Wolf shrugged. "Who knows? This is very new stuff. I've played around with a little of it, but ... who knows? At any rate, we're going to assume that Britten has a fairly tough mind in order to get as far as he has. We'll assume this not only for his own sake, but for ours, because we are going to shake him loose from his present set of memories, and we want enough of his original memories left for us to assemble. Now suppose we begin."
Whitehead excused himself. There was work waiting in his laboratory, he said, and watched wistfully as the two disappeared into the therapy room.
Alma began switching on the apparatus, while Wolf called for Jim Britten to be brought in.
"Still going digging in my mind?" Britten wisecracked as he walked in, flanked by the ubiquitous Grady and Jones.
"With a steam shovel," Wolf replied, and motioned that Britten be strapped onto the table.
This time Wolf wasted no explanations. Without pausing he slipped Britten a preliminary shot and began fitting electrodes onto his head and arms.
"We're going back a long time, now," he said, quietly. "Remember back to the days before you started college. How old are you?"
Britten began dreaming off. "Sixteen years old. It was a hot summer. Kentucky in summer. Hot. Hot as a solar cycle ... hot as a bicycle down the road ... a tricycle down the toad ... doctor you look like a big pimply warty green-eyed toad...."
Morris Wolf waited until the drug-induced schizophrenic symptoms were well under way, then motioned for Alma Heller to send a sequence of high-frequency pulses through Britten's nervous system, breaking down synapses and destroying memory patterns. This, in combination with the drug, was intended to clear the mind of memories involving the period of time to which Britten's attention had been directed. In this period, Wolf guessed, the conditioning had taken place. If not, then he must try another period.