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The Mindwarpers
By Eric Frank Russell
1965

WARNING: LOCK YOUR BRAIN
The government's most vital scientific laboratory. No enemy could steal its secrets, because no enemy could possibly get in.
But men's minds were another matter.
It began with key scientists leaving-just quitting their jobs and drifting away. Then master metallurgist Richard Bransome began to remember a past he had completely forgotten--a past in which he had been a cold-blooded murderer. And he set out on a strange, solitary mission to learn the facts-the facts about himself, and the facts about America's most incredible enemy.
But how could he do either... when he couldn't even trust his own sanity?
Eric Frank Russell, England's great science-fiction writer, returns in this book to the kind of theme he explored in his classic Sinister Barrier and Dreadful Sanctuary. The result is an astonishing tour de force of science and suspense.

WHY HAD HE KILLED ARLINE?
The details of that act now shone vividly in his memory as if embossed thereon a few days ago rather than twenty years back. But on preceding and subsequent events he was decidedly hazy.
What had been her hold over him? A theft? An armed robbery? An embezzlement or a forgery?
Wearily he rubbed his forehead, knowing that intense nervous strain can play hob with rational thought. Was some latent abnormality-first evident twenty years ago-now reasserting itself? Was he as sane as he believed himself to be?
He didn't know about THE MINDWARPERS . . . yet.


COMPLETE AND UNABRIDGED
THE MINDWARPERS
Eric Frank Russell
LANCER BOOKS
NEW YORK
A LANCER BOOK • 1965
THE MINDWARPERS
Copyright © 1966 by Lancer Books, Inc.
All rights reserved Printed in the U.S.A.
LANCER BOOKS, INC. • 185 MADISON AVE. • NEW YORK, N.Y. 10016



