The Mind Game, by Norman Spinrad

Re: The Mind Game, by Norman Spinrad

Postby admin » Sat Mar 19, 2016 9:03 am

Chapter Ten

Gomez seemed to have recovered his impenetrable veneer of enigmatic toughness since their last session. He sat behind his desk steepling his fingers and smiling a tight, sardonic smile that set Weller's teeth on edge. "Sit down. Weller," he said coldly. "This won't take long."

Weller perched on the edge of his chair, gladder than ever that he had a copy of the Master Contact Sheet locked in his house. If worse came to worse, this bastard was going to find out who held a high card in the hole!

''I've discussed your case with Torrez, and we've charted a scenario," Gomez said. "You've already been informed of part of it."

"I have?"

"You think that the directive to let you begin directing could have come from anywhere short of Monitor headquarters?"

"I see," Weller said. But do I? Throwing goodies my way hardly seems to be what this business is about. Is Sara part of the deal too?

Gomez leaned back in his chair. "We've decided that we've carried life analysis as far as it could go in your case," he said. "And that turned out not to be far enough. So now we're giving you a chance to show us where you're really at. What you do as a director will be part of it." He gave Weller a false grin that told him that the other side of the coin was going to be something nasty indeed.

"I'm sure I can satisfy you as a director," Weller said fatuously.

''I'm sure you can too," Gomez said. "If you could ream out a monkey show every week, I'm sure you can produce anything we tell you to to our satisfaction without having your head behind it. A hired gun is a hired gun. As far as I'm concerned, that will prove nothing."

Weller flushed with anger, or with a flash of something that he tried to convince himself was anger. It must have shown on his face, for Gomez gave a short, brittle laugh.

"Well, we do have some insight into ourselves, don't we?" he said. "Whether we can stomach it or not."

Weller said nothing, determined not to give the son of a bitch the satisfaction of an answer.

"Well, down to business," Gomez said coldly. "The purpose of this session is to issue two life directives. You've already gotten the first: you are directed to devote your full creative energies to producing material for the movement, starting Monday." He paused and flashed a feral grin. ''You understand that the outcome of your life analysis now depends on how well and faithfully you fulfill your life directives...."

"I can handle it," Weller said evenly.

"Good," Gomez said slyly. "And I hope you can eptify your consciousness behind the second life directive too. Because also starting on Monday, you are hereby directed to report to the Transformation Center for a room assignment."

"What?"

"You've been placed under total Monitor life programming," Gomez said, seeming to taste and relish every word. "You're going to have an opportunity to live Transformationalism fulltime. During the day you'll direct for Changes Productions. You'll sleep in your room at the Transformation Center every night. There will be a midnight curfew. You'll be assigned certain housekeeping tasks. And of course, you'll be closely monitored at all times, and the spirit with which you fulfill these life directives will determine the outcome of your life analysis."

"How often am I allowed to take a piss," Weller snarled. He couldn't believe what he was hearing, he couldn't believe they would go this far. And yet, wasn't this precisely what had happened to Annie?

"You can piss whenever you want to, Weller," Gomez said. "You'll even have commissary privileges, though eating at the Center is optional."

"You're really serious about this?" Weller said. "You really expect me to --"

"Quite the contrary," Gomez snapped. "I really expect you to tell me to go fuck myself. Because 1 think you're a phony, Weller. I think your so-called dedication to Transformationalism is a scam. This is your opportunity to prove it, one way or the other. Understand the situation. You've been given a life directive, not an order. You can choose to obey it or not."

"And if I don't?"

Gomez shrugged. "If you don't, you'll be declared a regressive. You'll be fired from your job. You'll be permanently barred from all Transformation Centers. All members of Transformationalism will be under permanent life directive to ostracize you. There will be no second chance."

'''That's all?" Weller said dubiously.

Gomez laughed. "Oh, we might be able to think up a few more things," he said, deliberately making it sound totally sinister.

"What about sex?" Weller asked, probing for how far this really went, for whether or not Sara was involved.

"Ah yes, Sara English," Gomez said smugly. "A tasty piece of ass."

Weller's jaw went slack. "You know that too?" he said softly.

"It surprises you? Why? Sara requested a clarification from Owen Karel like a good little girl. And she told you she was going to do it, didn't she? She's a good Transformationalist; she accepts Monitor discipline."

"Jesus Christ!"

"Now to answer your horny little question," Gomez said. "Sara English falls into the same category as your wife: a full-time Transformationalist who has passed life analysis. You haven't made that level yet. You are forbidden to have sex with anyone who has, and they're forbidden to have sex with you. You can ball anyone you want to outside the movement unless they've been declared a regressive. But not in the Center."

"And I've got to be back in my own bed by midnight, or I turn into a pumpkin?"

"You got it," Gomez said. He laughed. He leered at Weller. "Sticks in your craw, doesn't it, Weller?" he said. "Some Transformationalist you are! Go ahead, tell me to get stuffed; that's what you're going to do, isn't it?"

Weller forced his mind into a state of logical, detached clarity. He didn't need Bailor to tell him that this was the acid test. If he refused to accept the life directive, it would be open warfare with Transformationalism. He didn't feel as fearful about that as he would have yesterday, not with the Master Contact Sheet as ammunition. If they started really harassing him, all he had to do was send copies of the Contact Sheet to the media, to the presidents of all the non- Transformationalist companies on the list, to the district attorney, the IRS, and any other interested agencies he could think of, and Transformationalism would be in worse shit than anything they could lay on him.

But all that could get him would be revenge. Sweet as that might be, it wouldn't bring Annie back. It wouldn't help him find her. It would only make it more impossible.

However, if he did the unexpected and played along, that would be a critical step toward finally convincing even Gomez of his sincerity, provided be could endure the situation with a smile and maintain the act full-time under constant paranoid pressure.

But what would it be like to place himself so totally in their hands? Could he maintain the act long enough to pass life analysis and get to Annie? How long would that take? Would he crack? What would happen to him if he did? There were too many imponderables -- he had to see Bailor before he made the decision.

"Do I have to tell you my decision now?" he asked.

"You do if you want a final chance to tell me what you think of me," Gomez said. "After tonight, you won't be seeing me again."

Temporize, Weller told himself. You don't have anything to lose by that. "You've got me all wrong," he said. "I don't want to tell you off. This is a heavy life decision for me, but I understand why you're doing it, and I don't resent it." He smiled ingenuously. "You're trying to find out where I really stand, and you're confronting me with the same question. And you're forcing me to answer it. I can't say I like it, but I can't help admiring the process."

Gomez shook his head unbelievingly. ''You really can surprise me, Weller," he said. "You're telling me you're accepting the life directive?"

''I'm telling you I really have to think about it," Weller said. "Do I have to give you my decision now?"

Gomez shrugged. "We're beyond bullshit," he said. "From here on in, it's what you do that counts. You either show up Monday or you don't. You don't have to say another word."

Weller gave Gomez the old Transformationalist Stare. "Then let's leave it at that," he said. Gomez stared back at him. Their eyes locked for a long moment, a contest of wills, without communication,

It was Gomez who broke it off with a little laugh. "You're something, Weller," he said. ''I'd really be glad to be wrong about you. If you turned out to be the real thing, you'd be quite an addition to the movement. You might even have the head to be a Monitor." He reached across the desk and shook Weller's hand. "I can't say it hasn't been interesting," he said. Though I can't say it's been nice knowing you, either."

"Likewise," Weller said, and he meant it. If Gomez had not been an agent of Transformationalism, if that sharp, superior mind had not been programmed by John B. Steinhardt, if he wasn't a Monitor, they might have been friends. There were not many men he respected the way he respected Gomez, despite everything, in the face of every reason not to. Ironically he was pretty sure that Gomez felt the same way about him. In a strange way they were going to miss each other.

***

Weller poured himself a shot of straight bourbon and gulped it down. Pouring himself another, he found his attention caught by the condition of his living room, something he had managed to avoid noticing for weeks.

Dirty glasses, pizza cartons, beer cans, and old Kentucky Fried Chicken buckets covered every available inch of table space. Dust was everywhere, like a carpet of filthy snow. The kitchen, he realized, was even worse -- mounded with cruddy dishes and pots, the stove larded with grease, the refrigerator filled with rotting unnameables. The bedroom was a pit of dirty clothes and grimy sheets, and the towels in the bathroom looked and smelled like something in an old gas-station men's room. I'm really becoming a slob, he thought. As if I were refusing to adjust to Annie's absence, as if I were taking it out on the house, as if cleaning up the place would be admitting something I won't let myself admit. Maybe living at the Center is the right idea. At least I'd enjoy crapping that up.

He shuddered, swilled down his second drink, went to the telephone and dialed the number of Bailor's exchange. He had a scheduled meeting with Bailor on Saturday, but that was too long to wait. He had to have it out now, tonight. He had to get the decision made immediately; living with the uncertainty was unbearable.

The operator answered on the third ring.

"Hello, this is Jack Weller. I want to get in touch with Garry Bailor immediately."

"'I'm sorry, Mr. Weller. Mr. Bailor is no longer with us."

"What?" A bubble of acid liquor burst in Weller's gut.

"He's canceled the service."

"Well, then give me his home number. This is an emergency."

"I can't do that, Mr. Weller."

"Well, then for Chrissakes, call his home number and tell him that I'm trying to reach him. You can bend the rules that far, can't you?"

There was a pause at the other end of the line. Then the operator's voice said. "Well, if it's really that important to you...."

"Believe me, it is!"

''I'll give it a try. Give me your number and I'll call you back."

Weller gave her the number and hung up his phone. Not more than thirty seconds later, it rang. He snatched it up on the first ring. "Yes?"

"I'm sorry, Mr. Weller. Mr. Bailor's home phone has been disconnected."

"Oh my God ..."

"I'm sorry ..."

"Yeah, well, thank you," Weller muttered, hanging up the receiver. A cold gray fear crept over him. The dust, the dim yellow light of the single lamp, the dirty glasses and old food containers, the heavy weight of the empty house, it all seemed to be closing in on him. His last link to the outside world had been severed. He was finally, totally, frighteningly alone.

What the fuck has happened to Bailor? Where is the son of a bitch? What's he doing to me?

He stood up. "Shit!" he screamed, kicking the coffee table. "Motherfucker!" He felt his control of himself slipping away, and he didn't know what was on the other side. And he didn't want to know, either.

Maybe Bailor's at his apartment. Yeah, maybe he's got some other poor schmuck in there. Well, screw that! For a hundred bucks a week, he can damn well be there when I need him.

***

Weller drove to Bailor's Hollywood apartment like a maniac, leadfooting the accelerator, slamming through the gears, winding the engine out raggedly, cutting off cars, daring a cop to stop him. He drove as if he were in a Grand Prix race, keeping the car constantly on the thin edge of danger, so that his entire consciousness would have to be occupied with the task, so that there would be no room for anything else.

At the entrance of the building be rang the bell to apartment 3C. No answer. He rang again. Still no answer.

Then he noticed that the doorbell was no longer marked by Bailor's cover name, "Larry Jonas." A sliver of paper with the name "Rademacher" hand-lettered on it had been slipped into the nameplate slot. He checked the mailboxes. "Rademacher" had replaced "Jonas" there, too.

"Goddamn motherfucker!" he screamed, and he smashed the heel of his hand against a whole row of doorbell buttons, pressing three or four of them at random.

A moment later the entrance buzzer sounded. He slammed the lobby door open and ran up the three flights to apartment 3C, his shoes clanging harshly on the steel stairs.

There was a dim light in the curtained picture window. The son of a bitch was there after all! Weller pounded angrily on the door with his fist. "Open up, Bailor, you son of a bitch! Open this goddamn door!"

The door opened, and a young man with long blond hair, naked to the waist, stood in the doorway zipping his fly. A blast of pot smoke hit Weller in the face.

"What the fuck do you want, man? Let's see your warrant."

"I'm not a cop," Weller snapped. "Where the hell is Garry Bailor?"

"Who?"

"Garry Bailor. The guy who lives here. Larry Jonas."

The longhair studied him with red-rimmed eyes. "Are you tripping, man?" he said.

"Look, what happened to Bailor? The guy who rented this apartment?"

"I don't know, man. I just rented this place yesterday."

"Are you a Transformationalist?"

"No, man," the longhair said. "I'm a Scorpio. You're really stoned." He looked past Weller nervously, and following his gaze, Weller saw that people were looking out their doorways across the courtyard. "I wish you'd cool it," the longhair said. "We don't need any cops here, man. You want to come in and get your head together, that's okay, we've got some downs."

All the raging energy went out of Weller like air from a balloon. I'm standing here gibbering, he realized. I'm off my nut. "Sorry," he said quietly. "I didn't mean to hassle you."

"That's okay, brother. You want to sit down? You want a couple of reds?"

"No. Thanks," Weller said, turning away and heading for the stairs.

"You're sure you're okay, man?"

"Yeah," Weller said over his shoulder. ''I'll survive."

But by the time he had reached his car, he wondered about that. Bailor bad disappeared and pulled the hole in after him. Or someone had made him disappear and wiped out all traces of his existence. Were the Monitors even now interrogating him? Had they simply snuffed him?

Or had Bailor been a phony all along? A Monitor agent that they used to establish a dependency so they could yank the rug out from under him at this strategic moment? Weller shuddered -- that was real paranoia, delusions of reference, they called it. The paranoiac believes that the whole world is a conspiracy organized against him.

He got into the car, started the engine, and began driving home. He drove slowly and carefully now, letting the driving become a mindless task, lost in his own thoughts.

All that really mattered now was that Bailor was gone. The decision was now Weller's alone; there was no one left to help him make it. There were only two alternatives and both seemed totally unacceptable. If he gave up, if he let himself be scared off, he would have nothing -- no Annie, no job, no prospects, no hope. Transformationalism had become the totality of his existence; they had swallowed him whole already. But if he went on, he would be sucked in even deeper. Along that path might lay something even worse than becoming a total cipher -- he might end up really being programmed, truly converted. He might end up becoming the enemy he was fighting. Both alternatives were unacceptable, but he was forced to choose between them.

He parked the car in the garage and went into the house. The miasmic depression of the filthy living room was unbearable. The emptiness of the bedroom was unendurable. The foul kitchen filled his mind with memories of Annie cooking there, the room all spotless and shiny. Even the toilet seemed like the Black Hole of Calcutta. He wandered from room to room aimlessly, like a ghost, unable to stand being anywhere in the house. It was dead, it was a moldering tomb, and his life was a corpse, rotting inside it.

He felt the decision unfolding its inevitability within him. A line from an old Dylan song cycled through his brain over and over again. "You're invisible now, you've got no secrets to conceal."

Finally he realized that some deeper level of his psyche was trying to tell him something, because the line was only half-true. He had nothing left in his life, but he did have a secret to conceal. Or reveal.

The Master Contact Sheet. There was enough ammunition there to make the movement pay dearly for what it had done to him. At the very least it represented a kind of insurance ...

I'll xerox up a lot of copies, he decided. I'll put them in sealed envelopes with cover letters, stamp them, and address them to the district attorney, the Times, a couple of TV stations, and the IRS. I'll make up four packets of duplicated lists to be sent to the media and the authorities. And I'll mail them tonight to my agent, to Wally Bruner, to Bob Shumway, and to Uncle Bill, with instructions to mail out the envelopes if they don't get word from me to the contrary every thirty days.

I've really got something on them, he realized. And this is fail-safe. And this can do more than assure my own safety. I can use it to blackmail them into letting Annie go once I find her! One member more or less certainly isn't going to be worth having that Master Contact Sheet made public to them!

And if I go on, if I live at the Center, maybe I can dig up more dirt, maybe I can build up a dossier that will destroy them once and for all. Maybe I can somehow get Annie back and torpedo Transformationalism too.

He found that now that the decision had been made, he could stop pacing and sit down on the edge of the couch. He had nothing left to lose, but he now had plenty to gain. The risk was great and the odds imponderable, but his commitment to the battle had been total for a long time. He only had to look around the house to realize that. The war was on already, all he could do was dare everything and go in for the kill.
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Re: The Mind Game, by Norman Spinrad

Postby admin » Sat Mar 19, 2016 9:03 am

Chapter Eleven

Weller found an overnight parking space only two blocks away, trudged wearily into the Los Angeles Transformation Center, showed his pass to the gatekeeper, took the elevator to the fourth floor, entered his unlockable room, and flopped down on the bed to wait till six-thirty, when dinner, such as it was, would be served.

Like a good little Transformationalist he had been taking his meals at the Center during the four days he had been there. The idea of eating alone in tacky downtown Hollywood grease parlors was monumentally depressing, and he never seemed to have the energy to do anything else. Besides, they had him down for dishwashing, and he'd have to be back at the Center by seven-thirty to do his assigned shit work anyway.

The room itself was as featureless as such a tiny cubicle could be: a Salvation Army bureau, a closet, a night table with a single lamp, a cheap motel desk and chair set, and a bed. The carpet was a dingy beige, and the lime-green walls were not even adorned with a framed photograph of John B. Steinhardt.

A monk's cell, or not even that, since a monk spent a lot of time in his cell contemplating, whereas this room was a place to sleep and nothing more; deliberately designed, no doubt, to be so obnoxious that the occupant would be forced to spend most of his waking hours in the communal areas of the Center, soaking up the Transformationalist group-think. If the Center had not once been a hotel, the toilets probably would've been communal too, with the privacy doors taken off the crappers.

Weller checked his watch: five minutes after six. He could start drifting down to the dining room soon. Not that he looked forward to dinner with any enthusiasm, but being awake in this room for any length of time made anything else seem relatively attractive. Well, almost anything else. He could go to the library and browse through Transformationalist textbooks and pamphlets or the complete science-fiction novels of John B. Steinhardt. He could go watch some inspirational tapes in the video room. He could take part in a rap session on some fine point of Transformationalist dogma. He could sign up for some role-reversal games. He could masturbate, if the lockless door didn't make him too paranoid.

Or he could go down into the private lobby and chew the fat with some of his fellow inmates and amuse himself by trying to figure out who was a Monitor or who would be reporting what he said to whom.

He had done that his first night at the Center, after stowing his clothing in his room, eating a solitary meal, and giving himself his first case of housemaid's hands washing dishes in the kitchen. Might as well find out what I've gotten myself into, he had thought, as he dried his hands. He left the big restaurant-style kitchen, walked down the hall past the dining room, and entered the private lobby, which had probably been a meeting-room in the days when the Center was a hotel.

It was a big barn of a room, with a high ceiling, and scars on the asphalt-tile floor where a stage had obviously once stood. Mismatched old couches, chairs, and low tables were scattered around the room in no particular pattern. One lemon-colored wall was graced by the biggest standard photo of Steinhardt that he had yet seen. There was an urn of coffee on a table in one comer, and in another an ancient black-and-white television console was muttering to itself with no one watching.

About thirty people drifted around the room in small groups. Most of them were younger than Weller, and most of them, male and female, wore jeans, T-shirts, army-surplus gear, or finery snatched off the racks at the May Company. Weller immediately felt like an alien, as if he had wandered onto the wrong set.

He drifted around the room quietly and invisibly, like the Flying Dutchman, absorbing random bits of dialogue.

"-- said she had gotten an appointment to the Institute --"

"-- one of John's early novels, but you can tell the seeds are there --"

"-- is a better meditative deconditioner than Carson, if you ask me --"

"-- that's right, the Monitors! At least they're going to give me a preliminary screening --"

"-- really a bitch eptifying my consciousness behind that one. It's my major block --"

No one seemed to be talking about the Dodgers, politics, dope, sex, career, movies, or anything else that didn't relate to Transformationalism. Could it really be that these people had no private inner lives, nothing beyond the Transformationalist programs they were running on?

He glided to the periphery of a group of four: a dark-haired woman in her late twenties, seated on a couch with an intense-eyed young man with a strange 1950s crew cut, two other men standing in front of the couch talking to them, one with longish blond hair, the other a burly type in T-shirt and jeans.

"-- of course, it's just a rumor --"

"-- sounds possible, and everyone knows they're doing things at the Institute years ahead of anywhere else --"

"-- assuming thoughts do have a one-to-one relationship with brainwaves, I don't see why you couldn't produce a given state of consciousness by reversing the polarity of a brainwave monitor --"

"-- but John doesn't make that assumption anywhere --"

"-- doesn't say no, either --"

The woman on the couch looked up at Weller; she was thin, plain-looking, and something about her face made her eyes seem as if they were set too close together. "Hi." she said. "You're new here, aren't you?"

Weller nodded noncommittally.

"Have you heard anything about the brainwave inducer?"

"Not much," Weller said ambiguously.

"Are you into mind-matter interface theory?" the woman asked. "None of us really are. Do you know if it's even possible to produce a state of consciousness electronically?"

Weller shrugged. "I'm in the media end myself," he said.

The blond longhair looked at him strangely. "You work for Changes?"

Weller nodded.

"What do you do?"

"I direct."

There was an intake of breath; they were suitably impressed, but there seemed to be something more, a certain tension seemed to have descended on the little group. "Then what are you doing here?" the woman asked.

"Just following a life directive."

"That's weird," the crew cut said. "That's really weird. There's no one else on that level living here."

The four of them studied Weller guardedly. I'm older, I'm in a position way above them, and there's no one else here like me, Weller thought. It must be more Monitor paranoia. He resisted the impulse to play to it; this was definitely a time to maintain a low profile, and for all he knew, one of them could be a Monitor.

"So it goes," he said, shrugging, and drifted off, leaving what he was pretty sure would be an altered conversation behind him.

Weller glided in and out of a few more conversations -- a discussion about a young man's problems with getting his parents to accept his commitment to the movement, a disputation about the significance of a minor character in Transformational Man, a rehash of last night's role-reversal game -- all of which served only to increase his sense of alienation.

This really was a roomful of people who ate, slept, and drank Transformationalism. More than that, the people living at the Center seemed to be the very bottom end of the movement -- shiftless, confused kids without a pot to piss in or a dime to contribute to Transformationalism's coffers. Scooped up as Steinhardt's slavies as they might have been by the Hare Krishna movement or the Jesus Freaks, had they happened to be caught by those wavelengths first. The psychic lumpenproletariat of the seventies.

One night of trying to relate to that had been enough for Weller. Better to stay in his room twiddling his thumbs than put himself in a situation where he would be bound to shoot his mouth off sooner or later. There was no way he could keep talking about Transformationalism with these kids without finally telling them a thing or two or being tempted to play Monitor, and they didn't seem to talk about anything else. And he knew that the Monitors would be getting reports on anything he said to anyone.

Six-twenty. Time to drift down to the dining room, he thought. If I'm in luck, they'll let me keep to myself. Though he had a hunch that if he seemed to be making an effort to keep to himself, it would be a black mark in a dossier somewhere too.

***

The dining room was set up like a high-school lunchroom, or, Weller thought darkly, like something in a prison. There was a line of steam tables behind a counter that ran the length of one wall, and the rest of the room was filled with rows of long tables and cheap plastic chairs. Privacy was a hit-or-miss proposition, a matter of picking an empty stretch of table and hoping it didn't fill up after you sat down. About a dozen people were already eating, and the line by the counter was already fifteen people long, so the chances of being left alone didn't look too good.

Weller took a tray and dinnerware, waited dully on line for a few minutes, and finally got his turn at the steam tables. The choice, as it had been every night, was pretty grim. Poisonous-looking tamale pie. Spaghetti with lumpy meat sauce. Knockwurst and sauerkraut. Macaroni salad. Some kind of ghastly bile-green vegetarian stew with brown rice. The food was as cheap and crummy as it could get without inciting a revolution, even among these dedicated servants of the movement. Reluctantly, Weller settled for the knockwurst and kraut, macaroni salad, and coffee, and scouted around for an unobtrusive corner where he might have a chance to be left alone.

People were scattered pretty evenly around the room, but there was a stretch of about a dozen empty seats at the end of a table near a big garbage bin. Weller went over and took an end seat right by the garbage, hoping that would be unattractive enough to keep away his fellow inmates,

But he hadn't managed to get down more than a few forkfuls of macaroni salad and a single bite of knockwurst when a pimply young man and a guy about his own age sat right down across the table and introduced themselves with friendly enthusiasm.

"Hi," said the kid. "I'm Tod and this is Harry."

"You're new here," said Harry, "and we noticed you weren't mixing much, so we thought we'd help you get acquainted."

"I remember what it was like my first few days here," Tod said sympathetically. "I didn't know anyone, and I figured everyone else had had much more processing than I did and wouldn't be very much interested in a lower consciousness like mine."

Despite his better judgment Weller found himself warming to them a bit -- it had been a lonely four days, and they were apparently just trying to be friendly. "I'm Jack," he said, but he still didn't feel like saying more.

"How much processing have you had?" Tod asked conversationally,

"Block-auditing and meditative deconditioning," Weller muttered.

'"You've completed meditative deconditioning?" Harry asked.

Weller nodded.

"How long did it take?

"About a month."

Both of them looked quite impressed, even amazed. "I took the crash course," Weller explained.

Harry turned green with envy. "You must have a lot of money. I'd love to be able to do that, but I'm broke, and I'm working my way through processing doing the usual shit work, and that only gets me two sessions a week. I want to he a processor, but you've got to go all the way through meditative deconditioning before they'll even consider you, and at this rate it's going to take me at least another two months."

Very interesting, Weller thought. Apparently the amount of free processing you get depends on how much they value the work you're doing for them. There ain't no such thing as a free lunch here! ''I'm not rich," he said. "I'm working my way through too." He was trying to be just one of the boys, but he was beginning to realize that people who got sucked in through the Celebrity Center got much different treatment than the peons all the way down the line.

"What kind of work are you doing for the movement?" Tod asked.

"I'm working for Changes Productions. As a director."

"Wow."

Now they were really impressed. Sjit. No doubt everyone in the center would know about it by tomorrow. He was being trapped into becoming a local celebrity, and he didn't like it at all.

'''Then you must've passed life analysis," Harry said. "Was it rough?"

Uh-oh. It was a delicate moment. If he told them the truth, they would think something very strange was going on, but if he lied and told them he had passed life analysis, it would get right back to the Monitors, and that would probably be a heavy black mark. "Pretty rough," he said. "In fact, I'm not quite through."

They both looked at him narrowly. "And they're letting you direct?" Harry said suspiciously. ''I've never heard anything like that before."

Weller tried a different shrug. ''I'm a pro," he said. ''I've done network directing. Changes Productions has an awful lot of work. I guess they just figured they needed me to help out right away."

"Far out," Tod said. "Maybe I've seen something you've done?" But the older man's gaze was still lidded; either he sniffed the odor of the Monitors, or he was jealous, or both.

"I hope not," Weller said dryly. "It's all been Saturday morning garbage kiddie shows."

"Wow, it must be a big change doing real work for the movement then," Tod said. "I hope I'll find something that important to do."

"They seem to be able to eptify your contribution," Weller said. ''I'm sure they'll find you the maximized slot." Jargon, anyone?

"You must've met some of the real high-consciousness people," Harry said with open envy. "What are they really like?"

''I've met Benson Allen and Harry Lazlo," Weller said, glancing at his watch. It was getting time to end this little chit chat before it got into dangerous areas. The way these guys were forcing the conversation, they could be Monitors. "They're about what you'd expect -- high-powered, together people."

"Hey, maybe you'd like to come to our rap session tonight," Tod said. "We're going to have a block auditor talking about cultural correlations of block patterns."

"Sounds interesting," Weller muttered. "But I've got to be on the set early tomorrow, and I'm down for dishwashing." He checked his watch again, this time conspicuously. "In fact, I'd better get going. Been nice talking to you."

"We'll see you around," Harry said. "Maybe we can really talk sometime. I'd really like to know what life analysis is all about."

"Yeah, sure," Weller said, getting up and shoveling his scraps into the garbage bin. He sighed as he moved off toward the dish-stacking area. Who would've thought I'd ever be glad to go spend an hour washing slimy dishes and cruddy pots? he thought. Well, it looks like I'm going to be forced to interact with these people whether I like it or not. As a local point of interest, yet. He had to admire the way Gomez had set up this test situation -- there wasn't going to be any place to hide.

***

"Roll 'em!"

"-- BrainWave Monitor, scene five, take two."

"Speed."

Weller surveyed the set for a moment. The meditative deconditioner was the real thing, so he had no trouble getting a credible performance out of her. The actor playing the client was a real client too, but he was also just enough of a professional to be having difficulty playing the client he really was without overacting. Weller had finally gotten around that by running through each take half a dozen times before he rolled any film, so that he was dulled enough to simply respond mechanically to the processor as he would in the real situation.

The lighting was good -- a whole order of magnitude better than anything Georgie or Shano had been able to do -- a medium bright spot on the processor, soft backlighting for the client, establishing the relationship with a subtle visual image. The off-center and slightly low camera angle would give the whole scene an almost imperceptible larger-than-life iconographic quality. He was getting solid professional commercial footage, and he was getting it superfast by Changes Productions standards. Sara had to be pleased....

"Okay," he shouted. "Action!"

"You are walking along the beach, and far away over the surf you see an arm waving and hear a cry for help," the processor said. ''You're not a good swimmer, but you dive into the water, going into the center of your fear to rescue the person in distress ..."

Then ten seconds of silent concentration on the part of the actor playing the client, which would seem like subjective minutes on film ...

Weller wasn't even sure what they were going to do with this mini documentary on the brainwave monitor. The stuff they had given him to shoot would run about three minutes, but the script was full of interpolations like "narration to be added" and "insert stock footage," so he didn't even know how long the finished product would run, or even what it would be like.

He cued the next line of dialogue.

The client looked up, smiled gently, and said: "I felt physically afraid, but I did it. I really felt I was there, and I was able to conquer my physical fear...."

They're really playing it close to the vest, Weller thought. Shoot these scenes like a good little boy, and we'll slap some narration around them. Not only didn't he have any creative control over content, the damn script didn't even tell him what the eventual content would really be. It was almost a laboratory experiment designed to test his purely technical skills without letting him come within a mile of creative control. Almost a laboratory experiment?

The processor nodded sagely. "The monitor showed that you really eptified your consciousness behind that scenario, Mr. Carson," she said. "I think you'll now find that you deal with physical fear much better in real time. We're ready to go on to another block."

Good stuff, such as it is, Weller thought. They've got to be pleased with what I'm turning out. Unless some Monitor somewhere is analyzing my goddamn lighting and camera angles for subliminal regressiveness and disloyalty to the movement. That seemed like total paranoia, but around here total paranoia had a nasty way of coinciding with reality.

"Cut!" Weller shouted. "Okay, very good folks, that's a take. We'll take a ten-minute break, and then go on to scene six."

Weller mopped his brow and walked over to the back of the sound stage where Georgie had been watching. He saw that Sara had walked in at some point and was standing beside him, looking pretty pleased.

"That was very good, Jack," she said. ''You're doing good work, and you're really keeping ahead of the shooting schedule."

Ever since they had both been officially told that it was a no-no for them to go to bed together, she had been all business; she acted as if that little scene in her office had never been played. Which was all right as far as Weller was concerned; what physical attraction he had felt for her had been dissolved away by a distant contempt.

"If you ask me," Weller said, "the shooting schedules could stand to be tightened up around here. I mean, I don't really feel I'm rushing anything."

''You're really sharp," Georgie said somewhat ruefully. "I don't think the rest of us could work that fast; we just don't have your experience."

Weller felt like a bit of a shit; he really hadn't meant to point out Georgie's deficiencies as a director. "It takes time," he said. "But you'll learn, don't worry about it."

"Well, anyway," Sara said, "I just came here to tell you we're all invited to a party Saturday night at the Steinhardt house.

''The Steinhardt house?" Weller said. "We're going to meet John?"

Georgie laughed. "No way," he said. "John's hardly ever there, and he never comes to his wife's parties."

Weller cocked an inquisitive eyebrow at Sara.

''The Steinhardts have a big bouse in Bel Air," she said. "You could call it a mansion. John's not there very often, but his wife Maria lives there, and she throws these really huge parties."

"I've been to a couple," Georgie said. "They're really something. Film people, movie stars, real jet set. You should love it."

"It sounds charming," Weller said sardonically. Just what I need, a phony Hollywood party! He looked deliberately at Sara; some random impulse made him want to rub things in. "Will you be my date?" he asked.

Sara frowned, but there wasn't any real emotion in it. "You know I can't do that," she said. "We have our life directives."

"Not even a lousy date at a giant Hollywood party?" Weller teased. "Even if I swear not to make a pass at you?"

Sara began fidgeting. "Please ..." she said plaintively.

"Well, then screw it!" Weller snapped petulantly. "I don't want to go to some crummy HolIywood party anyway."

"You have to go," Sara said.

"Have to go? What the hell do you mean, I have to go?"

"An invitation to one of Maria's parties is like a life directive."

"What? What the hell kind of shit is that?"

"That's the way John wants it," Georgie said reasonably, as if that were a logical explanation for anything.

"John and Maria have a very complex relationship," Sara said. "They don't see each other very often, but they're very close. Maria doesn't have any official position in the movement, but she's, well, John's wife."

"Sounds like the ideal marriage," Weller said sourly. "But why does she want us there?"

Sara shrugged. "Maria likes crowds. She likes show-business people." She smiled forlornly. "She'll probably really like you," she said.

"Do you mean that the way I think you mean that?" Weller said.

"It could happen," Sara said quietly. "You can pick up your invitation in my office."

"And I really have to do this?"

Sara nodded.

Part of Weller was mightily pissed off at the chutzpah of Steinhardt's damn wife actually ordering him to go to her bloody party. But another part of him was curious to meet her. Steinhardt's wife. As close to the center of Transformationalism as you could get. Be honest with yourself, Weller, if you weren't being ordered to go to this thing, you'd damn well want to go. There was a certain fascination to the idea of actually meeting someone who slept with the Great Man.

"Okay," he said. "I guess I'll see you there." He had to admit that he felt a certain excitement at the notion of penetrating to the very eye of the storm.

***

His hands soaking in a galvanized iron sink full of hot, greasy suds, pulling out plates, giving them a lick with a sponge, dipping them in the rinse tub, stacking them on the rack. Weller had his nose rubbed in the incongruities of his position and the kind of total power over his life that they implied.

In the hermetically sealed little world of the Transformation Center, he had had a certain notoriety and status thrust upon him, virtually against his will. By now everyone knew he was a director at Changes, and he could become a center of attention whenever he so chose and all too many times when he didn't. Tomorrow night he would be a guest at Maria Steinhardt's party, and the poor nerds at the center would go crazy with envy if he let them know about that.

Yet at the same time, here he was, forced to do the lowest scut work as if they were carefully reminding him that the movement giveth, and the movement taketh away; all power to the movement. As if? What else was it but a deliberate demonstration of their total power over his life? You vill go to Maria Steinhardt's party. You vill wash dishes. You vill demonstrate the proper enthusiasm. Jawohl, and you vill like it!

It was also an object lesson in the dichotomy at the heart of Transformationalism. The penniless people who lived at the center, dedicating their lives and free labor to the movement, were no less suckers than the millions paying through the nose for processing. Whatever the marks had to give -- money or labor -- Transformationalism took. The slavies and the taxpayers were just two aspects of the same undermass that supported an elite which began with the processors, and narrowed up into the Monitors, the Allens and the Lazlos, and peaked into a Steinhardt mansion in Bel Air.

And they had set it up so that Weller was both a member of the elite and one of the lowliest peons simultaneously -- parties at the Steinhardt mansion and dishwashing at the Transformation Center. Perhaps that's what they're trying to do, he thought, force me to identify with the elite by rubbing my nose in the alternative. Or maybe what they're telling me is that there is only one real elite and its name is John B. Steinhardt.

Weller finished the last dish in the sink, wiped his hands, and walked out of the kitchen into the hallway, paying no attention to his fellow scullions. I'm not one of these suckers, he told himself, but I'll be damned if I'll become one of the suckees, either.

"Hi, Jack, why don't you come along to our rap session?" Tina Davies had accosted him again -- a tall, gangling blond in her mid-twenties, who had been trying to latch onto him for about two days now. There didn't seem to be anything sexual in it -- in fact, come to think of it, there was a vast lack of sexual energy at the Center, considering that there were so many young people jammed together in a communal situation -- rather it seemed to be a kind of evangelical fervor, the desire to be the one to lead this enigmatic figure fully into the fold. "We're going to discuss the roads to Transformationalism."

"The roads to Transformationalism?"

"You know, what brought us as individuals to the movement."

Weller studied her intense, angular face. What did bring these people to Transformationalism? He had to admit that the question intrigued him, and he also realized that if he stayed away from all the optional activities much longer, he would risk blowing the whole thing. So -- what the hell....?

"Okay," he said, "why not?" He only hoped he could walk the right line when he was forced to tell them why the hell he was there.

The rap session was being held in a fair-sized room on the fifth floor. Couches along three walls formed a kind of rude conversation pit. Four people were already there: Harry the would-be processor, a young kid named Bill whom Weller had met briefly once before, and a couple sitting thigh-to-thigh on one couch whom he hadn't yet seen. Tina and Weller sat down on the empty couch, and she did the honors.

