And Now the News (30 page)

They stood watching the patient. They were panting with tension.

“Help me with this,” said the doctor. Together, he and Miss Thomas unbuckled the restraining sheet. They cleared away the flashgun, the cymbals, and readjusted the bed-raising control to its normal slow operation.

“He's all right, physically anyway,” said the doctor after a swift examination. “I told you it would work if we got basic enough. He
wouldn't fear a lion because he doesn't know what a lion is. But restraint and sudden noise and falling—he doesn't have to know what they are. Okay, button him up again.”

“What? You're not going to—”

“Come on, button him up,” he said brusquely.

She frowned, but she helped him replace the restraining sheet. “I still think—” she began, and earned a “Sh!”

He set up the 200-cycle note again at its usual amplitude and they waited. There was a lag in apparent consciousness this time. The doctor realized that the patient was awake, but apparently afraid to open his eyes.

“Anson …”

Anson began to cry weakly.

“What's the matter, Anson?”

“D-doctor Fred, Doctor Fred … the big noise, and then I couldn't move and all the black and white smash lights.” He wept again.

“Doctor Fred!” he cried in panic.

Still the doctor said nothing.

Anson rolled his head wildly, fell back, tried again. “Make it so I can get up,” Anson called piteously.

“No,” said the doctor flatly.

“Make so I—”

“No.”

Piercingly, Anson shrieked. He surged upward so powerfully that for a second the doctor was afraid for the fastenings on the restraining sheet. But they held.

For nearly ten minutes, Anson fought the sheet, screaming and drooling. Fright turned to fury to an intense, witless battle. It was a childish tantrum magnified by the strength and staying power of an adult.

At about the second minute, the doctor keyed in a supplementary frequency, a shrill 10,500 cycles which had been blank on the index. Whenever Anson paused for breath, the doctor intoned, “You are angry. You are angry.” Grimly he watched until, a matter of seconds before the patient had to break, he released him to sleep.

“I couldn't stand another minute of that,” said Miss Thomas.
Her lips were almost gray. She moistened a towel and gently bathed the sleeping face. “I didn't like that at all.”

“You'll like the rest of it,” promised the doctor. “Let's get rid of this sheet.”

They took it off and stored it.

“How'd you like me to hit the ten-five cycles with that sheet off?” he asked.

“Build him a cage first,” she breathed in an awed tone.

He grinned suddenly. “Hit eighty cycles for me, will you?”

She did and they watched Richard Newell wakening. He groaned and moved his head gingerly. He sat up suddenly and yelped, and covered his face for a moment with both hands.

“Hello, Newell, how do you feel?”

“Like the output of a garbage disposal unit. I haven't felt like this since the day I rowed a boat for fourteen hours.”

“It's all right, Newell. All in a day's work.”

“Work is right. I know—you've had me out pulling a plow while I was hypnotized. Slave labor. Lowers the overhead. Damn it, Fred, I'm not going to take much more of this.”

“You'll take as much as I choose to give you,” snapped the doctor. “This is my party now, Dicky boy.”

Miss Thomas gasped. Newell slowly swung his legs out and sat looking at the doctor, an ominous and ugly half-smile on his face.

“Miss Thomas,” said the doctor, “ten-five, please.”

With his amusement deeply concealed, he watched Miss Thomas sidle to the controls and dial for the 10,500 supplementary note. He knew exactly what was going on in her mind. Ten-five was a fury motif, the command to Anson to relive the state of unbearable anger he had been in just moments ago.

“Miss Thomas,” said Newell silkily, “did I ever tell you the story of my life? Or, for that matter, the story of the doctor's life?”

“Why—no, Mr. Newell.”

“Once upon a time,” said Newell, “there was a doctor who … who …” As the shrill note added itself to the bumble of the 80-cycle tone, Newell's voice faltered. Behind him, the doctor heard the rustle of Miss Thomas's starch as she braced herself.