ONE
The governmental research establishment, the very heart of the country's scientific effort, was huge and formidable by any standard, even that of the technological twentieth century. By comparison, Fort Knox and Alcatraz, the Bastille and the Kremlin were as frontier forts built with wood logs. Yet it was vulnerable. Hostile eyes had examined what little could be seen of it, hostile minds had carefully considered what little was known about it, after which the entire complex became less safe than a moth-eaten tent.
The outer wall stood forty feet high. It was eight feet thick, of granite blocks sealed and faced with aluminous cement. Satin-smooth, there wasn't a toe-hold on it, not even for a spider. Beneath the base of the wall, thirty-six feet down, ran a sensitive microphone system, wired in duplicate, intended to thwart any human moles who might try to burrow their way inside. Those who had designed the wall had been firmly convinced that fanatics are capable of anything and that nothing was too far-fetched to justify counter-measures.
In the great length of this quadrilateral wall were only two breaks, a narrow one at the front for the entry and exit of personnel, a wider one at the back for trucks bringing supplies or removing products. Both gaps were protected by three forty-ton hardened steel doors, as massive as dock gates, mechanically operated and incapable of standing open more than one at a time. Each door was attended by its own squad of guards, big, tough, sour-faced men who in the opinion of all those who had dealings with them had been specially chosen for their mean, suspicious natures.
Exit was less difficult than entry. Invariably armed with a pass-out permit, the departer merely suffered the delay of waiting for each door to close behind him before the one in front could open. Movement in the opposite direction, inward, was the real chore. If one were an employee well-known to the guards one could get through subject to tedious waits at three successive doors plus a possible check on whether one's pass-the pattern of which was changed at unpredictable intervals-bore the current design.
But the stranger had it tough no matter how high his rank, important his bearing or authoritative the documents he presented. He would certainly suffer a long and penetrating inquisition at the hands of the first squad of guards. If his questioners were not thoroughly satisfied-and most times they were satisfied with nothing in heaven or on earth-the visitor was likely to be searched right down to the skin. Any protest on his part usually resulted in the search being extended to include close inspection of his physical apertures. Anything found that was deemed suspicious, superfluous, unreasonable, inexplicable or not strictly necessary for the declared purpose of the visit was confiscated on the spot and returned to the owner when he took his departure.
And that was only the first stage of this bureaucratic purgatory. At the next door the second squad of guards specialized in concocting objections to entry not thought up by the first guards. Its members were not above belittling the security consciousness and search proficiency of the first guards and insisting upon a second "more expert" search. This could and sometimes did include removal of the dental plates and careful examination of the naked mouth, a tactic inspired by the known development of a camera the size of a cigarette's filter-tip.
Guard squad number three had the worst skeptics of the lot. Its members had an infuriating habit of detaining twice-passed incomers while they checked with squads one and two was to whether this, that or the other question had been asked and, if so, what replies had been given. They had a tendency to doubt the truth of some replies, throw scorn upon the plausibility of others and seek contradictions over which they could foam at the mouth. Full details of searches were often demanded by them and any omission in search-technique was made good then and there even if the victim had to strip himself stark naked for the third time in thirty minutes. Guard squad number three also possessed but seldom used an X-ray machine, a polygraph, a stereoscopic camera, a fingerprinting outfit and several other sinister devices.
The great protective wall surrounding the plant was in keeping with what lay within. Offices, departments, machine shops and laboratories were rigidly compartmentalized with steel doors and stubborn guards blocking the way from one well-defined area to another. Each self-contained section was identified by the color of its corridors and doors, the higher up the spectrum the greater the secrecy and priority in security assigned to a given area.
Workers in yellow-door areas were not allowed to pass through blue doors. Toilers behind blue doors could "go slumming" as they called it by entering a yellow or lower priority area but were strictly forbidden to stick their noses the other side of purple doors. Not even the security guards could go beyond a black door without a formal invitation from the other side. Only the black-area men and the President and God Almighty could amble around other sections as they pleased and explore the entire plant.
Throughout the whole of this conglomeration ran its intricate nervous system in the form of wires buried in the walls, ceilings and, in some cases, under the floors; wires linking up with general alarm-bells and sirens, door-locking mechanisms, delicate microphones and television-scanners. All the watching and listening was done by black-area snoopers. The plant's inmates had long accepted the necessity of being continually heard and seen even when in the toilet-for where better than the little room in which to memorize, copy or photo-»ph classified data?
Such trouble, ingenuity, and expense was useless from the viewpoint of outside and unfriendly eyes. The place was, in fact, a veritable Singapore, wide open to attack from an unseen and unexpected quarter. There was no good reason why its weak spot should have passed by unobserved except, perhaps, that the apprehensive can be so finicky as to overlook the obvious.
In spite of hints and forewarnings the obvious was overlooked. The people at the top of the research center's plant were highly qualified experts, each in his own field and therefore ignorant of other fields. The chief bacteriologist could talk for hours about a new and virulent germ without knowing whether Saturn has two moons or ten. The head of the ballistics department could draw graphs of complicated trajectories without being able to say whether an okapi belongs to the deer, horse, or giraffe family. The entire place was crammed with experts of every kind save one-the one who could see and understand a broad hint when it became visible.
For example, nobody found any significance in the fact that while the plant's employees bore security measures, searchings and snoopings with resigned fortitude, most of them detested the color-area system. Color had become a prestige symbol. The yellow-area man considered himself downgraded with respect to his blue-area counterpart even though getting the same salary. The man who worked behind red doors viewed himself as several cuts above a white-door man. And so on.
Women, always the socially conscious sex, boosted this attitude to the utmost. Female workers and the wives of male workers adopted in their outside relations a farmyard pecking-order based upon the color of the area in which they or their husbands worked. The wives of black-area workers were tops and proud of it; those of white-area men were bottom and riled by it. The sweet smile and cooing voice and feline display of claws was the normal form of greeting among them.
Such a state of affairs was accepted by all and sundry as "just one of those things." But it was not just one of those things; it was direct evidence that the plant was occupied and operated by human beings who were not robots made of case-hardened steel. The absent expert-a topflight psychologist-could have recognized this fact with half an eye even though he might not know a venturi-tube from a rocket nose-cap.
That was where the real weakness lay: not in concrete, granite or steel, not in mechanisms or electronic devices, not in routines or precautions or paperwork, but in flesh and blood.
* * *
Haperny's resignation caused more irritation than alarm. Forty-two years old, dark-haired and running slightly to fat, he was a red-area expert specializing in high-vacuum phenomena. All who knew him regarded him as clever, hard-working, conscientious and as emotional as a plaster statue. So far as was known little interested Haperny beyond his work. The fact that he was a stodgy and determined bachelor was considered proof that he had nothing for which to live outside of his work.