"This is Jack Weller. Jack, you already know Bill and Harry, and this is Ted and Lori Brenner." She paused while everyone nodded foolishly to each other.

"Well, I guess I might as well start things off," Tina said. She took a deep breath and began to recite, as if the whole rap were rehearsed.

"I was one of the last of the college radicals, just old enough to become a political activist as the movement was dying out. So I found myself with a degree in nothing-in-particular and a life commitment to working for social change, with nothing dynamic to work through. I couldn't get behind the religious trips everyone was getting into, not after being so heavy into scientific socialism.

"And then a friend of mine dragged me to the Transformation Center, I tried a couple of processing sessions, and then I found myself reading in the space of a couple of weeks everything John had ever written. I found that Transformationalism was something I could get behind. The old New Left didn't reach into the mind, and the religious cults and consciousness-raising groups weren't into changing society, but Transformationalism had it all together -- historical perspective, a plan for transforming society, the organization to carry it out, and scientific methods for transforming individual consciousness. Transform society as you transform your own life, John says, and for me that says it all."

There was a long and somewhat embarrassing silence; the others seemed to feel almost as uncomfortable as Weller after listening to this little set speech. Finally Bill spoke up hesitantly.

"Man, I wasn't into anything like revolution. What I was into was smack. I won't go into that whole bummer. But I finally did manage to get off the shit through Synanon. And then who was I? I could identify with being an ex-junkie, or I could be nothing. So I left Synanon, and of course it wasn't long before I was shooting smack again. Well, I knew enough about where that was at to get really freaked out, so I got myself into the Narcon program, not even knowing it had anything to do with Transformationalism, I mean, I hadn't even heard of Transformationalism.

"Well, they got me off smack again, but the processing didn't stop there. They got my head into the emptiness that got me into shooting smack in the first place. They showed me how it was the frozen reality we live in that fucked me up, and they showed me how we could change it. They gave me something to live for besides the next fix, a way to keep changing and be a something instead of an ex-something. Why am I into Transformationalism? Man, because it's my life; it's made me something more than a nothing."

This time there was no silence afterward; old Harry started rapping immediately.

"Same thing with me, only I didn't even have anything like heroin, I was such a zero. I could've gone to college, but I didn't give a shit. I started working shit jobs right out of high school, and then I got drafted, did two years in Texas, never even got to Nam, out of the army and into more shit jobs. Fucked a lot of women, never lived with one for longer than three months in my life, and then one morning I woke up and I was over thirty, and I had no one, and I was nobody going nowhere. I went through a year or so of bumming around, doing stupid cheap burglaries, getting sauced all the time, and I was such an invisible nobody. I couldn't even get myself busted.

"One day I just wandered into this Center pissed out of my mind, and instead of calling the cops, the people here took me in, dried me out, and started processing me. It was like coming in out of a fog I'd been in all my life. Now I have a purpose. I want to be a processor. I'm in Transformationalism because it told me what I want to be when I grow up."

Weller stared across the room at the Brenners. They stared back at him with what seemed like the same reluctance to speak. A would-be revolutionary, an ex-junkie, and a nobody wanting to be somebody, Weller thought. Empty people waiting for something to fill them with itself. He wondered what the Brenners' story was, and he wondered what they thought his story was. He gave them the old Transformationalist Stare, forcing them to speak first. Finally they relented, speaking in turns with a single voice like some musical-comedy team.

"It was our marriage," Ted Brenner said. "I had a good job as a computer programmer, and Lori was teaching school. We had bread, we had things to do, and we loved each other, but somehow it was adding up to nothing."

"We started swinging," Lori Brenner said. ''Ted started fucking everything in sight, and so did I."

"But it was boring," Ted said. "Just a stupid game of cocks and cunts. All we were doing was punishing each other for punishing each other, and we weren't really even getting off behind that trip."

"We quit our jobs, took our savings, bought a VW bus, and drove around playing hippies for a year. But it all seemed dead inside."

"We couldn't even get into hating each other," Ted said. "And we couldn't even find anything else to hate. So we got new jobs and started going heavy into all the consciousness trips."

"You name it, we tried it. Esalon, Arica, Scientology, the whole number. Finally we tried Transformationalism because we had tried just about everything else."

"And Transformationalism finally showed us what was wrong," Ted Brenner said with sudden fervor. "All the personas we tried on didn't fit because we were looking for roles to wear like new suits of clothes, final forms for our consciousness, when the only thing that's really real is change."

"We must have known that on some level because we kept putting ourselves through changes, but the mistake we made was trying to find a permanent fit."

"But now we've got something to be committed to together that keeps changing and keeps growing and isn't trying to find a place to stop," Ted Brenner said. "We're in Transformationalism so that we can keep evolving together through the movement."

Weller cringed inwardly as all eyes inevitably turned toward him. The Brenners were a little too close to home. Maybe he and Annie had never gone in for guru trips or done hippie escape acts -- their careers had sucked up all that bored thirst for growth and change -- but hadn't they also been perpetually reaching for personas that were always out of reach, model lives that were never fulfilled, wet-dream fantasies of the future that allowed them to hide from the boredom and emptiness of the everlasting now?

Maybe that's why Annie got sucked into this thing in the first place, he realized. And me? Isn't that really why I'm following her into Transformationalism? Because without this dumb quest, without Transformationalism, without these mind games, what would I really be but a lonely nobody going nowhere?

He had to say something, and he could hardly get away with an outright lie, so he let it bubble up from his guts, editing out only the worst of it at his lips.

"I was directing a lot of shit, and my wife was an actress who was going nowhere, and we were trying to live in a dream world where I was forever about to do my first feature and she was going to be a star next week. And then my wife got involved in Transformationalism and left me...."

He paused, sighed, spit it out. "Okay, so I joined strictly to get her back," he said. "Well, I haven't gotten her back, and here I still am. Why? I don't know. Because I've got nowhere else to be? Because I have to find out what the fuck happened to Annie?"

He laughed bitterly. "Sometimes I think I'm here just because I have to find out why I am here. Because I know I'm not who I was, and I don't know who the fuck I am now. Transformationalism is always talking about riding the changes; well, I guess that's what I'm doing. Transformationalism started putting me through changes when my wife left; I didn't like it then, I'm not sure I like it now. But it hasn't stopped, and as of now, I've got no direction home. I'm here because I'm here because I'm here. It may not be as inspirational as all your little stories, but it happens to be true."

Weller collapsed against the back of the couch, feeling purged, as if after a thoroughly necessary puke. That really is the truth, he thought. I don't even know these goddamn nerds, and now I've spilled my guts to them. How about that? What does it all mean?

They were all eyeing him uneasily now, as if he had somehow violated the sanctity of the process, as if his lack of inspirational bullshit to match their own were some kind of personal insult. As if they were all a cabal of goddamn Monitors, weighing him, and finding him wanting.

Well, fuck you! he thought. You wanted to hear about my road to Transformationalism, and that's what you got, with no bullshit. I said it, it's the truth, and I'm glad. If you don't like it, go stick it up John B. Steinhardt!
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Re: The Mind Game, by Norman Spinrad

Postby admin » Sat Mar 19, 2016 9:04 am

Chapter Twelve

The Steinhardt house turned out to be a walled compound within the private community of Bel Air. Only the parking lot close by the main gate was outside the perimeter, and the gate itself was a massive steel affair overlooked by a closed-circuit television camera.

It was open as Weller arrived, but it was guarded by two big bozos in incongruous red carhop uniforms with pistols holstered to their waists. Nine thirty and there were already twenty or thirty cars in the lot and a minor jam on the street outside. Weller gratefully gave the Triumph to a real carhop and walked up to the gate fingering his printed invitation somewhat uneasily. There were half a dozen people at the gate ahead of him -- no one whom he recognized personally or famewise -- and the guards were collecting their invitations and passing them inside with a cold and intense scrutiny that gave Weller the impression that they were really Monitors.

Weller gave his invitation to one of the guards, endured a professionally suspicious eyeballing, and entered the grounds of the estate. The house itself was a big two-story pseudo-Spanish job, all white stucco and red tile, set back from the wall across a wide expanse of well-manicured lawn studded with an eclectic selection of palms, oaks, and evergreens, and hedged with bright red and overpoweringly fragrant bougainvillea. Everyone was walking straight down the flagstone path to the entrance; a "Keep-Off-The-Grass" sign would have been superfluous.

Inside, the ground floor was a series of large, airy parlors opening onto a central Spanish-style courtyard, with a low central fountain, short shade trees, bright beds of flowers, a maze of marble pathways, and a sprinkling of pseudo-Greek statuary. A second-story balcony ran all the way around the courtyard, dripping ivy. There were about a dozen people in the courtyard, and two or three dozen more scattered throughout the ground-floor rooms. These were all furnished as sitting rooms, with plush couches and chairs, brocaded or lavishly papered walls, nondescript representational paintings of landscapes, still lives, and figures, and endless little tables and wall shelves all stuffed with figurines, floral arrangements, and assorted bric-a-brac. The upper story of the house seemed to be off limits.

There was a buffet set up in each room. With a single waiter serving the usual conspicuous-consumption items: caviar, assorted hot hors d'oeuvres, smoked salmon, sliced beef, turkey, ham, endless salads, and pickles. There were six parlors, and in the largest two, which took up entire sides of the first floor, full bars had been set up. Quiet, indeed almost subliminal, Muzak murmured everywhere.

Weller got a Wild Turkey and water at one of the bars and wandered aimlessly from room to room, feeling at once alienated from his surroundings and peculiarly at home. He had certainly been to parties like this before, if never quite in a place on this scale or reeking quite this much of money. The sort of Hollywood party that was usually put on by a hot shot new director or producer rolling in bread but short of connections. Every celebrity in town would be invited, but if half a dozen real heavies showed up, it would be a smashing success. So the house was papered with invitations off every PR, freebie, and agent list in town, filled with unknown people who usually didn't even know each other, extras to create a crowd scene.

Here, however, celebrity spotting seemed a futile game. There were a few faces that Weller recognized from TV commercials or long strings of bit parts, but nothing that he could even connect a name to. There were some striking-looking Plasticine women in gold lame silk pants suits, plunging necklines, and bare backs, but they seemed to be window dressing for older men who might be minor-league producers, or just as easily successful Beverly Hills realtors. There were some lavishly dressed older women with clean-cut beachboy-type consorts in tow, but there were no rich hippie types, no conspicuous displays of tailored denim, beads, or feathers, and what few younger men he saw were, with the exception of the gigolos of the rich bitches, random loners like himself.

As far as Weller was concerned, it was instant boredom, so much so that after about half an hour, he found himself actually longing for the Changes Productions people to show up already and at least give him someone to talk to.

He was getting his third drink when he finally spotted a familiar face. It was Harry Lazlo, resplendent in a royal blue suit, white shirt, and red ascot, elbowing his way to the bar with a honey-blond young starlet type on his arm, luscious dark eyes, and a totally vacuous expression on her face.

As Lazlo ordered drinks, Weller maneuvered himself into position so that they would come face-to-face, hoping that Lazlo would recognize him; much more couth under the circumstances than forthrightly reintroducing himself. Lazlo's gaze intersected his; there was a flicker of recognition, and that would have to do.

"Jack Weller, Mr. Lazlo."

Lazlo smiled a broad Hollywood smile. "Oh yeah, our pro TV director," he said. "How's it going? What do you think of this little bash?"

Weller let a little grimace flicker across his face. Lazlo laughed, held up a palm. "Don't answer that," he said. Then, sotto voce. "Have you ever seen such a collection of phonies?"

"Upon occasion," Weller said dryly.

Lazlo laughed again, and then began walking away from the bar as he spoke, indicating that for the moment Weller was invited to join his little entourage. "Maria is quite a little star collector, would-be star collector, right? Every few months she throws one of these things and invites everyone from Charlton Heston to Jackie Kennedy, and what she gets is what you see -- a few TV producers, high-priced hair dressers, the old girls from Palm Springs, the bottom end of the freebie lists, tired old agents and PR men, and like that. Plus all the Transformationalist heavies in town." He shook his head ruefully. "Some people never learn. Hope springs eternal, right?"

''I've met the type," Weller said, as they reached breathing space in the middle of the room. He was somewhat surprised that Lazlo had betrayed such open disdain for Steinhardt's wife to someone like him; but he was pleased to go along with it.

"Have you met Maria?" Lazlo asked.

Weller shook his head.

"Well then, come on, let me do the honors, such as they are," Lazlo said, grabbing Weller's elbow and tugging him toward the courtyard. ''I'm sure the old buzzard wants to meet you."

"Huh? I'm sure she doesn't even know my name."

Lazlo laughed. "Who said she knew your name? You underestimate yourself, kid. Or you overestimate Maria. You've actually directed network TV, and that's more than you can say for ninety-nine percent of the people here. As far as Maria's concerned. there's no business like show business. Why do you think she invited everyone from Changes Productions in the first place?"

"I don't know -- why did she invite everyone from Changes Productions in the first place?"

Lazlo grimaced wryly. "Because Changes is owned by Transformationalism, and Transformationalism is owned by John, and she's John's wife, and that's the closest sniffing distance she can get to show-biz people. And you're something special, right, because you've actually worked in the major leagues.

"Huh?" Weller grunted dubiously, with a certain queasy feeling developing in his stomach.

"Don't worry about it," Lazlo said, dragging him out into the courtyard. "Maria will make it perfectly clear, like the man says. Now lessee...."

By now the courtyard was quite crowded; the benches were mostly filled and a couple of dozen people were milling around with drinks in their hands and platters of food. Lazlo scouted around; finally a look of recognition dawned on his face, and he led Weller and the silent girl toward a small group of people gathered around a woman seated alone in queenly state on a marble bench just in front of the gurgling fountain.

The woman on the bench was in her middle forties or so, with a smooth, once-stunning face that was just starting to sag slightly, and big dark eyes that still flashed fire and brimstone. Her dark brown hair was lightly streaked with gray, and she wore a reasonably tight green silk pants suit. The total effect said that she knew her age, and also knew that she still looked good enough not to have to hide it.

The court gathered around her included a gray-haired woman in a flowing caftan festooned with astrological signs, two older men in dark suits, a hard-looking tough who seemed to be a bodyguard, a good-looking younger woman in a midnight-blue dress, and a balding old weirdie in a white yoga suit. They fell back as Lazlo approached as if they knew that they were extras.

"Hello, Harry," Maria Steinhardt said in a deep throaty voice that seemed edged with habitual sardonicism. She looked at Weller appraisingly, without meeting his eyes. "Who's your friend?"

Lazlo brought forth the blond on his arm. ''This is Bridget," he said, also with a sarcastic twist.

"Not her, him," Maria Steinhardt snapped.

Lazlo laughed, and it really seemed to bug her. "This is Jack Weller," he said, "One of our directors at Changes."

"Really?" Maria said, looking at Weller again, but this time staring straight into his eyes for a long moment. "And what were you before Harry scooped you up into his clutches, Mr. Weller?"

"Jack's one of my prize acquisitions," Lazlo said. "About the only director we've got with network TV credits."

"Don't be so rude, Harry, I was talking to Jack," Maria said. She smiled at Weller, cocking her head to one side and leaning it on her hand. "Do you like being a prize acquisition," she asked.

"Depends on who's doing the acquiring," Weller said instantly. The vibes she was putting out toward him seemed rather obvious; indeed, they seemed intended to be obvious. Well, if that were the game, he might as well go along with it for a bit.

Maria laughed, mugging at him with an exaggerated lecherous smirk. "The obvious question," she said, "is what's a nice boy like you doing in a place like that?" Sycophant laughter gurgled briefly in the background.

"Serving the movement," Weller said uncertainly, realizing immediately how fatuous that sounded as Maria made a moue of distaste.

"How tiresome," she said.

"We all serve John in our own ways, don't we?" Weller said, putting an edge on his voice. He nodded briefly over his shoulder. "And we all reap our own rewards."

There was a subliminal ooh, and Lazlo did not look especially pleased. Maria Steinhardt glared at him with what seemed like a sudden flash of anger. Weller glared back -- not the old Transformationalist Stare, but a challenging dose of masculine libido. Maria's intensity didn't fade, but it seemed to transform itself from anger to something else.

"Touche," she said toothily. "Very interesting. Perhaps we can have a little chat later on, when things mellow out a bit." She turned to regard her entourage, a gesture of dismissal.

"Perhaps," Weller said bitchily, determined to have the last word. Then Lazlo eased him out of the little group and took him to one side.

"Beginning to get the idea, kid?" he said.

"It seems fairly obvious," Weller said. "A bit too obvious. I mean, John's wife...."

Lazlo laughed. "There once was a woman from Thames, who was found of unusual games," he recited enigmatically. "Don't worry about the Great Man, kid. Maria has carte blanche, and John is too smart to try screwing around with her. Whereas Maria...."

He laughed again. "Whereas Maria does little else," he said. "Well, I've gotta go see a man about a dog." And he moved off with the blond on his arm, leaving Weller wondering what the hell was going on between him and Maria, between Maria and Steinhardt, wondering what kind of game he was getting involved in, and what the percentages might be.

***

Weller drifted aimlessly around the party for another hour or so. Lazlo seemed to have disappeared, and by now the house was choked with guests, to the point where there were dozens of people balancing plates of food and looking fruitlessly for a place to sit down, to the point where the noise level began to make extended conversation almost impossible, to the point where Weller was beginning to consider getting the hell out of this boring mob scene. He had made his obligatory appearance, he had met Maria Steinhardt, and surely no one would notice anyone's early departure in this mess.

But an idea taking from in the back of his mind kept him from leaving. Maria Steinhardt. Had she just been flirting, playing a little game that she would play with a dozen young men tonight, or was there something more to it? If she really does have the hots for me, Weller thought, I should play it for all it's worth. Because it could be worth a lot. Maria was John's wife, and as such, she was a pipeline directly to the heart of Transformationalism. If she wanted to -- if he could make her want to -- she could easily find out where Annie was, and maybe even more. From what he had seen, from what he sensed, there was little that Maria could not have her way within the world of Transformationalism. Only Steinhardt himself could say no to her, and he had a feeling that even Steinhardt couldn't exactly defy her will with impunity. Screwing around with John Steinhardt's wife was about the most dangerous game he could conceive of, but the potential rewards --

"Jack! There you are!"

Sara English had appeared at his side, flanked by Shano Moore and Georgie Prinz. She was wearing a stunning low-cut red dress, but the way the three of them were huddling together, like white faces in a ghetto (or black faces at a country club), made her seem quite pathetic to Weller, a sad contrast to the powerful and charismatic Maria.

"Quite a show, isn't it?" Georgie said, looking around like a little kid allowed to attend an adult party.

"Yeah," Weller grunted, "A real mob scene." He felt himself being swept up into their little group for want of anything else to do, but he immediately wanted to ditch them. They weren't where this was at, and he certainly wasn't where they were at.

"See anyone you know?" Sara asked, meaning, no doubt, anyone from the great world of Hollywood out there, a connection that he could make for them.

"Just Harry Lazlo," Weller said, irked both at her, and at the fraudulent show-biz aura that the three of them were trying to suck up. At the same time it amused him to think that Maria Steinhardt was essentially coming from the same silly place.

"Shall we move around and see what's happening?" Shano suggested.

So the four of them wandered around the house for what seemed to Weller like forever. It was painfully obvious to him that he was expected to point out the non-existent luminaries, as if he were one of those characters standing on Sunset Boulevard hawking maps to the Homes of the Stars.

Instead Sara, Shano, and Georgie ended up somewhat forlornly pointing out some of the Transformationalist heavies to Weller. Benson Allen's second-in-command. Allen himself. The head of the San Francisco Transformation Center. Someone or other from Narcon. Executives from various Transformationalist companies. Apparently anyone who was anyone in the local chapters of the movement was constrained to appear at Maria Steinhardt's parties. Except for the insight it gave him into just how powerful Maria really was within the movement, Weller found the whole thing stupifyingly boring and somewhat pathetic. All this, and Maria still couldn't corral even a major name off a theater marquee; the whole thing must be an exercise in total frustration for her.

They were drifting out into the courtyard for the fourth or fifth time when Weller's eye was caught by a man sitting alone on one of the benches, sipping a drink, and leering quite unpleasantly at the passing throngs. He was wearing a black suit with a black turtleneck; his slick black hair was cut short in an almost military style, his swarthy face was hard and rather brutal-looking, but his dark eyes gleamed with an intense, sardonic intelligence. Although many people were obviously looking for a place to sit down, no one approached the bench where the isolated figure sat. The whole effect was quite sinister and, disquieting.

"Who the hell is that?" Weller asked, nodding his head toward the man in black as they passed close by his bench.

Sara, Georgie, and Shano all seemed quite disturbed by his question, and they hustled Weller far out of earshot before anyone answered. Even then, Sara spoke in a surreptitious half whisper.

"That's Fred Torrez."

"The Director of the Monitors," Georgie added.

Weller laughed. "I thought he was some kind of Mafia hit man," he said.

'''That's not funny, man," Shano said, looking uneasily over his shoulder. "Shit, the way he looks at people...."

"What's the matter?" Weller insinuated. "Does he scare you?"

"He's just not a dude you want to have notice you ..."

"Ah, there you are!" Maria Steinhardt suddenly appeared from around a bend in the path and grabbed Weller ever so lightly by the elbow.

"Come, let's have our little talk," she said, looking deep into his eyes and touching the rim of her upper teeth casually with the tip of her tongue. "If you'll excuse us," she said to Sara, Georgie, and Shano in a negligently commanding tone. And she whisked Weller off to a relatively secluded corner of the courtyard where a small tree cordoned off a little private alcove.

Still holding onto Weller's elbow, Maria leaned up against the bole of the tree, arching her breasts against the green silk of her suit, as if daring him to notice by stepping back. Or by moving forward.

She nodded toward the crowd but kept her eyes fixed on his. "Well, do you like what you see?" she said.

Weller half laughed. "Some of it," he said. "Do you like what you see?"

Maria slowly and deliberately lowered her gaze to stare forthrightly at Weller's crotch. "Some of it," she said. "I could like some of it. To tell you the truth, I find most of the people I invite to these parties pretty boring myself. Lord, Transformationalism and Transformationalists bore my ass off!"

"Then why do you throw these parties?"

Maria slowly swayed upright, away from the tree trunk, so that her body was now only inches from Weller's, so that he could all but feel the heat of her. She looked up into his eyes.

"For some of it," she said. "Sometimes I do meet someone who interests me." She shifted her weight back and forth from foot to foot, left, right, left, right, moving her pelvis subtly closer to his. "You, for instance," she said. "You don't seem like one of John's usual little patsies." She smiled. "Yes, I do believe I would really like some of it."

Still looking directly into Weller's eyes, she suddenly reached out her hand and unexpectedly grabbed his cock. Electricity shot through Weller's body, and he twitched involuntarily backward. She looked at him as if nothing were happening and began to knead his loins with her palm and fingers. Weller suppressed a groan, and then arched his pelvis toward her, moving into it, offering himself.

"You can have as much as you can take," he said.

"You'd be surprised what this old lady can take," Maria said, removing her hand and grinding her pelvis slowly against the front of his pants, once, twice, thrice. Weller groaned, reached out his arms toward her --

And she glided away nimbly to the side. "Now that we understand each other," she said conversationally, "I must be getting back to my guests."

Weller stood there, his flesh inflamed, feeling like a perfect ass.

Maria laughed. "Don't pout," she said. "In a couple of hours people will start leaving, and then we can continue our little chat in private. Upstairs. See you later." And then she danced away from him, back toward the crowd.

Weller stood there for long moments, trying to collect himself. I'm going to fuck Maria Steinhardt tonight, he thought. It's what I wanted, isn't it? But what he hadn't expected was that he really did want it. It was supposed to be just his way to Annie, but that old lady had really turned him on. He felt his body throbbing for her. And that was something he hadn't counted on at all. There was something treasonous about it. Somehow, he had counted on more control. God, it's been such a long time....

He sighed, readjusted his pants, and headed back in the general direction of where he had left Sara, Shano, and Georgie.

But he hadn't taken half a dozen steps before Fred Torrez crossed his trajectory. Without stopping or pausing, Torrez stared at him for a long hard moment, pinning him like a rabbit with those bright reptilian eyes. Then he was gone, leaving Weller quivering with a flash of unreasoning, paranoid dread, as if the Director of the Monitors really were omniscient, as if Torrez had heard and seen all and was even now plotting something sinister and unfathomable.

***

The party dragged on and on. Georgie, Shano, and particularly Sara grilled Weller incessantly about his little scene with Maria Steinhardt, and Weller found himself making up a long intermittent cock-and-bull story, the gist of which was that Maria had been hungry for some show-biz patter and he had simply supplied her with same. As they wandered through the now-diminishing crowds, talking to no one but each other and getting more and more bored, Weller found himself making up imaginary details of the show-biz rap he had supposedly fed Maria -- every silly story that had floated around Hollywood for the past two years.

At least it succeeded in deflecting their attention from the subject of Maria Steinhardt. Already, before anything had even really happened, Weller felt the need to draw a veil of secrecy over any connection between Maria and himself. From time to time Fred Torrez moved across his line of vision, sometimes chancing to look his way, sometimes not. But the mere sight of Torrez was enough to flash him into total paranoia about what he was going to do. According to Sara, Torrez had to be involved in issuing the life directive ordering him to live at the Transformation Center; therefore he was definitely not beneath the man's notice. If the Monitors found out that he had balled Maria Steinhardt....

What? Did Maria really have carte blanche to ball anyone she wanted to, as Lazlo had intimated, or would the long arm of John B. Steinhardt reach out through the Monitors and ... and what? How far would they go? All the way?

Soon the party began to wane, people started to leave, the rooms became less crowded, and the detritus -- the empty glasses, the overflowing ashtrays, the dirty plates, the bits of food scattered on the floor -- began to move into the visual foreground. The pseudo-gala atmosphere swiftly evaporated as the place began to look like the morning after the night before. Once the exodus had begun, it proceeded rapidly, as if by signal or command, and within the hour there were only a couple of dozen people left in the whole house, standing around in isolated little groups, saying their good-byes and making their departures.

"Well, I think we're going to take off now," Sara said as they ambled into the room nearest the main entrance. "You want to come along, Jack? Maybe we can get some coffee or something?"

"Or something?" Weller said archly, giving her a little deliberate significant eye contact, more out of pique than any expectation of a positive response

"Maybe a hamburger," Sara said sullenly, pointedly looking away.

"No, I think I'll hang around here a little longer," Weller said casually.

"I see," Sara said.

"Do you?"

"I think so," she said quietly. Then the three of them left together, and Weller went out into the empty courtyard and sat down on a bench. He sensed that he was about to cross another divide. The Transformationalism that he had known thus far was the world of the believers, the soldiers, the suckers. Even the processors and strong-arm boys, even Monitors like Gomez and Karel, belonged to the loyal legions. But the world he was about to penetrate dick first, the world of Lazlo, Maria Steinhardt, and maybe even Fred Torrez, was something else again. Here the denizens weren't the captives of illusion but the captors. He was moving into the center of Transformationalist power, where the dangers were greatest, but where the secrets were known, and where the levers of power that could get him to Annie could be manipulated at whim. By Maria. He was entering the bottom half of the ninth inning one run behind, and it was time to swing for the fences.

'''There you are ...," Maria Steinhardt appeared, looking slightly drunk, her hair disarrayed, a slattern wildness in her eyes. She put her hands on Weller's shoulders, leaned down somewhat woozily, and kissed him open mouthed and deeply, her breath tasting of alcohol, her tongue reaching hungrily down his throat, a hand fumbling in his pants. It only lasted a few moments, and then she was tugging him off the bench by the hands.

"Come on upstairs, my tasty little morsel," she said, and she led him up a flight of outside stairs to the balcony, down a second-story hallway and into the bedroom.

The walls of Maria Steinhardt's bedroom were a deep maroon, the ceiling was a somewhat lighter shade of the same color, the carpet was black, and the dresser, tables, chests, moldings, and bed frame were of heavily oiled wine-dark mahogany. The bed was covered in leopard skin, and the only light was a bloody reddish glow from a frosted overhead fixture. The total effect was of sinister, somber, feral power, reeking of murky S-M scenes. '"You wait here for a moment, and I'll be right back," Maria said, disappearing into a dressing room.

A tremor of uneasiness went through Weller; this was, after all, a woman drenched in power, and her sexual preference might very well turn out to be some ugly domination number. So far, he thought, she's been treating me like pliant raw meat off the rack, Well, to hell with that! he decided, taking off his clothes. You may be the boss lady of Transformationalism, baby, but not in bed with this good old boy. You want to play games, games you'll get, lady!

A few minutes later Maria emerged from the dressing room. She was naked; nipples erect on slightly drooping breasts, hair down around her shoulders, all in all a surprising turn-on. Except for the high black boots she wore and the little golden dagger hung on a chain around her neck. She stood across the room, legs akimbo, hands on hips, arching her body toward him, "Well?" she said challengingly.

Oh really? Weller thought. He felt himself hardening, but in mind no less than body. Meat for the monster? Is that what you think you're getting?

Slowly, silently, he walked across the room toward her, stopping with his chest inches from her breasts, looking down into her eyes with a cold, emotionless expression painted across his face. They stared at each other for a long moment, engaged in some ambiguous psychic contest, the outlines of which were but a dim perception of sexual warfare in Weller's mind. I'm here to put this bitch in my power, not the other way around, Weller thought. So I had better be the director whether she likes it or not. Especially if she doesn't like it.

Silently he took her hands in his, prized them off her hips against sudden resistance, and placed them on his own shoulders. Then he cupped her chin in his hands and pulled her head against his chest. Slowly he forced her face downward pushing her to her knees.

As soon as her knees touched the floor, she moaned, and began kissing and nibbling the flesh of his stomach, moving her mouth teasingly, almost imperceptibly downward, feeling him respond, feeling him anticipating what was to come in her own sweet time. And regaining, so it seemed to Weller, a dominant position, at least in the recesses of her own mind.

Not good enough! he thought coldly. He gripped her around the jaw with his right hand, pulled her head abruptly down, and with his right hand guided his cock between her lips. Then he put both hands behind the nape of her neck and pulled her toward him as he thrust forward from the hips.

She grunted throatily and seemed to give in entirely, sucking at him in a hungry frenzy, grabbing him by the buttocks and stuffing him into her as she began to use her mouth like a willing vagina.

Part of Weller was lost in animal lust and exquisite sensation, but another part was watching the whole thing with grim detachment, viewing it as a political act, a nasty power game that had to be played out to its dialectical conclusion.

When he came, it was in stony, tightly controlled silence, and without missing a beat, he kept her there for a long time afterward, lost in her private frenzy, until he had regained his ability to go on. On and on and on, he thought. I'm going to fuck you till your teeth ache.

He dragged her to the bed, threw her down on it, and entered her. Propping himself up above her on his elbows, touching her only from the waist down, he closed his eyes, and light-years detached from her reality, began to fuck her.

On and on and on he went, eyes closed, moving in an inexorable mechanical rhythm, fire in his body, ice in his mind. She moaned and she groaned and she clawed at him and she screamed and her writhing body spasmed again and again, but it was all taking place over an immense psychic distance. He was sticking it to John Steinhardt's wife. He was fucking Transformationalism itself, and it was the archetypal grudge-fuck. He felt like a medieval battering ram, pounding away at his enemy, as if he could fuck the whole movement into submission, as if by mastering Maria with his cock, he could master Transformationalism with his will.

On and on, until he could hear her breath coming in tired, ragged gasps, and then faster and harder, like a soldier sensing victory, like a shark sniffing blood. He felt as if he could go on all night, until she screamed for him to stop, until she begged for mercy, and then awhile longer. His body was the cold hard instrument of his will, and it felt neither fatigue nor, really, anything like normal sexual lust.

After a long time she began moaning, "Please ... please ... please ...." over and over again.

"More?" he asked harshly. "You want more, bitch?"

"No ... no ... enough ... Jesus ... I want you to come inside me ... please ..."

"Your wish is my command," Weller said sardonically, and he moved harder and harder and faster and faster, listening to her scream in what by now might be genuine raw pain, and finally exploded in a shower of cold metal sparks.

He rolled off her and lay on his back beside her. Maria was breathing hard and deep, her body heavily filmed with sweat. It took her several minutes to fully catch her breath, and when she did, she rolled half over and looked at him with wide eyes and a catlike smile.

"It's been a long time since I've been fucked like that," she said. "What got up your ass, baby?"

"Up my ass?" Weller said archly. "What are you talking about?"

Maria sat up against the nest of pillows at the head of the bed. "Oh, don't be juvenile," she said. "On you, it doesn't look very convincing. You're not one of John's little slavies. I can just imagine one of them having the balls to do what you did. Who the hell are you? What are you doing here?"

"I suppose you're going to report this to the Monitors," Weller said sardonically, all caution to the wind. ''I'm sure it violates some life directive or other, and if it doesn't, you can always make one up."

Maria laughed. "On the contrary," she said, "if you've violated any life directive, I'll have it canceled retroactively. Fred Torrez isn't going to get his greasy paws on you; I want you around for more."

"You could really do that?" Weller said, wanting to believe it but finding it a bit difficult.

Maria laughed again. "Fred takes orders only from John," she said, running a fingernail up the length of Weller's stomach. "And John takes orders only from me."

"Oh, really?" Weller said archly, sitting up against the pillows beside her. "Just like that?"

"You do ask a lot of questions, don't you? I'll bet you're not a television director at all. Let me guess ... The FBI? The Los Angeles Police? The Treasury Department?"

"I really am a director," Weller said. "Want to see my credits?"

Maria fondled his crotch. ''I've already seen your credits," she said. "But none of that precludes the possibility of your working for some agency or other, now does it?"

"Paranoia strikes deep," Weller sang. "Into your heart it will creep ..." He grinned at her. "Would you believe the KGB?" he said.

"Around here, I'd believe anything," Maria said. She put her arm around his shoulder. "Not that it would matter if you really were a spook. Believe me, no agency is going to be able to hurt Transformationalism. Certainly not with anything you can get from me."

"Hey, are you really serious?" Weller said. "Do you really think I'm working for some agency?"

"There is definitely something strange about you, Jack Weller," she said. "Or not strange enough. Remember, I've been with John since he was grinding out space opera for a penny a word. The three of us -- John, Harry, and I -- built the movement from the ground up, so I know exactly what kind of wimp gets roped in and what kind of loser ends up working for the movement for peon wages. I know it intimately, since I've balled maybe twenty or thirty of the creatures down through the years. And you are not that kind of creature. You do not talk like one. And you most certainly do not make love like one, my pretty."

'''That's the nicest thing anyone has said to me in months," Weller said sarcastically. This is a sharp lady, he thought. Maybe I should just lay my cards on the table. "I'll level with you," he said.

"Oh, will you now?" Maria said archly.

"Up to a point," Weller said. "I'll admit that I'm not a one hundred-percent-convinced Transformationalist."

"Thank God!" Maria said huskily. "What bores they are! What assholes!"

Weller looked at her somewhat incredulously.

"You're shocked?" Maria said. "My God, surely you realize that the world is divided up between the suckers and the suckees. Surely you can tell which is which without a libretto."

"It just sounds kind of strange coming from John's wife."

Maria's expression darkened. She leaned over, grabbed the tip of his cock with two fingers, and ran the little golden dagger she wore lightly across the root of it. "If you call me that again, I'll cut if off," she said. Point made, she laughed, and sat back again. "You can't imagine what a loathsome bore it is to be John's wife."

"And that's why you don't live with him?"

"John sits in the Transformational Research Institute in New York, playing wise man to all the scientists, sycophants, and flunkies he's hired," Maria said. "And it's gotten to the point where he half believes it himself. He doesn't want to leave, and I can't stand it there. It's like being sealed in a bottle with the Great I Am."

"So why don't you leave him?" Weller asked. "You probably wouldn't have any trouble getting a huge divorce settlement."

Maria patted his cheek softly. "You are young, aren't you?" she said. "John and I have been together for over twenty years. I met him when he was a lousy science-fiction writer -- and believe me, lousy was the word -- struggling to pay the rent. He didn't invent Transformationalism, he didn't even want to take it over. Harry Lazlo and I had to bludgeon him into it. Even today, John has no head for business --"

"That's exactly what Harry Lazlo said."

Maria's expression darkened. "That son of a bitch!" she said. "But the money-grubbing bastard is right. The three of us have always been a stable triangle. John wrote the book, John spins out the crazy theories and invents the product. John plays god, but Harry marketed Transformationalism, Harry built our financial empire, and only Harry knows enough to run it. In a way it's no different from the days when John was writing science fiction and Harry was peddling the crap he wrote as his agent."

"And you?"

"Me?" Maria shook her head ruefully. "I'm the only person in the world who really understands John, and I'm the only one who understands that puffed-up schlockmeister Harry Lazlo well enough to keep tabs on what he's doing and keep him from getting any smart ideas about taking over the movement himself. I'm the only person in the world who can ever tell John when he's being an ass and get him to listen. Without me, John would be a full-time messiah drifting further and further away from reality while Harry took over the actual power like some kind of cancer."