Newell looked at the doctor with astonishment. “What the hell am I up to?” he murmured. “That isn't a funny story. 'Scuse me, Miss Thomas.” He visibly relaxed, swung his feet back up on the bed and rested on one elbow. “I haven't felt like this since … where's Osa?” he asked.

“Home. Waiting for you.”

“God. Hope she doesn't have to wait much longer. Is she all right?”

“She's fine. So are you, pretty near. I think we have the thing whipped. Like to hear about it?”

“ ‘Talk about me,' ” Newell quoted. “ ‘Talk nice if you can, but talk about me.' ”

The doctor saw Miss Thomas staring incredulously at the controls, checking to be sure she had keyed the right note. He laughed. Newell laughed with him; it was one of the most pleasant of imaginable sounds. And it wasn't Anson's laugh, either—not even remotely. This was Richard Newell to the life, but warm, responsive, considerate.

The doctor said, “Did Osa ever tell you she thought you had a nameless monster pushing you around?”

“Only a couple hundred times.”

“Well, you have. I'm not joking, Dick—you really have. Only you've never suspected it and you don't have a name to call it by.”

“I don't get you.” He was curious, anxious to learn, to like and be liked. It was in the way he spoke, moved, listened. Miss Thomas stood with her hand frozen near the controls, ready to shut him off at the first sign of expected violence.

“You will. Now here's the picture.” And in simple terms, the doctor told him the story of Anson, the theory of multiple personality as a phenomenon of twinning, and at last his theory of the acrobatic stabilization the two entities had achieved on their own.

“Why acrobatic?” asked Newell.

“You know you act like a heel most of the time, Dick.”

“You might say so.” It was said quite without resentment.

“Here's why. (Just listen, now; you can test it any way you like after you've heard it all.) Your alter ego (to coin a phrase) had been
walled in, excluded from consciousness and expression and even self-awareness, ever since you were born. I won't attempt to explain that; I don't know how. Anyway, there it lay, isolated but alive, Dick,
alive—and just as strong as you!
”

“I … can't picture such a thing.”

“It isn't easy. I can't either, completely. It's like trying to get into the mind of another species, or a plant, if you can imagine such a thing. I do know, though, that the thing is alive, and up until recently had nothing—no knowledge, no retained experience, no mode of expression at all.”

“How do you know it's there, then?”

“It's there all right,” said the doctor. “And right this very minute, it's blowing its top. You see, all your life it's lived with you. It has had a blind, constant urge to break through, and it never could make it until it popped up here and we drew it out. It's a fascinating entity, Dick. I won't go into that now; you'll know it—him—thoroughly before you leave. But believe it or not, it's pretty nice. More than nice: it's positively angelic. It's lain there in the dark all these years like a germinated seed, pushing up toward the light. And every time it came near—you battled it down again.”

“I did?”

“For good sound survival reasons, you did. But like a lot of survival impulses yours were pretty irrational. A lion roars, a deer runs. Good survival. But if he runs off a cliff? What I'm getting at is that there's room for both of you in Richard Anson Newell. You've coexisted fairly well, considering, as strangers and sometimes enemies. You're going to do a lot better as friends and partners. Brothers, if you want the true term, because that's what the two of you are.”

“How does this—if true—explain the way I've been mucking around with my life?”

Looking for an image, the doctor paused. “You might say you've been cantilevered out from a common center. Way out. Now your alter—we call him Anson—is, as I've said, a very nice fellow. His blind strugglings have been almost all toward something—call it an aura, if you like—in people around you. The pressures are everything that's warm and lovable and good to be with.

“But you—man, you felt invaded! You could never reach out toward anything; Anson was there ahead of you, pressing and groping. You had to react, immediately and with all your might,
in the opposite direction
. Isn't it true that all your life you've rejected and tramped on anything that attracted you—and at the same time you've taken only things you couldn't really care about?”

“Well, I …”

“Just hold onto the idea. This speech I'm making is for your intellectual understanding; I don't expect you to buy it first crack out of the barrel.”

