“Explain,” said Taunton to one aide. “I want him thoroughly convinced that we are in earnest.” One of his men told me dryly: “It’s a matter of population, Courtenay. Have you ever heard of Albert Fish?” “No.” “He was a phenomenon of the dawn; the earliest days of the Age of Reason-1920 or thereabouts. Albert Fish stuck needles into himself, burned himself with alcohol-saturated wads of cotton, flogged himself-he liked it. He would have liked brainburning, I’ll wager. It would have been twenty delightful subjective years of being flayed, suffocated, choked, and nauseated. It would have been Albert Fish’s dream come true. “There was only one Albert Fish in his day. Pressures and strains of a very high order are required to produce an Albert Fish. It would be unreasonable to expect more than one to be produced out of the small and scattered population of the period-less than three billion. With our vastly larger current population there are many Albert Fishes wandering around. You only have to find them. Our matchless research facilities here at Taunton have unearthed several. They turn up at hospitals, sometimes in very grotesque shape. They are eager would-be killers; they want the delights of punishment. A man like you says we can’t hire killers because they’d be afraid of being punished. But Mr. Taunton, now, says we can hire a killer if we find one who likes being punished. And the best part of it all is, the ones who like to get hurt are the ones who just love hurting others. Hurting, for instance-you.” It had a bloodcurdlingly truthful ring to it. Our generation must be inured to wonder. The chronicles of fantastic heroism and abysmal wickedness that crowd our newscasts-I knew from research that they didn’t have such courage or such depravity in the old days. The fact had puzzled me. We have such people as Malone, who quietly dug his tunnels for six years and then one Sunday morning blew up Red Bank, New Jersey. A Brink’s traffic cop had got him sore. Conversely we have James Revere, hero of the White Cloud disaster. A shy, frail tourist-class steward, he had rescued on his own shoulders seventy-six passengers, returning again and again into the flames with his flesh charring from his bones, blind, groping his way along red-hot bulkheads with his hand-stumps. It was true. When there are enough people, you will always find somebody who can and will be any given thing. Taunton was an artist. He had
grasped this broad and simple truth and used it. It meant that I was as good as dead. Kathy, I thought. My Kathy. Taunton’s thick voice broke in on my reflections. “You grasp the pattern?” he asked. “The big picture? The theme, the message, what I might call the essential juice of it is that I’m going to repossess Venus. Now, beginning at the beginning, tell us about the Schocken Agency. All its little secrets, its little weaknesses, its ins and outs, its corruptible employees, its appropriations, its Washington contacts-you know.” I was a dead man with nothing to lose-I thought. “No,” I said. One of Taunton’s men said abruptly: “He’s ready for Hedy,” got up and went out. Taunton said: “You’ve studied prehistory, Courtenay. You may recognize the name of Gilles de Rais.” I did, and felt a tightness over my scalp, like a steel helmet slowly shrinking. “All the generations of prehistory added up to an estimated five billion population,” Taunton rambled. “All the generations of prehistory produced only one Gilles de Rais, whom you perhaps think of as Bluebeard. Nowadays we have our pick of several. Out of all the people I might have picked to handle special work like that for me I picked Hedy. You’ll see why.” The door opened and a pale, adenoidal girl with lank blond hair was standing in it. She had a silly grin on her face; her lips were thin and bloodless. In one hand she held a six-inch needle set in a plastic handle. I looked into her eyes and began screaming. I couldn’t stop screaming until they led her away and closed the door again. I was broken. “Taunton,” I whispered at last. “Please . . .” He leaned back comfortably and said: “Give.” I tried, but I couldn’t. My voice wouldn’t work right and neither would my memory. I couldn’t remember whether my firm was Fowler Schocken or Schocken Fowler, for instance. Taunton got up at last and said: “We’ll put you on ice for a while, Courtenay, so you can pull yourself together. I need a drink myself.” He shuddered involuntarily, and then beamed again. “Sleep on it,” he said, and left unsteadily. Two of his men carted me from the brain room, down a corridor and into a bare cubbyhole with a very solid door. It seemed to be night in executives’ country. Nothing was going on in any of the