And Now the News (25 page)

She was wrong, of course.
Oh, God
, he thought,
she's wrong, isn't she?

He opened the door.

Miss Jarrell did not see him. He watched for a long moment, then said, just loud enough to be heard over the soft thrumming of the 200-cycle note from the speakers, “Don't stop, Miss Jarrell. I'd like to see a little more of this.”

Miss Jarrell flung up a scarlet face.

The doctor said again, quietly but with great force, “Go on, please.”

She turned away to the bed, her back held with a painful rigidity and her ears, showing through her hair, looking like the tips of bright little tongues.

“It's all
right
,” soothed the doctor. “It's all right, Miss Jarrell. You'll see him again.”

She made a soft sound with her nostrils, grinned ruefully and went to the controls. She set one of them for the patient's allotted sleep-command frequency and hit the master switch. There was a gentle explosion of sound—“white” noise, a combination of all audio frequencies, which served to disorient the dismantled patient, his reflexive obedience attempting to respond to all commands at once—for ten seconds, and then it automatically faded, leaving the 550-cycle “sleep” note. The patient's face went blank and he lay back slowly, his eyes closing. He was asleep before his head reached the pillow.

The doctor stood suspended in thought for some time. Miss Jarrell gently arranged the patient's blanket. It was not done dutifully nor as part of the busyness of waiting for his next move. For some reason, it touched the doctor deeply and pulled him out of his reverie. “Let's have the P.T., Miss Jarrell.”

“Yes, doctor.” She consulted the index and carefully set the controls. At his nod, she touched the master switch. Again the white noise, and the deep moo of the 80-cycle tone.

The P.T.—pretherapeutic—personality would be retained untouched throughout the treatment, right up until the final setting process in the psychostat, except, of course, for the basic posthypnotic command which kept all segments under control of the audio spectrum. The doctor watched the sleeping face and was aware of a most unprofessional desire to have something other than that untouched P.T. appear.

He glanced at Miss Jarrell without turning his head. She should leave now, and ordinarily she would. But she was not behaving ordinarily just now.

The patient's eyes half-opened and stayed that way for a time. It was like the soft startlement of a feline which is aware of something, undecided whether the something deserves more attention than sleep, and therefore simply waits, armed and therefore relaxed.

Then he saw the eyes move, though the lids did not. Then was the feline taking stock, but deluding its enemies into thinking it still drowsy. The man changed like an aurora, which is ever the same while you watch, but something quite different if you look away and
look back again.
I think in analogies
, the doctor chided himself,
when I don't like the facts
.

“Well, Freddy boy,” drawled Richard A. Newell.

Behind him, he heard Miss Jarrell's almost inaudible sigh and her brisk quiet footsteps as she turned on the speech recorder, crossed the room and closed the door behind her.

Newell said, “Nurse is an odd term for a woman built like that. How you doing, Freddy?”

“Depends,” said the doctor.

Newell sat up and stretched. He waved at the red eye of the recorder. “Everything I say is taken down and may be used against me, hm?”

“Everything is used, yes. Not—”

“Oh, spare me the homilies, Fred. Transcribe them yourself, do you?”

“I—no.” As he caught Newell's thought, and knew exactly the kind of thing the man was going to do next, he felt himself filling up with impotent rage. It did not show.

“Fine, fine.” Projecting his voice a bit, Newell said over an elaborate yawn, “Haven't waked up like this since I was a kid. You know, disoriented, wondering for a moment where I was. Last bed I was in wasn't so lonesome. Missed thirty of those last forty winks, the way she was all over me. ‘Dick, oh, Dick, please …' ” he mimicked cruelly. “Told her to shut up and get breakfast.”

He laughed outright, obviously not at anything he had said, but at the writhing silent thing within the doctor, which he could not see but knew must be there.