"So it's not really a marriage anymore, it's a business relationship?"

Maria sighed. "You really don't understand, do you?" she said much more softly. "In our crazy ways John and I really love each other. These days, we can't stand being around each other for very long, but that doesn't change what's in our hearts. None of it really makes sense if you don't know John, and the horrible thing is that now no one really knows John except me -- including John himself. You can't imagine what it's like ... "

She tilted her head back and stared at the ceiling. "I'm not sure why I'm telling you all this," she said. "Maybe I need a shrink -- and I certainly can't talk to a damn processor! But I might as well spill my guts; it may be good for what's left of my soul."

She smiled softly at Weller. "Understand that John is a tremendous man -- full of life, full of ideas, spinning off sparks like a pinwheel. But he's also always been totally unfocused, and as full of bullshit as it's possible to be. As a science-fiction writer he was full of ideas that he was never able to take seriously, and he never gave enough of a damn about writing to do anything really good. What he loved was being an author. Going to every loathsome science fiction convention there was and blathering for days on end in a drunken stupor, absolutely mesmerizing people. What he was a genius at was bullshitting, which never really paid the rent."

She laughed sardonically. "When he discovered Benson Allen's little fan club, he had been in a total writer's block for a year and we were stone broke. Harry, who had been collecting ten percent of nothing for a year, smelled money, and so did I, but not John. To him the whole thing was a joke. 'I'm living out one of my dumb novels,' he used to say."

Her voice grew harder, more distant, almost wistful in a strangely bitter way. "But as the years passed and the money came pouring in, as hundreds of thousands of people began looking at John as the god of their personal worlds, as he came more and more to live in a closed universe where everyone he came in contact with agreed with his own half serious image of himself as the Great I Am, John started to half believe it himself. Who wouldn't, love? 'Maybe I really know what I'm talking about,' he started to say. 'Maybe I'm transforming myself into the man of destiny.'"

She shrugged. "After all, he was now living in the fantasy situation he wanted for himself when he was an unsuccessful science-fiction writer. He was famous without having to write -- John always loathed actual work -- he could be a fulltime bullshit artist, and he was a messiah, just like the heroes of all his crummy science-fiction novels."

She looked into Weller's eyes and grinned faintly. "Wouldn't you, Jack Weller?" she said. "If people made you rich and powerful and treated you like a god, wouldn't you start believing it yourself, even if you knew it was your own con that got you there?"

"'I've never thought about it ...," Weller muttered inanely.

"Well, think about one more thing," Maria said. "Think about how lonely it would be. Think about getting nothing back from anyone around you but reflections of your own bullshit. Think about living out your life inside a house of magnifying mirrors. That's where John would be without me. Think about loving a man like that, think about not being able to help loving him and not really wanting to."

She leaned her bead up against Weller's shoulder. "So we have our little arrangements," she said. "John lives out his fantasy without my confronting him with reality except when he wants me to, or when I think he needs it. And I have my Jack Wellers, my parties, my role as grand dame of Transformationalism when I need it. But strange to say, my sweet, our marriage is as solid as a rock, and it's for keeps."

She sat up again and regarded Weller narrowly. "Now that I've told you the story of my life," she said, "I bloody well expect to hear some truth from you in return. What are you doing here, Jack Weller?"

Weller had been listening passively, soaking it all up like a sponge, knowing that this moment was coming; fearing it on one level, but anticipating it with hope on another. This moment, after all, was what he was here for. And there really wasn't anything he had to tell her that wasn't in his Monitor dossier anyway.

"To make a long story short, my wife became one of the suckers, as you call them" he said. "Me, I wasn't buying, and she finally got a life directive to leave me. Now she's disappeared into the bowels of the movement, and I'm trying to find her. That's my ulterior motive, it's as simple as that. I'm not with any agency, I'm on my own." He shuddered. "Boy, am I on my own!"

"So you sold your nubile young body to this old lady to try and find your wife?" Maria said, shaking her bead.

Weller remained silent, realizing that he had put himself in her bands and insulted her in the bargain.

Maria laughed. She placed her band on the inside of his thigh. "You think I'm insulted, is that it?" she said. "Quite the contrary. I find it rather charming. You're taking a big risk with me, and you know it. It's all rather romantic, really, isn't it? I have a thing for younger men, and I've dragooned a lot of them into my bed, but seldom have they been motivated by anything as chivalrous as all that."

"For what it's worth," Weller said quietly, "you did really turn me on. I mean it wasn't exactly a chore ... "

Maria kissed him gently on the lips. "You think I couldn't tell that, poor baby? Look, let's be honest with each other. You love your wife. I love my husband. I don't want a real relationship with you, and you don't want a real relationship with me. What I want from you is sex, and I'm more than satisfied that you can please me. Can we make a deal?"

"Can you locate my wife Annie for me?" Weller asked.

"With ease," Maria said.

"Will you do it?"

Maria moved her hand into his crotch, teasing his flesh. "That depends," she said. "Are you willing to be my sex slave? At least part of the time?"

"Are you serious?"

"Indeed I am, love. I enjoyed the way you used me, but a poor old lady has to feel she's on top sometimes too."

"If you'll find Annie for me, I'm yours to command," Weller said. Within reason, he thought.

"We have a deal, my pet," Maria said. She kissed him again, this time long and deep, twining the fingers of both her hands in the hair above his ears. Still clutching him by the hair, she rolled over onto her back, leaned up against the pillows, and pulled his face to her breasts. "Now you will do my bidding, my sweet," she said, half laughing.

And she dragged his head slowly down the length of her body and into the soft lowlands of her inner thighs, while Weller, at first reluctantly, but then with a growing passion, licked, kissed, and nibbled at her skin.

When she clamped her legs tightly around his head and began rolling the hardness of her pelvis against the softness of his mouth, Weller found himself inflamed by the very abnegation of his position, perhaps even overcome by a certain affection for this strange and powerful woman, and her sighs and groans of pleasure were not entirely unpleasant music to his ears.
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Re: The Mind Game, by Norman Spinrad

Postby admin » Sat Mar 19, 2016 9:05 am

Chapter Thirteen

There were still guards at the gate to the Steinhardt mansion compound when Weller drove up in response to Maria's summons, and they still wouldn't let him take the Triumph inside the walls. He had to park outside in the empty parking lot and walk all the way to the front entrance to the house, where a young woman in a blue smock led him inside, through the eerily empty parlor of the ground floor, and up an interior staircase to the living quarters.

Now, in the early evening, with the ground floor and courtyard empty and in immaculate order, Weller found the house sterile and depressing, like an immense, plush prison cell, or a scaled-down version of Xanadu in Citizen Kane. He wondered how Maria could bear living alone in such a huge place, with only servants, guards, and flunkies for company. He began to think of her as quite a vulnerable person, and for some reason that thought deeply disturbed him.

Maria was waiting for him in a kind of small sitting room overlooking the courtyard, with a skylight ceiling, white wicker furniture, and a jungle of potted palms, ferns, and hanging plants. She was sitting in a big peacock chair in front of a small table, and she was wearing a white sleeveless dress. The whole effect was that of an antebellum mistress-of-the-manor in some depressing Tennessee Williams play.

Somehow Weller got the feeling that he was supposed to kiss her hand and call her "ma'am." Instead he gave her a quick kiss on the lips and sat down across the table. A young man dressed in blue appeared with a flagon of white wine and two goblets on a silver tray, served, and departed.

"Well, love," Maria said. "I've got good news and bad news. The good news is that I've located your wife."

Weller sipped at the cold wine. "And the bad news?" he asked.

"The bad news is that Anne Weller has been assigned to the Transformational Research Institute in New York," Maria said. "She's working on one of John's mysterious and boring research projects." She touched Weller's hand and smiled ruefully. "I'm sorry.

"What for," Weller said. "That's exactly what I wanted to find out. That's great. I'm really grateful to you." I'm nearing the end-game now, he thought. All I have to do is get into this Institute thing and get her out. There must be other Garry Bailors I can hire if I have to.

"I thought the whole idea was that you wanted to see your wife again," Maria said.

"Of course."

Maria sighed. "I don't think you understand what I'm telling you," she said. "The Institute is under incredible security. A flea couldn't get in or out without a life directive directly from John. There's no way you can get in, there's no way she can get out, and no way you can even get a message through."

From somewhere -- perhaps the way Maria was looking at him, desirously, nervously, apologetically -- Weller found himself drawing upon a cold and almost bitchy cruelty. "Then what I need is a life directive from John to get me in, isn't it, Maria?" he said, regarding her coolly.

"You think I can --?"

"Can't you, Maria?" Weller said evenly.

"Look, I may have given you the wrong impression about John," Maria said, almost plaintively. "Most of the time I can pretty much have my own way, but the Transformational Research Institute.... Nobody gets in there without a reason. John's reason."

"Well then, we have to give him a reason, don't we?" Weller said relentlessly.

Maria laughed. "You can be a ruthless, implacable bastard, can't you?" she said. "But in away, I find that rather attractive." Weller reached under the table and put his hand under Maria's dress, smoothing the soft flesh of her inner thigh. Maria ran her tongue slowly around the edges of her teeth.

"Let's go into the bedroom," she said. "Afterward, maybe we can discuss your little problem."

"You can be pretty implacable yourself," Weller said. But he let her lead him by the hand across the hall into the bedroom. I know where Annie is, he thought. I know where she is.

But the fact seemed only a distant anesthetized reality as Maria slowly undressed him and then slipped her dress over her head, revealing her total nakedness beneath.

Yet the things they then proceeded to do to each other, the kissings and lickings, the movements of body on body, also seemed to Weller to be taking place at some great distance from the locus of his consciousness.

He performed well, but he performed mechanically. Even as he thrust against Maria, he was thinking about Annie, about knowing where she was, about how to get to see her again. But he did not fantasize about making love to Annie while he was fucking Maria Steinhardt, nor did he feel guilty about the dichotomy between what he was thinking and what his body was doing. The only guilt he felt was over the fact that he had difficulty even forming a mental image of Annie's face.

Time passed. Maria had several orgasms, and finally appeared satiated, and Weller's mind returned to where it had been in the sitting room as if nothing had happened. Indeed, psychically, nothing had.

"Will you help me again?" he asked Maria as they sat side by side against the headboard.

"I told you," she said, "I just can't tell John to let you into the Institute. It won't work."

"The only way for me to get in there is for John to want me there ... ?"

"That's right, love. I can't even get in when John doesn't want me around.

"Well, what goes on in this damned place?" Weller asked.

Maria shrugged, "Some psychiatrist named Bernstein talked John into setting it up at a ridiculous cost. Supposedly it's a kind of mental Manhattan Project, at least that's what John thinks he's doing, On the other hand, Bernstein may actually be taking John to the cleaners. Who knows? According to John they're experimenting with everything from new-model brainwave monitors to psychedelic drugs. Whenever I ask John what he thinks he's spending all that money to accomplish, I get Transformationalist gibberish. I think he's convinced that the Institute is going to be his monument to history or something."

"And what the hell is Annie doing in this place?"

"I don't know," Maria said quietly.

"You mean there are some things John keeps even from you?"

"Yes. I mean no. I mean he'd tell me if I asked, but he'd want to know why ..." Maria seemed uncharacteristically nervous, even furtive, as if they had drifted into an area where her relationship with John B. Steinhardt was not quite what she liked to pretend it was.

"Okay," Weller said more sympathetically, "I understand the problem. But will you do what you can to help me? If I come up with a reason for John to want me at the Institute, will you help me sell it to him as best you can?"

Maria eyed him narrowly. "You know," she said, ''I'm beginning to get the feeling that you're some kind of agent again, that all this business about your wife is just a cover story."

'"You can check out my dossier with the Monitors."

"Oh, I already have," Maria said quite earnestly. "Still, if an agency were trying to penetrate the Institute, they might go to considerable lengths, even your wife...."

Weller forced a laugh. "Are you really serious?"

"Quien sabe?" Maria said more lightly. "On the other hand, the thought does add a certain spice to things. All right, whoever you are, you figure it out, and I'll front for you. Up to a point."

"Marvelous," Weller said, giving her a kiss. "My superiors will be very pleased."

***

Pacing in his tiny room at the Transformation Center, Weller was unwilling to even go downstairs for dinner, though he knew that in two hours he would have to drag his ass to the kitchen to wash dishes. For days now the disjunctions in his life, the splits in his mind, were driving him up walls, and every additional input -- at work, in the Center, in Maria Steinhardt's bed -- just seemed to wind the spring a little tighter.

So near and yet so far. All these months of scheming, of loneliness, of turning himself into someone he no longer knew, had come down to a single point: get inside the Transformational Research Institute. Do that, and it would all be over, the unbearable psychic tension would finally be resolved. No more balling Maria, no more playing the cold demon lover. No more mind games. No more living at the Center. No more washing dishes. No more grinding out commercials for something he hated.

But how? How can I make Steinhardt want me to come to the Institute? What can I give to Maria to get to him with? How can I sell myself --?

Weller sat down heavily on the edge of the bed. Sell myself? Or sell Steinhardt ...? Something was percolating up from the lower reaches of his mind. Eptify yourself behind the scenario, he told himself. It's there, I can feel it, I've got to reach for it.

Sell Steinhardt.... Sell Steinhardt .... What was it about those two words ...? Weller's mind ached, straining for an illusive thought that hovered just beyond his grasp, like the name of an old friend caught on the tip of his tongue, like a word in a foreign language he had studied in high school. Sell Steinhardt....

Of course! he suddenly realized. Those two words have a double meaning! Sell myself to Steinhardt, or literally sell Steinhardt like so much corn flakes.

Or both.

It finally clicked, like a crystal suddenly forming in a supersaturated-solution. I'm making commercials for Transformationalism, he thought, and they stink. Not because I stink, but because the scripts and actors stink. But Steinhardt on tape.... Steinhardt could sell a Corvair to Ralph Nader. I could make such Transformationalism commercials if I had John B. Steinhardt to use in them!

And with his ego, how could he not rise to the bait? How could he not at least want to talk about it?

That's it, that is fucking it!

But not immediately through Maria, he thought. Have to be more subtle about it. Plant the idea at Changes, let Karel know that I want to do it, and then use Maria to end-run around the Monitors when they come down on it. As no doubt they will.

He got up off the bed and began pacing again. He could hardly wait till tomorrow. Tomorrow, Sara and the whole crew at Changes were going to start getting a dose of how he really felt about what they were doing, and it was going to be a double pleasure dishing it out!

***

At the lunch break Weller casually wandered into Sara English's office, where Sara was sitting alone behind her desk going through some scripts. Since Maria's party there had been a lot of frost in the air between them, and Sara didn't deign to look up until after he had planted himself heavily in a chair beside the desk with a tired, depressed look painted deliberately across his face.

When she did look up at him, it was with a somewhat owlish expression, and when she spoke, her voice was diffident and distant. "What's the matter with you? Having trouble on the set?"

"No worse than usual," Weller grunted.

Now he seemed to have her full, alert, and surprised attention. "No worse than usual? What are you talking about? You've been consistently ahead of schedule since you started directing. There haven't been any complaints."

"Marvelous," Weller grunted sarcastically, leading her into it.

Sara sat up on the edge of her chair and studied Weller as if he had metamorphosed into some mythical monster. "What the hell's gotten into you, Jack?" she said.

"Don't you know? Can't you see it?"

"What are you talking about?"

"Oh, come on, Sara," Weller said in a carefully crafted tone of tired vehemence. ''You know that what we're doing is shit."

Sara's eyes went wide, then narrowed. She sat stiff-backed upright in her chair and her tone of voice became defensive and clipped. "I realize we're not all up to your technical level --"

"Oh, can it, Sara!" Weller snapped. "Technical ability has nothing to do with it. What I'm turning out is shit too. A little faster, a little slicker, but just as shitty. It's really starting to get to me."

"What is?" Sara said uncertainly, but also somewhat belligerently. "You still haven't told me what you're talking about."

"It's the basic stuff," Weller said. ''The scripts, and even more basic than the scripts, the very concepts of the commercials."

Sara's expression became rigid and her voice became almost mechanical. "You know where the scripts come from," she said nervously. "What's wrong with them?"

"What's wrong with them?" Weller said. ''They're stupid, amateurish, and counterproductive. No matter how well made they might be, they'd still just be well-made garbage." He found himself taking gleeful sadistic satisfaction in finally venting the truth, even if it were for his own Machiavellian ends.

But Sara apparently didn't believe her ears or didn't want to believe them. "You know I'm going to have to report this to Karel ...," she stammered.

Weller deliberately ignored her and continued his diatribe. ''The actors are impossible too, and the end product is something that couldn't sell thermal underwear to Eskimos. It's really depressing, knowing you're doing your best and nothing but crud is coming about because the concepts, scripts, and actors you're stuck with guarantee a hopeless product...."

Now Sara seemed really frightened. "Please stop it," she said shrilly. "Don't you realize what you're saying? Don't you know I have to report this? Don't you know that the scripts have the force of Monitor policy and the casting has the force of life directives?"

Weller shifted to a mode of tired resignation. "Of course, I know all that. But I tell you, I've reached the point where I finally don't give a damn. I care too much about what I'm doing to just sit back and let the Monitors fuck it up."

"Jack!"

Weller bled some wistful longing energy back into his voice. "When we have the potential to make a series of commercials that could double Transformationalism's national membership in a year."

"What?" Sara seemed to perk up a bit.

"I mean John himself." Weller said. "You've seen him on tape -- now that's star quality! Boy, could I make commercials for Transformationalism if I could use John B. Steinhardt! Why hasn't Changes made commercials using John?"

"I don't know.... You know that kind of policy isn't made on our level."

"Well, why not? It damn well should be." Weller paused, as if slowly coming to an impromptu decision. "In fact, I think I'm going to make the request myself. In fact, you can consider it formally made as of now. I hereby propose a series of commercials using John to be shot by me. What are you going to do about it?"

"Me?" Sara squealed. "I'm not going to do a damn thing. If you think you're going to involve me in --"

"Well, then what do I do about it, propose it to Owen Karel?"

"Jack, there's nothing you can do. You can't issue a life directive to John. You can't go over the Monitors' heads. You can't --"

"Why not? What's wrong with this organization that it can't accept some professional advice?"

"Jack, good Lord. You haven't even passed life analysis. Do you know what they'll --"

"Fuck it!" Weller snapped, standing up. ''I'm going to go find a typewriter, write a proposal, and give it to Karel."

"Please --"

"All right, if it makes you so nervous, you hand the proposal to Karel. With a complete report on this conversation. That should cover you with the Monitors."

"You're really serious about this, aren't you?" Sara said quietly. "You won't listen to reason?"

"I'm going to do it, Sara. Through you, or over your head to Karel. Your choice."

Sara sighed resignedly. "All right," she said. "You type up the proposal, and I'll hand it to Karel. But that's all I'm going to do. No recommendation, and I am going to report this conversation. I'm going to completely disassociate myself from this insanity."

"You do that," Weller snapped over his shoulder on the way out. ''I'll have it on your desk in half an hour." The die was cast. Whether the Monitors passed the proposal along to Steinhardt or not, it was going to get there. He'd give channels two or three days, and then play his hole card -- Maria, the Queen of Steinhardts.

***

For nearly two days Weller had been waiting for something to happen, for some Monitor ax to fall. He hadn't spoken to Owen Karel since Sara had transmitted his proposal and Karel hadn't spoken to him. But their paths had crossed several times, and each time the Monitor representative had given him a cold, withering, lingering stare. Apparently whatever was going to happen wasn't going to be decided at Karel's level. Was it possible that they would really buck it up directly to Steinhardt? Could it end up being as easy as all that? Sara had been avoiding speaking to him too, as if she feared contamination, as if she were determined to put as much distance between her and whatever was going to come down as possible, so it didn't seem very likely.

When the other shoe was finally dropped, Weller was in the kitchen at the Transformation Center washing dishes. A hand tapped him on the shoulder from behind. "Jack Weller?"

Weller turned and saw a big, gross bozo in T-shirt and Jeans. "Yes ... ?"

"Come with me."

''I've still got a lot of dishes to finish...."

"You're to come with me right now. It's a life directive."

Weller shrugged, dried his hands, and let himself he led to the fourth floor, to the very same room where he had had his life-analysis sessions with Gomez. And when the door was closed behind him, it was Gomez himself who sat behind the desk, scowling and somewhat harried-looking.

"Sit your goddamn ass down, Weller." As Weller sat down in front of the desk, Gomez slid a piece of paper across it at him. "What the fuck is this?" he demanded.

"Just what it says," Weller said coldly.

Gomez snorted. "Just because you're screwing Maria Steinhardt, you think you can get away with this shit. Is that it?"

Weller blanched. "You know about that?"

"That's a pretty stupid question, isn't it, Weller?" Gomez said. "Not up to your usual standard. Now what the hell is all this about?"

Weller forced himself to be calm. "You tell me," he said.

Gomez leaned forward on his elbows and glared at Weller. "Stop jiving me," he snarled.

''I'm not jiving you," Weller said. "I made a suggestion in my professional capacity, and here I am hauled in front of you. Why?"

"Your professional capacity is to do as you're told," Gomez snapped. "Not to tell the Monitors their business."

Studying Gomez, Weller sensed that the Monitor was not entirely on top of this situation; something was rattling him, and Gomez didn't like it. He decided to probe deeper. "Is that what John said?"

Gomez laughed harshly. "You think that thing got to John?" he said contemptuously. "Karel passed it up the chain to Torrez, and Torrez kicked it down to me, and none too gently either."

"What are you trying to tell me?" Weller asked ingenuously.

Gomez reached across the desk, snatched up the proposal, balled it up in his fist, and tossed it over his shoulder onto the floor. "That's what I'm telling you, Weller," he said. "If it were up to me, I'd declare you a regressive right now and be done with you. You've gone too far."

Weller realized that Gomez had given himself away. He leered across the desk at the Monitor. "But it's not up to you, is it, Gomez?" he said. "Someone has ordered you not to give me a negative life analysis. Torrez? Or --"

"Cut it out, Weller," Gomez snapped. "You know damn well who protected you."

Weller laughed. "Sticks in your craw, doesn't it?" he said.

Gomez flushed. He ground his hands into fists. ''You'd better be a great lay, Weller," he said. "Because as soon as Maria Steinhardt gets tired of you, your ass is grass. And that doesn't just come from me, it comes from Torrez."

'"But in the meantime ...." Weller insinuated, feeling a marvelous sense of his own power.

"In the meantime you'd better keep your nose clean," Gomez said. "We're under orders not to declare you a regressive, but that's as far as it goes. Any more of this crap, and we can still find ways of making it mighty uncomfortable for you around here."

It seemed to Weller that Gomez's threat was essentially hollow; in any event he had gone much too far to turn back now. The only way out was to press on. "What about my proposal?" he said.

"What about it?"

"I want it to go to John."

Gomez slammed his list on the desk. "I told you. Torrez himself vetoed it. That's the end of it."

"Not good enough," Weller said quietly.

"Not good enough?" Gomez shouted. "What the hell do you mean, not good enough?"

"I mean I don't accept it," Weller said evenly.

"I don't give a shit if you accept it or not; that's the way it is."

"Is it?" Weller said softly. "Is it really? You've got a choice, Gomez. You can transmit my proposal to John through the regular Monitor channels ... or I go the alternate route. You and Torrez won't look so good if John overrules you personally, now will you?"

Gomez gaped. "You wouldn't dare."

"Oh, wouldn't I? You've just told me that my ass is grass if Maria stops protecting me. That's my hole card. What do I have to lose by betting my whole stake on it?"

Gomez half leaped out of his chair, raging. "I'm warning you, Weller!" he screamed. "You lay off or --"

"Or what?" Weller sneered contemptuously.

Gomez subsided back into his chair. "Don't underestimate us," he said. "If you push this thing any further, it's Coventry for you."

"Coventry?"

"One step from being declared a regressive," Gomez said. "And not such a large step at that. You've been warned. You can take it as being official."

Weller stood up. "Do you have anything more to say?" he asked.

Gomez sat there silently, as if disbelieving his own senses.

"Then I'll he going if it's okay with you," Weller said. Holding his breath, he walked to the door. Gomez was silent. Weller opened the door, glanced back at the immobile Gomez, and stepped through into the hallway.

"Motherfucker!" he heard Gomez whisper to empty air as he closed the door behind him.

"Hot shit!" Weller exclaimed to himself. You played that beautifully, kid, he told himself. From here on in, the name of the game is escalation.

***

Maria Steinhardt lay naked on her bed, her head propped up on one elbow, staring at Weller, who sat up against the headboard looking down at her like the Great Sphinx. "You realize, love," she said, "that you are in my power. Fred Torrez was ready to declare you a regressive, and I don't think you fully realize what that means. Trying to communicate directly with John was pushing it too far; Torrez is an awful enemy for anyone to make. And now you want me to get this proposal to John in direct defiance of the Monitors! Don't you recognize any limits?"

"You said you'd do it," Weller said distantly. "You said if I came up with a reason for John to want me there that you'd get it through to him. Isn't this idea something that will appeal to him?"

Maria laughed. "Appeal to him? It's just the sort of egoboo that he loves to get drunk on. But how am I supposed to put it to him?"

"Tell him the truth," Weller said. "Tell him that the Monitors blocked the proposal and that I appealed directly to you."

Maria scowled. "Don't you realize that telling him that would be telling him that you're directly defying a Monitor life directive?"

"So what?" Weller said.

"So what? So if John doesn't like it, there's no way I can protect you from him."

''You think that's going to happen?"

Maria sat up beside him. She shrugged. "With John, even I don't always know," she said. "Don't forget, he'll read your Monitor dossier, maybe even talk it over with Torrez. Anything the movement knows about you, John will know."

Weller reached out a hand and flicked at her nipple. "Including what's going on here?" he asked. "Is that what you're afraid of?"

"You really think he doesn't know about us already? You think I could go to bed with anyone without John knowing? You think when I stopped Torrez from declaring you a regressive, he didn't report it to John?"

"So when you present my proposal to John, he'll know exactly where it's coming from and why?" Weller said. "You think that'll make him turn it down and ax me without ever talking to me?"

"On the contrary, pet," Maria said. "He'll want to meet you. It'll probably get you into the Institute. But have you given any thought to getting out?"

Weller felt a slight twinge of dread. He hadn't given too much thought to how he would get Annie and himself out.... But the Master Contact Sheet was damned good blackmail material, and the fail-safe copies had already been mailed.

And ever since he had begun this course of action, ever since his first night with Maria, his sense of his own power had been growing. There wasn't anything logical about it. It was a psychic thing, a sense of more fully inhabiting his own skin, perhaps something as simple and irrational as a slow and gradual rediscovery of the possibilities of his own courage. The way he had gotten away with defying Gomez had been the capper. Now he was beginning to feel that there was nothing he would not try, nothing he would not dare.

"You let me worry about that," he said, surprised at the ominous strength he heard himself putting into his own voice.

Maria must have heard it too, for she seemed to shrink back from him slightly. "What if I decide I just don't want to do it?" she said.

Weller ran a hand teasingly through her pubic hair. "Then you lose my lovely young bod," he said. On impulse he added, "As well as my goodwill."

"What's that supposed to mean?" Maria asked uneasily.

Weller felt a streak of cold cruelty leaping from his core to his mouth, like a sudden dagger drawn from a hidden scabbard. "You're always kidding me about working for some agency," he said lightly. "What if it isn't a joke?"

Maria's eyes widened. "You're not serious?" she whispered.

"Did I say I was?" Weller answered ambiguously. "But what if I was? What if something bigger and stronger than Transformationalism were closing in?"

"What could that be?" Maria said scornfully. But there was the slightest edge of nervousness in her voice.

Weller laughed. "The federal government," he said. "Maybe even the Mafia ..."

"The Mafia ...? Oh, really!"

Weller shrugged. "Transformationalism is a large business with a lot of useful contacts," he said. "Might make an attractive-looking meal to an even bigger fish. Someone might want to make you a merger offer you couldn't refuse."

"You're not serious ..."

"Did I say I was?" Weller repeated archly. "But if I was, who ended up protecting whom might turn out to be a horse of a different color. . ."

Maria studied him narrowly. "You're just playing a game with me, right?" she said.

"Right." Weller said fatuously. ''I'm just playing a game with you."

They stared into each other's eyes for a long, silent moment. "And you're just playing the same game with me," Weller said evenly. "You're going to speak to John as you promised to." He arched an eyebrow at her. "Aren't you?"

Maria smiled at him, somewhat nervously, somewhat wantonly. "If you want to play that game, I'll go along with you," she said. She laughed. "I wish I really believed you. I find something feral about it. I think it's turning me on. Grrr!"

She leaned over and sunk her teeth into Weller's earlobe, a really hard bite that sent a flash of pain to his brain. He tried to pull away, but she hung on, gnawing and growling. She rolled over onto him, reaching between his thighs.

Something snapped inside Weller -- perhaps it was the sharp pain, perhaps it was the persona he had assumed, perhaps it was the need to ram the lesson home, perhaps all three. He threw his arms around Maria and wrestled her off of him. He slapped her lightly across the cheek; she gasped, more in surprise than pain, and released his ear.

Weller flipped her over onto her stomach, pinioning her to the bed at the waist with his hands, raised his torso above her, spread her legs, and thrust between them.

"No! No!" Maria screamed in shock and outrage.

"No?" Weller snarled. "You're telling me you don't want it?" He laughed wildly and drove deeper.

Maria screamed in pain, but began to move her body against his, and soon the tone of her screams lowered, became a mewling of pain mixed with pleasure as she thrashed and ground slowly against him, impaled like a vassal, hating it and loving it at the same time.

Weller found himself stunned at what he was doing, astonished at his own sadism, and even more astonished at how much it pleased him to have Maria Steinhardt writhing in pain and pleasure beneath him. He snarled gutturally and round himself going with it completely -- the savagery, the feral animal pleasure, the sophisticated mental power trip -- with a demonic energy he had never felt before. He was a stranger to himself. The Jack Weller that had been would not be capable of something like this.

But that was in another country, and besides the lad was dead.

***

Weller entered the lobby of the Transformation Center at six fifteen, after an unusually long shooting day, feeling bone weary and piano-wire tense. Two days now and he had heard nothing from Maria Steinhardt. He had no idea how long it might take for her to speak to Steinhardt, nor how long it would take Steinhardt to react, nor what form the reaction might take if it turned out to be negative.

But the tension of waiting was becoming unbearable. At the studio Sara was totally ignoring him, and even Georgie and Shano seemed reluctant to be seen in conversation with him, as if word of what he was doing had filtered down to their level. Even his own crew seemed rather taciturn and sullen, though that might just be an extension of his own paranoia in an admittedly paranoid situation.

Weller paused at the gate desk, waiting to be recognized by the guard and passed through to the inner lobby. But instead of just nodding and passing him through, the guard pointed silently to a piece of paper taped to the front of the desk.

"What ... ?"

Silently, insistently, the guard jabbed his finger at the notice. Grunting, Weller bent over slightly and read it:

NOTICE: GENERAL LIFE DIRECTIVE

Jack Weller has been placed in Coventry by directive of the Monitors until further notice. No member of this Transformation Center may speak to Jack Weller except in the necessary course of relaying official directives, instructions, or information authorized over the signature of Benson Allen. Failure to obey this directive will result in one week's Coventry. Second offenses will be considered regressive behavior.

Weller stared at the guard in disbelief. The guard pointedly looked away, then buzzed him through the gate. Woodenly Weller walked to the bank of elevators. Another copy of the same notice was taped to the wall between the two doors. There was another Coventry notice inside the elevator, and between the elevator doors on his floor. And further down the hall near his room. What was this juvenile horseshit? Did they expect anyone to take this boarding-school hazing tactic seriously? Did they expect him to take it seriously?

He took a quick piss, washed his bands, and went down to the dining room where he spotted Coventry notices outside the entrance, at the head of the food line, and on the garbage bins. The silly fucking things were everywhere.

He got a plate of franks and beans and potato salad at the steam tables, where the servers wouldn't meet his eyes, and looked around for a place to sit. This time, perversely, he wanted to sit with people he knew, with some of the nerds who had been sucking up to him, to blast this stupid Coventry thing apart before it really got started. Tina Davies was sitting at the end of a table opposite Ted and Lori Brenner. There was an empty seat next to Tina, and Weller took it.

"Hi, Tina," he said. "How's it going?"

Tina stared down at her plate and continued to shovel spaghetti into her mouth.

"Ted? Lori?"

They wouldn't even meet his eyes.

"What the fuck is this?" Weller snapped. "Are you people actually going along with this juvenile nonsense?"

Tina gave him a furtive look, Ted and Lori ignored him completely, It was beginning to get to Weller. The whole thing was like some kind of stupid high-school joke, and it was getting on his nerves on exactly that sort of credulous level.

"What's the matter with you assholes?" Weller said conversationally. "You have shit for brains?" Still no response. This was no longer funny. Weller was really getting pissed off, and now he was determined to get a rise out of these bastards.

"You stupid motherfuckers!" he shouted loudly. "You spineless dog-faced baboons! Don't you have any minds of your own?"

The noise level in the dining room suddenly dipped as everyone looked to find the source of this unseemly disturbance. But when people saw who was doing the shouting, they immediately looked away again. Weller had the feeling he could have whipped out his cock and pissed in his plate and no one would dare to notice.

Tina, Ted, and Lori exchanged nervous looks. Then, without a word, the three of them got up at once and moved to another table, far across the room.

"Son of a bitch," Weller muttered to himself. He was surprised at how quickly this silent treatment had gotten under his skin. It was not so much that he craved the conversation of any of these nerds as it was anger and amazement that people who had been pestering him for attention for weeks were actually obeying this asshole directive to the letter. As if they had no minds of their own at all. Was that what this was supposed to be too, in addition to everything else -- a demonstration of total Monitor power?

Weller looked around the dining room. Two tables away, Harry, the aging nobody who wanted to be a processor, sat alone picking at his food. Weller decided to give old Harry a try; no one had been forcing his company on him more than Harry. Weller picked up his tray, walked over, and sat down across the table. Harry deigned to look up at him with a sad, somewhat wistful expression.

"Hi, Harry," Weller said gently, forcing himself to swallow his anger. "Are you playing along with this silent treatment too?"

Harry deliberately met his eyes for a moment, then looked down at his plate.

"I see," Weller said. "Because you're afraid not to?"

Harry looked up. His expression hardened. He glared at Weller. The meaning of it seemed totally incomprehensible.

"Do you even know why this is happening?"

Harry looked down at his plate.

Weller found that the anger was quickly leaching out of him, replaced by a certain sadness, not for himself, but for the poor zombies who were willing to eat this kind of shit, play this stupid game, without even knowing why. But as he thought of the games he had successfully run on Maria Steinhardt and the way he had faced down Gomez, that sadness became less sympathetic, became overlaid with contempt. The suckers and the suckees ... he thought.

"You know, Harry, I feel sorry for you," he said. "You've got to feel like a fool doing this. They've made you into a gutless coward. You want to be a processor, but don't you also want to be a man?"

Harry looked up angrily. His lips began to move as if he were about to break the silence. Then he caught himself, gave Weller a hang-dog look, and got up and walked away.

Weller sat there, isolated, but taking a certain comfort in it now. After all, he thought, I never really wanted to have anything to do with these people anyway, and this doesn't exactly make them more attractive. Now, at least, they'll really leave me alone.

He cut off a piece of frankfurter and forked it into his mouth with some baked beans. Yech! The food was greasy and tasteless as usual, but by now it was also as cold and limp as a wet washcloth.
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Re: The Mind Game, by Norman Spinrad

Postby admin » Sat Mar 19, 2016 9:05 am

Chapter Fourteen

Weller took a sip of his honest-to-God mint julep. Across the courtyard the fountain gurgled, and the sweet smell of blossoms filled the cooling evening air. Maria Steinhardt sat on the bench beside him, dressed in a brocaded kimono, her hair wild around her shoulders, her eyes smoky with satiation. Money, sex, and languor perfumed the atmosphere. It all seemed light-years away from the grinding, sullen tension of the set, the vicious, nerve-shattering silence of the Transformation Center.

"At first it really didn't get to me,"' Weller said. "But now ... I come back from work, and I eat by myself. They point and grunt at me in the kitchen while I'm washing the goddamn dishes. I walk into a room, and conversation stops as soon as I get within earshot. Even at work no one talks to me unless it's in the line of duty. It's beginning to drive me a little nuts. I mean, I know I'm becoming a bastard on the set. If it keeps up much longer, I'm afraid I'm going to start talking to myself."

Maria shrugged, not very sympathetically. "You knew what you were getting into, Jack," she said. "I can't do anything about it."

Weller took another cooling sip of his drink. "I didn't ask you to," he said. "Frankly I don't give much of a damn about improving my present situation. I want to get to the Institute. If that ends up being impossible, or if I'm kept waiting much longer, I'm just going to pack it all in."

