fall in love with Sue and with half the other girls he had ever fallen in love with. She wasn’t as pretty as Rachel or Lorin, and she wasn’t as intelligent as Margaret, but he could see her striding through life with that extra intensity that made everything Sue did seem twice as exciting as it should have.

  “It’s an apartment house for some astronomer whales,” Nancy said. “They’re studying the stars so they can navigate better.”

  Ellen wiggled in his arms. “Ellen help. Ellen help.”

  He bent over and scrubbed Nancy’s hair with his palm. He could feel the pressure he was under working on every organ in his body.

  “That’s exactly what I thought it was. Excuse me a minute while I make a phone call, love. I’ll be right back.”

  Nancy jumped up and grabbed his arm. “You said you were going to play!”

  He put Ellen on the floor and straightened up. “I’ll be right back.”

  “You said you’d play as soon as you got home. You promised.”

  She threw her arms around his leg and pressed her face against his thigh. The beginning of a tantrum twisted her face.

  Sue’s hands cracked like a pistol shot. “Leave daddy alone! Let him make his phone call!”

  He hurried down the hall to his bedroom with a four-year-old voice wailing behind his back. The bedroom door slid shut behind him and he turned toward the life-size phone screen mounted on the wall.

  “Computer. Call Dr. Robert Dazella in Washington, D.C.”

  The screen blinked twice. Dazella’s name and phone number appeared in the lower right-hand comer and the phone started buzzing at the other end.

  He waited with his hands clasped behind his back. He was a tall, thin man, and Sue claimed he oscillated between two postures; either he was sprawled all over a chair or he was standing up and pacing the floor like a sailing captain on the deck of a ship.

  Dazella’s ugly, big-browed face jumped onto the screen. His eyes scanned Nicholson’s body as if he were reading a report from one of his subordinates.

  “I see you survived anyway,” Dazella said. “How did it go?”

  “I ran into a little opposition. They set a mob on me and I had to break it up.”

  “The bastards don’t waste any time, do they? Did they hurt anything important?”

  “I got some minor bruises. I put in a couple of hours at the hospital so Sue wouldn’t run away from me when I came home, but I think I came out ahead. I stumbled over a little secret of theirs while I was under the drug.”

  “You found something you can use already?”

  “It could come in handy sooner or later. It’s a little grisly, but it’s the kind of thing we can turn around and use against them now that we know it’s there.”

  “Is it so important to them they may try to have me assassinated if you break down and actually tell me some of the details?”

  “I rechecked the phone for taps this morning. They already know I know about it anyway.”

  “You may as well let me know about it, too. The more people know about it, the less reason they’ll have to shut you up.”

  It had been a long time since he had seen Dazella look shocked. Lincoln had once said any man over forty was responsible for his face, and he could have used Dazella as supporting evidence. Dazella was a successful businessman and political organizer partly because he was a tough-minded man who could accept most of the realities without flinching. They had been working together for five years now and they had used psych techniques in both the campaigns that had put Dazella in the House of Representatives.

  “It’s a very economical gimmick,” Nicholson said. “One area, one type, and they can hit everybody with the same kind of stimulus. They can work on the damned place every day if they want to and never have to worry about the stimulus that works on one voter and turns his next door neighbor against them. They can probably sample one percent of the people in the area and come up with the same results they’d get if they sampled everybody.”

  Dazella sho
ok his head. “I knew the bastards had come a long way but 111 be Goddamned if I thought they’d gotten that far.”

  “It wouldn’t even have occurred to me if I hadn’t been drugged.”

  “How the hell could they set a thing like that up in five years? Some of those people must have lived in that damned place since the seventies. Boyd may have started playing around with psych techniques before John Hill started working for him but I’ll be damned if I can believe he could have come up with something like that himself.”

  “I thought about that on the way home. They could have had a high proportion of this particular G-type living there to start with. The houses are built so they’d appeal to this type. Hill could have noticed it and started slanting the advertising for the place so it would up the percentage. He could have had fifty or sixty percent when he started. I’d say it’s about ninety-five percent successful right now.”

  “And you’re still willing to go back there?”

  “After this? If this doesn’t convince some of our friends these bastards have to be brought down, nothing will.”

  “This was only supposed to be a probe, remember? What the hell do you think they’ll have waiting for you next time if they can set up a situation like the one they’ve got in that development? I know how these people think, Ralph. I’m not trying to talk you into backing out of this, but this is no time to get locked into it either. A little incident like this is all the evidence a guy like Boyd needs. He knows you’re definitely a threat now. He’ll hit you with everything he’s got and try to crush you before you get bigger.”

  “He tried that today,” Nicholson said. “This is no time to get overconfident, but they didn’t exactly prove they can’t be beaten either. This is the first time Hill’s had to operate in a situation where somebody’s trying to push people left while he’s trying to push them right. If he’d ever thought he might have to face another political organization armed with psych techniques, he wouldn’t have set a thing like Greenplace up. That’s the kind of gimmick that only makes sense when you don’t have to worry about somebody else finding out about it and using it against you. I turned it against them today and I can turn it against them when we start a campaign, too.”

  “That still doesn’t mean you can come out of this thing in one piece if Boyd decides they should focus everything they’ve got on you personally. I’m afraid I’ve got some news for you, too, Ralph. It isn’t quite as upsetting as yours, but don’t convince yourself you have to keep this up before you’ve heard it.”

  Nicholson tensed. There was a bottle of twenty-minute tranquilizers on the shelf over the bed and it was beginning to look as attractive as his bottle had probably looked when he had been a baby.

