Дэймон Найт - Orbit 13

“I’ve really heard enough crap from you,” Stanler said. “You’re the one who’s cheating. You’ve carried competitiveness to a psychotic endpoint, Foster, all because your height bugs you. Well, although half the male population’s no taller than you, I, too, find you an extraordinarily small man. No, no, don’t start protesting, because I know what I see. Always you’ve avoided admitting how small you feel by making everyone else feel that way. Well, don’t start trying it here—your silly height obsession’s your problem, no longer mine!’’

After Foster departed, Stanler prepared to leave himself. Miss Carter was already gone and this was one of those unfortunate days with no late customers. But keeping Foster-types for longer periods would have been a boring decline in standards—and anyway, soon unnecessary.

He dialed Mrs. Hinten’s number and she answered in her clipped, pseudo-British accent. He said, “Mr. Rachelson here, Ada.”

Her voice bubbled back to its proper side of the Atlantic. “Hi, Abe! An hour appointment for later?”

“Well, yes and no—an hour but now—strike while the iron’s hot.” She giggled. “Six thirty?”

“Oh, excellent, that’s excellent—a slow period!”

“—and the rates accordingly fifteen percent lower?”

“Ten, naughty!” she corrected. “Ten percent. We’ll be ready for you.”

Her brownstone, like her accent, was a compromise between social forces, he thought, buzzing the ground-floor bell; it was situated on the line between a high-rent residential district and a medium-rent commercial one. She answered the door herself, nodding a huge platinum wig at him. “Good to see you, Abe.” He shook hands with her, passing the forty-five dollars to her moist palm. She promptly stuffed the money into her bosom, less, he suspected, for any practical reason than for the sluttish excitation it gave to the clientele.

Two girls wearing only bras and panties were seated on a velvet sofa at the far end of the basement corridor. One was black-haired, with blue eyes made mistily sexy by astigmatism, the other a Puerto Rican type with peroxided hair and a gaze of utter indifference that he always found stimulating. He chose the peroxide specimen and they moved into a bedroom where they both went through a series of mechanical gestures that he arranged to climax just as the hour was ending. He swiftly dressed, gave the girl a five-dollar tip and shushed her as she absently began thanking him.

Going out, he had to listen once more to Ada saying, “With a phone number, Abe, not even your real name, just a phone number, I could call whenever something special pops in and you could get more off-hour discounts, too—”

“No, dear lady,” Stanler answered, “permit me to remain as anonymous as possible as long as possible. Until next week.”

Feeling relieved now of all potential sexual tension, Stanler went home and carefully bathed his body clean of whatever contact traces might remain. He ate the coq au vin left by his housekeeper, then, with the regulation Scotch and soda on his end table, set a pile of Scarlatti records in the stereo machine and spent several hours reading sentimental claptrap by Freud. It was always amusing to see how each ostensibly new, “revolutionary” therapy repeated the fundamental error of all its predecessors.

At ten his timer switched from records to FM for Woolton’s Show. Its theme was a syncopated Bach fugue tinkled out on a player piano while Woolton sang lyrics about “The show with the brainy sound.”

The instant this song ended Woolton came on, leaving no second free of his presence. “Woolton says—and hello to you, my thinking public out there!—did you ever hear the one about the guy who got rid of his migraine headache by paying somebody to hit him on the head with a ball-peen hammer? Well, there are such guys—and gals—in this town, handing over hard cash for purely verbal blows to the psyche, and the place they go to is the office of Dr. Ronald Stanler. But don’t laugh, not completely anyway, because, Mr. and Mrs. Thinking Public, some of these folks actually say it works! Decide for yourself!”

With that he launched into the interview, and Stanler could remember nothing he had said that was now omitted save for the brief slip-up about Woolton’s perpetual juvenility. Afterward, Woolton took over again: “Well, somehow the milk of human kindness is preferable to mechanical indifference and you may even wonder why such things are permitted but—” he hesitated for emphasis and Stanler thought how this pseudo-cynic was as big an idiot as all the others—”but your ever-earnest reporter did manage to find a few people who had been patients—oops! I mean customers—of Dr. Stanler and all indicated they’d been helped and that he actually refused to keep them on indefinitely as high-paying clients! So add another wing to that supremely vast educational institution, the School of Hard Knocks—at least for some people.

“But now, to get another taste into our mouths, here’s a supremely kind lady who has just returned from six heartrending months of aiding coca addicts in the Andean highlands. That’s the highland zone of Peru and Ecuador and it’s not cocoa but c-o-c-a.”

There were no further references to “Ball-peen Hammer Psycho-Theatrics,” but Stanler was pleased by what he had already heard; it could bring in the extra customers he desired.

And it did. The next day he acquired two clients and the day after, as if extra time were needed before such a cold plunge, five came in. All offered the possibility of insights that might be temporarily interesting and, in three cases, even amusing.

But the broadcast brought a further, less useful form of attention. A convention of psychiatrists was meeting at a nearby resort, and it seemed as if all five hundred delegates had heard the interview. These doctors were divided into about fifty schools of psychotherapy, ranging from traditional Freudians, Jungians, Adlerians and Rankians through electronic processors of sex acts and Jesuit confessors to group-care and love-scream advocates, but all managed to agree on a resolution condemning Stanler’s approach.

“. . . manifestly dangerous and pernicious . . . warranting closest scrutiny by the legal authorities . . . improper claims to therapeutic value . . . public should be warned . . .” The whole long statement was in this vein, and Stanler found himself besieged by news people demanding his reaction.

“To avoid wasting time on your stupid nonsense questions,” he told them, always to their pleased what-a-curmudgeon reaction, “I am making one statement to everybody: I have never bothered to attack any of the one hundred and sixty-nine mutually contradictory schools of psychotherapy’s claims to cure people, so I cannot see why they bother to attack me when I make no claims to cure anyone. I myself will say nothing more, advising you instead to contact my former clients. All possibilities of libel action by me against anything they say are hereby renounced. Maybe I’ll be denounced, maybe not, but gentlemen, I assure you I don’t give a damn one way or the other, and good day to you.”

The news people protested that former patients would never come forward, so his challenge had to be a bluff. But come forward they did. Within two days a score had been interviewed and, while some said they disliked Dr. Stanler personally and never cared to see him again, all, whether liking or disliking him, insisted their sessions with him had been of great value. For Stanler, in every case where a name was volunteered, it instantly and intimately evoked the former patient. The intimacy always involved weaknesses that had been at first deplorably human and, at the last, merely disgusting. But here they were, supporting him. It would be most touching, Stanler decided, if he could be touched.