"All of it," Maria said, arching an eyebrow and moving closer.

"All of it," Weller said evenly. And I'm beginning to mean it, he thought. I'm pressuring her, but I'm not just pressuring her. If I can't get to the Institute, there's no further point in torturing myself. I'll release my own copies of the damned Master Contact Sheet and let the fur fly where it may.

"Well I've spoken to John," Maria said. "Twice ... "

"And?"

"And he's amused."

"Amused?"

"John loves to think in twelve directions at once," Maria said. "I could tell that the idea of starring in commercials tickled him. But, of course, he knows about you and your wife and why you're doing what you're doing. And that amuses him too, on a different level. I have the feeling that this Coventry directive was his idea. He's playing with you. He's toying with you. He's running one of his silly experiments."

She put a hand on Weller's thigh. "And of course, he knows all about us," she said. "That amuses him too."

"I don't think I follow that one," Weller said sourly.

Maria placed her hands on her knees, leaned back, and stared up at the darkening sky as she spoke.

"It's hard to explain, and it's not very pretty," she said. "Our arrangement permits me my little affairs, but John doesn't exactly like it. It's more of a quid pro quo. If he forced me to stay at the Institute, or if he expected me to be totally faithful to him while he was off playing the Great I Am, it would be divorce-court time, ducks. Aside from the fact that my divorcing him would drive John crazy, it would be one holy horror for Transformationalism, because this is a community-property state, love, and I have enough on John and his whole movement to drag it through the gossip columns for months.

She looked at Weller and smiled rather sadly. "So John permits me my little affairs," she said. "'Your little egobooster-shots,' he calls them. Not that there isn't truth in that, not that there isn't a certain amount of love in it too. I mean, he understands me, he knows what a beating my ego has to take as the wife of the God-Of-All-He-Surveys. But John is a man too -- even though he likes to pretend he's transcended all that -- and it does give him a perverse satisfaction to be able to view what I'm doing in as tacky a light as possible."

She patted Weller's knee. "And the idea that you're ... servicing me for the most obvious of ulterior motives amuses him on that level."

"Pardon me while I puke," Weller grunted. What she had told him made him feel small and toadlike indeed. I think I'm running numbers on them, and all the while I'm a spear carrier in their loathsome little porno movie. Blech!

"Takes one to know one ... Maria said. "In the Biblical sense of course.

"Well, where does your charming little psychodrama leave me?" Weller asked.

"Leave us not be crude, my pet," Maria said gaily.

Weller was beginning to steam. He had a fantasy impulse to smash his fist into her face.

"I mean what do you think John is going to do," Weller said, through grinding teeth. "Is he going to turn me down, or do I eventually get to the Institute?"

"Always an eye for the main chance, hey?" Maria said teasingly. She laughed. "Oh, I believe John will eventually want to see you," she said blithely. "After he's extracted the maximum amusement from this little situation. You just have to hang on, love." She gave him a cold, hard look. "And make sure that I don't tire of you before then," she said.

"What's that supposed to mean?" Weller said belligerently. Maria stared into his eyes. "I don't think you like me very much now," she said. "Well, I can tolerate that. I can even be amused by it. Because like me or not, you have to please me, don't you, lover?"

Weller glared back at her, seething with rage and loathing.

Maria laughed cruelly. "It does something for this old lady's poor battered ego to, have a young man like yourself in her power. And at the moment the way you feel about me just makes it all the tastier."

She stood up, reached down, picked up the hem of her kimono, and lifted it, exposing her bare fur of dark pubic beard.

Weller jumped to his feet, grossed out by this unlikely act.

Maria laughed. "Right now I want you to eat me," she said. "Right here, just like that. On your knees."

Weller's hands convulsed into fists. He took a half step forward, violence pounding through his arteries. "You lousy --"

"Of course, you don't have to do it," Maria said. "We can just call it quits right now. In which case ...," She let the sentence dangle around a smug, amused smile.

Weller stood there frozen, his mind unable to function, while his treasonous body found itself being turned on by the very vileness of the situation, the pure brutal animalism of her domineering command.

Maria put a hand atop his head. He did not resist. "Eat my tired old cunt, lover," she said hoarsely. "Be my little slave, you dirty mind-fucker, you. Down on your knees!"

Trembling, resignedly, but not without a surge of perverse and twisted passion, Weller sank slowly to his knees. The worst of it was that a part of him knew that he was going to enjoy it, that in a moment he would be lost in her triumphant moans, that somehow the self-loathing he felt was being transformed into the demon desire to master her with pleasure. And she knew this and was getting off on it, and that, most vile of all, was making his body throb with a sickening lust.

***

Weller plodded numbly down the hallway to his room, passing one of the fading Coventry notices taped to the wall. He had to admit that the silent treatment had finally gotten to him.

His life had become a dreary tunnel of isolation -- from meaningful human contact, from anything that gave even a dim and feeble pleasure. He felt like a rat in a totally deterministic maze. A tasteless silent breakfast in the commissary, eight hours at Changes Productions shunned by his fellow workers and communicating only on a technical level, a grim lonely dinner at the Center, an hour of dishwashing, then walking around the Center like an invisible ghost or reading nothing in particular in his room until he was sleepy enough to blot out the world and begin the cycle again in the morning.

Now he understood what the Monitors were doing. Gomez, and beyond him, Torrez wanted him out, but thus far Maria was preventing them from simply declaring him a regressive, so the only way they could get him out was to make him leave of his own volition. So they were making his life a torture to be endured. All that kept him going was waiting for a summons from Steinhardt to go to the Institute. That was the contest he was locked into with the Monitors: could he endure the silent treatment until word came down, or could they drive him into giving up?

Even his hours with Maria were now part of it. Sex with her bad become a contest of wills in which he held a losing hand. If he didn't please her, he would be at the nonexistent mercy of the Monitors. Maybe she had even lied to him. Maybe she had never spoken to Steinhardt about his proposal at all. Maybe that was part of a cruel mind game too: something to make him endure the agony of Coventry forever, to lock him in perpetual stasis which would eventually break him to their will.

Weller reached his room, went inside, took a piss, and sat down on the edge of the bed to wait until the dining room opened so that he could pass another hour shoveling bad food into his face in stony silence. I've got to get out of this, he thought. I'm starting to feel like the walls are closing in on me.

Well, why not? he thought. I've got two hours till I have to show up to wash dishes, I could go out to eat. Most of the restaurants in the area were greasy joints, and he really didn't have the time to drive somewhere else, but there was a pretty good Chinese restaurant on Cahuenga, and he'd have time to get there, eat, and walk back. Why not?

He bounded off the bed, combed his hair, took the elevator to the lobby, and walked defiantly out of the Transformation Center, past the deliberately unseeing eyes of the guards and inmates, and out into the non-Transformationalist reality of the streets.

During the short walk to the restaurant, Weller found himself enjoying the anonymity of the streets, the tackiness of the porno shops, the bars, the sleazy massage parlors, the very scurviness of the denizens of downtown Hollywood. Although this had never been his world, it was very much like the world he had lost in a basic human sense: chaotic, plotless, random; uncontrolled by Monitors, life directives, or Transformationalist mind games. Like his lost world it was full of frustrations, boredom, desperation, and thwarted dreams, but at least it was a world of natural human evolution and natural human conflicts, not a hermetically sealed universe proceeding according to the plans, scenarios, and whims of one man and the power structure he had built to contain it.

That thought gave Weller some comfort, but it also made him feel somewhat alien out here in the free air, less than human, a creature of the psychic catacombs, a halfling.

The Chinese restaurant was a rather plain storefront with an extensive menu posted on the window. Inside, dim lighting, square tables with white clothes, Chinese paintings and instruments on the walls, and a kind of gilt-and-red pagoda facade across the entrance made a pass at atmosphere. At this early hour the place was almost empty. But as a waiter led him toward an isolated table-for-two, Weller spotted Johnny Blaisdell, his sometime press agent, eating at a table in a corner with his wife Madge. A moment later Johnny spotted him.

''Jack! For Chrissakes! Are you alone? Come over and eat with us." Johnny waved at him, very Beverly Hills with his silvery hair, air force shades, and mint-green leisure suit, with his honey-blond wife in a tightly tailored denim dress festooned with turquoise and silver.

Uneasily Weller went over to their table. The Blaisdells were an apparition out of his old life, the world he had lost. Once he had inhabited their reality and been one of them. Seeing them now and feeling his own sense of alienation, he had a sickening floating feeling of not knowing who he was or whether he still had a reality.

"What are you doing here, Johnny?" he asked as he sat down. "This isn't exactly your usual turf."

"We're going to an early sneak preview up on Hollywood Boulevard, " Madge said.

"Yeah. Hey, you want to tog along? I can probably bullshit you in."

"No thanks," Weller said automatically. ''I've got to be back at the Transformation Center by a quarter after seven." He could've bitten his tongue off after he said it, the way both of them looked at him as if he were the carrier of some loathsome disease.

"Yeah, I heard you had gotten really involved with Transformationalism," Johnny said. "How's your head, boy? You still just chasing Annie, or have they got you hooked?"

"How did you find out?" Weller blurted, and then realized how paranoid he sounded.

Johnny shrugged. "Word gets around," he said. Then the waiter appeared and sidetracked the conversation while Weller ordered a Martini, hot-and-sour soup, and chicken with peanuts and hot chilies.

But after the waiter left, Johnny returned relentlessly to the subject. "Look, Jack, I know where you're coming from, but don't you think you might be getting in over your head?"

"What are you talking about?" Weller said guardedly.

Johnny laughed rather humorlessly. "Hey, don't get paranoid," he said. "I only mean you haven't worked for a long time and --"

"I'm making commercials for Changes Productions," Weller said defensively.

"Who the hell is Changes Productions?"

Weller sighed. "A Transformationalist company," he admitted in a very small voice.

"Oh shit, you're working for them?" Johnny said. "Jesus, if you're that hard up, I ought to be able to --"

"Not, it's not like that, Johnny," Weller said. "I have to keep working for them; it's the only chance I have of finding Annie."

"So they've still got her somewhere ...," Madge said.

Weller nodded glumly. For some reason he found that he was very reluctant to discuss the whole thing. He recognized that as paranoia in himself, which made the conversation doubly distressing.

At this point the waiter arrived with Weller's food and drink. There was another break in the conversation during which Weller gulped down half his Martini and began to feel a little looser. After all, these were friends of his, sort of, and they cared about him, they were worried about him. They surely weren't agents of the Monitors or anything like that.

"Just how deep into Transformationalism are you, Jack?" Johnny asked. "I mean you're working for them.... " He studied Weller more narrowly for a moment. "I mean, you're not, you know, converted, are you?"

"Shit, no!" Weller exclaimed. He gulped down the rest of his drink and began picking at his food with chopsticks. "No fucking way!" he said vehemently. "You have no idea what it's like. I mean, they've got me living at the goddamn Transformation Center! It's a loathsome, Fascist organization, and all I want to do is find Annie and get us both out."

"Sounds like a tall order from what I hear," Johnny said.

"I can handle it," Weller told him. "Worse comes to worse, I've got some inside information I can --"

"Jesus, he's beginning to sound like Rich Golden." Madge muttered.

"Who?"

Johnny Blaisdell groaned and shot his wife a warning look.

"Who's Rich Golden?" Weller insisted.

"Just some nut," Johnny said, with obviously forced casualness.

"I think maybe Jack should talk to him," Madge said.

"Oh, for Chrissakes, Madge," Johnny snapped. "What will Golden do but make him more paranoid?"

''That's the point," Madge insisted. "If Jack's really so involved with Transformationalism, it might do him some good."

Johnny fingered his chin thoughtfully. "You might have a point," he mused.

"Will someone please tell me what this is all about before you drive me crazy?" Weller demanded.

Johnny shrugged. "Well, what the hell ...," he said. He looked at Weller with as serious an expression as Weller had ever seen on his face.

"Richard Golden is ... or was ... a hotshot journalist a few years ago," he said. "Mostly film stuff, but a pretty good muckraker now and again too. The girl he was living with -- I forget her name -- got gobbled up by Transformationalism, just like Annie. Well, Golden was a tough, hot-blooded son of a bitch with an exaggerated idea of the power of the press, and instead of playing whatever game you're playing, he went after their asses. Nosed around and started writing magazine pieces about Transformationalism, even had a contract to do a book about it at one point, I think."

Johnny paused dramatically and forked some food into his mouth. "Well, Transformationalism proceeded to go after his ass," he said. "They sued him about a million times, and they sued the magazine that printed the pieces, and finally they started suing anyone who tried to publish anything he wrote. Never won anything in court, but they made him a very undesirable boy to publish, and they bankrupted him with lawyer bills."

Johnny shrugged. "I don't know much more," he said. "All I know is that these days Golden bombards every column and press agent in town with totally libelous stuff about Transformationalism. I mean, genuine lunacy. You know, they own GAC and MGM and Howard Hughes, and they control your phones and have half of Washington in their pocket, and they're sending out secret control rays from the Capital Records Tower, and generally polluting everyone's vital bodily fluids. He's gone all the way round the bend."

"But apparently he does know a lot about Transformationalism," Madge said.

"Yeah, I mean, he's spent the last couple of years totally obsessed with the subject," Johnny said. He grinned wanly. "I suppose he must know a lot of real dirt too. Even paranoiacs have enemies."

"How can I get in touch with this guy?" Weller asked. Rays from the Capital Tower seemed a bit much, but there was little else that he didn't believe possible when it came to the powers and tentacles of Transformationalism. If nothing else, this guy Golden might have some stuff that would go nicely with the Master Contact Sheet in his blackmail file. And something else made him want to meet the man; here, after all, was someone he could really talk to, crazy or not.

"I could call him and set up an appointment," Johnny said uncertainly. "If you really want to get involved in that insanity ..."

"You think I'm not involved already?" Weller said dryly.

"Yeah, but you're not down on your knees chewing the rug yet, Johnny said. "I mean this guy is cray-zee!"

"Please do it, Johnny," Weller said. "I think I owe it to myself to look into it,"

''Okay,'' Johnny said, "I'll give it a try. But I don't guarantee anything. I mean, Golden sees Transformationalist agents under every bed. It'll take some convincing."

"That's the name of your game, isn't it?" Weller said.

Johnny laughed. "So it is," he said. "Give me a call about noon tomorrow, and I'll let you know how it goes." He glanced at his watch. "Hey, it's getting late. We'd better get the check or we won't make it. Sure you won't come along, Jack?"

"No," Weller said. "I really can't. But thanks. Thanks for everything. "

"De nada," Johnny said. "Anything I can do to help." He looked at Weller narrowly. "I mean, almost anything. Don't you start hitting me with daily paranoia stories about Transformationalism, okay?"

"Even if they're true?" Weller asked.

Johnny grimaced. "Especially if they're true," he said. "If there's really a conspiracy out there controlling my vital bodily fluids from the Capital Tower with secret rays, this old boy doesn't want to know about it. As far as I'm concerned, my clients already give me all the paranoia I can handle."

***

The address that Johnny Blaisdell had given Weller turned out to be a crumbling and sinister-looking apartment house on a slimy back street in Venice a couple of blocks from the beach; an area haunted by spectral hippies left over from the sixties, ghostly old beatniks left over from the fifties, and wasted junkies living very much in the perpetual now. Parking spaces at the beach were at a premium, so Weller had to park four blocks away and walk nervously down the dark streets, tensing every time he passed a shadowed alleyway.

This is really the pits, he thought, as he climbed the crumbling flight of concrete stairs to the building entrance. He checked Golden's apartment number on the mailbox -- 3C -- and entered the building through the unlocked inner door, for there were no working buzzers.

Up three flights of stairs smelling of old cooking grease and piss and into a dim hallway with peeling yellow paint and a series of doors, each one painted a different fading color. Three-C was painted battleship gray, and the door had a peephole and three locks in it.

Weller banged sharply on the door, and a moment later there was an eye at the peephole. "Jack Weller," he said, as per Johnny's instructions, "the man from Changes."

Click! Slok! Blang! The sounds of locks being turned and bolts being thrown, and then the door opened. A gaunt figure wearing T-shirt and jeans stood there outlined in the dim light, with matted brown hair that looked as if it hadn't been combed in a week, big sunken eyes, an etched beak of a nose, and a heavy five o'clock shadow.

"I'm Rich Golden," the man said. "Inside."

Weller stepped directly into a dark kitchen. He could make out the rough shapes of mounds of dirty dishes and pots heaped in the sink and more on the drainboard. His nostrils were assailed by the odors of old food scraps, garbage, and pot. Golden threw a bolt, turned three locks, and led him through a beaded archway into a kind of living-room-cum-office.

There was a musty old couch heaped high with papers, files, newspapers, reels and cassettes of tape. There were two chairs, also heaped with paper and crud. There was a big fancy desk with a typewriter, a telephone, a complex tape-recorder rig, and a metal gooseneck lamp which cast a harsh cone of white light on more papers, files, newspapers, pictures, and tapes. Two walls were lined with filing cabinets, and the tops of the cabinets were piled nearly to the ceiling with more files and papers. The room was lighted by a naked bulb covered by a pink Japanese lantern. The air was blue with pot smoke. And the only two windows were completely covered with tinfoil.

Golden casually cleared sitting space on the couch by dumping some heaps of papers, files, and tapes on the dusty floor. He sat down, lighted a half-smoked joint that had been sitting in an ashtray on the arm of the couch, exhaled smoke as Weller gingerly sat down, and said, "Let's get on with the briefing."

"Briefing?" Weller said uncertainly.

"Blaisdell told me your situation," Golden said, "and he told me you wanted a briefing on Transformationalism. I've checked him out, and I don't think he's in on it, though of course you never can tell. If you're paranoid, I could play back our conversation for you. Naturally I tape all my phone calls.

"Uh ... I don't think that's necessary," Weller said.

Golden giggled nervously. "Right," he said. ''Tapes can be doctored anyway, so what would it prove? You wouldn't believe what they can do with tapes."

Weller was having difficulty following the logic of Golden's conversation, if indeed there were any. "Tapes? They?"

Golden looked at him strangely. ''Transformationalism,'' he said. "The conspiracy. They can even synthesize your voice with a computer. They've got me making threatening crank calls all over town. Destroys the credibility of the real thing." He pushed the burning joint at Weller. ''Take a hit."

"No thanks," Weller said. He was having enough trouble understanding what Golden was saying without getting stoned!

"You really should," Golden said. "It randomizes your synapses and keeps the programming from taking hold in your brain. Blocks the control waves too. I've been doing a lid a week since I got into this. It's the only thing that keeps me autonomous. That's why they are against legalization, you know. No? Yeah, well you don't know what I know. But that's why you're here, right?"

"Right." Weller said. But he was beginning to wonder. So far, Richard Golden seemed crazy as a bedbug. He didn't even know where to begin, what to ask. He felt totally disoriented.

"Well, where do you want to start?" Golden asked. ''The heaviest stuff? The snuffs?"

"Snuffs?"

"Wait a minute," Golden said. "I'll go get the snuff file." He got up, rummaged in his filing cabinets for a few minutes, and came hack with two fat folders. He handed them to Weller. "Snuffs, he said. "The first file is the certains. Second is the probables."

Weller leafed through the first file. There were newspaper clippings of murder stories, neatly typewritten lists of names and dates cross-indexed to the clippings, and pages of typed notes that seemed to be in some kind of code. The second file was more of the same, but there was a lot of weird stuff about the assassinations of JFK and Bobby Kennedy.

"Surprises you, doesn't it?" Golden said. "You can hardly believe it. But it's all there in black and white. I estimate that they've done maybe a hundred snuffs. Including both Kennedys. Possibly King, too."

"What?"

Golden laughed. "Right, you think I'm crazy, and I don't blame you. But I've got evidence that both Sirhan and Oswald received Transformationalist processing. And how do you think Jack Ruby contracted cancer in prison? They can do it to you with rays. They've got all kinds of things at that Institute of theirs. Why do you think I've got tinfoil on my windows, huh?

"Are you serious?"

"Everyone thinks I'm crazy," Golden said. "Even I think I'm crazy. That's part of the technique. They don't just discredit everyone who's onto them. They try to turn you into a mental wreck so you stop believing it yourself. You want proof? Take a look at this!"

He rummaged through his files again. muttering and cursing to himself, and came back with another folder. This is hard investigative reporting," he said. "I got myself a book contract on the basis of this material. It's a file on the companies they control, though I certainly don't guarantee that it's complete yet. Some of them they own through fronts, some of them they control through key personnel. Take a look."

Weller looked through the neat compilation of lists, corporate letterheads, newspaper and magazine clippings, and carefully typed interview transcriptions with ever-growing unease. He recognized companies from the Utopia Industries listings in the lobby of their office building. He recognized companies and names from the Master Contact Sheet. There was no doubt that some of this stuff was true, and only a really top investigative reporter could have ferreted much of it out.

But there was more, much more. Studio's. General Motors subsidiaries. Names of local phone-company executives scattered throughout the country. Oil companies. Radio stations, TV stations, publishers, newspapers, and national magazines.

Much of it he knew to be true. Some of it was so clearly fantastic that it had to be pure paranoia. But in between were dozens or even hundreds of companies and executives who might or might not be really under Transformationalist control. And all of it seemed to be the product of the same brand of very professional investigative reporting. Where could you draw the line between paranoia and horrible reality?

"Well, what do you think about that?" Golden finally said.

"Very impressive. Very scary," Weller admitted. "And I've got confirmation of some of it. How in hell did you dig all this out?"

"Professional secrets," Golden said, taking a long drag off his joint. "I was one hell of an investigative reporter. I know how to dig out a story. And I've been at this full time for years. I wrote two dozen articles about it, and three of them were published, and people knew I was doing a book before they came down on me. People talked for a while. Before they started disappearing. Before they killed my book and kept my articles from being published. Whatever they do, they can't keep me from doing what I know best. And someday ... someday ...." Golden began to tremble. He balled his bands into fists, released them, did it again, four times in quick succession.

He took a quick drag off his joint, bounded off the couch, and snatched four huge files off the top of one of the cabinets. He sat down and dropped them heavily on the floor in front of him.

Look at this shit!" he said shrilly. "Know what it is? My media files! Records of all the lawsuits they threw at me. Letters from magazines telling me they won't publish what I write. Think I'm just being paranoid? I've also got records on three dozen writers, reporters, and TV newspeople that Tranformationalism has beaten into the ground for daring to say anything about them. Lawsuits. People getting fired for no apparent reason and then never getting rehired. Reporters just disappearing, man! Getting cancer. Being committed to mental institutions. Bankruptcies. Phony dope raps."

Golden bounced off the couch and went to his desk. "Think I'm crazy, huh?" he said, touching his phone. "Well, maybe I am. They sure try hard enough. Phone calls in the middle of the night every night for months. Now they're tapping it, and I think they're sending subsonic vibrations -- fourteen cycles a second, the panic frequency, look it up -- through the dial tone. I may be crazy, but I'm not full of shit."

Golden abruptly seemed to calm himself somewhat. He sat back down on the couch. "Look," he said, "Blaisdell told me what your situation was, otherwise I wouldn't have taken this chance, not unless I knew you were really in danger, I mean, how do I know you're not a Monitor, right? For that matter how do you know I'm not a Monitor? How do either of us know Blaisdell isn't a Monitor ... ?" Golden blinked, as if realizing that he was wandering.

"Shit," he said, sucking on his joint, "what I'm trying to tell you is that I come from the same place you do, is why I'm taking this chance. They sucked up Carla, my old lady, just like they did your wife. Only instead of being nuts enough to try and infiltrate them -- and you think I'm crazy! -- I went after them head on, power of the press, and all that bullshit."

Golden got up, went to the desk, took a plastic bag of grass and some rolling papers out of a drawer, and began to roll a fresh joint. "But that's what it was, bullshit," he said. "Man, the so-called power of the press is like pissing into a hurricane up against something like Transformationalism."

He lighted the joint and began pacing in small circles, pulling on it as he spoke. "Shit, they destroyed my career. I mean, I'm good, I've sold articles everywhere, magazines came after me, and now I couldn't get an assignment to cover a cat show for the Valley Green Sheet. You know why I'm still alive? Because the fuckers figure I'd be more trouble to them dead than alive. I've got information that should send them all to jail for a thousand years, and I can't do anything with it. No one will touch it, no one dares listen to me. But I'm a well-known crank on the subject of Transformationalism: if I were murdered, then maybe there'd have to be an investigation. If I hadn't understood that early on and gone totally public, I wouldn't be talking to you now."

"Why don't you turn over this stuff to the police?" Weller asked. "Or the FBI? Or even a congressional committee?"

Golden laughed maniacally. He went over to a row of filing cabinets and leaned against them. "The police? The government?" he said scornfully. "In here I've got records of how many congressional campaigns have been financed with Transformationalist money. How many state legislators they control. How many cops they own." He shook his head and sat down on the couch beside Weller.

"What I'm trying to tell you," he said in a strangely subdued voice, "is give it up, man. Don't you yet understand what you're up against? Transformationalism controls over a billion dollars in capital. They snuff people. They control dozens of politicians. They can stop anyone from writing anything about them. They know more about brainwashing and mind control then anyone. And at that Institute of theirs, they've got whole platoons of Dr. Frankensteins inventing subsonics that can control your mind through your phone, rays that give you cancer, drugs they can put in the water to turn people into zombies, machines that can read your thoughts, and other machines that can put thoughts into your head. Give it up, man! You can't beat the bastards."

"What about you?" Weller said. "You're still fighting them...."

"Me?" Golden said bitterly. "What the hell else can I do? They took my love away from me, they took my career away from me, and they're trying to take my mind away from me. I've got no choice. What am I supposed to do? It's keep going or become a junkie or commit myself to a nut house or kill myself. Fighting Transformationalism is all I have left. There isn't any other me."

Weller stared into Golden's red-rimmed eyes, and what he saw shook him to the core. With his cancer rays and Kennedy assassinations and hypnotic dial tones, there was no doubt that Golden was far around the bend. Yet it was also certain that some of his material was the real thing -- the Master Contact Sheet proved that. If some of it were true, how could Weller be sure that any specific part of it wasn't true, except for the rays and the phone paranoia and the Kennedys? If most of the material on companies controlled by Transformationalism were true, if the media file were the real thing, if the political files weren't pure paranoia, then he was up against something that made the Mafia look like the Knights of Columbus. The Master Contact Sheet might be worthless as blackmail material if Golden, with all his files, was so totally impotent.

But, even more frightening was what he saw in the man himself. This broken, raving creature had been a top journalist; Johnny Blaisdell had said so, and Johnny knew who was whom. And whatever else was or wasn't true, it was an indisputable fact that it was Golden's involvement with Transformationalism which, one way or another, had reduced him to this state. An involvement that had begun just as his involvement had begun. "Fighting Transformationalism is all that I have left," Golden had said. ''There isn't any other me."

And you, Weller? he thought. What other you is there now? Are you looking at your future? Are you looking at what you're becoming?

"Can't you get yourself out of it, Golden?" Weller said. "Can't you move to New York or somewhere, get your head straight, and start all over?"

Golden sighed. "You still don't have the big picture," he said. ''I've been declared a regressive. They're all over the country, and they watch me all the time. Wherever I'd go, they'd know. Wherever I try to get published, they'll stop me. Their rays reach everywhere. They're keyed into the national phone system. There's no way I can escape them. All I can do is keep on fighting until they stop me." He took a long hit on his joint. "Which, some day, they surely will," he said.

Weller sighed. There was a long, long silence. Finally Weller stood up. "I think I'd better go now," he said. "I've got a midnight curfew at the center and it's getting late."

"Yeah," Golden said. ''I've told you what I can, and you sure don't want them looking into where you disappeared to tonight." He smiled softly. "Good luck, Weller," he said. "I hope you make it. I know you won't, but I hope you do."

Golden extended his hand. Weller took it, making it, for some atavistic reason, an old-fashioned fists-upraised sixties handshake. "You too, brother," he said.

For the first time in months, he had met a kind of kindred spirit, someone with whom he felt a strange sense of solidarity.

You poor bastard, he thought, as Golden closed his locks and bolts behind him. You poor, brave bastard.
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Re: The Mind Game, by Norman Spinrad

Postby admin » Sat Mar 19, 2016 9:06 am

Chapter Fifteen

Weller walked slowly and reluctantly down the stairs from Golden's floor; even the inside of this ominous and reeking building seemed a reality preferable to what he was returning to. Maybe Golden is right, he thought. Maybe I should just get into my car and keep driving. Maybe I really can't fight Transformationalism or get into the Institute. Maybe this waiting is the final mind game, one that will go on and on until they reduce me to a basket case like him. Maybe if I get out of their reality, they'll stay out of mine, and maybe that's the best thing I can hope for....

He reached the ground-floor landing, opened the inner door to the vestibule, and stepped inside. He was about to open the outer door when a big man dressed in black suddenly stepped out of the shadows outside to block him.

He whirled and saw that another man in black had materialized inside the building behind him, blocking the inner door as well. He was caught like a rat in a trap.

The man outside the building stepped into the vestibule. He was blond, with thin, angular features and burning blue eyes. He didn't look like any crazed junkie mugger. "Mr. Weller," he said, with grim Los Angeles cop politeness, "you are to come with us." But this was no cop either.

The man inside the building came up beside him. "Relax, Weller," he said in a rough voice tinged with irony. "This isn't a stick up. We're Monitors." This bimbo was dark and swarthy and looked like an ex-boxer gone slightly to fat.

Before Weller could react at all, each of them took him gently by an elbow, and they propelled him numbly outside where a third Monitor was waiting, this one in his forties with a steel-gray crew cut.

"No trouble?" asked the crew cut.

"No trouble, Irv," said the swarthy one. "You're not going to give us any trouble, are you, Weller?"

It had all been done so quickly and smoothly that Weller was only now beginning to experience his own reactions -- fear, anger, but also a numbed acceptance of the fait accompli. "What the fuck is this?" he snarled without very much conviction.

"You know what it is, Weller," Irv said. "Fred Torrez wants to have a little talk with you. You have not been behaving in a very highly evolved manner."

"Relax, Weller," said the swarthy one. "We're not going to drop you in the Pacific. Our directive is to deliver you to Torrez, healthy, and more or less in one piece."

"And if I don't want to see Torrez?"

"Then," said the blond, "we're authorized to coldcock you and drag you there."

"Let's move it along," said Irv, who seemed to be the leader. He stepped in front of Weller and began walking rapidly as the other two, still holding Weller by the elbows, brought him along.

Weller found himself moving with them in a state of almost relaxed resignation. The only other alternative was to get himself a beating, and in a weird way be found that surrendering his will to the inevitable produced a certain release of tension, an incongruously calm floating feeling. Part of him still felt that it was unmanly not to resist, but there was no energy behind it except a certain bloodless guilt at going along so meekly.

They took him around the corner to a big, black, late-model Buick. Irv got in behind the wheel and the other two shoved him into the backseat between them. Inanely Weller remembered that his Triumph was parked in a zone that would get him a ticket or even a tow away tomorrow morning.

"What about my car?" he said. "It's in a morning no-parking zone." It sounded asinine under the circumstances, but it also intruded a homey note of mundane reality into this dreamlike situation which was oddly comforting.

"Give me the keys, and we'll send a man around for it later," the blond said. He laughed. "We wouldn't want you to get towed."

Numbly Weller handed over the keys. He even found himself muttering, "Thanks," as if it were the most natural thing in the world. His mind simply couldn't connect with what was happening; it was all like some dumb gangster movie. He wondered if this were what a prisoner felt like on his way to the electric chair; was that why they never seemed to struggle?

"Uh, my car is --"

"We know where it is," Irv said, "You've been closely monitored for a long time. Did you think you could see a regressive like Golden without us knowing about it?"

Weller sighed. He wondered if on some level he hadn't known this was going to happen, if some part of him hadn't deliberately provoked it. Certainly he was reacting strangely enough, as if this were a fate he had long since accepted.

Irv started the car and eased it out of its parking space. "Oh yeah," he said, "don't forget the mask."

The blond Monitor reached behind him and snatched a white cloth bag off the rear window shelf. "Put it on, Mr. Weller," he said, handing him the bag.

This was finally just a bit too much for Weller's sense of reality; this was B-movieland. "You're not serious," he said.

"Put the fucking thing on!" the swarthy Monitor snarled. You're going to Monitor Central, and no one gets to know where that is but us."

"Up yours, Charlie!" Weller said angrily, "Enough is enough!"

Instantly the blond Monitor clamped his forearm under Weller's chin and began choking off his air. The other Monitor cocked his fist inches from Weller's jaw. "You can wear the mask, or I can knock you into the middle of next week," he said. "Your choice."

"Put it on," said the blond, and he tightened his pressure against Weller's windpipe. Choking, and really scared by now, Weller numbly pulled the mask on over his head.

Immediately the pressure on his throat was released. "That's better," a rough voice said. "You'll be much better off if you get it through your head that we mean business and do what you're told."

Trapped in the blind white universe of the mask, Weller found himself sinking back into a floating resigned state of consciousness, lulled by the continuing silence, the swaying and rolling motion of the car, the sense of total discontinuity with the outside world.

***

How far or where they had driven, Weller found impossible to guess. At times, the car seemed to be climbing -- up into the Hollywood Hills? At other times he seemed to hear the sounds of the ocean -- along the beach? They had been driving maybe twenty or thirty minutes when the car stopped, the engine was turned off, and a voice said: "All right Weller we get out here."

Hands guided him by the elbows along what felt like a gravel path, up a short flight of stairs, through a door, down a hall, up more stairs. down another hall, and through yet another door. Then a brisk deep voice said. "Sit him down, take off the mask, and leave us alone."

Hands pushed him down into a chair and then removed the mask.

Weller found himself blinking in another world of white. As his eyes adjusted, he saw that he was sitting in a tiny room whose walls, ceiling and even floor were painted a shiny, pure white. A harsh overhead fixture bounced right off all the gleaming white surfaces, cruelly punishing his eyes. In front of him was a white Formica desk. Even the intercom and the folder on the desk were white.

Behind the desk, the only visual relief from the white glare was Fred Torrez. His black hair, black suit, black turtleneck, and hard black eyes seemed cleverly chosen to force him into the center of visual attention.

"The truth, Weller." Torrez snapped in a rough yet somehow cultivated voice. "Now. What were you doing consorting with an extreme regressive like Richard Golden?"

Torrez's dark eyes, cunningly amplified by the glaring white stage set, bored into him like lasers of pure void. Understanding the trick was little help, Torrez had knocked him completely off-balance, and Weller had no idea of how to respond, none at all.

"Uh, well, you know about my idea to do some new commercials --"

"Please spare me the insult of low-level evasions," Torrez said Silkily, favoring Weller with the smile of a very intelligent shark. "Assume that I understand you better than you do yourself, and we'll get along." He patted the folder on the desk. "You're all in here for one who has the eyes to read it. We know you think you're our dangerous enemy. You've been congratulating yourself on fooling us into partially accepting your phony conversion with a few stupid acting tricks and the help of Garry Bailor."

"You know about Bailor?

Torrez waved a finger at him like an approving schoolteacher. "We begin to get the picture, eh?" he said. "I told you, didn't I? Assume the Monitors know everything. Assume we know about Maria Steinhardt. Assume we know why. Assume we know why you want so badly to get to the Institute. Assume we're smarter than you are, and we'll both save ourselves a lot of tedium."

"Is Bailor --?

"A Monitor? Dead? Programmed? I'm sure you'd like to know," Torrez said sweetly. His face abruptly hardened and his voice dropped an octave. "But I'm here to ask questions, Weller, not to answer them!" he snarled. "Now why did you do such an obviously stupid thing as have a chat with Richard Golden?"

Reeling, clutching psychically for purchase, Weller sat there like a dummy, unable to concoct a mode of response. What kind of people are these?

"I'll help you, Weller," Torrez said coldly. "I'll lay all your cards faceup on the table for you. You joined the movement to get your wife back. You went to bed with Maria in order to locate her, and in that you have succeeded. Congratulations, Weller."

Torrez cocked his head and grimaced sardonically in response to Weller's surprised reaction. "What do I have to say to convince you that you're not on our level?" he said. "That you concocted this little scheme to use John in commercials in order to penetrate the Institute and recapture your wife, and you used Maria to bypass me in order to reach him with your bait? Face it, Weller, we read you like a psychomap."

"You seem to know all the answers, so why bother asking questions?" Weller managed to grunt silently.

"Because a visit to Richard Golden was definitely not in your program," Torrez said. "A piece of moronic counterproductivity. Too self-destructive to be credible. The only possible explanation within your life scenario is that you went to Golden for blackmail material with which to pry your wife out of the Institute. And all I want to know from you is what you imagined that blackmail material could be?"

He doesn't know! Weller's mind suddenly snapped into sharp focus. Torrez doesn't know about my having a copy of the Master Contact Sheet and he doesn't know about the fail-safe mail drops. That's what he's looking for, but for once he doesn't know what it is. It's my only edge. I've got to keep it from him.