  “I may as well get it all in one day. What are they doing to the world now?”

  “I had a long talk with one of my friends in the Philadelphia organization the other day and he told me something I’d never heard before. He called me up because a couple of Boyd’s people had been asking questions about you, and I told him you were worried about the possibility they might psych you and asked him if he’d give them some false information for us. He told me he didn’t think it would make a damn bit of difference. Boyd isn’t limited to keeping tabs on people in his district. He can probably get his hands on anything the central computers in the census bureau can pull out of the federal files. He can’t do it often, but he can do it now and then if he wants the information bad enough.”

  Nicholson’s heart jumped. He straightened up before he could get his emotions under control and Dazella scanned him again. He could have typed himself with one glance at the personal biography the census bureau could put together from all the records stored in the federal computers. It would only have been a guess, but any competent psychologist could have verified it in two or three days without his subject even knowing he was being tested.

  “I probably should have told you about it before I let you go back there,” Dazella said. “I didn’t comer the guy who could really verify it’s true until this morning and I didn’t want you to go back there with something like that in the back of your mind if it wasn’t true. I can’t prove it to you, but don’t kid yourself into thinking it isn’t true. Nobody came up. to me and told me Boyd’s people made him tell them how to get around the locks on the computers. But I talked to two people I trust beside the guy I talked to this morning and they all told me they’re convinced it’s true. I wouldn’t make another move if I were you without assuming he’s got you typed and taking it into consideration. You’re the strategic point in the whole project, Ralph. Once he finds out you’re the only psychologist on the other side he’ll go after you with the biggest guns he’s got.”

  The haze between Nicholson and the screen disappeared. The part of his personality that monitored his emotions smiled wryly. He wasn’t reacting like this because he was afraid they would psych him. He had known they would probably type him when he had started this; the census records would make it easy for them, but there were a dozen other ways they could do it if they wanted to spend the money. He was cringing like a cornered animal because a few more people were going to learn Ralph Nicholson was a human being with human emotions and human drives. He had been typed ever since he had enrolled in graduate school in 1980—dozens of people knew the basic structure of his personality—but the old reflexes still leaped into action every time he learned somebody new might be added to the mob.

  He shook his head. “I should have known the bastards could do something like that. Give them another twenty years and they’ll be running the country like it’s a damned push-button toy.”

  “Forget the damned country. Give them another month and they may be running you.”

  “It doesn’t make that much difference. I knew they could type me when they started this. They could probably put a round the clock crew on me and keep me under surveillance for six months if they had to, with the kind of organization they’ve got. I’ve only got two defenses against psych attacks that really count. I know what kind of techniques they’ll probably use and I’ve got Ed Saboletsky backing me up. I talked to Ed on Thursday and he finally gave in. I’m supposed to call him once a week and get an hour long psych check. He’ll call you right away if he thinks they’ve been working on me and he’s supposed to call me any time he hears something unusual has happened to me.”

  “What if they do something to you he can’t detect?”

  “I picked Ed Saboletsky because he’s the best therapist I know and because he thinks any successful psychologist who gets involved in politics should have his own psychology examined by a select committee of the American Psychological Association. He’s so worried about me he’ll probably think I’ve been psyched if I call one of my daughters by the wrong name.”

  “What if they do something to you that can’t be repaired?”

  “What are you trying to do, Robert, scare me? We talked about that the first time I told you I wanted to do this, damnit. I can sit down right now and work out four different ways they could condition me so I’d become a nervous wreck every time I went near Windham County. I got a first hand look at the risks I’m running three hours ago, remember?”

  Dazella scowled. A child screeched in one of the other rooms and Nicholson’s muscles tensed as if somebody had sounded the buzzer that was supposed to precede the electric shock. He was supposed to take Sue to a big party tonight and Nancy was probably going to pounce on him as soon as he left the bedroom. A twenty-minute chemical vacation would make a big difference.

  “Do me two favors, Ralph,” Dazella said. “I can’t talk you out of going ahead with this if you really want to. And I’m not sure I really want you to stop anyway. But use a car next time, Goddamnit And for God’s sake, quit making excuses about taking self-defense instruction. I’ve been talking to the head man at the dojo Peggy studies karate at and and I think we’ve come up with something you can use. Have you ever heard of the little stick, the six-inch stick?”
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  Nicholson shook his head. He was a rare creature in this day and age; he had never studied karate, aikido, or jujitsu. He had wanted to learn a practical self-defense system ever since he had been a kid but he had been too busy when he had been a student and he had never gotten around to it since then.

  Dazella reached inside his jacket and pulled out a white plastic stick. “It’s just a little stick like this. You use it just like you use the fist or the open hand in karate. You strike at the nerve centers and the pain centers with the ends of the stick. The big difference is that you can learn to use it in a lot less time than it takes you to leam karate. You can practice in between patients in your office if you want to. You’ll need an hour of general instruction—they can give you that over the phone—and you can buy a practice dummy and work out by yourself after that. They’ve got a dummy that sells for five hundred dollars. It comes with a complete programmed course and they claim they can modify the course to suit your schedule. You can put the program in your office computer and plug the dummy into the computer with a single plug.”

  Dazella’s right hand rose above his shoulders. He stabbed at an invisible target in front of him as if he were holding a knife. “Chin…solar plexus…side of the neck…eyes…You can kill somebody with this thing if you know what to do with it. Half the people in the country would be using them if everybody hadn’t gotten hooked on the other unarmed arts first.”