And Now the News (27 page)

“Now you knew perfectly well that I'd discover the alternate. So the first thing you do is call my attention to it, and the next thing you do is give me an argument about it, knowing I'd disagree with you, knowing that if there was any doubt in my mind, it would disappear in the argument.”

“Why on earth would I do a thing like that?” she challenged.

“I told you—so I'd get off the case—reset the P.T. and discharge him.”

“Damn it,” said Miss Thomas bitterly.

“That's the trouble with knowing too much about a colleague's thought processes,” he said into midair. “You can't manipulate somebody who understands you.”

“Which one of us do you mean?” she demanded.

“I really don't know. Now are you going to tell me why you tried this, or shall I tell you?”

“I'll tell you,” said Miss Thomas. “You're tired. I don't want anything to happen to that Anson. As soon as I found him, I knew exactly what would happen if you went ahead with Newell's therapy. Anson would be the intruder. I don't care how—how beautiful an intruder he might be, he could only show up as an aberration, something extraneous. You'd pack him down to pill size, and bury him so deep in a new-model Newell that he'd never see daylight again. I don't know how much consciousness he has, but I do know I couldn't bear to have him buried alive.

“And supposing you committed therapy on Anson alone, brought him up like a shiny young Billy Budd and buried that heel Newell—
if you'll pardon the unprofessional term, doctor—down inside him somewhere? You think Anson would be able to defend himself? You think he could take a lane in the big rat race? This world is no place for cherubim.

“So there isn't a choice. I don't know what Anson shares with Newell and I never will. I do know that however Anson has existed so far, it hasn't spoiled him, and the only chance he has to go on being what he is is to be left alone.”

“Quod erat demonstrandum,”
said the doctor, spreading his hands. “Very good. Now you know why I've never treated alternate ego cases. And perhaps you also know how useless your little machination was.”

“I had to be sure, that's all. Well, I'm glad. I'm sorry.”

He smiled briefly. “I follow that.” He watched her get up, her face softened by content and her admiration of him unconcealed.

She bent an uncharacteristically warm gaze on him and moved toward the door. She looked back once on the way, and once there, she stopped and turned to face him. “Something's the matter.”

There were, he knew, other ways to handle this, but at the moment he had to hurt something. There were several ways to do the hurt, and he chose the worst one, saying nothing.

Miss Thomas became Miss Thomas again, her eyes like one-way mirrors and her stance like a soldier. She looked out of herself at him and said, “You're going on with the therapy.”

He did not deny it.

“Are you going to tell me which one gets it?”

“Depends on what you mean by ‘gets it,' ” he said with grim jocularity.

She treated the bad joke as it deserved to be treated and simply waited for it to go away.

He said, “Both.”

She repeated the word in exactly his inflection, as though she could understand it better if it were as near as her own lips. Then she shook her head impatiently. “You can apply just so much therapy and then there's a choice to make.”

“There's this choice to make,” he said, in a constricted tone that
hurt his throat. “Newell lives in a society he isn't fit for. He's married to a woman he doesn't deserve. If it is in my power to make him more fit and more deserving, what is the ethical choice?”

Miss Thomas moved close to the desk. “You implied that you'd turned down cases like this before. You sent them back into society, untreated.”

“Once they sent lepers back untreated,” he snapped. “Therapy has to start somewhere, with someone.”

“Start it on rats first.”

I am, he said, fortunately to himself. He considered her remark further and decided not to answer it, knowing how deeply she must regret saying it.

She said, “Hildy Jarrell will quit when she finds this out.”

“She will not quit,” said the doctor immediately and positively.

“And as for me—”

“Yes?”

Their gazes locked like two steel rods placed tip to tip, pressing, pressing, knowing that some slight wavering, some side drift, must come and must make a break and a collision.

But instead she broke. She closed her eyes against tears and clasped her hand. “Please,” she whispered, “do you have to go through with this? Why? Why?”