"What makes you assume an unevolved schmuck like me was thinking that far ahead?" he said.

Torrez glared at him. "Are you going to tell me that you're just riding the changes? Or that this stupid commercial business is sincere?"

"You wouldn't believe me if I told you."

"Try me, Weller," Torrez said harshly. '"You might be pleasantly surprised."

Oh God, what I need now is a super piece of misdirection! Weller thought desperately. I need space to think. I don't know what the hell I'm doing. I've got to get him off onto something else.

"It's John," he said off the top of his head.

"John? What's John?" Torrez was authentically puzzled. Definitely derailed for an instant. Weller reached deep within himself, let a half-recognized truth pop into his consciousness, and molded the ultimate piece of acting of his career around it -- craft informed by a certain spontaneous authenticity.

"Okay, I admit it all," he said with convincing lameness. "Everything you said is true except for one item. I really am sincere about wanting to make those commercials ... or at least I'm sincere about using them as an excuse to meet John."

"Why do you want to meet John?" Torrez asked, with what seemed for the first time like a flicker of human interest.

"Because Transformationalism is John Steinhardt. Look at all that's happened to me. I'm not the same person anymore. I don't know exactly who I am. Is Tranformationalism making me a zombie or eptifying my mind? What is John? That's the answer I'm looking for, that decides everything. John is Transformationalism, and without knowing him, I know nothing."

Weller stared into Torrez's eyes with flashing sincerity. "You know the man," he crooned enviously. "You know the true reality. You must understand what I'm saying."

A veil of dreamy wistfulness seemed to fog Torrez's hard, logical eyes. "So you are driven to comprehend the fullness of John B. Steinhardt," he said softly. '"Yes, I think I can believe that. But you're a fool to think that's possible, that your consciousness can contain a complete image of John's reality. Madre Mia, I tried for years, and what I finally learned was I've been very lucky to find the favor of a greater man than I."

"You expect me to swallow that? A man like you, in your position? That's the official line, Torrez, what you tell the suckers. That kind of bullshit is why I have to meet John myself. I just don't buy you as a worshiper of the Great I Am."

Torrez laughed with unexpected sincerity. "You think you know me because you've talked to me a few minutes? Maybe you do. But how much of me is John's creation? How much really is left of the dumb little punk he found leading a street gang all those years ago ...? I look back on what that kid was and I look at me now ... " He shrugged. "And you still don't believe that John is something neither of us will ever fully understand?" he said sarcastically.

Weller saw that the mask had slipped, if only for a moment, revealing a flash of Torrez's human reality; whether Torrez had crafted this or not, Weller was convinced. Fred Torrez worships Steinhardt. I believe it. One step from the top, and he sincerely worships the man. It mesmerized Weller with a kind of secondhand awe.

"A nice piece of misdirection, Weller!" Torrez cracked, snapping back into his previous mode, back behind the mask.

"You don't believe I'm sincere?"

"Do you?" Torrez said with a thin smile, '"Think about it. Of course, I believe you. Who could've gone through what you've gone through and not be obsessed with the question of John's ultimate personality? You just realized that yourself, didn't you? You started out misdirecting me with a piece of stage business, but as you spoke, you were realizing that it was the truth."

Weller broke out into a cold sweat. Is this guy fucking telepathic? Or am I really as transparent as all that?"

"And now I've raised your consciousness another level by pointing it out to you, haven't I?" Torrez said, with the first slight hint of smugness. "But that doesn't mean that the old program don't persist. You're still running one that says penetrate the Institute, reprogram your wife, and blackmail your way out with something from Golden. And I hope all this has convinced you that you're not leaving here until you tell me what that something is."

As Torrez glared darkly at him out of the white glare, it seemed to Weller he was really nervous about something, that he was under some kind of pressure, that he was projecting certain vibrations of frustration. He knows about everything but the fact that I've got copies of the Master Contact Sheet in mail drops, that maybe I do have a way out of the Institute if I get there. But he thinks it's something I was trying to get from Golden, not something I've already got secured! And this whole interrogation is based on that error! All I've got to do is convince him that he's right ...

Which means that this is some kind of security check ... Which means that word has already come down from Steinhardt! Weller suddenly realized. And the word is yes! I'm going to the Institute if I can convince this guy that I'll be powerless once I get there. All I have to do is feed him something credible along the lines he wants to hear. He's on the spot as much as I am.

"All right, you win," Weller sighed. "I thought it would be better to take a little insurance with me, and I had been told that Golden was the world's expert on Transformationalism. But when I got there.... Well, I guess you know, don't you? The guy is crazy. Hypnotic telephones. Kennedy assassinations --"

"And cancer rays from the Capital Records Tower," Torrez said. "So you're going to tell me that Golden's files were such a rat's nest of paranoia, credible data, and whatever lies between that none of it seemed useable."

Weller's face fell, for that was exactly the line he was going to take.

"Let's not waste time here while I browbeat you into admitting that there was something there you thought you could use against us," Torrez snapped. "Let's be civilized adults and agree to consider that process completed, shall we? So what was it?"

Stick as close to the truth as you can and still lie, Weller told himself. It's the only possible way to get anything past this guy. "All right, all right," he whined, with a petulant show of resignation. "So he had this big file on Transformationalism's corporate connections . .. from his investigative reporting days, sound stuff that seemed credible ... but ..."

"But what?" Torrez's attention seemed to have narrowed to a tight point of focus.

He believes that, Weller thought. All I have to do now is convince him I don't have it, that I'd have no leverage over them when I get to the Institute.

"But he wouldn't let it out of his hands long enough for me to copy it," Weller said. "Your boys grabbed me as I came out the door, so I couldn't have it hidden anywhere. So all you have to do to prove I'm telling the truth is search me."

Torrez leaned back in his chair and studied Weller for a long moment while Weller held his breath. It would work, I am clean. I've turned his own logic in on him.

''Very well, Weller," Torrez finally said. "We'll search you all right, and I'm sure we'll come up with nothing. I'm sure you still have some strong regressive programs running, but it really doesn't matter any more. From here on in, you're under total Monitor control."

He smiled his shark smile at Weller. "Because you're getting what you wanted. Tomorrow morning we're flying you to the Institute." He pressed a button on his intercom. "Send Irv in for Mr. Weller," he said. "Standard Institute security procedure."

Weller had only a short moment to savor his triumph. Then the three men who had snatched him entered the interrogation room. "Good luck, Weller," Torrez said. "But then, you've already had it." He nodded to the guards.

''This way," said Irv. The other two pulled Weller to his feet by the elbows, hustled him down a featureless white hallway, up two flights of stairs, and into a small green cell containing only a john and a Spartan cot.

"Strip," said Irv.

"What?"

"Take your clothes off, Weller. Standard security procedure. We'll go through them and return them to you in the morning."

Woodenly Weller took off his shoes, socks, trousers, and shirt and handed them to the blond Monitor.

''The shorts too," said Irv. "Don't be bashful."

"What's the matter? You think I've got a gun in my shorts?"

"Just do it!" snarled Irv.

Weller sighed, then stepped out of his shorts, handed them over, and stood there naked, vulnerable, depersonalized.

"Now lean your hands against the wall and spread your legs."

"What the fuck --"

"Help him!" snapped Irv.

The other two Monitors each grabbed one of Weller's wrists and slammed his palms up against the wall, while Irv spread his legs by kicking his left foot to the side. Then he bent down and examined Weller's rectum. "Okay, he's clean. You can release him."

Weller came off the wall boiling with fury and outraged dignity. But the three Monitors standing shoulder to shoulder in front of him instantly brought home the total powerlessness of his position, the futility of even making some smartass remark, which he couldn't come up with anyway.

"Okay," said Irv. "Sweet dreams."

Suddenly, as if on cue, each of the other two grabbed one of his arms and whipped them behind his back in a double half nelson. Irv pulled a hypodermic out of his jacket pocket and jabbed it painfully into the pit of Weller's right elbow.

Weller felt the sharp needle pain, then a pins-and-needles pressure traveling up his arm, then a rubbery feeling in his knees, a soft fuzziness intruding upon his sensorium.

Irv withdrew the needle, and the other two released his arms. Weller stood there for a long moment, boiling with fury, shaking with fear. He took two hesitant steps forward. His head began to whirl, his vision doubling, then tripling, and then his knees began to turn to Jell-O.

"Onto the bed," said a distant voice.

Arms eased him backward onto the cot just as his legs went out from under him. Everything seemed to be moving in slow motion through a clear but viscous fluid. "Son ... of ... a ... bitch ..." he heard his own voice mutter thickly as his leadened eyelids drooped toward unconsciousness.

The last thing he heard before the blackness closed in was the heavy click of the door lock.

***

Weller drifted up from inky dreamless sleep along a line of sparks that seemed to be traveling slowly down his right arm across his shoulder up his neck and into his head, where it expanded into a dull ballooning throb. He opened gummy eyelids to see vague towering black shapes against a sea of green. He rubbed his eyes, trying to gather his scattered thoughts as his vision slowly came back into focus.

He was lying naked on a cot in a small green room. His body felt strangely detached from his mind, heavy with a luxuriant lassitude. His thoughts seemed to be coming very slowly, and somehow no cerebral event seemed to have any real import. He was somewhere in something called Monitor Central. He had been drugged. He was going to the Institute. He had met Fred Torrez. He dimly realized that wild emotions should be coursing through him, but nothing seemed important. No thought was more than a random image flitting across the surface of his mind. Nothing seemed to associate itself with anything else.

The three Monitors who had brought him here were standing over his cot. One of them held a pile of clothes. Another held two empty hypodermics. All three of them were studying him. Why did they bother? He was an inert pile of putty. What possible interest could he have for anyone?

"He's awake," said one of the figures in black. "Lets get him up and dressed."

Hands gripped Weller's arms and lifted. He seemed to float effortlessly up off the cot like a big helium-filled balloon. Nothing seemed to take any effort at all. How warm and peaceful it all was!

"Come on, Weller. Let's get dressed."

Clothes seemed to slip onto his body of their own accord, like live slithering things. No effort was required of him. All he had to do was float in the warm viscous air and everything would be taken care of. Wasn't that nice? Wasn't that better than ... than ... whatever ... ?

Something was fitted over his head and now he was in the middle of a fluffy white cloud, just drifting along peacefully. It was much nicer than the green room and the black figures, much more soothing, far more relaxing. He was abstractly aware that hands were gripping his arms, holding him up, guiding him along through the cloud. Or rather holding him down to keep him from drifting away into the stratosphere, for his feet seemed to be skipping featherlight over some level surface. And if they weren't holding him down, why then he would probably bounce slowly away like a big, silly beach ball.

Bounce, bounce, bounce, slowly down some stairs, losing altitude, though his head remained in the nice white cloud. Across another surface, down more stairs, another level.... He lost count. It began to seem as if he had been doing this for a very long time -- years, maybe -- as if it might continue forever. Forever? What was that? The concept seemed illusive. It had something to do with watches and hourglasses, but there were neither watches nor hourglasses up here in the clouds....

Then he found himself sitting on a soft bench, with the presence of a body on either side of him. A roar and a whir, and the bench started to move. It must be a car. I must be sitting in a car. We're going for a ride. Isn't that nice?

***

For a long time or for a short time, at any rate definitely for some period of time, the car floated along, speeding up, leaning around curves, slowing down, stopping now and again, while Weller drifted peacefully in fluffy whiteness. The various motions of the car made him feel a little strange, as if there were a heavy balloon inside him, filled, perhaps, with water instead of air, so that it moved around more sluggishly with the motion of the car than the rest of him, wallowing and surging.

Finally the car stopped, and the engine sound died away. Hands guided Weller out of the car and onto his feet. Then the mask was taken off his head, and he was momentarily blinded by painful bright lights.

Still half-blinded he was guided across another level surface, and by the time his eyes cleared, he was standing at the entrance ramp to a small, sleek jet aircraft with two engines at the tail, all silvery and shining in the bright smoggy sunlight.

"An airplane ride?" he said, his mouth all cottony. "Where are we going?"

The three black figures ignored the sounds that were coming out of his mouth, and they guided him up the ramp. The inside of the airplane was like a nice little living room: brown leather armchairs, some of them beside little airplane windows, others arranged around a small wooden table; wooden paneling, and a navy-blue carpet.

The three black figures guided him to one of the chairs around the table. But Weller couldn't see out a window.

"Could I have a window seat?" Weller asked politely. "They're not all taken, so could I have one, please."

"Oh, for crying out --"

"Let the man have his window seat," said the one with the steel-colored hair. "Maybe it'll keep him quiet. They told us not to give him another shot unless we really had to."

The nice man helped Weller to his feet and guided him to a soft window seat in the middle of the cabin. His body melted into the buttery cushions and seemed to fade away, so that only his eyes were left, looking out the window across a concrete runway and a field of parched grass at a tiny control tower shimmering through the gray-blue smog, far, far in the distance. Hands fastened his seat belt to keep his body from floating up out of the seat, which would make it hard for him to look out the window. They were taking good care of him. They thought of everything.

Then he heard a sudden loud roar which went on and on and on. And then the plane began to move along the ground, so slowly you could hardly tell it was happening if you weren't looking out your window, if you didn't see the control tower disappearing as the plane swung around.

The plane moved along the taxiway just like a car driving down the freeway, only much slower, as if it were creeping through rush-hour traffic, though there didn't seem to be anything else in sight. There were even white lines and symbols painted on the concrete, just like a highway.

Then the plane stopped. It pivoted like a cannon being aimed. The sound got much louder and it started to vibrate like some great beast straining at its leash. Suddenly the plane was moving again, faster and faster and faster, and then Weller felt something kick the back of his seat even as he melted further into it; there was a sudden, sharp, floating feeling that made the water balloon inside his body slosh and gurgle sending strange and not very pleasant waves through the clear Jell-O of his flesh.

He looked out the window and saw the ground dropping away, then tilting crazily to the right, becoming smaller and smaller and smaller. Far below he could see thousands of little toy buildings, and even little tiny toy cars moving along a toy highway. Then the world outside the window became a soft white fog for a time, just as it had been when the black figures were leading him along into the car.

When the fog cleared, Weller saw nothing but bright blue sky above and a carpet of white wool below stretching from horizon to horizon as far as he could see. It was very beautiful, and it was so incredibly peaceful, just like the white hazy feeling in his mind. just like the fluffy softness of his body melting into the seat, as featureless and undisturbed as his clear blue empty consciousness. I could drift here forever, he thought. Maybe I will. Wouldn't that be nice? His eyelids grew sensuously heavy. After awhile he couldn't tell whether his eyes were open or closed. Not that it mattered.
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Re: The Mind Game, by Norman Spinrad

Postby admin » Sat Mar 19, 2016 9:06 am

Chapter Sixteen

White clouds and blue sky, and sometimes, far below like a huge and beautifully made full-color map but without all the lettering and lines, visions of sere dun-colored desert, shoulders of furry green mountains, checkerboards of brown and green, moving past ever so slowly like time itself, like thick clear molasses.

Sometimes the colors would melt into warmy curvy shapes that floated and engulfed each other like amoebas. Sometimes the amoebas would devour each other, leaving only warm blue or velvety soft blackness. Sometimes he would see the dark figures seated around a table doing something with cards and stacks of money. Once in a while a face would peer into his and then become an amoeboid shape or a fluffy white cloud or just infinite blueness.

It lasted forever, or it lasted no time at all. How could he tell? Why would he want to bother? It was so pleasant just to float along through the softly moving shapes, riding the gentle swell of the infinite river of time, totally peaceful, totally calm, no ticking of watches or rasping of sharp-edged thoughts to spoil the perfect peace of being a soft white cloud, of being nothing at all.

But then something happened to spoil it. He could feel a painful pressure where someone might have had ears, and the water balloon inside him seemed to rise unpleasantly upward.

Looking out his very own window, Weller saw the ground rushing up at him; low, wooded, rolling hills, incredibly lush and green. Then the world outside tilted and spiraled, and he saw tiny toy houses, open green fields, and a long gray line scribed on the ground, whirling up at him like a pinwheel.

The world straightened out and whooshed up at him. The model-railroad trees became real woods blossoming up just below the window, and the gray line on the ground became a concrete runway rolling arrow straight beneath the plane.

There was a hurricane sound which made him momentarily shut his eyes in confused terror and then a huge bump and more hurricane.

When he opened his eyes again, he saw that the plane was rolling to a stop in front of a low white building with a forest-green roof. Behind the building were the waving dark-green crowns of tightly packed trees. The forest extended around both edges of the building completely enclosing a large open area of thick green grass. They had landed in a huge grassy clearing in an endless wood. Wasn't that nice? The trees were full of deeply green foliage tossing gently in the wind, and the grass was like a picture postcard of an English park. It was so much greener and richer than the vegetation of Southern California that it didn't seem quite real. It was like a movie set of some African jungle, like a fairyland.

"End of the line, Weller," a voice said. Then hands were unbuckling his seat belt and guiding him down an aisle, through a door, and out into open air, incredibly fragrant with the green smells of growing things and the rich brown odor of loamy forest floor.

They guided him down a ramp, his legs very rubbery, his head reeling with the fragrant forest smells on the sudden free breezes, the expansion of the visual universe from the cramped reality of the jet to a disorienting infinity of green.

At the bottom of the ramp a bald older man dressed in white shirt and pants as if ready for a tennis match was waiting in a green golf cart. The Monitors sat Weller down beside him. The bald man smiled at him. "Welcome to the Transformational Research Institute," he said.

Weller smiled back at him but his mouth refused to form any words. The bald man scowled at the Monitors. "Fried to the eyeballs?" he said.

"Standard security procedure," said the gray-haired Monitor. "He's all yours now."

The bald man shook his head. "That will be all," he said to the Monitors, in what Weller thought was not a very friendly tone of voice. Then with a sudden lurch and a soft gentle hum, the golf cart drove off across the bright-green field toward the line of woods.

''I'm Dr. Irving Carson," the bald man said with exaggerated slowness. "I suppose it's up to me to apologize for the state you're in. Rest assured, we don't go in for such crudities here at the Institute."

Weller smiled at Dr. Carson. He wondered what Dr. Carson was apologizing for. But it all seemed much too complicated to bother with. It seemed much nicer just to enjoy the ride and smell the trees than to try to figure out what all that meant.

They drove into the woods and along a complex network of concrete paths, past a series of rough wooden bungalows, a low windowless white building, and a big four-story brick structure which looked like a small, posh hotel. Through the trees, Weller glimpsed more bungalows, a swimming pool, what might have been a barn, and another low white building. The Institute seemed like a very nice place, a very private country resort for very rich people. They've sent me on a vacation to the country, Weller thought. Isn't that considerate?

The golf cart pulled up beside the entrance to a small one-story building built of rough-cut gray stone. Dr. Carson checked his watch. "Dr. Bernstein has squeezed in au hour for you in thirty minutes," he said. "But we'd better clear the cobwebs out of your mind first."

Very gently Dr. Carson led Weller out of the golf cart, took his arm, and guided him inside the stone building. The halls were painted a soothing deep yellow with rich natural-wood moldings. There were women in crisp white nurses' uniforms bustling about and men in doctor's smocks. It seemed to be some kind of small hospital, though it didn't have that awful hospital odor or that sterile hospital decor. Weller was sure be was going to like the Institute if even the hospital was so nice and cozy.

Dr. Carson led him into a small examining room filled with medical cabinets, instruments, and strange lamps. But it was painted a bright royal blue and had pretty pictures on the walls, so Weller was not at all uneasy as Dr. Carson sat him down on the edge of the examining table. This was such a nice place that he was sure the people would be very understanding and friendly and that no one would hurt him.

Dr. Carson took a hypodermic out of an autoclave, went to one of the cabinets, and came back with a vial and a cotton swab. He stuck the needle through the rubber top of the vial and filled it with clear fluid. He swabbed the pit of Weller's right arm. "This won't hurt at all," he said, and stuck the needle into a vein.

As Dr. Carson slowly depressed the plunger of the hypodermic, a hard cold sensation moved up Weller's arm, across his shoulder, and into his head. Something like cotton candy began to melt away in his mind, slowly replacing itself with a dull, throbbing ache. His consciousness seemed to sink back into his body, and he became aware that all his muscles were aching and trembling. A terrible feeling of weariness came over him.

By the time Carson had withdrawn the hypodermic, Weller was shaking with fatigue, his eyeballs burned, his brain seemed to be trying to beat its way out of his skull, his mouth tasted like a toilet bowl, and a black rage was boiling through him. I've been drugged! he thought. I've been fried out or my mind for hours! How long has it been? Where the hell is this place ... ? New York! Jesus, I've been stoned out of my mind clear across the country! Son of a bitch!

"How do you feel now?" Carson asked.

"How do I feel?" Weller snarled, "You bastards pump me full of downers and you ask me how I feel? I feel like I've swallowed a quart of Lysol, you son of a bitch! My head is killing me!" A sudden wave of nausea passed through him and his head swam with vertigo, "Jesus ...," he groaned.

Carson smiled fatuously. "Well, at least you're obviously no longer sedated," he said, "Please understand that we at the Institute don't approve of these crude Monitor tactics."

"Fuck you," Weller moaned. I think I'm going to puke, he decided. I wish I could cut my fucking head off.

Nothing fazed Dr. Carson. "You're going to be surprised at all the advances we've made here," he said, going to one of the cabinets, taking out a bottle of green liquid, and pouring two inches of it into a water glass.

"You might as well begin your education with this," he said, handing the glass to Weller. "Go ahead, drink it. You'll feel much better."

Weller eyed the poisonous-looking stuff suspiciously. "What is it?" he said. "Rat poison?"

"Something for your head," Carson replied. "A massive dose of megavitamins. Plus a mixture of amino acids, MAO inhibitors, alkaloids, L-dopa, and central-nervous-system stimulators. Replaces depleted enzymes. Tones up the synapses. Raises the biochemistry of the brain to optimum function. We call it eptifier. Go ahead, drink it. Satisfaction guaranteed."

Weller sighed. Even a dose of cyanide would improve how he felt at this point. Resignedly he gulped down the green liquid. It tasted like cod-liver oil mixed with hair tonic.

"I don't feel any different," he said belligerently.

"You will," Carson said. "It takes a few minutes to metabolize." He checked his watch. "We've got to meet Dr. Bernstein now," he said. You'll be a new man before we reach his office."

***

By the time they had reached the golf cart, Weller was beginning to feel almost human; at least he could walk without vertigo, was no longer in imminent danger of barfing, and his pounding headache had receded to a vague broken-glass feeling in his brain.

Carson drove off in the general direction of the big brick main buildings, past bungalows, two low white buildings, the swimming pool, tennis courts.

"This place used to be a private resort for the idle rich," he said. "Institute Central was the main hotel. Most of the buildings you see were here when we bought the place. All we've had to build are a few lab buildings and the computer complex. There was even an airstrip, though the runway had to be lengthened and resurfaced to take John's Learjet. Still, it was an ideal purchase. As far as the outside world knows, it's still a private resort, and even most of the security set up was already in place."

Carson smiled at Weller confidentially. "I believe the original owners were Mafia connected," he said. ''Who else would've had the estate already enclosed by electrified barbed-wire fencing and had guard-dog kennels already set up? As I understand it, even our Dobermans and Shepherds were bred from stock they threw into the deal."

Perhaps it was the fresh air, or perhaps the Institute really had developed a magic hangover cure, for Weller found that his mind was becoming crystal clear. It was obvious to him that Carson's chatty little talk was coldly calculated to casually inform him that this place was under very tight security, that he could forget about just walking out whenever he pleased.

Realizing that, and realizing how alertly he had perceived it, he also realized that his headache was now gone, along with. his vertigo, his nausea, his muscular tremors, and even his fatigue. Even the cruddy taste in his mouth was fading away. He could feel and enjoy the intermittent warm sunlight dappling his skin through the trees and smell the heady wet perfume of an eastern forest, so unlike the dry chaparral of Southern California. Birds chirped music in the treetops, and his eyes caught them flitting from branch to branch. Goddamn it, he was beginning to feel not merely recovered. but physically great and mentally alive.

"You ought to package that stuff as Instant Hangover Cure," he told Carson. "You could make millions."

"Oh, it's much more than that," Carson said. "For now we don't want to call public attention to the Institute. But Dr. Bernstein will brief you. Arthur's not only the director, he set the place up. It's as much his baby as John's."

They had reached the main building: a rambling four-story brick structure with a big glassed-in portico, and a main entrance facade done up with pseudo-Georgian white columns. Carson drove around to the side of the building where another golf cart was parked beside a round redwood table. Sitting at the table was a slightly built man in his sixties in tan chinos and matching bush shirt, with thin birdlike features and long, unruly white hair, looking for all the world like a mad scientist from central casting.

The old man got up as they pulled up beside him and got out of the golf cart. "Ah, Mr. Weller," he said, extending a bony hand. "I'm Arthur Bernstein. I trust you've recovered from your trip well enough to take the ten-penny tour. John wants to get you oriented as quickly as possible for some mysterious reason, and this is my only free time for two days."

Weller shook Bernstein's hand perfunctorily, studying the old man's face. Though Bernstein spoke in a high, rapid voice and seemed to tremble with nervous energy or perhaps merely the frailness of age, there was something calm and oceanic about his cool green eyes, as if some vaster and entirely different being inhabited this ancient fleshly envelope.

"No thanks to the Monitors," Weller said. "But I've got to admit that the stuff Dr. Carson gave me is something else again."

Bernstein cocked an eyebrow at Carson.

"Formula three," Carson said.

Bernstein nodded. "Good enough for a start," he said. "Monitor security measures aren't exactly designed to insure mental clarity," he told Weller. "But then, that's their business and enhancing consciousness is ours, hmmm? It all balances out. Well, we'd better get started. As usual, my schedule is terribly tight."

With a dismissive nod to Carson he led Weller to the other golf cart and drove around to the main drive at the front of the building. "John tells me you're highly motivated, Mr. Weller," he said. "Excellent. You won't be disappointed. We're at the cutting edge of human knowledge here. The Institute is the essence of Transformationalism -- our goal is nothing less than the total understanding of human consciousness on a rigorous scientific level, and no expense has been spared to give us the means of achieving it. You're a lucky man to be here, Mr. Weller."

It had all come out rapid-fire and flawlessly like an often-repeated guidebook spiel, but Weller sensed that Bernstein was sincere, that he could not even entertain the notion that anyone else did not share his dedication to his work. The movies' traditional mad scientist -- except there was no disheveled aura of crankiness about him.

Bernstein abruptly stopped the golf cart in front of a low windowless white building. "This is our computer complex," he said. The logical place to begin."

He led Weller into the building through a double-doored, airtight vestibule, down a gleaming white hallway, and into a huge room. Reels of tape spun on memory units. Card-punch machines and automatic typewriters clattered. Numbers, curves, and shapes flickered on dozens of assorted cathode-ray tubes. A dozen white-smocked technicians scampered around busily like the machine tenders of Metropolis. The exciting electric odor of ozone hummed in the air. Whatever this place actually did, Weller had to admit, it certainly would make the ideal set for a movie about itself.

"The sum total of the most advanced human knowledge about the mind and its workings is stored and correlated here," Bernstein said, with the ardor of a doting grandfather. "The memory banks are updated daily, so we can call up a real-time picture of where we stand at any moment. It all comes through here."

Bernstein sat down in front of a typewriter with a screen display. "I'll show you," he said. He typed a few lines. "Brainwave change correlations with eptifier formula twelve," he said, as columns of figures appeared on the screen. "The molecular structure of RNA." A helical chemical diagram replaced the numbers. "Yesterday's creativity curve of Frederick Conners." A spiky curve replaced the chemical diagram.

"And so forth," Bernstein said, looking back and up at Weller.

''I'm afraid all this is Greek to me," Weller said.

"Oh?" Bernstein said, surprised for some reason. "I thought you were going to be filming some of our activities for the archives," he said. "I had assumed John sent for a man with the technical background."

Is that what I'm supposed to be here for? Weller wondered. Or is Steinhardt not above even telling this character some cover story? Something told him he should keep his mouth as shut as possible.

"My technical background is in film making," he said. "I guess John felt it would be easier to brief a professional film maker on the technicalities than to make a director out of some scientist."

Bernstein looked at him most peculiarly. "I see," he said. Suddenly, for no discernible reason, he was nervous.

He stood up and seemed to distance himself inside a professorial persona. ''I'll try to keep it in layman's terms then," he said, waving his arms for emphasis, almost as if he were on a lectern. "Here at the Institute we are experimenting in many areas. We're trying to obtain as total a description of human consciousness as possible. The structure of the brain. The biochemistry of the mind. The electronic nature of thought and mental states themselves. We are quite close to our first-stage goal, a rigorous scientific model of total human consciousness, a biophysics of the mind."

He leaned against the typewriter console, more for emphasis than for support. "In this computer everything we have learned is stored and constantly updated as we learn more. This computer also does the necessary calculations for all of our various projects. He thumped the console affectionately.

"But this computer contains much more than even that," he said, a far away look coming into his oceanic green eyes. "It contains a complete systems model of what we now know of human consciousness. A subprogram simulates the bio-chemistry of the brain, another simulates brainwave patterns, yet others simulate sight, vision, smell, all the human sensory input. And so forth. Everything that interacts to form human consciousness can be made to interact electronically here in patterns and combinations of our choosing. Are you following me so far, Mr. Weller?"

"I'm not sure," Weller said. "Sounds to me like you're playing with one of those intelligent computers that get temperamental and take over the world. I may not be a scientist, but I've sure seen the movie."

"Artificial intelligence?" Bernstein snorted. "Pointless rubbish! We're not trying to imitate the human mind with some clumsy simulacrum. We're using a computer simulation of how the human mind works so that we can learn how to make it work better. We test our experimental results against our computer model of consciousness to see whether our inputs make its outputs simulate the known human patterns. If they do, we know we have learned something, and if they don't, we mow we have to update our model."

He smiled a fatuous, reassuring smile at Weller. "Rest assured, Mr. Weller," he said. "We're not replicating Dr. Frankenstein's monster in electronic software. We're simply using the latest computer technology to maximize the efficiency of our research and development programs. If those fools at the Pentagon did the same, they'd save the taxpayers ten times over the cost of financing this work."

From the vehemence of the sudden shift Weller got the feeling that Bernstein had had some frustrating experience with the military-industrial complex at some point in his past.

"I gather you've worked for the Pentagon then?" Weller asked.

Bernstein did a short take and hurriedly ignored the question. "And now I think you'd like to see some of what we are actually doing in concrete terms, wouldn't you, Mr. Weller?" he said. "There's really nothing here to actually see, is there, after all? Nothing that would make for dramatic film. And that's what you're here to do -- isn't it, Mr. Weller?"

"Yeah," Weller said, unable to fathom why Bernstein had become almost fearful of him. Could it be more Monitor paranoia, even at this level? Even the director of the Institute has to watch over his shoulder for secret Monitor agents?

"Shall we continue the ten-penny tour?" Weller said, amusing himself with a slightly authoritative tone that did indeed seem to keep Bernstein guessing. '"I'm sure your time is valuable."

***

Bernstein whisked Weller around to about a dozen assorted laboratories within the next hour, exactly like a plant manager showing what he imagined were choice locations to the commercial director sent down to him from the home office to film his premises. Long on scenes where people were doing outre things with exotic equipment, but short on specific information as to what was really going on.

There were three or four chemical laboratories full of glass tubing, electronic instruments, and foul smells. According to Bernstein they were experimenting with brain biochemistry.

What did that mean?

They were experimenting with chemical enhancement of consciousness.

"Why, Dr. Bernstein," Weller chided, as they stood in one of the bubbling alchemist laboratories surrounded by tables of incredibly complex glassworks, "you mean you're inventing new kinds of psychedelic drugs?"

Bernstein almost physically flinched. "Psychedelic drugs are to what we are doing here as a witch doctor is to a brain surgeon," he said indignantly. "You're not alone, Mr. Weller. Most people have difficulty distinguishing science from witchcraft in this area. As witness the impossibility of getting research grants from the government or from industry. Only John Steinhardt has had the vision to support this work. Everyone else has assumed that I'd be concocting mind poisons for rebellious youth."

"You've got to admit that seems like a fine distinction to a layman like me," Weller said, "Are you saying you're not inventing new ways to get stoned?"

"Get stoned?" Bernstein snapped. "What an archaic, useless conception. Is that what you felt today when you drank the eptifier, Mr. Weller? Stoned? High? Disoriented? Hallucinative? I think not!"

"Was that stuff developed here?" Weller said, suitably impressed.

"Of course it was," Bernstein said. "We're not interested in strange new alkaloids that produce random disorientation. All human consciousness exists in a biochemical matrix. Therefore there must be chemical differences in the brains of ordinary men, morons, and geniuses, for example. Our goal here is nothing less than to develop the chemical means of giving every human being on the Earth the brain metabolism of a charismatic, creative, visionary genius."

"Like John?" Weller said half humorously. How Faustian could you get?

"Like John," Bernstein answered, in utter dead earnest. "Beyond John. There is no reason why we cannot go beyond the raising of the mass consciousness to the level of the best of us. Someday we will know enough to go beyond eptifying what we evolved with and create the biochemical base for a whole new level of human consciousness that has never existed before. True Transformational Man."

"Are you really serious?" Weller asked.

"Of course, I'm serious," Bernstein said. "Don't you find that your mind is working as well now as it ever has? Isn't that proof that we have at least begun the process?"

Considering that he had had the mind of a carrot not too long ago, Weller had to admit that his head seemed to be rolling along in high gear. He had been able to grasp most of what Bernstein was talking about once the technical jargon had been left behind. He had picked up the man's Monitor paranoia and even played with it. He had sussed out that Bernstein had worked for the Pentagon, had been unable to get research grants for this kind of work from the usual sources, and thus was grateful to Steinhardt for backing him. But not grateful enough, apparently, to trust him entirely. Not bad, Weller, not bad.

"I guess you have a point, Doctor," he said.

From there, Bernstein had grown a little less hostile, a little less contemptuous, though his nervousness remained. At least he stopped assuming that Weller was skeptical of everything he saw. And for his part, Weller was beginning to question his own skepticism too.

There were dissecting laboratories filled with bottled brains and sensory-deprivation tanks and huge human-sized mazes with moving walls and strange optical effects controlled from a central console, and so many other things that he had seen so fast that it all became a blur. It was clear that Transformationalism had spent tens of millions of dollars setting up this place. It was not clear at all how they could possibly expect to return a profit on the investment, which certainly could not be said of any other of John B. Steinhardt's manifold enterprises.

Bernstein himself might be a little weird, a little defensively self-righteous, a little afraid of phantom Monitors, maybe even a little nuts in spots, but he did seem to be sincere about what he was doing. If anything, a little too sincere. And the wonders he was predicting seemed more and more possible as Weller got a fuller and fuller picture of how many people were working here, how many projects they were running, and how much this must be setting Steinhardt back. One thing Transformationalism didn't seem to be into was expenditure without results.

Was this what really lay at the heart of Transformationalism? A dedicated effort to advance the level of human consciousness with Steinhardt's own psychic Manhattan Project? Was it possible? But how could something really worthwhile come out of the cynical scams, the broken lives, the power trips, the mind-control numbers, the fascist secret-police methods of the Monitors? How could you make gold out of shit? How could you advance human consciousness by screwing up human minds?

The tour was almost over, and they were about to enter the building where the biofeedback labs that had developed the brainwave monitor were located. Bernstein and Weller were getting along at least to the point where Bernstein had started to notice Weller's mood.

He paused, touched Weller on the arm, studied his face for a moment, and said, "You seem a bit confused, Mr. Weller. Are you having trouble understanding what you're seeing?"

"In a way."

"Well, is there anything you'd like me to clarify for you before we wind things up? This will be our last stop, and I can only give you about another seven minutes of my time."

Weller laughed. "There's plenty I'd like you to clarify for me," he snapped, "but I doubt if you can."

"Try me," Bernstein said, giving him a grandfatherly look with those big eyes.

Well, here I am at the Institute, Weller thought. If I'm not going to be me now, I don't know when else I will. Try me, the man says ...?

"All right, Dr. Bernstein, I'll try you. Don't you ever think about justifying what you're doing to yourself? While you're playing with your fancy scientific toys, don't you ever think about what pays for them?"

Bernstein slammed the inquiry shut like an angry clam. "I would think that the justification for our work would be self-evident to anyone with a modicum of intelligence."

''I'm not talking about what you're trying to accomplish, Dr. Bernstein," Weller said. "For the sake of argument, let's say I'm sold on that." He paused, pondered for a moment. Bernstein was obviously sincerely dedicated to what he was doing, perhaps too dedicated, judging from his little dig at the Pentagon. But he also had expressed distaste for Monitor methods and seemed to have a certain fear of them. If nothing else, it would be interesting, perhaps ultimately useful, to find out where he really stood.

''I'm talking about Transformationalism," Weller said.

"Transformationalism?" Bernstein's expression became distant again, guarded.

