False Memory

objects as weapons, swashbuckling your way through the house until you’re shot down.”
    This nice bit of work with the actor was a contract job, which the doctor was obligated to accept from time to time. This was the price he paid to be permitted to employ his control techniques for personal entertainment, with little or no fear of imprisonment in the event that any of his games went awry.
    If this had been one of his private amusements, the scenario would not have been this simple. In spite of the lack of complexity, however, this little game had a high fun factor.
    After programming the actor to have no accessible memory of what transpired between them here this evening, Ahriman led him into the living room of the suite.
    Originally, the doctor had intended to spend at least an hour dictating semicoherent psychotic rants while the actor entered them into his personal, handwritten journal as if they were his own dark fantasies. They had done this during a few previous sessions, and almost two hundred pages of feverish paranoid terror, bitter hatred, and doomsday prophecies—virtually all related to the President of the United States—filled the first half of the journal. The actor would remember writing none of this and would open the journal only when instructed to do so by his psychiatrist; however, following the assault on the presidential nose, once the prep had been gunned down, the authorities would discover this heinous document buried under the collection of souvenir panties that the movie star had talked off the legions of women whom he had seduced.
    Now, troubled by the Rhodeses’ commando-style removal of Skeet from the clinic, Ahriman chose to skip dictation this time. The existing two hundred pages would be sufficiently convincing both to FBI agents and the nation’s tabloid readers.
    Taking direction well, the actor rolled back into a headstand against the living-room wall opposite the television, as nimble as an adolescent gymnast twenty years his junior.
    “Begin counting,” Ahriman said.
    When the actor reached ten, he returned from the mind chapel to full consciousness. As far as he was aware, his psychiatrist had just now entered the room.
    “Mark? What’re you doing here at this hour?”
    “I was in the building for another patient. What’re you doing?”
    “I spend about an hour a day in this position. Good for brain circulation.”
    “The results are obvious.”
    “They are, huh?” the movie star beamed, upside down.
    Counseling himself to have patience, the doctor engaged in ten minutes of excruciatingly boring conversation regarding the huge box-office receipts pouring in from the actor’s current megahit, giving the subject something to remember from this visit. When finally he left Room 246, he knew far more than he cared to know about typical attendance patterns at mall theaters in the greater Chicago area.
    The famous actor. He bites democracy’s nose. And the millions cheer.
    Not great but much better. Work on that one.

     
     
    With January wind blustering outside and fields of electronic crickets humming inside, Dusty activated Skeet with the name Dr. Yen Lo.
    The kid sat up a little straighter at the table, his pale face becoming so expressionless that Dusty only now realized how subtly anguished it had been before. This observation sharpened the ever-present sorrow that he felt over the fact that his brother had been robbed, so young, of a full and purposeful life.
    When they went through the haiku and Skeet’s three responses, Fig Newton said, “Exactly,” as if he knew about such psychological control mechanisms.
    Minutes ago, in a hurried consultation in Fig’s library—a small bedroom filled with books about UFOs, alien abductions, spontaneous human combustion, cross-dimensional beings, and the Bermuda Triangle—Dusty had outlined for Martie the effects he hoped to achieve with Skeet. What he proposed seemed fraught with risk to Skeet’s already fragile psychological condition, and he worried that he would do more damage than good. To his surprise, Martie at once embraced his plan. He trusted her common sense more than he trusted the sun to rise in the east, so with her endorsement, he was prepared to take the awful responsibility for the consequences of his plan.
    Now, with Skeet accessed and his eyes jiggling as they had jiggled at New Life Clinic, Dusty said, “Tell me if you can hear my voice, Skeet.”
    “I can hear your voice.”
    “Skeet... when I give you instructions, will