George Chesbro - Bleeding in the Eye of a Brainstorm

"You're probably right. If BUHR had deemed Emily useful to the Company, why wasn't she harvested?"

"Probably because she can't cope with other people's negative feelings; in case you haven't noticed, there's a lot of negativity in the world."

"I've noticed."

"The medication treated Emily's symptoms of schizophrenia, but she was-is-always on the edge of a different kind of breakdown. Imagine constantly experiencing not only your own fears and pain and anger but those of everybody else in your immediate vicinity as well. All those things enter Emily's mind and tear at her. She can't tolerate, at least for long, being around other people who are stressed, or angry, or sad, and since there was always the risk that she would run into those feelings if she mingled with the others, she preferred to spend all her time in her room. They-we-couldn't put her on tranquilizers, because that would dull her hypersensitivity, the one thing that might make her useful to the Company in the first place. She became my sole responsibility. I was supposed to develop some kind of nonchemical therapeutic program that would stabilize her emotionally. If I'd been able to do that, I believe she would have been taken out."

I nodded. "The second category of side effects is the amplification of natural talents?"

"Yes," she replied with a faint smile. "Observing that was the most satisfying part of the job. To see people who had been hopelessly mentally ill and delusional most of their lives suddenly not only be able to function but also discover they had some extraordinary talent was wonderful. People who'd only talked to trees were suddenly able to do remarkable things, assuming the natural talent had always been there, buried under the schizophrenia, in the first place. We had mathematicians, musicians, painters, poets."

"And at least one budding chess master."

"It was kind of magical, watching these people. It could also be very funny. We had ourselves quite an assortment of jugglers, comedians, ham actors, you name it. We could have mounted our own Broadway show."

Considering the fact that Dr. Sharon Stephens's show folk had been prisoners, kept sane and alive, like all the others, only so that they might one day serve as indentured servants for the CIA, I wasn't amused. I asked, "What was the third category?"

Her smile vanished. "Monsters," she replied in a voice that cracked.

"Like Raymond Rogers?"

She hesitated, frowned slightly. "Yes and no."

"Let's do the yes part first. Rogers was turned into a killer, a homicidal maniac totally out of control. Did that happen a lot?"

"Not a lot. There were only a few cases like Raymond's that I observed while I was there. It would happen suddenly; a patient would appear to be a category one or two-sometimes for weeks, or even months-and then one day go berserk. It was totally unpredictable. There was always at least one male nurse on duty at all times who was armed with a tranquilizer gun in case that happened."

"That danger exists for the patients who are out there on the streets now? And the people upstairs?"

Again she hesitated, then slowly, reluctantly, nodded. "Yes. Percentagewise, the risk is minimal, but it exists. Raymond exists. They have to be monitored constantly. I'll have to talk to the guards you introduced me to, tell them what signs to look for. They must watch out for your friend and the patients as well as intruders."

Terrific. Felix MacWhorter had been dead-on, much more so than either of us could have realized about the risks I was undertaking when he had warned me against trying to obtain more of the drug for the patients. It was risky even shielding these people. My neck was stretched a long way out on the chopping block, along with the necks of more than seven million other people in the city. My particular good deed could conceivably set an all-time record for tragic consequences. My mouth had suddenly gone dry, and I swallowed in an attempt to work up some moisture. I felt a crush of responsibility, and for a fleeting moment I wished I had less time to deal with the problems of Margaret and the patients, not more. "What happened to the people who went homicidal?" I asked.

"They were tranquilized and taken to a secure lockup facility in a separate wing."

"And?"

"Raymond was the only one of them I ever saw again. I don't know what happened to the others."

"And that's why you say Raymond is different?"

"Yes," she replied in a voice that was becoming increasingly stressed and halting. "As part of my training, I was allowed to observe a couple of his training sessions. I think he was. . the only one they could. . control. Or whom they thought they could control."

"Tell me about Raymond's training sessions."

She stared at the floor, clasping and unclasping her hands. "Dr. Frederickson, I. . I. ."

"Come on, Doctor," I said impatiently. "Time's a-wasting. This isn't Nuremberg, and it isn't the time for soul-searching. You did the right thing when the chips were down. We've got a very big mess to try to clean up, so just tell me what they did with Rogers. How did they control him?"

"I think. . One of the senior doctors explained that all of the patients who had gone berserk had bloodlust, but it was generalized. They were all males. I got the impression some of them finally managed to kill themselves. With Raymond, there was a specific link between killing and his sex drive."

"An off-the-shelf serial killer."

"Exactly," the woman said in a voice barely above a whisper. "After he'd killed, there was a period of reversion. He would become calmer. I was told you could even talk and reason with him for a while, until the bloodlust began to mount again, but I never witnessed that, and I never spoke to him. I was. . very frightened."

"I'm sure Raymond and his keepers had some interesting conversations. So when they wanted to calm him down, they gave him things to kill?"

She nodded. "It was what he needed, along with his medication, to remain functional."

"Other patients?"

"No," she replied, still staring intently at the floor. "Animals- mostly dogs and cats."

"Well, he's certainly graduated from dogs and cats, and he isn't exactly treating his bloodlust with moderation. He's insatiable. The death count as of noon today was thirty-three. What was he doing up in the infirmary on the day he got loose?"

"I don't know. I'm not sure."

"Which is it? Was it standard procedure to treat these homicidals in the infirmary?"

"No. When they needed medical attention, they were usually treated in their own wing, after they'd been tranquilized. At least that's what I was told. Maybe …"

"Maybe what, Doctor?"

Now she looked back up at me and met my gaze. She had gone very pale, but her voice was steady. "I've given this a lot of thought, Dr. Frederickson. There was no reason to bring Raymond up to the main infirmary, not unless they wanted to use some of the specialized testing equipment we kept there. He certainly wasn't tranquilized, and he wasn't even wearing physical restraints. There were only two guards with him, and he killed those. They must have thought they had him under control. I think it's possible they planned to run some final, sophisticated tests on him before …"

"Before harvesting him for possible use as a terror weapon?"

"Yes. It's one explanation. It's possible they were going to send him out on a trial run, perhaps put him in a situation like the one he's in now. They must have thought they had him under control, could just send him out and reel him back in when they wanted. They were wrong."

"Indeed. Maybe BUHR didn't even care about reeling him back in, just in seeing what would happen. He's probably not coherent, and he'd die anyway if he were taken alive and his pills taken away from him. They might figure there were other Raymonds to be shaped."