Leave us not be too obvious, Weller thought. "Look, you apparently worked for the Pentagon," he said, "and I doubt somehow that you were truly dedicated to the military aspect of the work. You probably didn't give much thought to that; all you were interested in was the funding. Now you're being funded by Transformationalism. How about leveling with me? Do you give a damn about the people whose money is supporting your work now?"

Now Bernstein was obviously furious at something, but he kept his rage under tight control. "I get the feeling you're a Monitor, Mr. Weller," he said, biting off his words.

"Oh, come on, Doctor. Would John send someone to spy on you?"

Bernstein just snorted.

"So you yourself feel that your dedication to Transformationalism might be questioned?" Weller said devilishly.

"All right, whoever you are," Bernstein said, "if this is going to get back to John, then let it. John knows that he and I have a working relationship, a quid pro quo, that I am not a worshiper of his and never will be. That was made clear and agreed to at the outset. We both know that, don't we, so shall we stop playing games? I'm doing exactly what I said I would. John has no reason to question my loyalty, and I resent being grilled like this."

"You just told me you've never been a worshiper of John, and in the next breath you tell me he has no reason to question your loyalty?" Weller said.

"Don't play your little Monitor games with me?" Bernstein said shrilly. "I know more about the mind than your kind will ever dream of knowing."

"But Dr. Bernstein. I never said I was a Monitor," Weller said. ''I'm not a Monitor. I'm making a film. I'm just trying to get some depth in my material. Honest. Really."

"Just as you say," Bernstein said coldly. "Shall we conclude our innocent little tour then?"

So saying, Bernstein turned and trotted into the biofeedback building, forcing Weller to tag along at his heels and terminate the conversation. I'm not sure why I'm doing this, Weller mused, but it's beginning to get a little interesting.

Bernstein whisked him in and out of a series of electronic workshops and laboratories, where brainwave monitors were being assembled from crated parts, where lab technicians were working on scratch-built experimental models, where other electronic esoterica were being fiddled with.

"Our earlier work with biofeedback led to the brainwave monitor," Bernstein told him. "Or rather we went to biofeedback principles to invent what John was looking for."

"The brainwave monitor was John's idea, not yours, then?" Weller asked, as Bernstein led him down a long blue hallway.

"I've never claimed otherwise," Bernstein said defensively, but also with a strange tinge of contempt. "John wanted an impressive-looking device that would scientifically measure mental states. He told me forthrightly that the processee's belief in the credibility of the brainwave monitor was what counted. As he put it, 'It would also be nice if it kind of worked. But whether it does or not, I need it in three months.'"

Bernstein shook his head, and now he seemed to be talking half to himself. "Those were the parameters. It then became a simple matter of turning biofeedback machines into a kind of lie detector. After all, a lie detector is a crude attempt to measure mental states indirectly. It measures skin resistance, and breathing rate and so forth, which measures physical stress, and if you assume that physical stress correlates with mental stress, you at least have a machine that tells you when a question is making someone nervous."

"That seems pretty crude to me," Weller said. "And it's not admissible evidence in court in many places."

Bernstein didn't look at Weller, but his voice sharpened, as if he were talking to a bright student who had just made an intelligent point. "Of course. It doesn't at all get at what's going on in the brain. The electroencephalograph does that, gives you a picture of the brainwaves, and biofeedback work proves that brainwave patterns have some correlation with mental states because it shows that people can learn to change their brainwave patterns on a screen by meditating, or deliberately thinking hostile thoughts, for example."

Bernstein paused outside a heavy steel door. He looked up at Weller, and for the moment at least seemed to forget that he thought Weller was a Monitor. "So you see, it was really a rather simple matter to turn a standard multichannel biofeedback machine into the brainwave monitor. About all I had to do was turn the screen around so that the processor was watching it rather than the subject whose brain was wired into it. In fact, as you've seen, we put the things together out of standard biofeedback components, for the most part. John's idea was the main thing, what I did was rather an obvious solution to the technical problem."

"But does the thing really work?"

Bernstein shrugged. "At least it does something," he said, so in theory such a device should be possible."

"In theory? You mean the brainwave monitor is a phony?"

Strangely Bernstein didn't slip back into his Monitor paranoia. Somehow Weller had gotten him onto his professional program. "The brainwave monitor does give us data on what's going on inside the brain," he said. "Interpreting it coherently is the problem. We don't yet know enough to judge whether the thing does what we say it does or not."

"You mean not even you know whether it's real or a phony?"

"Precisely, my dear Mr. Weller," Bernstein said, putting his hand on the knob of the heavy steel door. "That's why we're running many of our projects here on determining relationships between brainwaves and mental states. On John's direct orders. We don't know what we have ourselves."

Something ironic came into his attitude. "Now in here," he said, "we have something else that's eating up a lot of time and money at John's direct order." Was Bernstein trying to say something to Steinhardt through what he supposed was a Monitor overseer? That he himself thought that Steinhardt was wasting his time on crackpot schemes? That Steinhardt should realize that it was after all his own money he was wasting. along with the time of busy scientists?

Bernstein led him into a small, stark cubicle like a projectionist's booth. One whole wall of the room was a heavy window overlooking a larger room where, of all, things, some kind of unreal concert was going on. A piano player, a saxophonist, a drummer, and a guitarist were jamming silently behind the soundproof glass. Each of them wore a brainwave monitor headband, trailing a long wire which was plugged into a bank of electronic consoles lined up behind them like monster amps. The consoles had four oscilloscopes wired into them. Four white-smocked technicians were studying them intently, fiddling with controls. A fifth technician was supervising the group -- not the musicians but the control technicians.

"What on God's green Earth is that?" Weller exclaimed.

"That," Bernstein said, "is our latest project. "An attempt to reverse the brainwave monitor. If specific brainwave patterns correlate with specific mental states, why can't you induce specific mental states by transmitting their electronic patterns into the brain? So here we have a group of jazz musicians improvising. Each one is receiving controlled electronic input into his brain, and the patterns of various mental state models are tried. Can we make the saxophone player more creative? Can we give the piano a depressive chord structure? Can we make the drummer pound out an angry beat?"

"Push-button brainwashing," Weller whispered. "A goddamn mind-fucking machine!"

"I suppose it might be," Bernstein said dryly. "If it worked."

"It doesn't work? Then why are you doing it?"

''This project is being pushed forward on John's direct orders," Bernstein said, making the last two words a disclaimer of any responsibility of his own. "He thought of the idea, and he believes in it. This isn't all of it either; we're doing the same thing with other areas of creative work, among other things. It's quite an extensive series of projects."

"Which you, I gather, think are a wasted effort."

Bernstein snapped back into his official shell, as if he were addressing Steinhardt through a supposed Monitor but was determined to get his displeasure through without crossing some invisible line. "The idea has merit and possibilities, but it's about twenty years premature. We don't even know to what extent the brainwave monitor works, and here we are trying to program thought processes through electronic wave patterns. It's like trying to do chemistry before you've figured out the nature of the atom.

"But then, John was a science-fiction writer, not a scientist. He could brilliantly visualize an inevitable scientific development long before the state of knowledge necessary to bring it about. Ten or twenty years from now this kind of thing will be possible here at the Institute, and then this work will have to all be done over again anyway. Right now...."

He shrugged. "John is as entitled to his obsessions as I am to mine," he said. "After all, he's paying for both."

With that he opened the door and ushered Weller back into the hallway. "And that concludes the time I have to spare, Mr. Weller," he said. ''I'll drive you to Institute Central, where, I understand, there is a temporary room waiting for you. I hope I've been informative."

"Oh, you have, Dr. Bernstein, you have," Weller said. Bernstein gave him another nervous look, and they walked back to the golf cart in uneasy silence.

"There's just one thing," Weller said, as he climbed into the cart beside Bernstein. "A while back you told me John had no reason to question your loyalty. Yet apparently you think his pet project here is wasting your time. I mean, what kind of loyalty is that?"

Bernstein stared at Weller. His eyes flashed through anger and then seemed to glide upward onto some plane of oceanic calm, beyond Monitor paranoia. "The only kind of loyalty that's worth anything," he said. "Honest loyalty."

"Mr. Weller," he said, starting the golf cart, "awhile back you also asked me about my moral position on where my funding came from. Well, now I'll tell you. Before I met John Steinhardt, I had a vision of transforming human consciousness, and no hope of bringing it about. "

They drove past the computer complex and out onto a main pathway, past labs and bungalows and guard-dog kennels and who knew what else. "I dreamed of a facility like this and the freedom to use it," Bernstein said. "But, what I was actually doing was pitiful and frustrating. I spent years working in inadequate laboratories niggardly financed by poverty-stricken universities. I spent years working for military psychological warfare units. For a time I was even reduced to doing motivational research for an advertising agency."

He waved an arm as if to embrace the entire Institute. "And then John came along," he said. "A man who also had a vision of the further evolution of human consciousness, maybe not the same vision, but at least a vision. But John wasn't like me. Somehow he knew how to apply his vision to the real world. He knew how to make money. He already had vast financial resources. And he was willing to use them."

Around a gentle bend in the path the brick main building became visible behind a low copse of trees. "Mr. Weller, have you ever heard of a government or a corporation spending millions of dollars to advance scientific development purely out of a desire to advance the course of knowledge and better the human condition? I haven't. Only John B. Steinhardt is doing that without any foreseeable hope of turning a profit."

They reached the front of Institute Central. Bernstein stopped the golf cart and turned to Weller. "And you can doubt my real loyalty to John?" he said contemptuously. "I don't have to agree with all his methods to be loyal to him. I don't have to believe that he always knows what he's talking about, and I don't even have to understand his motives. Because I don't care if he's doing it to feed his ego or leave a monument to posterity or achieve scientific respectability by validating his own pet crackpot theories or make himself more powerful or all of them. My loyalty to John is based entirely on the fact that we share a common goal which both of us believe is of transcendent importance."

He looked Weller full in the face but seemed to speak through him to someone else, to Steinhardt. "As far as I'm concerned, that makes any other differences irrelevant. And I trust John still feels the same way."

"Oh, I'm sure he does," Weller said, climbing down from the golf cart. "I don't think you have anything to worry about."

"I'm glad to hear that," Bernstein said. He turned on the golf cart's electric engine. "I hope I've helped you with your film," he said. "I will see you again when you're ready to shoot this film, won't I, Mr. Weller? You will be shooting a film, won't you?"

"You'll have to ask John that," Weller said. "He's the boss."

"I understand the message," Bernstein said peculiarly, and he drove off leaving Weller to wonder what message he had just transmitted from the ectoplasmic Steinhardt.
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Re: The Mind Game, by Norman Spinrad

Postby admin » Sat Mar 19, 2016 9:07 am

Chapter Seventeen

After having dropped out of an airplane in a drugged stupor directly into a guided tour by the director of the Institute himself, Weller was abruptly left dangling in limbo for a night and day and a night again. Perhaps it was some kind of Transformational lesson or perhaps a bureaucratic screw-up or perhaps just sheer indifference.

His room here was a far cry from his crummy hole at the Los Angeles Transformation Center. Pine paneling, thick green carpeting, a comfortable bed, even a color television set which not only brought in all the New York stations, but gave call-up access to a library of Transformationalist tapes. The closet and chest had even been filled with new clothing, and what was more, the stuff fitted him. If he were a prisoner, this was the Alcatraz Hilton.

That night Weller ate Beef Wellington and Peach Melba in the Institute Central commissary, laid out much like the grim dining room at the center, but with white tablecloths, softer lighting, a gourmet menu, and a small choice of wines.

This was definitely a more clannish crowd, the favored few at the Institute. Nobody tried to force themselves on Weller here. Far from it. There were tables of middle-aged people in white smocks, a blue-jean crowd, hard-noses who might be Monitors or security guards, and they didn't even seem to mix much with each other.

Eating in isolation, Weller had the feeling that he was totally cut off from the internal lines of communication of the Institute and would be until some word came down from the Man. People weren't going to talk to strangers here unless they were officially introduced.

And when he went back to his room, he realized that he was totally cut off from the world outside as well. There was no phone in the room. He hadn't noticed that before. In fact, when he thought about it, he realized that he hadn't seen a phone anywhere in Institute Central. Well, that figured. With barbed-wire fences, guard dogs, body searches, and security guards, the Institute could hardly be expected to have pay phones to the rest of the world for its inmates. The Alcatraz Hilton was exactly what it was.

Enough was enough for one day, and he fell asleep almost before he hit the pillow. He would face tomorrow when it came.

But the next morning, after a late breakfast in the nearly empty commissary, what he found he had to face was nothing and lots of it. There was something called the "Directive Desk" in what had been the lobby of the hotel and behind it was an earnest young girl in white, with bright young eyes and a slightly ravaged complexion.

"Is this where someone might leave a message for me?" Weller asked her.

"A message?"

"Yeah. I just got here and I don't have the faintest idea of where I'm supposed to go or what I'm supposed to do or if I'm to report to someone. No one bothered to tell me."

"Well, let's see if we have any updated directives for you, Mr....?"

"Weller, Jack Weller."

She checked a gridwork of cubbyholes with nameplates above them. "If there is one, it's here," she said.

She came back with a single sheet of paper that she had taken from one of the cubbies. "Here it is, Mr. Weller!" she said brightly. She read from the paper. "Operant directive, Jack Weller, until further updating. Await next directive, provisional Q-level privileges. There you are!"

"Where is that?" Weller said. "What does it mean?"

"Oh, it's quite simple. You're free to do whatever you want until you get a new directive, which will probably come through here. Within Q-level restrictions, of course."

"Q-level restrictions?"

"Full commissary privileges," the girl recited. "No phone privileges. No admission to restricted areas without a specific directive to the contrary. No unauthorized communication with permanent personnel." She smiled at Weller. "It's like being on vacation," she said. "We have a pool and a tennis court and lots of woods to walk in. Relax and enjoy yourself."

"Swell," Weller grumbled. Don't call us, we'll call you. I didn't exactly come here to go swimming and walk in the woods, he thought. Well, maybe it might be worthwhile to take a look around.

Without a golf cart the Institute suddenly became a much bigger place, a small town spread out thin over many acres of woodland. Weller found that on foot it was very difficult to gather an overall image of its totality. Wandering up the main path that Bernstein had driven him down the day before, the buildings and facilities no longer seemed so crowded together, there was no sense of a "Main Street" or even a university quad. The hilly landscape had been left more or less intact, and the woods that covered it had only been sheared away where a building or a path needed the empty space. Everything was half concealed by the hills and hollows of the landscape and heavily shrouded by thick copses of trees.

And for the population that this place must have, there were precious few people to be seen wandering the grounds. Most of the buildings that Weller passed had signs out front that said, "Admittance Under Directive Only." He got the feeling that that applied to just about every individual part of the whole. Computer people couldn't get into chemical laboratories. The biofeedback labs would be closed to biochemists. There was probably a whole volunteer army of Transformationalist slavies doing the necessary dirty work who couldn't get into anything but the facilities set aside specifically for them.

"Q-level restrictions" seemed to mean that he was limited to Institute Central, the old resort facilities, and the open paths and woodlands. Look, but don't try to touch.

Hardly in the mood for swimming or tennis, Weller decided that the most useful way to kill time would be to walk through as much of the Institute as he could. He might run into Annie. And if nothing else, it would tire him out, which might be an aid to turning his mind off, not a bad thing when all you can do at the moment is grind your mental gears.

So he wandered off the main path into the woods, trying to keep more or less in a straight line so that he could eventually come to an edge of the property, the first logical step of any foot survey. He followed a path going in his direction past a lab and some bungalows, then reentered the woods when it veered away to the right.

It took him about ten minutes of walking on the shaded brown earth of the woods to reach the fence.

It instantly flashed him an image of a prison camp. The woods abruptly ended in a defoliated zone ten yards wide. A rectilinear spider web of thin wires formed a ten foot high fence between where Weller stood at the edge of the woods and the clear zone. A similar fence ran along the other side of the zone where the woods began again. This triple barrier of electrified fence and cleared zone seemed to go all around the property line. Weller walked alongside it, up and down hills, around bends, until by the changing position of the sun, he could tell he had circled the whole grounds.

Twice he saw uniformed and conspicuously armed guards zipping along inside the fenced zone in golf carts. He instinctively melted back into the woods at their approach. Once he saw a pack of Dobermans patrolling in the fenced-off zone, sniffing and reconnoitering as if it were their territory. They dashed snarling and yowling up to the fence as they got a whiff of him, and Weller ran off deep into the woods until the pack sounds died away.

Carson wasn't kidding about the security. Although the Institute was all woods and tennis courts, it was sealed off like a military outpost. The bucolic setting only cleverly masked the fact from inquiring outside eyes.

Weller went back to Institute Central for lunch after completing an entire circuit of the barrier without finding a break. Even the airstrip was inside of it.

After lunch he followed paths at random to see how much of the network he could cover on foot, since, presumably these paths went everywhere.

He came upon several areas within the Institute grounds that were sealed off from the rest of the place by their own fenced perimeter, though here the barrier was a simple, high barbed-wire fence, and no prowling dogs were in evidence. These sealed compounds included a colony of small bungalows surrounding a low white building in a shaded hollow, a motor pool and security area, and a low house of gray stone capped with a huge, shimmering geodesic dome.

Each of these compounds had a single gate and the guards looked like standard-model Monitors without visible armament. Within the Institute grounds, apparently, it was assumed that fences would be respected.

Weller spent a long afternoon wandering about in this methodical fashion, but what struck him was how little he was actually able to see: the outsides of buildings, the fences around other buildings, occasional people in golf carts humming by like lords of the manor, and one or two peculiar looks as they passed.

It was eerie. A velvet-lined prison camp through which he was allowed to wander at will as long as he didn't try to get into anything. He was totally cut off from contact with the outside world and any realistic hope of physical escape, and at least at the moment he was cut off from any real contact with what was going on within the world of the Institute too. They could keep him in this state forever if they wanted to -- cut off from the outside world, unable to find Annie, unable to see Steinhardt, eating three fine meals a day, and haunting the Institute grounds like a ghost.

After a heavy solitary dinner of tournedos of beef and a full bottle of Burgundy, Weller took an after-dinner walk, feeling more like a ghost than ever in the clear dark night full of towering trees and intermittent bright starlight.

Maybe this is Transformationalism's final solution to the Jack Weller problem, he thought. Maybe all I've succeeded into doing is talking my way into John Steinhardt's version of jail.

That thought was just a little too scary out there in the lonely darkness, and it drove him indoors, into the light, into his room, where he further removed himself from any more paranoid contemplation of his real situation by gorking himself out in front of the tube until he felt tired enough to fall into what he earnestly hoped would be dreamless sleep.

***

Weller was abruptly jolted into wakefulness by an insistent pounding at the door to his room. Blinking sleep from his eyes, he staggered out of bed and pulled on a pair of shorts, noticing blearily that the sun was just rising over the tree line outside his window, filling the world with a grim, gray early morning light.

Furry-mouthed and evil-tempered, he opened the door and grunted, "Yeah?"

A burly man in a black T-shirt and jeans stood there looking horribly awake and impatient. What the hell did he want at this ungodly hour?

"John has invited you to have breakfast with him at his house," the man said with infuriating politeness. "Within the half hour," he added more authoritatively. "Get shaved and dressed. I'll wait for you out here."

"Urrr ...," Weller grunted and closed the door. Christ, he thought, dragging himself into the bathroom, and I'm half asleep. No doubt the son of a bitch planned it that way!

He took a quick shower, shaved, brushed his teeth, combed his hair, pissed, and put on white ducks and a blue short-sleeved shirt. By the time he had finished, his mind was more or less awake, though he found himself wishing for a belt of that magic brain stimulant Carson had given him. He felt alert enough to face an ordinary day's work with equanimity, but confronting John B. Steinhardt over breakfast seemed to call for an eptified state of mind of which he still didn't feel capable.

The Monitor was still waiting in the hall. He took Weller to a waiting golf cart and drove over to the fenced-off compound that enclosed the gray stone house capped with the geodesic dome. The morning chill and the heatless rising sun began to shock Weller's brain into fuller wakefulness as a guard passed them through the gate and the golf cart pulled up beside the building's entrance.

The Monitor led Weller into the house through a quite ordinary doorway and into a large vestibule faced with living rock. Beyond he could see a short hall that opened into a living room with an enormous Henry-Moore-looking sculpture as a centerpiece. On the wall of the vestibule, hanging slightly off-center, was a single, small Cubist oil painting; the signature was that of Pablo Picasso. A spiral staircase, all hand-rubbed brass, led upward into a blaze of sunlight.

"John's waiting for you up there," the Monitor said, pointing to the spiral staircase. "I stay here."

Nervously Weller ascended the staircase into a confusion of plants, sunlight, and chaos.

From the inside the dome was entirely transparent; the sun was a great ball of pale orange fire illuminating the eastern half of the world, and the woods and buildings of the Institute encircled the chamber like a great living landscape painting. A forest canopy of potted plants hung across the top of the dome, casting long, confusing dappled shadows. More plants -- small palms, bonsai and palmettos --were scattered around the circular room, seemingly at random.

And there were all sorts of clutter crowding the big room as if it were the playpen of some enormously wealthy adult child. A big reflector telescope set high on a steel platform equipped with its own ladder. A huge video recording and playback console. Free-standing bookcases seemingly set up at random. An antique globe of the world four feet in diameter. Dozens of clocks, ranging from antique grandfathers to a Spilhaus Space Clock. A rosewood bar. A tremendous globular tropical fish tank. Untidy heaps of nameless electronic equipment. A Van de Graaff generator. Cases, tables, and shelves overflowing with maps, small statues, chess sets, models of airplanes, ships, and spacecraft. A pinball machine. As many as twenty lamps, no two in a matching style.

The furniture was equally weird. A huge macrame hammock on a steel frame in the middle of the room. A large oak desk with an immense old carved chair behind it. A watercouch covered in black velvet. Camel saddles. Nests of large paisley floor pillows. Leather director's chairs scattered all over the place. And in the eastern quadrant of the room a big, round butcherblock table with a director's chair in front of it, and a complicated-looking black leather recliner behind it.

Leaning back in the recliner, wearing only a pair of white Bermuda shorts with rolls of fat hanging out over the waistband, was John B. Steinhardt. His thinning gray hair was longer than in his official pictures, his moustache was slightly bushier, his naked chest was grizzled with thick gray hair, his complexion was pink shading into red, his watery blue eyes were somewhat bloodshot, though far more lively than any photograph could portray, and he had a long cigar stuck in the corner of his wide, heavy-lipped mouth.

Somehow it was not exactly Weller's fantasy image of the Great Guru in his throne room.

"Ah, so we meet at last!" Steinhardt called in a gravelly barroom voice, as he brought his recliner to an upright position. "Sit yer ass down!"

Shakily Weller planted himself in the director's chair opposite Steinhardt. There was a big pot of coffee on the table between them, two place settings with cups, a bottle of green fluid, and a half-empty fifth of Jack Daniels. Up close, Weller saw that Steinhardt's face was deeply lined and blotched here and there with spider webs of red capillaries.

"Have a little pick-me-up," Steinhardt said, pouring two inches of the green fluid into each of two glasses. "You look like shit." He paused, hesitated, then poured an inch of bourbon into his own glass. "Shot of booze in your eptifier?" he asked genially. "Kills the taste. No matter how much tinkering they do with the formula, it still tastes like piss."

"A little early for me," Weller said, picking up his glass.

"Low level, Jack, low level," Steinhardt said. "If you take enough eptifier, you can drink like a fish from sunrise to sunset and still feel like Adonis. Why do you think I had my boys invent the stuff?" With that, he downed the contents of his glass in two quick gulps. Weller choked down his eptifier glumly. So far, the Great Man seemed like an old rummy.

"Breakfast!" Steinhardt suddenly bellowed. "We're ready for breakfast!"

A moment later a young blond girl wearing skintight white short-shorts and a tiny halter that barely contained her trim high-pointed breasts came up the spiral staircase bearing a silver tray with cream, sugar, and two covered dishes.

She put the tray down on the table, served them coffee, and uncovered the dishes, revealing what appeared to be eggs Benedict. "My own recipe," Steinhardt said. "Westphalian ham, and bearnaise instead of hollandaise, with bialys instead of muffins. Eclecticism, my motto."

He smiled a rubber smile, and put his arm around the girl's waist. Abruptly he pulled off her halter, revealing perfect pink-lipped breasts. "Now ain't that a pair of knockers?" he said, as the girl stood there with a sincere smile plastered across her face. Weller's mouth fell open.

Steinhardt laughed uproariously. "Okay, Sally, you can go now," he said, slapping her on the behind.

When she had gone, Steinhardt stared across the table at the shaken Weller, eyes twinkling with inner amusement. ''I'm a disgusting old fart, right?" he said. "You're appalled. You expected the Maharishi and you got King Farouk. You can't figure me out. You sure you don't want some booze?" He poured a dollop of Jack Daniels into his coffee and took a sip. Suddenly his face became deadly serious, his eyes like sapphire lasers.

"Of course, it's all a con," he said slyly. "Just wanted to see how you'd react. Who knows, within the next thirty seconds, I may whip out a bowie knife and cut your prick off for balling my wife." Again Steinhardt broke himself up into rumbling laughter.

Weller sat there transfixed, not knowing how to react. Everything about Steinhardt seemed so totally unexpected, so totally unpredictable. For want of anything else to do, he took a bite of his eggs Steinhardt. They were delicious.

Steinhardt took another sip of his spiked coffee. "Now then, m'boy," he said in a W. C. Fields voice, "about this off-the-wall idea of yours about me making commercials.... "

Shakily Weller eyed the bottle of eptifier. If the stuff really worked -- and it did seem to -- he could use all the eptifying he could get. "May I?" he said, picking up the bottle.

"By all means," Steinhardt said. "The crazed magnificence of my total being must be scaring the shit out of you."

Weller poured himself another shot of the green fluid. Immediately Steinhardt topped it off with a slug of bourbon. As Weller started to protest, he held up his palm. "My wish is your command," he said. "I kid you not."

Resignedly Weller gulped down the whole mess. The whiskey sent fire to his stomach and heat to his brain. For a moment his eyes watered. When they cleared, he felt a surge of psychic energy; his synapses seemed faster, his mind was racing, and Steinhardt didn't seem quite so intimidating.

"Look, I don't have to tell you what hot shit you are, obviously," he said. "But maybe I do have to tell you that the commercials we're turning out now stink."

Steinhardt nodded. "Recruiting creative people and keeping them creative while keeping them recruited is one of our central, unresolved paradoxes," he said. "So far, old Heisenberg has been laughing up his sleeve at us."

Not knowing what to make of that, Weller pressed doggedly on. "I'm the only real pro you've got," he said. "And you'd be the kind of video personality who could sell Communism to Barry Goldwater -- under my direction."

"No doubt, no doubt," Steinhardt said around a mouthful of food. He paused, gulped down a slug of coffee. "But if you think I'm going to waste my time making used Transformationalism commercials, you have the consciousness of an earthworm."

Poleaxed, Weller could only mutter. "Why?"

"Why!" Steinhardt roared. "Did Jesus Christ make TV commercials? Did Buddha? Did Greta Garbo? What happens to my shadowy, enigmatic mystique if I start peddling Transformationalism myself like so much snake oil? Down the willy-hole it goes, and you can't run a movement like this without an authentic enigmatic mystique. To make commercials I'd have to assume an image, a frozen instantaneous persona. Aside from what it would do to this glorious movement, it would bore the piss out of me. So forget that cockamamie idea, Jack. It's shit for the birds."

"Then ... why did you bring me here at all?" Weller stammered, his mind reeling. Steinhardt was proving impossible to figure out, too confusing to even think straight around, as if his brain projected an enormously powerful magnetic field which screwed up any mental compass within its sphere of influence.

Steinhardt leaned back, poured himself half a glass of straight whiskey, and sat there toying with it, staring up at the canopy of hanging plants. "I once read a science-fiction story," he said. "Or maybe I wrote it, I cranked out so much crud in the old days it's hard to remember which. Anyway, there was this all-powerful ruler of an alien planet who wanted to perpetuate his rule 'beyond the grave,' as we used to say in the old pulp days. So be built himself a giant computer, and he programmed his own personality into it. Then he programmed the thing to pick succeeding programmers according to how closely they matched his own personality, and he programmed it to breed the whole race into an ever-closer mass approximation of this ideal personality, namely his own. A thousand years later they were him."

Steinhardt lowered his gaze to stare at Weller, and suddenly there seemed to be something crazed and monstrously monomaniacal leering at him across the breakfast table. "How do you like that little wet dream?" Steinhardt said. "The entire human race graven in the image of yours truly!"

Weller reacted from the gut. "It makes me want to puke," he said.

Steinhardt broke up into rumbling laughter. He reached across the table and thumped Weller on the shoulder. "Ah, I think my instincts were right about you." he said. "My own fantastic processing techniques have put a head on your shoulders."

"Huh?"

"Huh?" Steinhardt mimicked. "You're right, of course. It's a stupid, disgusting, regressive idea, the exact opposite of what I'm determined to leave behind when I shuffle off to Buffalo."

"I think you left me around the last bend," Weller muttered.

"Don't worry," Steinhardt said, "you'll get used to it." He steepled his hands and seemed to become more serious.

"The story I've just told you is the history of all previous religions, social movements, and attempts to create higher levels of human consciousness," he said. "A hotshot like me comes along, shatters generations of fixed consciousness, reignites ongoing change, and sets up a movement to perpetuate the situation. If he doesn't end up swallowing his own hype -- a long assumption in this racket, let me tell you -- it works as advertised as long as he's alive to keep throwing off changes. But once a Buddha, Jesus, or Steinhardt croaks, he becomes a graven image at the service of the surviving organization."

Steinhardt paused, took a sip of whiskey, shook his head sadly. "You see, we shaved apes are entropy junkies. People get tired of free consciousness, they get a sick craving for a new, stable mind freeze. And what do they do? When the psychic liberator is no longer around to kick them in the ass, the organization he's left behind turns him into a new object of worship, iconized and Madison-avenuized for all time. In his name they turn his historical image into an instrument of the very kind of brain-freeze he's busted his balls to destroy. The legacy of Jesus is Billy Graham. In the name of revolutionaries like Marx and Lenin we have a bureaucratic state. The party of Lincoln ends up as the party of old Tricky Dick. You're dead right, m'boy. It is to puke!"

Weller sat there transfixed while this monologue went on. This weird old drunk was apparently also an authentic visionary thinker. It didn't add up to a coherent whole. Weller couldn't reconcile these two Steinhardt personas no matter how much he tried. And he had no idea of what the man was getting at.

"But what does all this have to do with why I'm here?"

Steinhardt leaned forward and stared at Weller with cold, penetrating energy. "When I'm dead, I don't want my assorted disciples and ten-percenters to own my image," he said, "I don't want them turning the memory of John B. Steinhardt into a billboard behind which the usual religion-money-power-mind-control shell game does business as usual. I want my memory to keep generating changes despite the legacy of Transformationalism, to be a continued source of creative chaos. And that's why you're here, Jack, that's why I need a director."

Suddenly Steinhardt went through another change, took a sip of coffee, and went back to eating his eggs. "And that's also why I don't want to make commercials," he said. ''They'll have me making too many commercials when I'm dead as it is. What I want to make while I'm still around sniffing the flowers is a kind of anti-commercial. A video-taped last testament to be released far and wide when I croak. A half hour? An hour? Six hours? I dunno. We'll have to figure that out."

He waved his fork in the general direction of Weller's face. "But I'll tell you what I want it to be like," he said. "I want it to be full of internal self-contradictions. I want to contradict all the bullshit Transformationalism is inevitably going to say about me for the next thousand years, and then I want to contradict my own contradictions. I want to reveal myself as a drunken teenybopper-fucking pathological liar as well as a saintly liberator of human consciousness. I want to tell dirty jokes and frame timeless epigrams. I want to live on on tape completely independent of Transformationalism, and I want a testament that will make it absolutely impossible for anyone to ever write the bottom line on John B. Steinhardt."

"I'm not sure I understand," Weller said uncertainly.

"Old Mao Tze Tung almost got the idea with his notion of permanent revolution," Steinhardt said. "But he got too caught up in his own ego trip and ended up with a society forever consulting his little Red Book of epigrams. It's fun to be a god when you're alive, but when I'm dead, I want to revert to the public domain, as it were."

Perhaps It was the double dose of eptifier, or perhaps the sheer force of Steinhardt's personality, but Weller felt his mind opening up to encompass this weird concept. A tape of Steinhardt supporting and debunking Transformationalism at the same time would indeed counterbalance the power of Transformationalism in the only way possible, with a dialectic between the ghost of Steinhardt and the inheritors of the movement he had founded. The Steinhardt testament would by definition always have to be the last word on the subject, but if it were properly made, no one would be able to be sure what it said. Even in death Steinhardt would remain the center of the movement, and the center would be void. The idea had style.

"Well, what do you think?" Steinhardt asked. "Could you help me put together something like that?"

"I gather you would write the script?" Weller said dryly.

"Script?" Steinhardt bellowed. "Write? Are you nuts? I'll get gibbering drunk and babble at the camera for about thirty hours. Then you'll go shoot a lot of footage here and at the centers and put together something vaguely coherent out of the whole mess."

"Uh ... I'd be willing to give it a try," Weller said. "When do you want to start?"

His head felt as if it were flying off in all directions at once. He was overwhelmed by Steinhardt, appalled by the arduous task that was being proposed, challenged by the concept and by the prospect of working with this incomprehensible creature. And he suddenly realized that no thought of Annie had crossed his mind during the whole conversation. His reason for being here in the first place had been driven from his mind by the force of Steinhardt's personality. How in the world can I manipulate this conversation for two seconds? he wondered. How can I dare to bring up what I came here for in the first place? Somehow, at this moment, before Steinhardt, his own petty personal problems seemed goatlike, picayune, beneath cosmic notice.

"Not so fast," Steinhardt said. "I didn't say you had the job yet. I was just asking whether you wanted to try out for it. I mean, how can I be completely sold on a character like you, who wormed his way in here by fucking my wife, who's played games with nerds like Garry Bailor, who's driven some of my best Monitors screaming up the walls, who's got poor old Doc Bernstein shitting in his pants?"

But Steinhardt spoke in such a genial -- indeed almost affectionate -- tone that Weller could hardly work up even a healthy twinge of paranoia.

Steinhardt took a final sip of coffee and stuck his cigar back in the corner of his mouth. "So I'm assigning you a guide who will also be a commissar," he said. "Someone who will stick close to you and give me a better bottom line on where your consciousness is really at. You'll spend some time getting the feel of the operation here and shooting the shit with me from time to time. You'll be trying to sell yourself to me just as you would any other producer -- while your guide reports back. Then we'll see what's what. It's your big break, Jack, make the most of it. If you don't blow it, you'll be a big man in the movement. Not only that, you'll share a little piece of my ineffable immortality. But there's plenty of time, I ain't about to kick off by next Tuesday."

Steinhardt rose somewhat ponderously from his recliner. "Now then," he said impishly, "shall we go downstairs and meet your comrade commissar?"

He led Weller down the spiral staircase, into the vestibule, along the hall, and into a huge living room whose major feature was a giant sunken conversation pit with the huge flowing abstract sculpture growing in its center like some science-fiction tree. Seated alone at the far side of the pit and partially hidden by the sculpture from the angle at which they had entered was a woman wearing a white blouse and tennis skirt.

As they rounded the sculpture and she came into full view, Weller's heart skipped a beat and a big hollow balloon exploded in his stomach, sagging him at the knees, sending blood rushing in waves to his head.

The woman in white was Annie.

But a changed Annie. Her long blond hair had been cut short into a severe pageboy. Something was subtly different about her mouth. And her eyes.... They were preternaturally bright, but it was a cold vitality; younger, older, timeless as glacial ice.

She rose to meet them, staring evenly at Weller with an absolutely unreadable expression. For his part, Weller could not find a word to say; his whole being vibrated with an immense silence, an echoing emptiness filled with half-formed memories, with anticipated expectations of this moment that had nothing to do with the reality itself. The whole world seemed to funnel down to a point centered between her eyes.

It was Steinhardt who broke the silence with a great booming laugh, ''Jack, meet your guide and comrade commissar," he said. "And let this be a lesson to you, kiddo. You were promised you'd be reunited with your wife when you were sufficiently transformed. Well, how do you like your ultimate processor, Charlie?"

He laughed again, took Annie's hand, placed it in Weller's, and drew them together by throwing his arms wide around both of their shoulders. "For the moment, at least, you have my blessings upon your union, chilluns," he said. He withdrew his arms, walked away, waved his hand, shook his head, and left the room rumbling with laughter.

They stood there alone staring at each other like long-lost lovers, like blind dates, like strangers. "God," Weller finally said, "I just don't know what to say."

Annie smiled, a thin ghost of smiles remembered. "Neither do I."

Then abruptly they were in each other's arms, bodies pressed together, shapes fitting into well-remembered shapes, lips tasting well-remembered lips, and for a while it seemed to Weller that months of time had been annihilated, as if this were only one more in an endless series of embraces down through the years, as if the space between this time and the last had never existed.

