Alfred Bester - The Computer Connection

I plotted the scene for them and opened the door to the anteroom. The two women walked out holding the chart as high as they could reach. “Sorry to keep you waiting,” Fee said to the assembled. Then they sailed the chart out of the anteroom. Behind that screen M’bantu was carrying Sequoya.

When we got to my place Borgia was waiting (I swear I never saw Scented Song making the call) looking like a Sicilian Florence Nightingale, which indeed she is; Sicilian, that is, not a nurse. She’s the damned best doctor I know. Since 1600 she’s taken medical degrees at Bologna, Heidelberg, Edinburgh, Salpêtrière, Cornell, and Standard Oil. Borgia believes in keeping up with the times.

She had a goongang slaving in the house. “Found them starting to rip the place,” she reported. “Your door doesn’t hold. So I put them to work.” She had indeed. Sabu was lushing it up on a bale of hay. Laura was chasing goldfish in the drawing room pool and absorbing them. The house was cleaned and immaculate. A most notable woman.

“Shape up,” she ordered. The gang lined up before her timidly. “Now hear this. You two have incipient embolisms. You three are on bot, which has lethal side effects. All of you are faggots and need a proctal. I want you back here tomorrow afternoon for a full medical. Hear?”

“Yassuh, medico.”

“R. Out.”

They out. A most forceful woman. “Evening, Guig,” she said in XX. “Evening, all. Who’s that thing? She doesn’t belong to the Group. Get her out of here.”

By God, Fee stood up to her. “My name is Fee-5 Grauman’s Chinese. I live here and your patient is my guy. Next question?”

“She talks XX.”

“And she knows about the Group. Quite a gal.”

“It’s the Maori strain,” M’bantu interjected. “A magnificent people.”

Borgia grinned a mile wide, went to Fee, and shook her hand like it was a pump handle. “You’re my kind, Fee,” she said. “There aren’t enough of you around these days. We’ve megabred the backbone out of existence. Now let’s have a look at the patient. Got somewhere more intimate, Guig? This is like a zoo, and that python keeps belching.”

We walked the Chief into my study and Fee put him down in a chair at the desk. The others excused themselves to look after their pets, and Edison went to repair the door which he’d ruined. “Fill me in, Guig.” I described the Chief and the disaster that had overtaken him while Borgia prowled around him and examined him. “Yes,” she said. “All the basic symptoms of postepileptic delirium; mutism, passive negativism, catatonic stupor. Easy, Fee, I’ll drop the clinical jargon. Probably sounds to you like I’m depersonalizing your guy. I’m not. Now, exactly what’s the urgency? How much time have I?”

“We’ve managed to lose the U-Con brass for a little while, but they’ll be howling for Guess tomorrow and a full status review. About seventy million went into the experiment and—”

“Eighty-five,” Fee said, “and I can hear them howling for him now. They’re in a panic and they want the Chief. Explanations or his scalp.”

“They have any suspicions about what’s happened to him?” Borgia asked Fee.

“Not yet. Most of them are saying he’s chickcopped.”

“ESP?” Borgia asked me, much interested.

“No, bug-tap. So you can see everything’s at stake. We have to pull him out fast or he’s sunk.”

“What’s in it for you, as if I didn’t know.”

“Later, Lucy. Not in front of his girl.”

“I’m not his girl,” Fee said. “He’s my guy.”

Borgia ignored the semantics. She prowled around Sequoya again, sensing him with invisible antennae. “Interesting. Very interesting. The resemblance to Lincoln. See it, Guig? Is it a pathogenic type? I often wonder. You know, of course, that young Lincoln went into a cataleptic collapse after the death of Ann Rutledge. He never recovered. Remained a manic-depressive for the rest of his life. Now let’s try a shortcut. Have you got any writing tools? Handwriting-type.”

Fee pulled a pad and a stylus out of the desk.

“Is he righthanded, Fee?”

“Yes.”

“We’ll try a trick that Charcot showed me in his clinic.” Borgia put the stylus in the Chief’s right hand and placed the pad under it. “Sometimes they want so desperately to communicate with us, but we must find the way for them.” She bent over Guess and started to speak in Spanglish. I stopped her. “He’s more comfortable with XX, Borgia.”

“Oh, he’s that educated? Encouraging.” She spoke smoothly to the Chief. “Hello, Dr. Guess. I’m a physician. I would like to have a talk with you about JPL.”

Sequoya’s face didn’t alter; it gazed placidly into space, but after a moment his right hand trembled and wrote:

hello

Fee let out a little yell. Borgia motioned for quiet. “Dr. Guess,” she went on, “your friends are here. They are very much concerned about you. Won’t you tell them something?”

The hand wrote:

doctor guess your friends are here they are very much concerned about you wont you tell them something

“So.” Borgia pursed her lips. “Like that, eh? Will you try, Fee-5? Say something personal.”

“Chief, this is Fee-Fie-Fo. You haven’t kept your promise yet.”

chief this is fee fie fo you havent kept your promise yet

Borgia tore the sheet off the pad. “Guig? Maybe something about the recent disaster?”

“Hey, Uncas, U-Con tried to sell me those naked rats. They claim they’re your soul.”

hey uncas ucon tried to sell me those naked rats they claim theyr your soul

Borgia shook her head. “I’d hoped this might be the road to a breakthrough but it’s just echopathy.”

“What’s that?”

“You find it sometimes as a part of the catatonic syndrome, Guig. The patient repeats the words of another, in one form or another.”

“He’s just parroting?”

“That’s about the size of it, but we’re not licked yet. I’ll show you another one of Charcot’s tricks. The human psyche can be incredibly devious.” She transferred the stylus to the Chief’s left hand and placed the pad under it. “Hello, Dr. Guess. I’m a physician and I’d like to have a talk with you. Have you come to any conclusion about what happened to your cryonauts?”

The placid face still stared into space. The left hand twitched and then began to scribble in mirrorwriting, from left to right:

“Mirror, Fee.”

“Don’t bother,” Borgia said. “I read dextro and levo. He’s written, ‘Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, but—’ ”

“But what?”

“It stops there. ‘Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, but—’ But what, Dr. Guess? What?”

Nothing.

“Failed again?”

“Certainly not, ass. We’ve discovered that he’s functioning deep down inside. Very deep. Down there he’s aware of everything that’s going on around him. What we have to do is peel off the shock layer that’s formed over him.”

“Do you know how?”

“Countershock, but if it has to be quick it’s going to be iffy.”

“It has to be quick. How will it be iffy?”

“They’ve developed a new tranquilizer, a polypeptide derivative of noradrenalin.”

“I haven’t understood a word.”

“D’you know how tranquilizers work? They thicken the connections between the brain nuclei, the glial cells, and the neurones. Slow down the transfer of nerve-firing from cell to cell and slow down the entire organism. Are you with it?”

“With.”

“This noradrenalin derivative blocks it completely. It’s close to a nerve gas. All traffic comes to a dead stop. That’s the operative word. Dead. We may kill him.”