Wolf threw his second punch immediately. "Tell Jones to cut me loose," he demanded.
"Cut him loose," Britten echoed, in bewilderment.
After an interminable interval, Jones laid down his gun, found his knife, opened it, and slashed the cords from Wolf's arms. Wolf's muscles were already tensed. He snatched Jones' gun, lurched forward, and even as Britten's mouth opened to countermand his order, he slugged Britten with the butt of the pistol, hitting him viciously and hard until he lay unconscious on the floor.
Then he said to Grady, "You'd better get us back to the hospital," keeping the gun in his hand.
But Grady and Jones made no trouble. With Britten out of the picture they obeyed the one obviously in command. Poor boys, Wolf thought. Now they were in need of therapy.
As the hospital hove into view, he said to Alma Heller, "We have just seen the real beginning of psychological warfare. Where it took us a whole roomful of equipment to condition Britten's responses to a trigger word, he was able to do it to Jones and Brady single-handed. His method is something we'd like to know. But more than that, Britten himself was conditioned to respond to a signal unknown to us and undetected by us. My God, it could only have been telepathic!"
Alma Heller's eyes closed for a moment.
"I think," she said, "that psychiatrists are going to reach the same position that physicists did during World War II."
Morris Wolf looked dourly out of the window, watching the hospital balloon up under the helicopter.
"That's the most unpleasant thing anybody has said all day," he replied.