Yet as their tongues touched and their bodies moved on each other, he came to feel a subtle alienness, the feeling of the first touch of a new lover, not so much the thrill of fresh flesh, but rather an indefinable psychic distance, a subliminal newness.

They parted and sank down onto the upholstered lip of the conversation pit.

"It's over," Weller sighed. "It's really over."

Annie laughed. ''That's funny," she said. "I was about to say it was just beginning."

A nervous tremor went through Weller's body. This moment was nothing like anything he had anticipated. Words, even coherent feelings, were coming so hard. No time had passed since she left. A thousand years had gone by. He couldn't get it together. "Well, how the hell are you?" he asked inanely.

"Great," she said. "Fulfilled. Whole. And you, Jack? They haven't told me much. Just enough to write those two letters, and then a lot of Monitor security silence ..."

"I've gotten here," Weller said.

"So you have." Annie broke out a great big old-time smile that began to warm the strange ice around Weller's heart. "So you have!"

She hugged him fiercely. "I have missed you!" she said. "It's been fantastic, but it hasn't been easy. It's been a long lonely time...."

She rubbed her cheek against his. "If I hadn't known it was the right thing for both of us, I don't know whether I would've been able to go through it just for myself. But all that's over now. You've come back to me transformed. And you're going to be working directly with John. If I didn't love you so much, I'd be green with envy."

The cold, distant feeling that had begun to dissipate began to close in on Weller again. For even now, in what should have been a personal moment, a joyous moment of reunited love, the massive shadow of John B. Steinhardt still hung over them, a gigantic afterimage that would not fade, a presence that intruded upon their intimacy by the very force of the man's absence. Weller had the urge to grab Annie's hand and run -- out of the house, through the woods, over the fences, past the dogs, three thousand miles back in space and time to their house in long-lost, long-ago California.

"Hey, can we get out of here?" he said. "Is there someplace we can be alone?"

Annie kissed him lightly on the lips, "Sure," she said. "I've got my own cabin in the Colony. But it's going to be our place now. You're authorized to move in with me. It's a new beginning for us. Ah, it's so wonderful the way things fall into place when you have the courage to ride the changes!"

She hugged him again, took his hand, and pulled him to his feet. "Come on'" she said. "Let me show you our new home."

Weller forced a happy smile and a bouncy walk as she led him out of Steinhardt's house. Why, he wondered, do I feel like this? I should feel happy, I should feel I've come home, I should feel I've won. Why can't I let joy into my heart? What's wrong with me? Why do I feel this dread? Why do I feel I'm holding hands with a stranger?
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Re: The Mind Game, by Norman Spinrad

Postby admin » Sat Mar 19, 2016 9:07 am

Chapter Eighteen

Birds sang, sunlight poured through the treetops, and Annie was babbling excitedly as they walked along the pathways of the Institute to God-knows-where. The air, the effort of his own body, the presence of Annie beside him, the rap that he was simply letting wash over him, all combined to relieve Weller of the pressure of his own thoughts. We'll just walk through the woods and then make love, and we won't have to think of anything for a while....

"... such high-energy people at the Colony. Maybe we can even rig up a mobile unit for you while you're working with John. We should really get some meaningful results out of that!"

As Annie paused at the crest of a gentle slope crowned with trees, Weller realized that he had lost all track of whatever it was she had been talking about. And she was, apparently, talking about something that meant a lot to her. "The Colony?" he said. "What's that? You keep talking about it, but I'm afraid I've been too happy to pay much attention. "

Annie led him through the line of trees. In the hollow beyond Weller saw perhaps two dozen bungalows shaded by trees and clustered around a low white building. He thought he recognized the scene from yesterday's walking tour. And sure enough, when he took a closer look, there was the fence surrounding the area and the guarded gate.

"The Colony," Annie said, nodding in the direction of the cluster of bungalows.

"Yeah, but what is it? What goes on?"

Annie looked at him peculiarly. "Don't you know?" she said. "It's one of the few projects under John's personal directive; it's got top priority. We've got about twenty residents now -- writers, painters, sculptors, even a photographer."

"You mean Transformationalism is running some kind of artist's colony?" Weller said with some surprise. "What on earth for? As a reward for creative people in the movement?"

"Oh no," Annie said, "it's not for movement people. Everyone has to be a working professional with real credits. They get three months free room and board and unlimited free processing while they work on their approved projects."

"In return for which?" Weller asked. There had to be a quid pro quo. Selflessly bankrolling a playpen for indigent artistes seemed way out of character for Steinhardt.

"In return for which they serve as subjects for our experiments with creativity," Annie said.

"What sort of experiments?" Weller asked, with a picture of some diabolical Frankenstein laboratory in his head.

"They're circuited into brainwave monitors while they're actually doing their creative work," Annie said. "We're recording creative consciousness so we can monitor the changes different Transformational processes make in their creativity. So we can try out different eptifier formulas."

"What for?"

"What for?" Annie said, dumbfounded. "So there'll be no more writer's blocks. No more down days on the set with you dragging yourself home in a black funk. We're going to be able to optimize creative consciousness with eptifiers and new processes. Some day doing creative work is going to be a conscious function that you can turn on like a faucet. We're going to take all the agony and frustration out of it. We're going to turn creative consciousness into a permanent state of mind."

The notion had to be seductive to anyone who had ground his way through day after day of deadening hackwork, but Weller's mind didn't get caught up in that for very long. His consciousness was focused on Annie. He had never seen her so totally into what she was doing, not for what she might get out of it, but for the thing itself. But what the hell was she doing?

"You didn't say anything about actors," he said. "What are you doing to optimize your creativity, Annie?"

"Oh, I'm beyond all that," she said breezily. "You have no idea what a relief it is. There was never anything creative about my so-called career. I was just trying to become a movie star; rich, famous, a wet-dream fantasy for guys sitting there in the dark watching me on the screen. It was all just a super ego trip. I was empty inside, and all I was doing was trying to fill that empty space with fame and adulation. "

"And that's it?" Weller said sullenly. "All those years of trying, and you walk away from it just like that?"

Annie smiled at him, and the tranquil radiance of it nearly drove him crazy. "Can't you understand how wonderful it is to stop trying to feed your own starving ego and be totally involved with what you're doing on a really meaningful, fully eptified level?"

"Well, what the hell are you doing?" Weller grunted.

''I'm a creativity monitor," she said.

"A what?"

"I work in the creativity program. I'm in charge of the brainwave tapes. I keep records of who's doing how much work on what. I help decide which process to run on who when.

Weller's growing anger broke through for a moment. "Sounds boring as hell," he said.

"It's vital work, Jack," she said somewhat testily. "It's important to the movement."

"Running a time clock is probably important at MGM," Weller said sourly. "That doesn't make the job less of a bummer."

"It's not just mechanical work," Annie insisted. ''I'm working" to create more creative consciousness. And I'm one of the people involved in project decisions. I'm the one who evaluates how well which programs are working on the subjects."

"So you're not just a clerk, you're a cultural commissar," Weller blurted.

"Commissar?" Annie said, laughing. "Where did you get a crazy idea like that?"

"From the highest authority," Weller said. "Steinhardt told me flat out that you'd be giving him evaluation reports on me."

Annie's expression finally darkened, as if she had just realized that they were having something like an argument. "You make it sound so awful," she said. "But it's not like that. I'm not spying on you, I'm helping you. Together we're going to convince John that you're the man for the job. I don't have any doubts. Do you?"

"No," Weller muttered, unable to express what he truly felt. Anger, sadness, a sense of loss. That it had gone this far! That Annie could trade her career for playing Comrade Commissar to a bunch of freeloading writers and painters! That she could even report back to Steinhardt on him and expect him to approve of it! That he couldn't feel free to.say a damned true thing about it! Oh baby, baby, I've got to get us the fuck out of here -- fast!

There was a long period of awkward silence. Then Annie broke it with a warm smile that seemed like a forced act of will. "Let's not spoil today with an argument then, okay?" she said breezily.

"Yeah, sure, okay," Weller said, making himself smile back. She took his hand and led him down the far side of the hill. There was no trouble at the gate -- the guard recognized Annie and had gotten an updated directive on Weller too.

Annie led him to a secluded cabin in a corner of the compound, heavily shaded by lowering oaks, its rough wooden siding blending it into the landscape.

Inside were two rather small rooms and a full bath. The bedroom was paneled in knotty pine, with rich blue draperies and bedspread. The other room was a combination living room, kitchen, and dinette in the manner of a family style motel. There was a compact stove-sink-refrigerator-combo unit behind a Formica breakfast bar with yellow stools. There were two easy chairs, a leather couch, a low round walnut table, a desk, and a color television set. Plush green wall-to-wall carpeting, anonymous framed prints, a complete set of pots, dishes, and silverware. Everything but the checkout notice. And of course, an extension phone. Apparently even a "creativity monitor" did not rate free contact with the outside world.

"Cozy, isn't it?" Annie said as they sat side by side on the couch after the ten-cent tour.

"Yeah, all the comforts of Las Vegas," Weller said. He found that he had made an unconscious decision not to bring up the matter of missing phones. Already he found himself being somewhat guarded with Annie, slipping easily into the persona he had crafted for himself during his stay in the movement, and hating himself a little for it. But both Steinhardt and Annie had made it quite clear that she would be reporting on him as if he were one of the Colony guinea pigs, and nothing that he had seen in her so far gave him any confidence that her loyalties were not still split. Transformed? he thought bitterly. Yeah, that's just about the measure of how we've both been transformed.

And here we sit, he thought, knowing it's long since time to make love. I know it, you know it, but where's our reality? There are so many piled up changes in both of us that we're like two kids sitting in the backseat of a parked car with our strangenesses and desires forming an invisible wall of tension between us.

Later, after the long ice was broken, making love could just be making love again, but now it was something that had to be done, which made Weller's first move a willful act of determination.

Weller snaked his arm around Annie's shoulders. She moved hesitantly into the crook of his arm, but he could feel a holding back, a tension, in the pressure of her body against his. They turned to face each other, eye to eye, lips shimmering across a spark gap from lips, close enough for Weller to smell the perfume of her breath.

"Well ..."

"Well ... ?

"Oh, this is ridiculous!" Weller said, trying to giggle it and failing, and he reached out, pulled her to him, and at last touched his lips to hers.

At that moment psychic tension alchemized itself to almost tearful lust, and the body's visceral memories and longing freed him from the paralysis of the mind. The kiss became deep and melting and endless, a dissolution of the tension interface between them.

Weller released his breath into her and tasted her answering sigh, and at last he was free from history and expectation, free from the games and torments of the mind, a human animal come home to his own.

They kissed and they touched, and they tasted each other anew. Clothes came away fumbling in haste, and in what seemed like one continuous bright moment, Weller was deep inside her.

But not deep enough. As he felt her body responding beneath him, he found himself wanting to concentrate his total life-force into the knightly lance of his cock. He had to thrust its purifying length into the ambivalent shrouded core of her and reconquer the lady of his heart from the dragons of the mind.

So what had begun as one thing became another. Tender homecoming became a demonic exercise in fancy fucking. Male ego lust combined with righteous wrath and messianic husbandhood to turn him on in darker and deeper ways than he had ever been before.

Once she began to cry out in orgasm, he threw himself into the center of her ecstasy with even more heightened fervor. He wanted to keep her there for a long, long time. Until she was reformed from the chaos of ecstasy around him, purified of that which had been put there by Transformationalism.

On and on he went, moving into the sound of her rising and falling cries, determined to keep her changes coming until be had fucked her brains clean.

When he finally came himself, it was with blinding, uncontrollable force that shook him to his toes, but even that wasn't enough. Far from being a culmination or a release, it was a goad and a challenge. He wanted to pour himself through this instantaneous pipeline to her center, flow with his own seed, and fill her with himself.

He went on and on afterward until they were both far over the ragged edge of exhaustion, panting and heaving for air.

"My God, it's been a long time," Annie said huskily. "Ah, I've missed you!"

As soon as words returned, Weller felt himself returning from the cosmic battlefield. Now they were neither engaged in some Armageddon of lust and will, nor were they tension-ridden strangers. Now we're just Jack and Annie again.

Annie smiled impishly at him. "It was a lot better than I remembered," she said teasingly. "And as I remember, what I remember was pretty damn good."

"Pretty fucking good!" Weller said, and a laugh managed to bubble out of him. What had to be done, had been done, and from here on in, their lovemaking would become what it had always been -- neither a thing of cosmic tension between them nor the golden path to the reclaimed Annie of his desires.

That battle was going to be decided on a psychic level, not in bed.

On balance he found be couldn't decide whether that was a bledsing or a curse.

***

In a gesture of housewifely normalcy Annie stacked the last of the dinner dishes in the sink, wiped off her hands, and sat down beside Weller on the couch, which happened to be facing the television set.

But once again her words came not from his wife but from her Transformationalist persona. "I think it's time for you to get your first look at what we're doing here at the Colony."

They had lazed away the afternoon making love and talking, and their lovemaking had become more and more ordinary, even as Weller had known it would, for which he was warmly grateful. The more familiar it seemed, the more of a homecoming it was. There were times when the pleasure of making love to your own wife became the kinkiest sex trip of all.

But he also wondered if they hadn't done so much lovemaking partially because it kept them from talking. She was shining with the fulfilling light of Transformationalism -- what had been a time of agony for him had been a golden age for her. He couldn't be honest with her about what he felt about the movement, nor could he react from the heart to what she told him.

So whenever words replaced touch, the walls were up, and their conversations swiftly degenerated into stylized fencing matches, half-sincere and half-political, in the most loathsome sense of the word.

The last one, mercifully terminated by steak and home fries, had come pretty close to the edge.

She couldn't get over how wonderful it was that he had left Monkey Business and become a director for the movement. "God, it's so good to see you out of there and doing something real. It's like seeing you get out of prison."

"If you consider shooting television commercials a step up from kiddie shows," Weller said.

"But they're Transformational commercials. They're doing something real to change the world, it's not just a meaningless Hollywood sausage factory."

"I seem to remember you had a pretty strong desire to become an Armor Star frankfurter yourself," Weller said testily. "And believe me, all I'm doing now is turning out a different brand of baloney."

Annie looked at him narrowly. "You're not happy to be working for the movement?" she said. "You don't believe in what you're doing?" Suddenly he had the feeling that there was a tape recorder built into the nearest lamp. That was definitely a commissar-type question.

"They're wasting my talents," Weller said, backing off from the test. "I want to be doing the best I can, and churning out commercials is not it, I hope."

"But that's why you're here, Jack," Annie said more brightly. "You've reached a level of consciousness where they'll really let you direct." She kissed him on the cheek. "You're even going to get to work with John! If that doesn't make you proud, it sure does me."

"Well, it's good to hear that," Weller said sullenly. "Seeing as how your little reports on me will help determine whether I get to do it or not. "

"Oh Jack, don't be so paranoid about it. It's nothing, just a formality. Do you think you'd be here at the Institute with me if John had any real doubts?"

"That didn't seemed to be John's attitude," Weller said.

"Do you really think you can understand John's attitudes? We're all supposed to report any regressive tendencies we see in each other. It's for everyone's own good."

"That's charming," Weller snapped. "Does that mean I'm supposed to report any regressive tendencies I see in you?"

Annie actually got nervous for a moment. "Why? Have I said something wrong?"

The humorlessness of it was ridiculous. "Well, I'm not entirely convinced that some wee part of you isn't still interested in a regressive career as a movie star," Weller chided, trying to zing her into seeing the fatuousness of of such an extreme of Transformationalist zeal.

"Really?" she said earnestly. "I really think I've eliminated that block, but if that's what you're picking up, it may be what I'm putting out on some level, and maybe you should report it."

"Oh Annie, can't you tell when I'm putting you on any more?"

''I've forgotten all those tacky little Hollywood games," she had said, giving him a look of momentary contempt.

Fortunately at that point there had been a loud sizzle from the broiler as the steaks called angrily for attention, and the ideological tension that had been building up to a confrontation again had been aborted once more, this time by the dinner table instead of the bed.

But now the dishes were in the sink, and the fencing match would probably begin again, because now they were going on a tour of the Colony, according, no doubt, to his directive for the day. Well, there was no point in delaying the inevitable, and he did have a certain curiosity about what was going on here.

"Okay," he said. "I guess it's time I got the grand tour."

The first stop was in the low white building at the center of the cluster of cabins, where a big, loft-like room was divided up into a series of cubicles. What was going on looked like standard preliminary processing: a subject wired into a brainwave monitor and a processor reading off block-auditing sequences, or life scenarios. Half a dozen people undergoing standard block auditing and meditative deconditioning? Here, at the Institute? It didn't make sense, not after what he had had to go through to get here.

Silently he motioned Annie into the access hall. "What's going on here?" he said. "How come you're running such low-level processes on these people? I was told that no one got into the Institute without going all the way through life analysis. What are these beginners doing here?" He found to his surprise that he somehow felt indignant about it.

"The people at the Colony are an exception," Annie said. She suddenly began to look uneasy, as if there were something going on that she didn't care to talk about.

"Why?"

"Well ... ah ... the Colony has a dual purpose.

"Dual purpose?"

"Shall we go meet some of the people at their work?" Annie said with forced brightness.

"You haven't answered my question."

"It's really pretty technical, and I don't think --"

"Come on, Annie, this is me you're jiving," Weller snapped. "Besides, you're my official guide, and if I'm going to work with John, I have to know these things. "

Annie fidgeted for a moment, caught up in some unguessable conflict of directives. "Well, okay. The truth is we have a problem attracting creative people into the movement and keeping them there," she finally admitted grudgingly. They just don't come to the regular Transformation Center -- that's why John thought up the Celebrity Centers. And when we do get them into processing, they almost always drop out at low levels. Something about creative consciousness seems to block processing."

"So you lure them here with free room and board so you can play with their heads."

"You make it sound so tacky."

"Isn't it?"

"Not at all," Annie insisted righteously. "If something about Transformational processing turns off creative people, we've got to learn what it is, and correct it. If we don't bring Transformational Consciousness to the very people who mold mass consciousness, how can we create a Transformational culture? We've got to make Transformationalism chic with the molders of public consciousness."

"A direct quote from John?" Weller said dryly.

"More or less. John is very concerned with this problem, having been a writer himself. But we are getting somewhere, thanks to the Colony. We can process a hundred people a year here. Processing may not be what they come for, but at least they get it, and some of it must stick."

"If creativity interferes with processing, I'd bet my bottom dollar that processing interferes with creativity," Weller said angrily. "How much creative work have you done lately?" For that matter, how creative have I been since I got involved in this mess, he realized glumly. All these mind games sap up psychic energy like vampire bats. No wonder creative people instinctively avoid it! But these poor bastards here get it force fed to them like I did.

"How much work is really getting done in the Colony?" Weller said sharply. "I'll bet all your guinea pigs are sitting around on their asses or reaming out crud to justify their existences."

"That's not so." Annie said. "With modified processing and eptifiers, we're succeeding here. People are being processed and working creatively at the same time. I'll show you. I have to collect some brainwave recordings anyway."

"Sure, why not?" Weller said. "Let's see if the guinea pigs are spinning their exercise wheels."

Annie took him through a copse of trees to a nearby cabin where an emaciated man in cut-off jeans was working on a large abstract canvas in a midden of paints and brushes. But instead of the beret that seemed to go with the act, he wore a brainwave monitor band, but without a wire lead in evidence. As for the work in progress, Weller might not have known much about art, but he knew enough about baloney.

"Hello, Jerry," Annie said. "This is my husband Jack. He makes commercials for the movement. He'll be staying with me now." There was something cold and guarded in the way Annie spoke. She had pointedly avoided mentioning that he was going to be working with John with an instant cover story, and that was something she had seemed womanly proud of, a boast about him that he would've thought she was dying to make.

"Jerry Winter," the thin man said. "So you're the latest inmate of Uncle John's Funny Farm?"

Annie shot Winter an absolutely poisonous look, and Winter seemed to fear it. "Oh come on, Annie," he said ingratiatingly, "it's just a little affectionate inside joke. Don't lose your sense of humor."

He succeeded in forcing a rueful little smile from her. ''I'll just change your tapes, and we'll get out of your way," she said. Then, with painfully obvious emphasis, "I can see you're right in the middle of important work, and I'm sure your tape will confirm it."

She went over to a piece of equipment half obscured by some canvases which looked like a small brainwave monitor without a screen. Instead, reels of tape were spinning atop it at low speed. Annie shut it down and began rewinding the tape onto one reel.

"Is that really what this place is like, a booby hatch?" Weller asked Winter while Annie was absorbed in changing the tapes.

Winter laughed uneasily. "Come on, man," he said, "it was just a joke. We all love it here. This is the best place on the circuit. I've been living at artists' colonies for three continuous years now, so I ought to know. The food is great, the scenery is attractive, and the booze is free. What more could anyone ask?"

Annie started threading a new tape in the machine from a large pile behind it. Winter glanced in her direction, then said confidentially: "Of course, it does get a little weird. Being wired into these machines all day. The processing sessions. The strange potions they give us to drink. "

Annie came back with a reel of tape in her hand, and Winter changed gears again. "As you can see," he continued much more loudly, "we're treated like pampered pets. So if our hosts ask us to contribute ourselves as subjects to their experiments, we'd be ingrates to complain. How sweet it is, compared to teaching Art One to snot-nose kids!"

"And you are working well here, aren't you?" Annie said.

Winter beamed at her, and presented his work in progress -- an endless spaghetti bowl of random multicolored strands that looked as if he had doodled with it forever and as if he could jive it along for twice as long as that. "See for yourself," he said, with a grand paternal flourish of his arm.

Weller had trouble not breaking up, and he had a feeling that Winter was choking on his own laughter too.

Annie accepted that as an exit line, and they left for the next cabin. Weller didn't know whether to be embarrassed at the way Winter was putting on his own wife, or to be amused and pleased at the way he was professionally sponging off John Steinhardt.

"Don't take Jerry too seriously," Annie said as they walked across an expanse of shaded brown earth. "As you can see, he pretends not to take himself seriously either. It's a common mind block with creative people. But you can also see that he is doing creative work."

"Oh sure," Weller muttered, reluctant to pursue the subject further and start another argument. "Uh ... by the way, I noticed there weren't any wires from the headband to the recorder, " he said, in an effort to change the subject. ''What do you use, a radio transmitter in the headband?"

"Uh-huh," Annie said, as they reached the door to the next cabin, "better mobility." Apparently however, she was not about to switch tracks. "Now here we have someone who is as creative and sincere as you could imagine," she said. "Magda Talbot Lawrence, author of ten published novels."

"Never heard of her," Weller said.

"Well ... uh ... they've all been gothics or sex novels up until now," Annie said in a smaller voice. "But that's why she's here," she said more brightly. "Now she's working on a meaningful novel about the Spanish conquest of Mexico. We're giving her the freedom and consciousness to do serious noncommercial work."

In the front room of the cabin a pudgy gray-haired woman in her fifties was typing furiously on an electric typewriter. A fat manuscript was piling up neatly on her desk with Prussian precision. She merely glanced up as they entered. Her face was lined and hard, and she had the eyes of a dedicated proofreader; bored, bleary, but punctiliously alert.

"Please, no conversation now, Annie," she said in a schoolteacher's voice. ''I'm right in the middle of a critical scene, and I can't interrupt the flow."

"I'm only here to collect the tape," Annie said defensively. "I didn't mean to intrude on a creative moment."

"Well, you have, my dear, you have," said Magda Talbot Lawrence. "You don't want to create negative results in your experiments by intruding upon my creative consciousness, now do you? So please go about your business quietly, and let me continue to go about mine."

With that, she determinedly resumed typing, and Annie felt constrained to walk on tiptoe as she did her business and led Weller out of the cabin with a psychic finger to her lips.

"Now tell me people aren't creating here!" she said triumphantly, when they were outside in the free air.

"Well, she looks creative, anyway," Weller said. He wondered whether Magda Talbot Lawrence was the real thing, a tough old bird who was determined to get some work done no matter what went on, or whether her freeloading act was just more sophisticated. Either way, the manner in which she seemed to control the situation and Annie had to be impressive.

"Still the skeptic, Jack?" Annie said, fondling her precious reels of tape. "But these tapes go beyond personas and appearances. When we feed them through the computer, we know who was really in what state of consciousness when. Scientifically."

Then how come your top-scientific brain Bernstein apparently thinks that's baloney? Weller wanted to say. "Uh-huh," he muttered, retreating into his own thoughts. Brainwave patterns characteristic of the creative parts of the mind at work, he could believe. But a machine that could tell whether crud or genius was coming out by reading brainwaves was probably another gizmo out of the science-fiction mind of John B. Steinhardt. An electronic shit detector was a little hard to swallow, especially in the light of how much bullshit there was here that didn't seem to register on their meters.

The final four cabins that they visited confirmed Weller's opinion that the artistes of the Colony were taking John B. Steinhardt and Annie for a ride. There was a young hippie poet who mumbled stoned aesthetic impenetrabilities. And a wood sculptress who wore a muumuu and seemed ready to serve them her special herbal tea. There was a science fiction writer, perhaps a pensioned old crony of Steinhardt's, churning out one more in a long line of potboilers, and ready to deliver an hour-long sermon on the sins of the New York literary establishment at the drop of his own wrongly ignored name. Finally there was a once-famous novelist who hadn't published a book in eight years, who was supposed to be working on some kind of screenplay about his own life, and who was maintaining very well considering that he seemed fried to the eyeballs.

They were a slick collection of ducks, and they knew they had a soft touch here. The con job they seemed to be doing on Transformationalism seemed at least as professional as anything Transformationalism was running on them.

It pleased him to think that know-it-all Steinhardt could still be sucker enough to be exploited by artsy-fartsy slickies even while he was running his programs on them. It restored some of his confidence in his own ability to cope with the Great Man.

"Well, do we have artists or don't we have artists?" Annie said smugly as they walked to their own cabin.

"They're artists, all right," Weller said. "The medium is the message."

The next morning Annie went to work somewhere right after breakfast, and Weller, left alone to sit and wait for nothing in particular, had a flash of what it must have been like for her to stay at home most days waiting for the phone to ring while he was at the studio. He began to understand the attraction of her new life for her. Here she had programmed activity all day that she was convinced was meaningful. She in effect was happier in a nine-to-five job than as a free-lance actress. Was that the thing she had found out about herself that made her happy to give up her career?

One thing you had to say for the Institute, thought seemed to develop complexities in this environment.

He hung around the cabin for an hour or so then took an aimless walk around the compound. When he got back, John B. Steinhardt was wailing for him perched on a golf cart and looking like Teddy Roosevelt as the Great White Hunter in a bush suit with a silver flask sticking out of a pocket.

"Climb aboard, kiddo," Steinhardt mumbled. "We're going to run a little program on old Doc Bernstein. It'll give you the feel of what I want to do with my testament, and we'll have a little fun with the pompous old fart."

"What did you have in mind?" Weller asked, climbing into the cart.

'''Your Monitor act, bucko," Steinhardt said genially. "Don't be coy with me, cobber. Bernstein's half convinced you're a Monitor, and we both know it."

"So?"

"So," said Steinhardt, starting the car and heading off toward the compound gate. "So we'll help keep his thinking Transformational."

"I have no idea what you want me to do," Weller said.

"Just disagree with me all the time to the best of your ability," Steinhardt said. ''I'll do the rest."

Steinhardt waved patricianly to the guard at the gate, and they buzzed off in the direction of the computer complex. Weller had no idea of what sort of test this was going to be and how he was supposed to pass it. He had a momentary urge to ask Steinhardt for a belt from his hip flask.

"By the way, that reminds me that Annie seems to feel you may have a regressive attitude toward the Colony," Steinhardt said.

Anger coursed suddenly through Weller, not without an admixture of fear. "What did she report I said?" he asked, barely containing his belligerent indignation.

"Why, the poor lass thinks that you believe that our resident intellectuals are a bunch of phonies," Steinhardt said, suppressing a grin that showed only in his eyes. "That their only creative area is that of the mooch artist."

"Uh ... I don't remember saying.... "

"Come on, kiddo, don't try to out-insult me," Steinhardt said genially. "Neither of us is as stupid as we're both pretending. Or course our intellectual zoo here is full of blocked writers, artsy con men, and bullshit artists who can't make it in the marketplace. You think the heavyweights are going to be attracted by free food and flop?"

"But these people are ripping you off and you know it?" Weller said perplexedly.

"You're concerned for my well-being," Steinhardt exclaimed, breaking up into bellowing laughter. He took the flask out of his pocket and unscrewed the cap. "I'll drink to that!" he said, toasting Weller and taking a gulp. "But then, I'll drink to anything!"

"You think that's funny?" Weller said.

Steinhardt nodded, then waved his flask at three passing technicians. ''I'm touched," he said. "To think that you're concerned for my well-being. I always said I was too easily taken advantage of." He broke up into laughter again.

"Would you mind letting me in on the joke?" Weller asked.

"M'boy, these clowns are perfect for my purposes," Steinhardt said. "When they leave here, they'll hang around in bars talking about themselves for hours on end, bullshit forever in endless seminars, and make ends meet by occasionally teaching our impressionable youth. They'll talk about their favorite subject, themselves, in as favorable a light as possible, and that will improve our image in media and publishing circles. Ten years of processing hype artists like these, and Transformationalism will be table talk where the intellectual and media elite meet to eat."

"So it's just a con to sell more Transformationalism?" Weller blurted.

"Everything Transformationalism does is a con to sell more Transformationalism," Steinhardt said matter-of-factly. "But everything is also something else. If I can develop processes and eptifiers that will make these characters creatively conscious, I'll have it."

"Have what?"

Steinhardt became more intense than Weller had ever seen him. ''The philosopher's stone, kiddo," he said. ''The ability to make men creative at will. The key to a Transformational world. The culmination of everything I'm trying to do. The new millennium."

"And, incidentally, a cure for writer's block," Weller couldn't help cracking. It made more sense now. All this must in some way be a grandiose attempt to break his own years-long block.

Steinhardt took it with a smile. "Incidentally, my ass!" he said. Being at the mercy of my own subconscious drove me nuts. Try waiting three years for nothing to come, and you'll see what success here can mean. My goddamn writer's block is the essence of the problem."

""The Great I Am," Weller muttered under his breath.

"What did you say?" Steinhardt said sharply.

"Nothing," Weller replied, for he realized that that was what Maria was always calling Steinhardt, and he certainly didn't want to sidetrack Steinhardt into that.

Steinhardt grinned at him strangely. "That was no lady, that was my wife," he said. "When will you learn how far I really am ahead of you, kiddo?"

At that moment they finally reached the computer complex. "And now for our next Transformational lesson of the day," Steinhardt said, parking by the entrance. "Remember, laddybuck, disagree with me as best you can. I'm sure that you'll do fine, now that we've gotten in a little practice."

Storming through the computer complex, Steinhardt accosted Bernstein in the main control room, typing on a keyboard below a display screen. "There you are, Arthur," he said. "We've been having a little discussion I'd like your expert opinion on."

Bernstein looked up, saw that it was Weller with Steinhardt, and seemed to retreat immediately into some psychic distance. "What is it now, John?" he said slowly. "As you can see, I'm busy right now."

"Well, this is a matter of cosmic importance," Steinhardt said. "Jack here thinks our creativity program is a waste of time and money, that we're chasing after the unattainable."

Bernstein looked sharply at Weller. "And what's more, he thinks that you seem to be of the same opinion." Now Weller looked at Steinhardt in surprise. What was this role that Steinhardt was casting him in?

"I've never made a secret of the fact that I believe a lot of this brainwave stuff is of questionable validity," Bernstein said indignantly. "You don't have to send Monitors around to find that out."

"Let's just say that Jack here has persuaded me to look at my obsessions with a more open mind," Steinhardt said, ignoring the innuendo. "So let's have some updated results."

"As you wish, John," Bernstein said coldly. "So far, we've verified that there are certain brainwave patterns that always seem present when a subject is doing creative work." He touched some keys. A series of four regular wavy lines appeared on the display scene. "Subject Jerry Winter in ordinary conversation." He played more keys. The top two lines flattened out while the bottom two seemed more agitated. "Same subject in the act of painting." He typed a long sequence. Five more brainwave patterns appeared on the screen, all closely approximating Winter's. "Five random Colony subjects in objectively verifiable creative states."

Bernstein looked up and back at Steinhardt. "Conclusion: creative states are always associated with characteristic brainwave patterns," he said.

"But we've known that for a long time, Arthur," Steinhardt said impatiently. "What about inducing creative consciousness electronically? That's what you're supposed to be inventing. That's the number-one priority under my personal directive. How long is it going to take?"

Bernstein spoke to Weller, or to Steinhardt through Weller. "John insists that I leap to the next conclusion and build him a creativity machine."

"That's right," Steinhardt said. "I don't see why you're having so much trouble with the piddling details. I gave you the whole idea myself. Reverse the polarity of a brainwave monitor so you can broadcast the creative wave pattern into the brain. Create the right electronic environment, and the creative juices should start to flow."

"You see, Mr. Weller," Bernstein said, "we've built such a device according to John's specifications, and we have been experimenting with it --"

"So where are my results?" Steinhardt roared. ''I'm getting tired of all this dicking around."

"We're still not getting them, John," Bernstein said. "Fear, panic, anger, and tranquility we seem to be able to induce electronically, because they're simple and powerful mental states that override the subtleties. But electronically induced creativity eludes us. Because although certain brainwave patterns are always associated with creativity, it does not necessarily follow that creative activity always arises from the presence of those patterns. It's obviously not a straight causal relationship."

"That's a lot of bullshit," Steinhardt said. "I'm not asking for perfection yet, I just want something that more or less works." He gave Weller a kick and a sidelong glance. "You just want to forget about electronically induced creativity so you can concentrate on the chemical stuff."

What am I supposed to do now? Weller wondered. Disagree with him? Disagree with what?"

"That chemical stuff, as you call it, John," Bernstein said, "is what's getting the best results." He touched a few keys. The six closely approximating brainwave patterns on the screen coalesced into one average pattern. "Characteristic creative pattern." Bernstein typed another sequence, and a second series of brain traces appeared, quite different from the first. "An ordinary subject in resting state," Bernstein said. "The same subject told to write a paragraph about himself." The second pattern moved into a somewhat closer approximation of the first. "Now with eptifier." Now the approximation of the second pattern to the first became much closer.

"Conclusion," Bernstein said, "eptifier elevates the creative consciousness of an ordinary subject doing something like a creative task. Further conclusion: this is the line of research we should give our number-one priority."

'''You see what I mean?" Steinhardt said to Weller. "He's dragging his feet on my project so I'll forget about it and let him ride his own hobbyhorse," Again Steinhardt gave Weller a little kick. Disagree ...? How ... ?

It suddenly dawned on Weller that maybe both of them were chasing rainbows. Steinhardt, with his idea of playing the brain like an electronic organ and Bernstein, with his genius drugs. They were both trying to create talent out of thin air. And all these damn brainwave patterns could possibly show was creative effort, not results. Disagree? It was easy enough to disagree with them both.

"Well, I can see Dr. Bernstein's point about electronically induced creative consciousness," he said, giving Steinhardt what he wanted first. "Seems to me if you recorded Michelangelo working on the Sistine Chapel and Joe Blow grinding his heart out on his fifteenth unpublishable novel, the screen would show the same damn thing."

"Exactly," Bernstein said, obviously pleasantly surprised. All we can measure is a state of effort. Other states also seem to produce the same brainwave pattern -- stress, for example, and even meditative deconditioning. We can produce the pattern at will electronically, but not the results."

Steinhardt winked at Weller. Weller decided to throw a curve and disagree with Bernstein too. "On the other hand," he said, "all you can do with the eptifier is produce heightened effort in the same situation, not better product, right?"

"So far ...," Bernstein muttered. "But if we could concentrate more effort --"

"So what you're saying is that we're both equally full of shit," Steinhardt said.

"I didn't --"

"No, no!" Steinhardt said, holding up his palm. "That's exactly the kind of feedback I want to get. That's why I wanted you to look things over without preconceptions, Jack. Now what's your recommendation?"

"Recommendation ... ?"

"We're at an impasse here," Steinhardt said. ''I'm willing to listen to reason. That's why I asked you for a fresh opinion. Where do we put our number-one priority? With Arthur's vast scientific background or my vast instinctual vision? Make your recommendation."

By now Weller couldn't figure out what would be taking which side against whom, nor whose side Steinhardt really wanted him to take. Bernstein looked at him very nervously. Sure, as far as he thinks, I'm about to deliver some kind of official Monitor opinion. But what the hell is going on in Steinhardt's head? Well....

"Well, if it were up to me, I guess I'd say go both ways," Weller said. He looked at Bernstein slyly, then exchanged his end of a confidential glance with Steinhardt. Trouble is," he said, "the good doctor here is motivated to make the eptifier experiment succeed at the expense of the electronic stuff." He smiled sweetly at Steinhardt. "And you're biased in the opposite direction."