He glanced again at the pilot light on the recorder and said, “Mentioning no names, of course,” and the doctor understood immediately that names would be mentioned, places, dates and interrelationships, whenever Newell chose … which would be when the suspense ceased to entertain him. Meanwhile, the doctor could prepare himself for the behind-the-back gossip, the raised eyebrows of the transcribing typist, the after-hours debates as to the ethical position on a doctor's practicing on the man who had … who was …

The sequence spiraled down to a low level of his personal inferno
and flickered there, hot and smokeless.

“You didn't tell me,” said Newell. “How you doing? Find the secret of my success yet?”

The doctor shrugged easily, which was not easy to do. “We haven't begun.”

“Thought not.” Newell snorted. “By the time you're finished, you won't have begun, either.”

“Why do you say that?”

“I extrapolate it. I come here, you give me a shot of knockout drops, I get a sound sleep and wake up rested and cheerful. Otherwise, nothing. Yet I know that you've taken my slumbering corpus, poked it, prodded it, checked in it and wrung it out, tooted on your tooters, punched cards and clicked out four miles of computer tapes—for what? I'm still me, only rested up a little.”

“How do you know we did all that?”

“I read the papers.” When the doctor made no reply, Newell laughed again. “You and your push-button therapy.” He looked up in recall, as if reading words off the ceiling. “What's the claim—82% of your patients cured?”

“Modulated.”

“Pretty word, modulated. Pretty percentage, too. What kind of a sieve do you use?”

“Sieve?”

“Don't tell me you don't select your patients!”

“No, we take them as they come.”

“Ha. You talk like the Lysenkoists. Remember them? Russian genetics experts fifty years back. They claimed results like that. They claimed nonselective methodology, too, even when some of the people supposed to be breeding split-kernel corn were seen splitting the kernels with a knife. Even the Communists rejected them after a while.” He flicked a wolfish glance at the recorder and grinned. “But then,” he said clearly, “no Communist would reject
you
, Freddy.”

Of the four possible responses which came to him, the doctor could find none that would sound unlike a guilty protest, so he said nothing. Newell's widening grin informed him that his silence was just as bad.

“Ah, Fred, m'boy, I know you. I know you well. I knew a lot
about you five years ago and I've learned a lot more since.” He touched the dark wiry tuft between his collarbones. “Like, for example, you haven't a single hair on your chest. Or so I've been told.”

Again the doctor used silence as a rejoinder. He could examine his feelings later—he knew he would; he inescapably must. For now, he knew that any answer would fall into Newell's quiver as new arrows. Silence was a condition Newell could not maintain or tolerate; silence made Newell do the talking, take the offensive … inform on and expose his own forces. Silence Newell could use only sometimes; words, always.

Newell studied him for a moment and then, apparently deciding that in order to return to a target, it was necessary to leave it temporarily, looked at the compact control panel. “I've read a lot about that. Push one button, I'm a fighting engine. Push another, I lie down with the lamb. Who was it once said humanity will evolve into a finger and a button, and every time the finger wants anything, it will push the button—and that will be the end of humanity, because the finger will get too damn lazy to push the button?” He wagged his head. “You're going to gadget yourself clear out of a living, Fred.”

“Did you read what was written over the entrance when you came here?” the doctor asked.

“I noticed there was something there,” said Newell amiably, “and no, I didn't read it. I assumed it was some saw about the sanctity of the personality, and I knew I'd get all I could stand of that from you and your acolytes.”

“Then I think you ought to know a little more about what you call ‘push-button therapy,' Newell. Hypnosis isn't therapy and neither is the assigned audio-response technique we use. Hypnosis gives us access to the segments of personality and creates a climate for therapy, and that's all. The therapy itself stands or falls on the ability of the therapist, which is true of my school as it is of all others short of the lobotomists.”

“Well, well, well. I goaded a real brag out of you at last. I didn't know you had it in you.” Newell chuckled. “82% effective and you do it all your little self. Now ain't you something? Tell me, able therapist, how do you account for the 18% who get by you?”

“Why do you want to know?”

“I might alter the figures for you. Who are these sturdy souls?”

