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| Cover by Richard Powers |
| THE MINDWARPERS Eric Frank Russell New York: Lancer Books, 1965 |
Rating: 4.5 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-0-? | ||||
| ASIN: B00102FP4I | 158pp. | SC | $0.50 | |
Why had he killed Arline?
Richard Bransome could not find a reason in his memory. He remembered the deed, all right — could not stop remembering it in vivid, gory detail: her cold, belittling nagging, his rage erupting, the heavy object in his hand, her collapsing to the floor in the house in Burleston. He remembered dragging her to his car, driving to a lonely stretch of road outside the town, burying the body under a large tree. It had all come back to him as he overheard a chance conversation in the cafe he frequented after work, about a 20-years-dead female corpse being found after a storm felled an ancient tree.
Bransome left at five, exchanged nods with the guards and started home. It had been a bad day, the lousiest day he could recall. Everything had gone wrong, nothing right. He seemed to have spent a large part of his time looking over his shoulder, beating away his fears and making unsatisfactory attempts to concentrate on his work. Ability to concentrate is the prime virtue in a scientific research establishment. How can a man do it with a death-cell depicted in his mind? Up to now he had suffered approximately twenty-four hours of nervous strain merely because a couple of truck drivers had gossiped about an unknown crime at some unspecified place near Burleston. The tree they had discussed was not necessarily his tree, the bones not necessarily those of his victim. It might be that belatedly someone else's misdeed had been brought to light. Right now the hounds might be in full cry after some other quarry. – Page 34 |
But the memories give Bransome no peace. The tranquility of his home life dissolves; his wife and son greet his return each evening with apprehension. In short order he is driven to take a leave of absence from his top-secret metallurgy work for the defense establishment. He journeys to Burleston, checks into a hotel. The next day he walks around town making discrete inquiries. No one remembers the crime he describes. He orders up copies of the local paper, goes through them year by year. Nothing turns up. Even a call to the town's police department (from a pay phone), posing as Arline's brother, produces no information on his crime.
There's a close parallel between Bransome and Major Bennett Marco, Frank Sinatra's character in The Manchurian Candidate (1962). The difference is that Marco was supposed to do specific things;3 Bransome and his absent colleagues are intended to stop doing something — namely working for the U.S. The way the gaggle of unsavory foreigners accomplishes this is fairly well worked out, and ingeniously plausible.
By now you should be forming a suspicion as to what's really going on. The clincher actually appears very early in the novel, when Bransome and a colleague discuss other men who have suddenly taken leave, quit for no good reason, or simply failed to show up one day.
Bransome's quest to learn about his crime, his gradual realization that it never happened, his run from the federal agent tailing him while locating and meeting another "dropout", and his quest to stop the men who messed with his mind, are what make the tale worth reading. Bransome is a bit too physical and impulsive for a scientist. Once he jumps from a speeding train1 to escape from the federal agent, and he barges into the bad guys' hideout armed with nothing but his fists.2 It's fairly standard Cold War cloak-and-dagger fare, not Russell's best work, but it's enjoyable. I give it next to top marks.
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