''I'm biased only toward getting results," Bernstein said angrily.

"Oh come on, Arthur, he's right," Steinhardt said. "If I can admit it, so can you. Question is, what do we do about it, Jack?"

Weller shrugged, having reached the end of his line of bullshit.

Steinhardt clapped his hands together. "I've got it," he said brightly, but with a certain falseness, even sarcasm, to his tone that gave Weller the idea he had been working around to this for a long time. "We'll make it a contest."

"A contest?" Bernstein muttered uneasily.

''I'll free you to work full-time on the eptifier experiments, Arthur," Steinhardt said. "That's what you want, isn't it?"

Bernstein looked at him suspiciously. "Yes," he admitted grudgingly.

"Great. Then it's settled. Hayakawa will take over supervision of the brainwave-induction experiments. You'll both go full bore. At the end of three months we'll see who's produced more results, and the losing project will be canceled."

"Science isn't a contest!" Bernstein said angrily. "This isn't fair. It's blackmail."

"Oh, come on, Arthur," Steinhardt said soothingly. ''I'm putting my own pet project in the same jeopardy as yours, and I'm the boss of everything. Fair is fair. Wouldn't you say so, Jack?"

I guess I'm still supposed to disagree with him, Weller thought. "Well, to tell you the truth, it does sound a little unscientific, John," he said.

"You're not here to tell me what's scientific or not, bucko," Steinhardt said angrily. "What the hell do you know about it? There's too much Monitor interference in scientific affairs around here anyway. Wouldn't you say so, Arthur?"

Suddenly he was directing his confidential looks at Bernstein. What the hell did I do wrong? Weller wondered.

'''For once I agree with you, John," Bernstein said with some emotion.

"Then that's that," Steinhardt said. ''I've listened to enough advice, and now I've decided. Turn over the induction experiments to Hayakawa. So it is written, so it shall be."

"But John --"

Steinhardt held up his hand. "I hear no more," he said. "Come on, Weller, I want a word with you."

He led Weller out to the golf cart without a word, but with an attitude that glowered at him like a thundercloud about to burst. But once outside Steinhardt leaned up against the golf cart and broke into laughter. "Perfect, kiddo," he said. "Now do you see what I'm getting at?"

"Huh?"

"Come on," Steinhardt said, climbing into the golf cart. ''It's really quite simple. I'd hoped you'd get it for yourself." Weller got into the cart beside Steinhardt, and they began driving back in the general direction of the Colony.

"Observe what we've done to old Bernstein's head," Steinhardt said. "Now he'll bust his balls to prove his own theories while Hayakawa gives his all to prove mine. And he's not sure whether I just saved his baby from cancellation at the recommendation of the Monitors. You took his side against me and my side against him, so he doesn't know what to think about you. Whose influence am I under? And how much?"

"But what's the purpose of that, except to create paranoia?" Weller said.

Steinhardt laughed. "That's exactly the purpose," he said. "Paranoia is the great motivator of subordinates. Creative chaos, m'boy. The operant characteristic of great leadership such as mine. That's exactly the effect I want my taped testament to have. The kind of ongoing chaos that maintains a true Transformational Consciousness. I mean you've certainly got to admit that we put Bernstein through changes."

He looked at Weller speculatively. "And in regard to you, I wanted to see if we could work together in the production of such Transformational mischief," he said. "And I think we could. But the trouble is, the more you convince me that you're the man I need, the less you convince me that I can trust you. Once more I find myself caught in our central paradox."

"Which is?" Weller said, lost in Steinhardt's maze of machinations.

"Which is that talented people don't seem to trust Transformationalism, and Transformationalism doesn't seem to be able to trust creative talent," Steinhardt said. He took his hands off the wheel to wave his arms momentarily, as if to embrace the Institute. "You think I don't know that all this is my pigheaded Faustian determination to manufacture creative talent out of the general run of mediocrities we attract? To synthesize what I can't extract. My God, I was a creative type myself, and I would've avoided anything like Transformationalism like the plague if I couldn't get to be guru. You think I don't understand where people like you are coming from?"

"Then why not forget the power trips and mind games?" Weller said. "Why not surround yourself with independent equals like Bernstein?"

"Bernstein? Equals?" Steinhardt roared. "I don't have any equals! Creative talent is one thing, being what I am is quite another. I need creative people to serve me, not to tell me what to do."

"You're really serious?" Weller said. "You really think you can surround yourself with talented slaves?"

"Slaves?" Steinhardt said. "Why are you people all so dense? I've got slaves coming out of my asshole! I need wide-awake servants."

"There's a difference?"

"Of course, there's a difference," Steinhardt said, calming down a little. "I know more about making people do what I want them to than any man in history. I can manipulate their minds like a maestro. But what I need is people who are self-motivated to serve the cause, with their talent intact and their minds unprogrammed."

"Sincere, dedicated, self-motivated, creative talent that does what it's told?" Weller said. "You don't ask for very much, do you?"

"No, I don't," Steinhardt said seriously. "I don't want you worshiping me because I'm such a charismatic son of a bitch. I have enough of that to make me puke. I want you to be dedicated to what I'm doing because you believe in it, because you know it works, because you see that I'm right -- of your own free will. Think about it."

They had reached the gate to the Colony compound, and Steinhardt was silent as they passed through it and drove back to the cabin where Weller was staying with Annie, no doubt trying to give Weller the time to see the clear, pure light.

He stopped the golf cart in front of the cabin, leaned back, took a slug of whiskey, and regarded Weller as if he were a father pleading for the love of his errant son. "Look, the way I've handled you is a kind of experiment, Jack," Steinhardt said. "By the time Maria brought you to my attention, every little thing about you was in your dossier. I knew exactly what you were doing and why from the beginning. Torrez wanted you dealt with in the usual way, but I said: no, Fred, this guy's got style, let's give him his run. Let him follow his own star to me, but let's throw the book at him. If he makes it on his own hook, playing his own game, and we transform him from a regressive to a believer in the process, he'll have gotten there creatively, and we'll have solved one of our central problems."

He put his hand on Weller's shoulder. "So here you are, kiddo," he said. "and I still don't know if my little experiment worked. Are you sincere, Weller? You've got everything to gain. Work with me, and you'll be rich and powerful, and your talent will be optimized. All you've got to be able to say to yourself is, 'I was wrong, and John Steinhardt is right,' and a whole, new world opens up. I kid you not."

Weller stared silently at Steinhardt. For a moment he felt the force of a bond of sincerity between them, the impact of a powerful and perhaps even genuinely great man asking for his willing allegiance. He's right, Weller thought. He's offering me the world. Money, power, Annie, a chance to do really creative work. Why can't I just give in and accept it? Why does it repel me?

Why, said the other side of his head, can't you learn to love Big Brother?

So when he finally answered, his words were those of his carefully crafted persona, the character which had brought him this far, and which he could not abandon for the sake of John B. Steinhardt. ''I'm ready to go to work for you right now, John," he said.

"Jesus, I know that, laddy-buck," Steinhardt said. "But are you sincere about it, or are you still just a good con man?"

Weller laughed. "I'd probably give you the same answer you'd give me to that one," he said.

Steinhardt laughed with him. ''I'll drink to that answer," he said, toasting Weller with his flask and gulping down a slug of whiskey.

His eyes narrowed, he shook his head speculatively, and seemed to suddenly withdraw into some private, murky head space. "But as I've said before," Steinhardt said darkly, ''I'll drink to anything."
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Re: The Mind Game, by Norman Spinrad

Postby admin » Sat Mar 19, 2016 9:08 am

Chapter Nineteen

Weller sat watching Annie wash the dinner dishes in the little sink from an unsettling cinematic distance. Close-up of her hands moving the sponge across the plates, pull back for a low-angle full shot on her body bent over the sink, emphasizing her silent psychic distance from his camera-eye.

He had to physically blink himself out of this distancing mode, this cinematic paranoia. Either I'm really going nuts, he thought, or this really is a totally paranoid situation.

From the Great Man he heard nothing, but every casual conversation with Annie got immediately steered into the deep waters of Transformationalism, as if Steinhardt were pressuring her to accumulate data. The line of questioning was rather obvious.

What had Steinhardt said to him? What was it like really working with John? What did he think Steinhardt thought of him? What did it feel like to have your consciousness enhanced with prolonged contact with the Font of All Wisdom?

It could all have been covered by the reverent curiosity of a true believer, if it weren't transparently designed to uncover his true feelings about the Great I Am. He sensed that Annie was constantly watching and recording his reactions these past two days -- monitoring him, to coin an odious phrase.

It would have been classical paranoia if Steinhardt hadn't openly told him that was exactly what she was going to be doing. I'm not paranoid, he thought. It's really happening. My wife is willing to spy on me for Transformationalism, and there's no doubt about it.

And what are you loyal to, Weller? he thought. To a wife who doesn't want your loyalty on your terms and won't return it? To a dead-end career that maybe you can never go back to? What the hell is there in your life besides Transformationalism?

He knew that he really only had two alternatives. He could try to blackmail his way out of the Institute with the Master Contact Sheet and hope that he would make it. And hope against everything he knew that she would choose to come with him when push came to shove.

Or he could accept John B. Steinhardt as his personal savior. And keep Annie. And become rich and powerful. And become a different person.

Obviously there was only one logical, Transformational conclusion. Steinhardt had set it up so that a rational man had only one self-interested choice. Gain everything or lose everything was reasonably clear-cut. But he rebelled against that logic. There was no way he could find it in his heart to love Big Brother. At this point he was beginning to wonder whether that made him a hero or a masochist. Perhaps they amounted to much the same thing.

Annie finished the dishes, dried her hands, and walked slowly over to him, thighs rubbing lightly together, blouse undone to the third button, and a come-hither look in her eyes. ''I've got plenty of time before I have to go to tonight's staff meeting," she said, sitting down beside him with a little toss of her hair and a wiggle of her ass.

But Weller was finding it hard to relate to her sexually since she had started interrogating him on the sly. Making love to her was becoming more and more difficult and less and less satisfying. Whenever he made love to her, he felt that a world of eyes was looking on over their shoulders, and two of them were hers.

So once again he pretended to ignore the obvious, and for once did a little sly interrogating of his own. He leaned forward and said, "What happens if I do end up directing John's little project? What happens then?"

Annie angled her body away from him and looked at him in confusion. "What happens then? What do you mean?"

"I mean us," Weller said. "Once it's over, where do we go from there?"

"Over?" Annie said shrilly. "Once what's over?" Her voice suddenly hardened into the commissar's tone he had been hearing for days, and he had neither the heart nor the stomach to confront it.

''I've got to admit this has been good for us," he began cautiously. "But this place is like a hothouse. Sooner or later we've got to return to the real world and pick up the threads of our lives."

Her eyes became distant and impenetrable. "Our old lives are dead," she said. "Old instantaneous personas. We're not those people any more. We can't go back, we can only go on. Can't you see that, Jack?"

"Sure," Weller said sadly, and he really could. "But what we are now are instantaneous personas too. Riding the changes got us here, but some day we're going to have to ride the changes out, or we'll end up becoming dead shells again. There aren't any final destinations. John would say so himself."

"I don't like what I'm hearing, Jack," Annie said in an almost threatening tone. "You're telling me you want us to leave the movement. Isn't that really it?"

Even now, especially now, when a single "yes" would finally bring them to the inevitable confrontation, Weller's courage failed him, and he found himself drawing back from the brink. "No," he said. "Not leave the movement, just have some lives of our own, too. Not turn our backs on Transformationalism, but not let it swallow us whole, either. Some kind of compromise between serving the movement and serving ourselves."

"As far as I'm concerned, serving the movement is serving myself," Annie said coldly. "I don't want to go back to Hollywood ego tripping. I won't. I can't."

"Can't?" Weller snapped. "Don't you think you'd better take a hard second look if leaving here is something you think you can't do? Whatever happened to freedom? Don't you ever miss it?"

"You're just running a cheap word game," Annie said angrily. "I can't leave because I don't want to leave. Freedom is what I have finally found in Transformationalism. Freedom is working for something that transcends your own petty ego, something that takes you outside the limits of your self, that makes you a part of a greater destiny."

Her voice had become that strident commissar speech he had come to know all too well, But suddenly it became soft, personal, and immediate as she touched a palm to his cheek,

"Poor baby," she said, "I don't think you've ever found anything like that for yourself, have you? Not even here, not yet. Oh Jack, wasn't I the same way? We blamed it on the Hollywood system, but even our dreams and ambitions were confined by our own egos. If only we were free to do our things, we'd find what we were looking for, we'd really be creative people, we'd be all right. A movie star and a hotshot feature-film director, right? All we ever thought of was moving up in the Hollywood machine that was grinding us down."

Her eyes brightened, and she began to radiate energy, peace, genuine contentment. "You can't see that till you get out of it," she said. "Not till you find what was missing all along. And I've found that in Transformationalism. I feel whole now. I feel home. This is my life, this is what I was meant to do. I feel it completely. All I need to be totally happy is to have you share it with me."

Weller finally felt the full force of the vast gulf that had opened up between them. He could no longer hold back the knowledge that had been building in him since that very first reunion in Steinhardt's house. He was losing her. Winning her back from Transformationalism had turned into another dead dream. And beyond this terrible pang of impending loss was something that was almost envy. Though the cause might be delusion and Transformationalist programming, she genuinely felt the kind of fulfillment he had always longed for. Where he was empty, she was filled. What she had was something he both loathed and envied, a state of consciousness that might be Steinhardt's conjuring trick, but one that he craved to experience.

I wish I could, he found himself thinking without fully understanding it. If only I could!

"I want to share what you feel too," he said. "But I'm not sure that Transformationalism is something that can get me there."

"It can be, Jack," Annie said, snuggling against him. "All you have to do is let it."

"That's what John says too," Weller said wearily.

"Well, there you are ..."

"And where is that?" Weller sighed.

"Let me show you," she said. "Let me take you home." She put her arms around his neck and kissed him, with as much love and sincerity as he had ever felt.

He kissed her back with the same depth of feeling in his heart, made more poignant by a foreshadow of doom. But their realities didn't seem to connect, it was as if rubber gloves sheathed his whole body, like making love through a condom.

After awhile he let her lead him into the bedroom, and she clutched him fiercely as they made love, as if she wanted to absorb him into herself, into that which filled her. He longed to let himself go, to merge with the woman of his heart, and let that surrender take him where it would.

But something held him separate. He could no more bear to lose himself than he could to lose her. He could not follow her this final mile any more than she could follow him. Their trajectories had diverged. He felt that he had entered the twilight of their life together, that from here on in any time they made love might be the last.

And yet, he thought, as she sighed into his ear, it doesn't have to happen. All I have to do is not make it happen. What is it that I'm clinging to that makes me throw everything else away? I don't even know.

Yet whatever it was, it seemed too precious to let go of. Even if it cost him the death of their love. For surrendering himself to Transformationalisrn for her sake, sweet though the rewards would be, seemed also like a kind of death.

***

That night, while Annie was attending some staff meeting, there was an unexpected knock on the door. When Weller opened it, John B. Steinhardt was standing in the doorway.

He wore black pants and a white shirt open almost to the navel. With his gut hanging out and his eyes quite bloodshot, he looked like a beery truck driver, and the unopened bottle of Jack Daniels he held by the neck completed the image. By the look and smell of him, he was half shit-faced already.

"Come on outside, bucko. We're going to get drunk together in the moonlight," he said. Weller stared goggle-eyed at this apparition, not knowing what to say to such a proposal.

Steinhardt took hold of him by the bicep and pulled him outside into the clear, fragrant night air. "Kiddo, I've talked with you, I've gone over Annie's reports fifty times, I've watched you in action, and I still can't make up my mind about you," he said. "It has finally occurred to me that maybe the reason is that you're having the same trouble with me. So I said to myself, let's have this out man-to-man. Let's share the old sacrament and get pie-eyed together."

He paused, reached into a pocket, and took out a pint of green fluid. "Better chugalug this eptifier first," he said, handing the bottle to Weller. ''I'm talking about serious drinking."

Automatically Weller found himself choking down the vile stuff as they walked away from the cabin toward the margin of the woods. The idea of getting drunk with Steinhardt held its terrors, but it also intrigued him. In some absolute way he found himself agreeing with Steinhardt that it was the right and manly thing to do, and that made him feel something like affection for the son of a bitch.

"Good a place as any," Steinhardt said, picking out the trunk of a big tree and lowering himself to the ground against it. He uncapped the bottle of bourbon. "Have a slug," he said, handing the bottle up to Weller. ''Take a good big one and wash that crummy taste out of your mouth."

Weller took a long swallow of whiskey and sat down beside Steinhardt. From where they sat halfway up a gentle slope, the bungalows of the Colony were half-hidden in the trees, the guards and fences were invisible, and a bright half-moon cast silvery shadows down into the hollow. The cool night breeze carried no scent of the things of men. They might be anywhere. They might be anyone.

"Have some more," Steinhardt rumbled. "You've got a lot of catching up to do."

Weller shrugged and took another long drink, feeling the warmth of it filling his belly and radiating out toward his fingers and toes. He handed the bottle over to Steinhardt, who took a big gulp, then handed it back with a drink-up motion of his forearm.

Weller took another drink. The moonlight seemed to flow and glow like a river of water. Crickets hummed in his ears.

"What do you really think I am?" Steinhardt said. "A drunken old phony who lucked into something good, right?"

Weller felt a direct circuit opening up between the top of his head and his mouth, bypassing caution and logic. Well, what the fuck? he thought, taking another belt of Dutch courage.

"You got to admit, John, you're not exactly the ideal vision of an ascetic guru," he said.

Steinhardt took the bottle and gulped down a drink. "Fuckin'-A," he said. "I'm a complex son of a bitch."

"Why are you doing this?" Weller asked.

Steinhardt laughed. ''To save the world," he said. ''To make an easy buck. Because it's there. You think I know?"

"I mean why are you getting me drunk?"

Steinhardt handed back the bottle. "Because you've got a bad case of psychic constipation," Steinhardt said. "Think of it as Ex-Lax for the mind."

Weller took another drink. "Yeah?" he said. "Seems to me some people I could mention have verbal diarrhea."

"For sure, laddy-buck," Steinhardt said, snatching away the bottle. He took another drink. "I got onto the booze in the old days. When you have to crank out twenty thousand words a week just to survive, verbal diarrhea is a survival value. And it hasn't done me wrong, now has it? Y'know, I believe I was half shit-faced all the way through Transformational Man. When I discovered Benson Allen's little fan club, I had to read my own damned book just to find out what the hell I had written."

"Did ya like it?" Weller giggled, recovering the bottle.

Steinhardt laughed. He shrugged. "It was what we used to call a good read," he said. "Just between you and me, lad, I wasn't the world's greatest science-fiction writer. Lots of ideas, but sitting down there and typing was torture. Fortunately I could type sixty words a minute even dead drunk."

Somewhere behind the fog that was rolling into the forefront of Weller's mind, he sensed that Steinhardt's drunkenness was focused, that he was taking all this somewhere, that these self-deprecating revelations had a purpose. But he couldn't figure out what it was. Maybe another drink would help.

"What about you, kiddo?" Steinhardt said. "You gonna tell me that you were an ivory-tower aesthete? I mean, directing monkey shows? Did you really think you were doing anything but making a buck as best you knew how?" He winked and snatched back the bottle. "One old hack to another, Jack?"

Weller shrugged. Out here in the woods, his head reeling in the moonlight, all that seemed so far away and unreal, something he could be as detached about as Steinhardt apparently was. "Takes one to know one, I suppose," he admitted.

"Then why won't you come the rest of the way with me?" Steinhardt said.

"Huh?"

Steinhardt stood up, leaned against the tree with one hand, and looked down at Weller. ''What you just admitted to me is not something you would have admitted to yourself before you had the benefits of Transformationalism, now is it?" he said. "You're not a hack mentality now any more than I am. I've brought you that far, now haven't I?"

Steinhardt's figure looming above him seemed huge and powerful, ancient and wise, outlined in the moonlight. "I suppose you have," Weller admitted quietly.

"So why not accept the next stage of your evolution like a man?" Steinhardt said. He sat down again and handed Weller the bottle. "I've gotten you off your treadmill to nowhere," he said. "So why don't you let me take you along for the best part of the ride?"

"Onta your treadmill?" Weller blurted boozily.

"I don't notice the ground moving backward under my feet," Steinhardt said, "Which is more than I think you can say for yourself right now, bucko."

"Offa the TV con and onta the Transformationalist con," Weller grunted stonily.

"So you really think it's all a con?" Steinhardt said in a voice gone hard and ominous.

The chirping of the crickets buzzed angrily in Weller's ears. "Fuck this!" he snapped. "Don't you think it's a con, John?"

Steinhardt clapped him on the shoulder. "Yer a kid after me own heart!" He grabbed the bottle and took a long, long swallow.

"Of course, it's a con!" he exclaimed. "It's the best goddamn con in the world! An income in seven figures, a billion dollars worth of capital to play games with. Learjets, Institutes, city townhouses, country retreats, Cuban cigars, and the devout dues-paying worship of millions. You ever hear of a better con?"

"You tell me it's a con, and then you expect me to swallow it?" Weller said thickly.

"Why not?" Steinhardt said. "It's such a good con that I swallowed it myself."

"Huh?" Weller grunted. His head was reeling, the half-hidden rooftops of the bungalows below seemed to flash and shimmer, and Steinhardt's eyes were a silver sheen of reflected moonlight. Words were becoming sounds that were hard to follow logically.

"That's the whole point," Steinhardt said. ''I'm the best advertisement there is for Transformationalism because I knew it was a con when I took over Benson Allen's nut cult of the great me. Where I was coming from, everything in Transformational Man was drunken ravings I tossed off in six weeks for fifteen hundred bucks. I didn't see any potential at all. Harry and Maria had to browbeat me into taking over the movement, and even then the best I hoped for was to get my ass out of debt and get a few months ahead on the rent. "

Steinhardt paused and took another drink. Weller couldn't believe where he was or what he was hearing, though he knew it was only confirmation of what he had always believed. But for John B. Steinhardt to be sitting there, drunk as a skunk, admitting that he was nothing but a sleazo con artist, that was totally unreal.

"But as the changes marched on, strange things began to happen in the old coconut," Steinhardt said. "Suddenly I woke up, and I was the leader of a mass movement, and I was rich, all off this low-grade scam. It put me beyond money, beyond the need to feed my ego; I had all of that I could ever want. So I said to myself: John, what the fuck is going on here?"

Steinhardt stood up and began pacing in small circles in front of Weller, punctuating his words with the bottle, like some bemused old rummy. "So I reread the Word according to me as if I were my own disciple -- all the pamphlets and theories and bullshit encyclicals I had reamed out over the years to keep things going and create more product to sell."

He paused to take a long, rather slobbering drink. "Jesus, I was amazed at my own unsuspected brilliance, I kid you not," Steinhardt said with utter seriousness. "Somehow all this wisdom had come out of some place inside of me without my really even being aware of it. Even Transformational Man reads like the stuff of destiny now. And I had even previously explained that kind of transformation to my followers without realizing it. I couldn't see who I was until I was freed from that science-fiction-hack persona I had been stuck in. I had to become a phony guru to get enough changes between me and that to understand the previous level. And once I saw the process I had put myself through, I couldn't just be a phony guru either, because, goddamn it, the stuff I had used to set up the con was the real thing, and I had proven it on myself."

Steinhardt sat down close beside Weller and grinned at him crookedly. "Can you guess what I did then?" he asked rhetorically.

Weller managed to nod a woozy no.

"I put myself through all the bullshit processes I had invented," Steinhardt said. "I secretly had Benson Allen run them all on me. Partly to find out whether they really worked, partly I had some idea of breaking my writer's block. Well, I didn't break the block, but I found out I didn't want to. I found out that the thing I had become was the optimized me and all I had to do was accept it."

He handed the bottle to Weller, who drained what little was left. "I transformed myself through the Transformational processes I had dreamed up as a con," Steinhardt said. "Drink to that, laddy-buck! Drink to the ultimate self-made man!"

Shakily Weller dropped the empty bottle. The treetops were whirling through a starry sky. His head was roaring with the buzz of the crickets. His mouth could hardly form coherent words. Sweat was breaking out on his forehead. Steinhardt studied his face.

"Hey, you look awful, kiddo," he said. "Better walk you home." He dragged Weller unceremoniously to his feet and steadied him around the shoulder for a moment with a sureness and energy which Weller, in his present condition, found amazing.

"Why ... why ... why are you telling me stuff like this?" he managed to say as they walked slowly toward the cabin, with his knees trembling and swaying as if he were on stilts.

"Because I want you to understand that I came into all this with at least as cynical an attitude as you did," Steinhardt said. "What's more, I don't have to believe that Transformationalism's the real thing to get anything I could ever want out of it. But I believe in it, even knowing a lot more shit than you do about it, sonny boy."

Halfway to the cabin a bubble of anger burst in Weller's reeling brain. He pulled himself away from Steinhardt's support and stood there, weaving, but standing alone on his own two feet. "What about the ripoffs, John?" he said. "What about what you've done to my wife? What about the mind-fucks and the control programs? What about the way you screw up people's lives?"

Oh, my god, Weller thought, after he had heard himself. What have I done?

But Steinhardt laughed, put his arm around his shoulders, and continued helping him back to the cabin, unruffled by anything. "Yeah, that's the bottom line between us, isn't it?" he said. "Somehow you got it in ya head that because I'm offering you the goodies of the world, that ya gotta fork over your soul."

They reached the cabin then, and Weller disengaged himself from Steinhardt and leaned up against the doorframe. His vision was beginning to go cloudy and a bubble of nausea was forming in his gut. "Yeah, well ain't that it?" he gargled.

"What the hell do I want your soul for?" Steinhardt shot back. "What am I gonna do with it, claim it as a tax deduction?"

"You wanna make me someone else ...." Weiler woozed, really beginning to feel sick to his stomach.

"So what?" Steinhardt said. ''I've done that to you already. Whatsa big deal, I do it to myself all the time. It's ongoing change, kid. You can't stop it, you can only try to find the best wave to ride. The one you got off of has already passed."

"I don't want anyone screwing around with my head," Weller said, holding onto the doorframe with both hands now. "It hurts like hell but itsa only one I got. I wanna stay me. "

"Come, kiddo, you're not the old persona you're trying to cling to anymore," Steinhardt said. "You can't be. Too many changes. All you can choose is who you're going to become, there's no return trip tickets on the train we're riding. The Jack you are now is twisting you up in knots trying to hold onto a past that's gone and can't come back."

Weller could only dimly understand what Steinhardt was saying now. Sounds and thoughts were crowded to one corner of his mind by the surging green demand of his guts, by a need to puke that was becoming his most immediate and fondest desire.

"Urrrrr ..." he groaned.

"All you've got to do is let it go," Steinhardt said. "Accept the gifts of destiny. Be a fuckin' Transformational Man. Accept where you are now, and let yourself be what you're becoming. Let it all come out."

Let it all come out? That seemed like an idea of transcendental wisdom for sure at the moment. He was holding back an awful sour gag at the back of his throat. Steinhardt was absolutely right. There was no reason not to puke, no reason to hold it back any further.

"Goddamn it, you're a genius, and I'm an asshole," he groaned. "You're absolutely right, ya are. That's exactly what I'm gonna do right now, let all that stuff go, and get it the hell out of me."

Steinhardt stuck his face in Weller's. The smell of his breath made Weller gag, and he just barely held his gorge down. "Really?" Steinhardt said, blinking eyes as pink as elephants. "You're really ready, kiddo? No shit?"

"No shit," Weller muttered around a suppressed gag that this time seared the back of his throat with acid vomit. "Immediately!"

"Ya, well, we'll have to talk about it tomorrow when we're both sobered up," Steinhardt said. "Yer okay, kiddo!" He slapped Weller on the back, nearly causing him to lose his precarious balance. "But ya sure can't drink with the old master," he said. "You kids got no stamina."

"Uhhhh ..." Weller grunted, half as a reply, and half a visceral reaction. "Gotta go...."

He dashed through the door bent at the waist, staggered into the bathroom falling to his knees, and just managed to get his head over the toilet bowl as horrid sour puke exploded from his throat. Again and again he heaved his guts out, until he felt totally empty, until dry spasms made him clutch his stomach in pain, until nausea subsided into an overwhelming fatigue, an irresistible slide toward black nothingness.

He staggered into the living room half out on his feet, moaned as he felt his legs going out from under him, and just managed to flop facedown across the couch before his consciousness slid into sweet oblivion.

***

Annie looked narrowly across the breakfast coffee at him and for the third time said, "But what happened, Jack?"

Weller had choked down a big glass of eptifier as soon as she had awakened him in the morning from his stupor on the couch, so his pounding headache had just about subsided and the awful feeling in his gut had more or less faded away -- not, however, to the point where he could face the thought of food with any equanimity. But the black, confused mood in which his mind had awakened would not go away.

"I told you twice, we got utterly shit-faced, and I don't remember what the fuck happened!" he snarled.

"Well, you don't have to snap at me about it!" Annie said. ''I'm not the one that got drunk, puked, and passed out on the couch."

"But you're the one who's interrogating me about it!" Weller said. "That's your goddamn directive, isn't it, my little commissar?"

Annie's face went stony cold. "It has nothing to do with that," she said with exaggerated evenness. "It's strictly personal."

"I find it hard to believe that anything's strictly personal anymore."

"You don't trust me at all anymore, do you?" Annie said more softly.

Weller sighed. He didn't even know what he was arguing with her about. He half suspected that he was really arguing with Steinhardt, or perhaps even another side of his own head. Fact was, he did remember most of what had been said during his drinking bout with Steinhardt. Everything but the very end of it which was a vague green cloud of nausea, puking, and something which had happened between them. Somehow he had woken up with the feeling that he had won, that he had finally convinced Steinhardt of his sincerity. Or that Steinhardt had really won him over in his drunken state, at least to Steinhardt's own drunken satisfaction. He knew that something had happened, that the situation had been altered, but what and how were lost in the memory of a drunken blur.

And when Annie kept asking him about it, he had automatically taken it as a directive from Steinhardt; as if, through her, Steinhardt was trying to find out what he remembered, or maybe even trying to fill in a blank spot in his own memory track. But that was pure paranoia, wasn't it? Annie couldn't have spoken to Steinhardt yet this morning, now could she?

''I'm sorry, Annie," he said. "It's certainly true that you've been up front with me. At least I know where I stand with you."

Annie lifted her coffee cup to her mouth, stared speculatively over the lip. "And where do you imagine that to be?" she asked.

"Second place," Weller said, "to Transformationalism."

Annie looked down into the depths of her coffee.

"Am I wrong?" Weller asked.

Annie remained silent.

"If I'm wrong, I wish to hell you'd tell me so," Weller said. "If I told you I simply couldn't take this shit any more, that I was taking off, that you had to choose between Transformationalism and me right now, what would you do? Tell me you would come with me!" Fuck it! he thought. I've finally said it. We've finally come to the bottom line.

Annie slowly looked up at him. Her lower lip trembled. Her eyes filled with tears. "Is that what you're saying, Jack?" she whispered. "Are you finally issuing your ultimatum?"

"That's not answering my question," Weller said with awful coldness.

"And you really want an answer?" Annie said plaintively. A muffled mourning bell was already peeling in her voice. I've got my answer, Weller thought. Haven't I known it all along?

But why the hell am I doing this? Paused on the brink of the final, irrevocable parting, the end of their marriage, the end of everything he had fought for and sacrificed for and suffered for all these months, Weller drew back again. What am I doing? he thought. I think I've finally won at least this round. I think I've sold myself to Steinhardt, somehow. I've bought time to work on her head, all the time I could ask for. Why the hell did I almost throw it all away?

"No," he said. "You don't have to answer me. I was just running a life scenario on you."

Relief, anger, and then puzzlement chased each other across Annie's face. "Why did you run a number like that on me?" she demanded.

"Because I think that John and I decided that I was going to work with him last night," Weller said. "And before I committed myself to that, I wanted to be able to feel that whither I goest, you goest too. So I could be sure I knew exactly why I was going to stay."

"Do you want me to lie to you?" Annie said quietly.

"No. You couldn't if you tried. I know where we stand."

"Well then," Annie said, suddenly brightening artificially, "then let's forget about it. Why torture ourselves with unreal negative life scenarios? Especially when the real news is so good!"

"You're so sure you know what's real," Weller said. "Maybe you'd like to tell me."

"We've got a life together here," she said. "You're going to work with John. There are no horrible choices to be made. Everything's coming out all right, isn't it? Isn't that what's real?"

Weller sighed. For the time being anyway, maybe that was reality. Certainly, at this moment, he lacked the courage to make it anything else. "Yeah," he said, squeezing her hand and forcing a smile. "I think I'm still hung over is all. Everything is coming up roses."

"Sure it is," she said, leaning over the table and kissing him on the lips. But deep inside him that mourning bell kept peeling, as if the essence of what he was still fighting to keep had already been lost.

***

Nervously alert, his mind racing with yet another dose of eptifier, Weller ascended the spiral staircase to John B. Steinhardt's domed lair. The summons had not come till noon, and he had had enough time to clear his head and think things through clearly. Steinhardt had displayed his dirty linen to him as if it were a badge of honor. Whether the intimacy it had established between them were real or not, it was obviously what Steinhardt had intended, and Weller had certainly told Steinhardt a thing or two himself. So if Steinhardt had really convinced himself that they had had a meeting of minds, why disabuse him of the notion? All I have to do, Weller decided, is keep my mouth as shut as possible and agree with everything he says. All I've got to do is let him con himself.

Steinhardt was lying in the big hammock in the center of the circular room, wearing only a kind of blue terry-cloth kilt. He unslung himself from the hammock like some ungainly walrus as Weller entered and stood there with his belly hanging out. "How's your head today, kiddo?" he asked brightly. "You were really fried last night."

Steinhardt walked over to the big oak desk at the north side of the room and perched on the edge. Weller dropped himself into a director's chair near the desk. ''I'm more or less okay," he said. "That green goo sure works as a hangover cure."

Steinhardt took a cigar from the humidor on the desk, lighted it, and sent a nauseating puff of smoke in Weller's direction. "No blackouts?" he asked. "You remember everything that happened last night?"

"Clear as a bell," Weller lied forthrightly.

Steinhardt reached out his hand. "Well then, we have a deal, don't we?" he said. "You're going to be my personal director." Weller shook his hand and was able to beam back at him. For this was it, he had won, Steinhardt really trusted him now.

Steinhardt loped heavily toward the bar. "Care to drink to it?" he said.

"Thanks, but no thanks," Weller grunted.

Steinhardt laughed. "Well, then I guess I'll just have to drink your toast too," he said, pouring about four inches of bourbon into a water glass and swilling down half of it with a smack of his lips.

He put down his glass, leaned against the bar, took a puff of his cigar, and became almost professional in tone, changing gears entirely. "Okay, Jack, we'll begin work next Monday. By then I want you to be ready to give me an idea of where you want to shoot your outside footage, how you think the testament should be organized, and I'll be ready to discuss when I do my raving for your cameras. Okay?"

"Okay," Weller said. "Except we really can't talk about when we're going to start shooting until we have a crew lined up."

"Don't worry about that, we'll just pick a date and I'll fly in whatever you say you need."

"Er .... I don't know if Changes Production has good enough people for a project on this level," Weller said speculatively.

Steinhardt shrugged. "You be the judge of that," he said. He laughed and look another gulp of whiskey. "For my immortality, I want nothing but the best, and I'm not going to limit my director to whatever Harry Lazlo has thrown together. You want pros, I will hire you pros. Consider your budget unlimited."

"Great!" Weller said. This might really turn into something after all.

"Well, I've got other fish to fry now," Steinhardt said, walking toward the stairs and ushering Weller along in tow. "You just relax and think until then, Jack, and hang loose."

He held Weller back by the elbow at the top of the stairway. "Just one thing," he said looking straight at Weller. "You do know what you're getting into? I mean, you already know a lot of things that aren't exactly for the masses, kiddo, and working with me on this thing, you figure to learn a lot more. Also, I don't want anyone in the movement who doesn't have to know about this project to get wind of it. The official story will be consistent with what got you here -- we're just making commercials. Got it?"

"Sure, John," Weller said a little nervously. "If that's the way you want it."

"Good," Steinhardt said. "So you understand the need for reasonable security procedures."

"Security procedures?" Weller said uneasily.

"Oh, just standard stuff," Steinhardt said breezily. "Nothing to get excited about. You'll have to remain at the Institute throughout the whole project. No contact with outside parties. And a few other minor details."

He gave Weller a wink and propelled him on his way with a slap of the back. "We want to keep our little project under our hats, don't we, bucko?" he said conspiratorially.

I should be feeling that I've got it made, Weller thought, as he slowly descended to ground level. I have got it made. But something somehow told him that everything had gone too easily, that it was he and not Steinhardt who had just been had. It didn't add up logically, but he couldn't get rid of the feeling.
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