“Organic defectives,” said the doctor.
And certain others …
but he kept that to himself.

Newell shouted, “Touché!” and fell back with a roar of appreciative laughter. But the doctor saw his eyes close before he closed them, little windows with all the faces of hate looking out.

The doctor was delighted. He braced himself for the reaction against his own pleasure which he could always expect from his austere professionalism, but it did not come. He put this fact away with the others he knew he must examine later.

Newell was saying, “You can't have it both ways, Fred. About hypnosis not being therapy, I mean. What's this I heard somewhere about certain frequencies having certain effects, no matter who you are?”

“Oh, that. Yes, some parts of the audio spectrum do affect most people. The subsonics—fourteen to around twenty cycles, for example, if you use enough amplitude—they scare people. And beat frequencies between two tones, where the beat approaches the human pulse, sometimes have peculiar psychological effects. But these are byways, side phenomena. We use the ones we can rely on and ignore or avoid the others. Audio frequencies happen to be convenient, accurate and easy for patients and therapists to identify.

“But they're not essential. We could probably do the same thing with spoken commands or a spectrum of odors. Audio is best, though; the pure electronic tone is unfamiliar to most people and so has no associations except the ones we give it. That's why we don't use 60-cycles—the hum you're surrounded by all your life from AC devices.”

“And what about if you're tone-deaf?” asked Newell, with an underlay of gloating which could only mean that he was talking about himself.

“Nobody's that tone-deaf, except the organic defectives.”

“Oh,” said Newell disappointedly, then returned to the half-sneering search for information. “And so the patient walks out of here prepared for the rest of his life to go into a state of estrus every time an English horn sounds A-440?”

“You know better than that,” retorted the doctor, for once not concealing his impatience. “That's what the psychostat is for. Every frequency the patient responds to is recorded there—” he waved at the controls—“along with its intensity. These are analyzed by a computer and compared by another one with a pattern which shows which segments are out of line—like too much anger or unwarranted fear, in terms of the patient's optimum. The psychostat applies dampers on the big ones and amplifies the atrophied ones until the response matches the master pattern. When every segment is at optimum—the patient's, mind you; no one else's—the new pattern is fixed by an overall posthypnotic which removes every other suggestion that has been applied.”

“So the patient
does
go out of here hypnotized!”

“He walks in here hypnotized,” said the doctor. “I'm surprised at you, Newell. For a man who knows so much about my specialty, you shouldn't need to be lectured on the elementals.”

“I just like the sound of your voice,” Newell said acidly, but the acid was dilute. “What do you mean, the patient walks in here hypnotized?”

“Most people are, most of the time. In the basic sense, a man is under hypnosis whenever any one of his senses does not respond to a present stimulus, or when his attention is diverted even slightly from his physical surroundings. You're under hypnosis when you read a book, or when you sit and think and don't see what you're staring at, or when you bark your shin on a coffee table you didn't see under bright lights.”

“That's so much hairsplitting.” Newell didn't even pause before his next sentence, which came from quite a different area than his scoffing incredulity. “Why didn't you tell me all this when I said I couldn't be hypnotized?”

“I preferred to believe you when you said you knew it all.”

Every pretense of joviality disappeared. “Listen, you,” Newell grated, in the ugliest tone of voice the doctor had ever heard, “you better watch what you are doing.”

It was time again for silence and the doctor used it. He gave Newell no choice but to lie there and stare at his own words. He
watched the man regaining his poise, laboriously, hand over hand, then resting, testing, waiting to be sure he could speak again.

“Well,” Newell said at length, and the doctor almost admired him for the smoothness of his tone, “it's been fun so far and it'll wind up more so. If you really can do what you say, I'll make it right with you, Freddy boy. I'll really pay off.”

“That's nice,” said the doctor guardedly.

“Nice? Just nice? Man, I'll give you a treasure you couldn't get any other way.
You
could never get,” he amended. He looked up into the doctor's face brightly. “Nearly five solid years a-building and it's all yours. Me, I'll start a new one.”