Oh, God, he thought. I hate this. “I can't discuss it.” That, he thought painfully, is altogether the truth.

She said heavily, “I don't think you should.” He knew it was her last word.

“It is a psychological decision, Miss Thomas, and not a technological one.” He knew it was unfair to fall back on rank and specialty when he no longer had an argument he could use. But this had to stop.

She nodded. “Yes, doctor.” She went out, closing the door too quietly. He thought, What do you have to be to a person so you can run after someone crying, “Come back! Come back! Don't hate me! I'm in trouble and I hurt!”

It took Miss Jarrell about forty minutes to get to the office. The doctor had figured it at about thirty-five. He was quite ready for her.

She knocked with one hand and turned the knob with the other and flew in like an angry bee. Her face was flushed and there was a little pale tension line parenthesizing each nostril. “Doctor—”

“Ah, Miss Jarrell,” he said with a huge joviality. “I was just about to call you. I need your help for a special project.”

“Well, I'm sorry about
that
,” she began. Her eyes were wide and aflame, and the rims were slightly pink. He wished he could magic a few minims of azacyclonol into her bloodstream; she could use it. “I've come to—”

“The Newell case—”

“Yes, the Newell case. I don't think—”

He had almost to shout this time. “And
I
think you're just the one for the job. I want the 200-cycle entity—you know, Anson—I want him educated.”

“Well, I think it's just—
what?
” And as the angry syllable ricocheted around the office, she stared at him and asked timidly, “I beg your pardon?”

“I'd like to relieve you of your other duties and put you with Anson full time. Would you like that?”

“Would I like … what will I do?”

“I want to communicate with him. He needs a vocabulary and he needs elementary instruction. He probably doesn't know how to hold a fork or blow his nose. I think you can do a good job of teaching him.”

“Well, I—why I'd love to!”

“Good. Good,” he said like a department store Santa Claus. “Just a few details. I'll want every minute on sound film, from white noise to white noise, and I'll want to review the film every day. And, of course, I'd have to ask you not to discuss this with anyone, on or off the staff. It's a unique case and a new therapy, and a lot depends on it. On you.”

“Oh, you can depend on me, doctor!”

He nodded in agreement. “We'll start tomorrow morning. I'll have the first word lists and other instructions ready for you by then.
Meanwhile, I've got some research to do. Contact the Medical Information Service in Washington and have them key in ‘Prince, Morton,' and ‘Personality, Multiple,' on their Big Brain. I want abstracts of everything that has been published in the last fifty years on the subject. No duplicates. An index. Better order microfilm and send it by telefax, AA priority.”

“Yes, doctor,” said Miss Jarrell eagerly. “Foreign publications too?”

“Everything any researcher has done. And put a Confidential on the order as well as the delivery.”

“
Really
secret.”

“Really.” He concealed the smile which struggled to show itself; in his mind, he had seen the brief image of a little girl hiding jellybeans. “And get me the nurses' duty list. I have some juggling to do.”

“Very well, doctor. Is that all?”

“All for now.”

She nearly skipped to the door. He saw a flash of white as she opened it; Miss Thomas was standing in the outer office. He could not have been more pleased if she had been there by his explicit orders, for Miss Jarrell said, as she went out, “And thank you, doctor—thank you
very
much.”

Chew on that, Thomas, he thought, feeling his own small vindictiveness and permitting himself to enjoy it for once.

And: Why am I jumping on Thomas?

Well, because I have to jump on somebody once in a while and she can take it.

Why don't I tell her everything? She has a good head. Might have some really good ideas. Why not?

“Why not?” he asked again into a joyless void. “Because I could be wrong. I could be so wrong. That's why not.”

The research began, and the long night work. In addition to the vast amount of collateral reading—there was much more material published on the subject of multiple personality than he had realized—he had each day's film to analyze, notes to make, abstracts to prepare for computer coding, and then, after prolonged thought,
the next day's lessons to outline.

