The Key to Midnight

ago.'
        'While you think,' said Omi Inamura, 'I'll see what I can do with her.'
        For thirty minutes the doctor strove to break down the memory block. He cajoled and argued and reasoned with Joanna; he used humor and discipline and logic; he demanded, asked, pleaded; he pried and probed and thrust and picked at her resistance.
        Nothing worked. She continued to answer with those same six words, grating them out in a tone of barely contained rage: 'Tension, apprehension, and dissension have begun.'
        For a while Alex stood at the cage, eye to eye with the myna. It was a small bird, but its stare was fierce. Most of the time, the myna worked its orange beak without producing any sound, but once it said, 'Nevermore,' as though it were perched on a plaster bust above a study door, lamenting Poe's lost Lenore.
        Alex wondered why the myna spoke in English rather than in Japanese. Omi Inamura spoke English well, but with most of his patients, he would converse in his native language.
        'Freud,' said the myna. 'Freud. Fly away.'
        The creature's speech was simple mimicry, of course; it didn't understand anything it said. Still, Alex was intrigued by the quick intelligence in its eyes, and he wondered what thoughts went through the mind of a bird. Somewhere he'd read that birds were descended from flying reptiles. Although the myna was cute and appealing, its basically reptilian view of the world was most likely cold, strange, and utterly alien. If he'd been able to read its mind, no doubt he'd have recoiled in horror and disgust from-
        Read its mind.
        Mind reading.
        Telepathy.
        Tension, apprehension, and dissension have begun.
        'I've got it,' he said, turning away from the bird and hurrying back to the circle of armchairs. 'The line. It's from a science fiction novel.' He sat down on the edge of his chair. 'I read it years and years ago.'
        'What's the title?' Inamura asked.
         'The Demolished Man.'
        'You're certain?'
        'Absolutely. It's a classic of the genre. When I was young, I read a lot of science fiction. It was the perfect escape from… well, from everything.'
        'Do you remember the author?'
        'Alfred Bester.'
        'And the line Joanna keeps repeating? What's the significance of it?'
        Alex closed his eyes and cast his mind back into his childhood, when the covers of books had been doors through which he escaped to far places where there had been no monsters as terrible as drunken and abusive parents. He could see the futuristic artwork on the paperback almost as clearly as if he'd held it in his hands only a week ago.
        'The novel's set a few hundred years in the future, during a time when the police use telepathy to enforce the law. They're mind readers. It's impossible for anyone to commit murder and get away with it in the society Bester envisions, but there's one character who's determined to kill someone and escape punishment. He finds a way to conceal his incriminating innermost thoughts. To prevent the telepathic detectives from reading his guilt in his own mind, he mentally recites a cleverly constructed, infectious jingle while retaining the ability to concentrate on other things at the same time. The monotonous repetition of the jingle acts like a shield to deflect the snooping telepaths.'
        Inamura said, 'And one of the lines he recites is "Tension, apprehension, and dissension have begun." '
        'Yeah.'
        "Then if there is an answering sentence that will dispose of Joanna's memory block, it's almost certainly another line of that jingle. Do you remember the rest of it?'
        'No,' Alex said. 'We'll have to get the book. I'll call my office in Chicago and have someone track down a copy. We-'
        'That might not be necessary,' Dr. Inamura said. 'If the novel is a classic in its field, there's a good chance it's been translated into Japanese. I'll be able to obtain it from a bookstore here or from a man I know who deals in rare and out-of-print titles.'
        That put an end to their first session. There was no point in continuing until Inamura had a copy of The Demolished Man. Once more the doctor turned his attention to Joanna. He told her that upon waking she'd remember all that had transpired between them - and would be more easily hypnotized the next time that he treated her.
        'In fact,' Inamura told her, 'in the