The Fall of the Republic by Crawford Kilian

Author:Crawford Kilian [Kilian, Crawford]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Venture Press
Published: 2017-11-07T07:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER XI

Outside Pierce’s room, the morning sun glowed through the leaves. The window was open, and someone was playing Bach on the guitar: Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring. Pierce lay on his bed under a sheet, one hand tapping in time to the music. He had lost some weight; his cheekbones stood out.

“I don’t believe in reliving a trauma as a means of overcoming it,” Dr. Franklin said from his chair beside the bed. “Might as well cut into a scar to see how deep it is. But sometimes we just have to do it, Jerry, so we can understand what made the scar and how deep it runs.”

“I understand.” But Pierce spoke absently, as if he were bored.

“You know what Dymoxyn is; it was part of what made you a Trainable.”

“Memory drug.”

“Exactly. We’re going to give you a fairly large dose and see what turns up.”

“Sure.”

Simply getting Pierce to this stage had taken almost two weeks. Now he was at least conversing and seemed capable of understanding what was happening to him. The Agency did not worry much about legal subtleties, least of all since the declaration of the Emergency, but Franklin had no intention of being sued over administering a potent substance like Dymoxyn: Pierce’s remarks, on tape, would show he had agreed to treatment of his own free will.

A nurse attached electrodes to Pierce’s scalp. The electrodes were connected to a relatively new machine, a cerebrospinal field scanner. It was a pair of black metal boxes about the size of videocassette recorders, linked by cables to a flat-screen monitor. As he spoke, Dr. Franklin could see the effect of his words on Pierce’s brain.

“Remember when computers were first coming in?” Dr. Franklin said. “Everything was incompatible with everything else. You had to go through a real hassle to take information from an IBM disk and make it understandable to an Apple.” The screen showed the characteristic red-blue pattern for an apple.

“Well, people’s brains are something like that. We’re all genetically incompatible. Maybe if we weren’t, we could read each other’s minds.” He saw more familiar patterns: people, something, read. “Now we’re just getting to the point where we can print out cerebral functions, but we don’t always know what we’re actually reading. Imagine someone was writing down a series of Chinese ideograms as someone else was speaking Chinese. Maybe you couldn’t understand the words or the ideograms, but after a while you’d see some repetitions. You hear the word shan and you see a particular ideogram.” Dr. Franklin drew it on the palm of his hand so that Pierce could see: a horizontal line with three bold verticals.

“Then you see the speaker point to a mountain when he says shan, and you realize what it means. From that you can start making guesses about what other words might mean. That’s what we’re doing these days. Once we used things like word association tests. Now we look for certain kinds of patterns in response to particular stimuli. How’s your mother these days?”

“Fine.

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