Simmons suddenly relaxed. She whispered, "I accept it. Oh, I am SO glad that was really what happened. Then my father must have been wrong about everything."
"Right," said the Countess Krak, villainously undoing in a breath what that poor, laboring psychologist-father had devoted his whole life to build up. What a destructive Manco Devil that Krak was!
The Countess took a firmer grip on the microphone. She was obviously through playing around. Now she was going to get down to business. She said, "Now we're back to the first time you saw Wister. What you really thought was that you were not good enough for him. Correct?"
Simmons said, under the helmet, "Correct."
Krak said, "Now it is the time of the first Nature Appreciation class last fall. You are alone, you are leaving the UN. You do not want Wister to follow you because you know you are not good enough for him. You feel very sad about it, right?"
Simmons said, "Right."
Aha, here it came. I knew that Krak was going to order her, now, to write a suicide note. For that is exactly what I would have done. Simmons was finished!
The doorbell rang.
I let out a wheeze of relief for Simmons. She had been saved by the bell. Grafferty! All was not lost. He was just a little early, for there was no corpse there yet. But he would see at once what this was all about: he would find Simmons in a hypnotic trance and know that murder was in the air.
Krak said into the mike, "You will lie there quietly for the moment and ignore anything you hear until I get back."
She put down the mike. She went out of the bedroom and closed its door behind her. She went into the living room. She peeled off her gloves, threw them aside and fluffed her hair. She opened the door.
DOCTOR KUTZBRAIN!
He was standing there in a bowler hat and black overcoat. He lifted up his inch-thick glasses and stared at Krak. "Well, well! Lizzie Borden!" Then he smiled like a hungry wolf and pushed his way in and banged the door shut behind him.
As soon as he was in, he said, "I just stopped by to tear off a little (bleep). I always visit my patients in times of stress, namely mine."
In a disgusted voice the Countess Krak said, "Really."
Kutzbrain was taking off his overcoat. He said, "Nothing like a little psychiatric therapy to cheer one up."
The Countess said, "Do you live with Miss Simmons?"
"Oh, no, no. I'm Doctor Kutzbrain, her psychiatrist at the University Hospital. But I'm impartial. I spread my professional skills around. I don't think you've been an inmate of my ward yet, Borden, but you're a real looker so I'll make sure you soon will be. So just lie down on that sofa and pull up your skirt and we'll get into the preliminary professional psychiatric examination. If it feels good enough, I can get you into the ward instantly. Those look like nice (bleeps) under your shirt. But they need a (bleep) erection test."
My hair rose. The Countess Krak had killed three men just for extending a hand toward her sexually. This dumb (bleepard) was about to be stamped to jelly! And then I really laughed with glee. Grafferty was going to find a real corpse!
The Countess Krak was reaching into the plastic shopping bag. I knew it was for some lethal weapon. It was a roll of something black. She tore one of the perforated bits from it.
The doctor's hand was still reaching. She put the small black square in it. "Hold this," she said icily.
He took it and stared at it.
She reached into the black plastic bag. There was a little dynamo in there. She touched a plunger which started it.
Doctor Kutzbrain stood straight up. He went utterly rigid. His face went blank. He was fixed in place like an awkward statue!
Oh, my Gods! One of the Eyes and Ears of Voltar devices she had filched from the Afyon hospital! I remembered it. It was a remote-control rig. When one had one of those black patches planted on him and the device was activated by the tiny dynamo, the person went rigid and blank and stayed that way as long as the dynamo ran, and when it was cut off the person returned to motion without being aware of the halt. According to the directions I had fleetingly seen, they used it to obtain evidence photographs in low-level light conditions. But she was simply using it to immobilize Doctor Kutzbrain.
Probably she would kill him later. Grafferty still had a chance to get his corpse, so necessary to headlines and to my plans for finally wrecking the Countess Krak.
Still, even if Grafferty came early, there was quite enough to cook her goose: a leading psychiatrist of the city standing like a catatonic statue in the middle of the living room and a very pathetic victim hypnotized in the back bedroom. Whichever way the cards fell, the Countess Krak was for it! New York City would give her Hells, to mention nothing of Voltar penalties for Code breaks.
She made sure that Doctor Kutzbrain was remaining statuized. Then she went back into the bedroom to finish off Simmons, all unaware that the police were howling on their way. I knew that she could never get out of there in time.
The Countess Krak closed the bedroom door behind her. Miss Simmons was sprawled on the bed-breasts, belly and thighs bare. The Countess reached over and pulled the bathrobe closed: I could not figure why she was doing that; I myself thought Simmons' nakedness pretty stimulating.
Krak sat down in the chair and again took up the microphone. "It is just after the first Nature Appreciation class last fall. You have left the UN and are now entering Van Cortlandt Park. Where are you?"
"Just entering Van Cortlandt Park," said Simmons, very muffled under the helmet. Her body started to stiffen.
"You see that Wister is following you. You know you are not good enough for him. You plead with him to go away."
From under the helmet, "Please go away, Wister."
"Good. Now he has gone away. You walk further into the park. You see eight men following you. Look back at them. What do you see?"
Miss Simmons' body went more rigid and began to twitch.
"I see eight men following me."
Krak said, "You are looking for a secluded place. You find one. What does it look like?"
Miss Simmons went more tense. She said, "A hollow with a high bank all around. The path comes down from the hill into it. The grass is green, there is a brook."
"Good," said the Countess Krak. "One of the men is closer than the rest. What would you really want him to do."
"Like it says in Krafft-Ebing."
"What is Krafft-Ebing?" asked Krak in a puzzled voice.
"The books like Psychopathia Sexualis. Like Have-lock Ellis' books or Sigmund Freud's. My father used to read them to me every night at bedtime. As a psychologist he said that all those nasty fairy tales were full of phallic symbols. Like putting thumbs in pies. And he said his daughter must read the same things they teach in kindergarten today because psychology is the best arousal-depressant for children as it pounds into them all the horrible things they must not do. He did it to help my natural frigidity so I could be normal like the other children in my class."
The Countess Krak lowered the microphone into her shoulder. "Good Heavens!" she muttered in Voltarian. Then she raised the mike and said in English,
"So what did you want the first man to do?"
"Like Krafft-Ebing. To knock me down in the mud and... mumble... mumble... mumble... just like it says in Kra... mmmmmmmm! Oh, yes. Oh, my, YES!" Her words had been more and more choked and her breathing was short and heavy. "Come on... mumble, mumble... Put... mumble... mumble. AH!"
The Countess Krak was staring at her. She covered the microphone. In Voltarian, she muttered, "Well, there's no stopping her now." In English she said into the mike, "That's exactly what is happening. You can see it, feel it, you are right there. Go ahead."