The rest of the clinic refused to stop and wait for this job to be done, and he had an additional weight of conscience as he concealed his impatience with everything else but the Newell case. He was so constituted that such a weight made him over-meticulous in the very things he wished to avoid, so that his ordinary work took more time rather than less.

As for the research, much of it was theory and argumentation; the subject, like reincarnation, seemed to attract zealots of the most positive and verbose varieties, both pro and con. Winnowing through the material, he isolated two papers of extreme interest to him. One was a theory, one an interim report on a series of experiments which had never been completed due to the death of the researcher.

The theory, advanced by one Weisbaden, was based on a search through just such material as this. Indeed, Weisbaden seemed to have been the only man besides himself who had ever asked the Medical Information Service for this complete package.

From it, he had abstracted statistics, weighed them to suit his theory, and come up with the surprising opinion that multiple personality was a twinning phenomenon, and that if a method were found for diagnosing all such cases, a correspondence would be found between the incidence of multiple births and the incidence of multiple personalities. So many births per thousand are twins, so many per hundred thousand are triplets, and the odds with quads and quints are in the millions.

So, too, said Weisbaden, would be the statistical expectation for the multiple personality phenomenon, once such cases stopped being diagnosed as schizoids and other aberrants.

Weisbaden had not been a medical man—he was some sort of actuary—but his inference was fascinating. How many twins and triplets walked the Earth in single bodies without any organic indication that they were not single entities? How many were getting treatment for conditions they did not have; how many Siamese twins were being penalized because they would not walk like other quadrupeds; how many separate entities were being forced to spend their lives in lockstep?

Some day, thought the doctor—as so many doctors have thought before—some day, when we can get closer to the genetic biologists, when psychology becomes a true science, when someone devises a cross-reference system between the disciplines which really works … and some day, when I have the time—well, maybe I could test this ingenious guess. But it's only a guess, based on neither observation nor experiment. Intriguing though—if only it could be tested.

The other paper was of practical value. A certain Julius Marx—again not a medical man, but a design engineer with, apparently, hobbies—had built an electro-encephalograph for two (would anyone ever write a popular song about
that?
) which graphed each of the patients through a series of stimuli, and at the same time drew a third graph, a resultant.

Marx was after a means of determining brain wave types, rather than individual specimens, and had done circuitry on machines which would handle up to eight people at once. In a footnote, with dry humor, he had qualified his paper for this particular category: “Perhaps one day the improbable theories of Dr. Prince might approach impossibility through the use of such a device upon a case of multiple personality.”

Immediately on reading this, the doctor ordered EEGs on both Anson and Newell, and when he had both before him, he wished fervently that Julius Marx had been there with him; he suspected that the man enjoyed a good laugh, even on himself.

The graphs were as different as such graphs can possibly be.

The confirmation of his diagnosis was spectacular, and he left a note for Miss Jarrell to track down every multiple personality case he had rejected for the past eight years and see what could be done about some further tests. What would come after the tests, he did not know—yet.

The other valuable nudge he got from the Marx paper was the idea of a resultant between two dissimilar electro-encephalograms. He made one from the Newell-Anson EEGs—without the use of anything as Goldbergian as Marx's complicated device, but with a simple computer coupling. He kept it in his top desk drawer, and every few days he would draw it out and he would wonder …

Therapy for Anson wasn't therapy. Back at the very beginning, Miss Thomas had said that his was a personality that wouldn't dismantle; she had been quite right. You can't get episodic material from an entity which has had no subjective awareness, no experience, which has no name, no sense of identity, no motility, no recall.

There were many parts to that strange radiance of Anson's and they were all in the eye of the beholder, who protected Anson because he was defenseless, who was continually amazed at his unself-consciousness as if it were an attribute rather than a lack. His discovery of the details of self and surroundings was a never-ending delight to watch, because he himself was delighted and had never known the cruel penalties we impose on expressed delight, nor the masking with idioms we use instead:
Not a bad sunset there. Yeah. Real nice
.