"You mean PR. I think I'll be in business in another two or three weeks."

Teenie sighed. "I guess I'll just have to resign myself to it. How long do you think it will be until I get my hands on Gris?"

"Two or three months," said Madison.

She looked at him crossly. "You sure are slow! Well, you didn't come down here sightseeing. What do you want now?"

"I just wanted your permission to send in a camera crew and get some blank passes. I want a little travelogue."

She shrugged. Then she said, "While you're at it, tell your cameraman to be sure and take some pictures of that dungeon. I want something to remind you with in case you get ideas of not coming through. Call it animal psychology." And she popped her bubble gum emphatically in his face.

Chapter 8

One week later, Madison called his staff together.

"I think we're all organized," he said. "I just want to tell you that if anybody flubs, he will be subjected to one or both of two penalties. He or she will be forced to take a dose of LSD and if the offense is very bad, the offender will be forced to have a psychiatric treatment. Is that understood?"

They squirmed. It must be pretty bad if the chief, a known murderer, looked that grim about it. They shivered, they went pale under their newly acquired tans. They said they understood.

"All right," said Madison. "It's all systems go!"

The five circus girls rushed off, got dressed as noble ladies.

Five air limousines took off, headed for five different social functions.

Five false identoplates that said, incontestable that they were noble ladies from distant Confederacy planets got them entrance to estates and ballrooms.

The PR war was on.

They had their orders. They had been drilled and drilled. They were to circulate amongst the guests and at any opportunity, talk about the marvelous new doctor from a planet of very advanced culture named Earth that had developed a marvelous thing called psychiatry. And would you believe it? The root of all mental disturbance was sex? Amazing! But he was curing people in droves. It was the latest thing, quite the rage.

For days and days, on and on, for dozens and then hundreds of soirees and balls and at homes, the whispering campaign pounded on.

The two officer-impersonators, dressed now in solemn scientific garb, attended on the heels of the circus girls, thoughtfully and conservatively confirmed the rumor and also brought Madison his feedback.

Madison, with a dungeon waiting, watched the cam­paign nervously.

Very few people, even on Earth, realized that psychiatry and psychology were just the creations of PR and had no other substance.

Freud's theory that everything was sex had remained scoffed at and neglected until he had married into a New York advertising firm and then the advertising men began to push it, and until this day sex was the dominant basis of all Earth advertising. The PR on psychoanalysis was so good that it overrode the fact that a third of the patients committed suicide in the first three months of treatment. And there were no cures of record.

Madison was following the general PR pattern psychiatry had pursued so successfully. He even had LSD available, a milestone of psychiatric success which had permitted it to capture no less than the head of the largest news magazine in America, make him an addict and convert him to the psychiatric cause. Loose, of Slime magazine, had thus become a primary crusader for psychiatry and LSD and a relentless hatchet man for any other technology that arose that psychiatry thought might constitute a threat.

Madison did a little praying when, at the end of ten days, it was announced that the famous psychiatrist would give a lecture to a very select few.

An auditorium on the eightieth floor had been made ready. Limousine after limousine arrived on the roof. Seat after seat was taken. Madison began to breathe more easily as he watched through a peephole.

Doctor Crobe, an electric collar hidden beneath his professional tunic neckband in case he departed from his coached speech, came to the platform and began to speak of the work of Sigmund Freud in the field of sex. It was a good speech. It should be: it was taken straight out of Freud, for Madison had found, much to his delight, that the old Soltan Gris office contained complete translated transcripts.

Crobe droned on. He had a small speaker in his ear that could prompt him if he forgot any part of the speech. He filled the air with ids and egos and censors. And then he got down to the nitty-gritty of it: if wives were dissatisfied sexually with their husbands, inhibitions could build up. The censor was only a thin veil at best, and with the least prompting, the terrible insanities which lurked below could burst out and bring terror. Everyone was inhibited. It all depended on whether one was sexually satisfied.

Applause greeted the lecture. It was not surprising. Most of the people attending were the wives of publishers and editors.

Then Doctor Crobe, as he was supposed to do, said that as a special favor, he would grant interviews that very afternoon to a favored few.

He got five.

They were taken to a room equipped as a hospital. The two actors, now garbed as medical technicians, took their pulse and weighed them and did other banal things. But they also looked into their mouths with a tongue depressor. And unbeknownst to the women, that tongue depressor had on it a small dose of LSD.

Madison held his breath. Lady Arthrite Stuffy was one. She was the wife of the publisher of the largest news-sheet in the land, the Daily Speaker, the one where he had first been rebuffed so cruelly.

Out of sight, but with everything on monitors, Madi­son watched the five being escorted to their interview rooms.

Lady Arthrite Stuffy, much younger than her husband, was led into the first room that Madison and Flick had earlier entered and turned on the black window.

The sacrificial altar had been covered with a velvet cloth. The room looked quite ordinary. The young woman, at the direction of the courteous medical technician and assisted now by one of the criminal whores garbed as a nurse, lay down on the block.

The other women were led into different rooms of the same nature.

Doctor Crobe entered the room of Lady Arthrite Stuffy. His collar was on remote control. He knew better than to depart from the arranged speech,

"Now just compose yourself," said Doctor Crobe. "Just lie there and go over all the rows you may have had with your husband. By doing so, we will penetrate the veil of the subconscious. If we can get back past the censor, we will then know what you are inhibiting. And we can clear away any latent neurosis or insanity. I will be back shortly."

The nurse remained, smiling a reassuring smile.

He went to each of the four remaining rooms and did the same.

Madison looked at his watch. The LSD would really bite in about an hour.

Doctor Crobe kept circulating, telling each one to think deeper about any husband troubles.

The hour was up.

Lady Arthrite Stuffy said to the nurse, "All this thinking is making me a little nauseated. My heart seems to speed up when I dwell upon the terrible arguments we have had."

It was the signal. Madison watched his monitor closely to be sure the subjective stage had been reached. He pointed at the electronics man beside him and gave a signal. The button was pressed.

In every LSD trip, two things were important: the first was the "set" or state of mind of the person; the second was the "setting," where the person was at the time of the trip.

The lecture and the directions to think of quarrels with the husband were the "set" and now came the "set­ting."