“But I haven't always … I mean what about Osa? Are you telling me I didn't really want Osa?”

“That's the cantilever effect, Dick. Anson never felt about Osa the way you did. I think she must have some confining effect on him; he doesn't like to be confined, does he, Miss Thomas?” He chuckled. “She either leaves him cold or makes him angry. So angry that it's beyond belief. But it's an infant's anger, Dick—blind and furious and extreme. And what happens
then
, when you react in the
opposite
direction?”

“Oh, my God,” breathed Newell. “Osa …” He turned his suddenly illuminated gaze up. “You know, sometimes I—we—it's like a big light that …”

“I know, I know,” said the doctor testily. “Matter of fact, that's happening right now. Turn off the ten-five, please, Miss Thomas.”

“Yes, doctor.”

“That high note,” the doctor explained. “It's for Anson—induced anger. You're being pretty decent at the moment, Newell. You realize that?”

“Well, why wouldn't I? You've done a lot for me.”

The note faded. Newell closed his eyes and opened them again. There was a long, tense silence.

Finally Newell said in his most softly insulting tone, “You spin a pretty tale, Freddy boy. But I'm tired of listening. Shall I blackmail you the hell out of here?”

“Five-fifty, Miss Thomas.”

“Yes, doctor.” She turned Newell off.

Back in the office again, Miss Thomas jittered in indecision. She tried to speak and then looked at the doctor with mute pleading.

“Go ahead,” he encouraged.

She shook her head. “I don't know what comes next. Morton Prince was wrong; there are no multiple egos, just multiple siblings sharing the same body, the same brain.” She halted, waiting for him to take it from there.

“Well?” he said.

“I know you're not going to sacrifice one for the other; that's why you never handled these cases before. But—” she flapped her hands helplessly—“even if Newell could carry the equipment around, I'd never sleep nights thinking that Anson had to go through the agony of that ten-five note just so Newell would be a decent human being. Or even, for that matter, vice versa.”

“It wouldn't be either human or practical,” he said. “Well?”

“Do they take turns being dominant, one day on, one day off?”

“That still would be sacrificing each half the time.”

“Then what? You said it would be ‘Newell, meet Anson. Anson meet Newell.' But you don't have the same problem you'd have with Siamese twins or the same solution.”

“Which is?”

“Separating them without killing either one. All these two have is a single brain to share and a single body. If you could cut them free—”

“I can't,” he said bluntly. “I don't intend to.”

“All right,” she conceded in defeat. “You're the doctor. You tell me.”

“Just what you said—the Morton Prince cases were in communication.”

“And Newell and Anson are, just because we gave Anson a vocabulary? What about that cantilever effect you explained to Newell? You can't let them go through life counterbalancing each other—Newell pulling violently to the other side of Anson's reactions, Anson doing the same with Newell's. Then
what?
” she repeated almost angrily. “If you know, why put me through this guessing game?”

“To see if you'd come up with the same answer,” he said candidly.
“A check on my judgment. Do you mind?”

She shook her head again, but this time with a little complimentary smile. “It's a painful way to get cooperation, only it works, damn you.” She frowned then, considering. “The two of them are compartmented. Are they different in that way from the other multiples?”

“Some, yes—the ones that are detected because there is communication. But not the others. And those cases rate treatment (because all people in difficulty do) and Newell-Anson, if we work it out properly, will show us how to help them. There's an obvious answer, Miss Thomas. I'm hoping—almost desperately—that you come up with the one I thought of.”

She made a self-impatient gesture. “
Not
the psychostat.
Definitely
not eliminating one or the other.
Not
making them take turns.” She looked up with a questioning awe on her face. “The
opposite
of treating Siamese twins?”

“Like what?” he asked urgently, leaning forward.

“Don't separate them.
Join
them. Make a juncture.”

“Keep going,” he pressed. “Don't stop now.”

“Surgical?”

“Can't be done. It isn't one lobe for Newell, the other for Anson, or anything that simple. What else?”