Дэймон Найт - Orbit 10

Raw daylight through the open end of the room. The nervous lowing of cattle. Smell of dung and sweat, undertang of old, lingering blood. The other men, looking curiously at him. They had masks for faces, viper eyes. Viper eyes followed him through the room. Hooves scuffed gravel outside.

Heavy-lidded, trembling, he took his place.

They herded in the first cow of the day, straight up to Mason. He lifted the hammer.

The cow approached calmly. Tranquilly she walked before the prods, her head high. She stared intently at Mason. Her eyes were wide and deep—serene, beautiful, and trusting.

Lilith, he named her, and then the hammer crashed home between her eyes.

DR. MAX BRUCH’S long, gaunt frame wriggled uneasily as he glanced at his watch and saw with mounting anxiety that it was a quarter to three. In fifteen minutes Harvey Putzman, the only patient he had ever dangerously disliked, would be coming through the door to throw himself on the sofa and spew spittle-laden malice at the ceiling. Putzman, the sensationally popular novelist of the newest new generation—most psychoanalysts would have considered it a professional coup to have him on their list of emotional cripples. And Putzman was willing to pay extremely high for the privilege of having his peculiar agonies privately aired. So what was there to dislike?

“Nothing except for everything,” Bruch groaned aloud. Those monstrously arching nostrils, implying a lifetime of zealous pick­ing, were only the outermost configurations of the man. What created a deeper revulsion was the ingratitude this extremely clever writer showed for everyone who had ever helped him, the parents who spoiled him, the rabbi who forgave him, the teachers and mistresses who always insisted he was a genius. His nine-hundred-page epic, Weequahic, had been vicious enough toward all of them, drowning with venom that whole section of Newark, New Jersey, for which it was named. But the past year’s analytic sessions had shown this was not merely poetic license; Putzman in the flesh actually hated more bitterly than he had ever dared reveal on paper!

Ten minutes to go. Bruch took a little white pill from his vest pocket and went to the water cooler. The first time for the pill, but there had to be a virgin moment in every enterprise. He gulped it down fast and returned to his swivel chair to wait.

Every patient was entitled to the best treatment possible but, from his twenty years of experience, Bruch knew referring Putz­man elsewhere would not help; it was literally impossible to like Putzman in these days of his glory and chances were that the next practitioner would handle him with even more prejudice. “I must help him even if it kills me,” he said through clenched teeth. There instantly followed the consoling thought that if the pill were the least bit successful with Putzman, then it would help with any case. Where before in medical history had a doctor taken the medicine instead of the patient?

Only, so far, it wasn’t working.

Then Putzman was there in the room, muttering about just hav­ing left his publisher and agent. “Think they’re screwing me but it’s the other way around, they’ll see soon!” He regarded Bruch with distaste, fell on the couch and launched into a recent dream that made Hieronymus Bosch seem Alice in Wonderland bowd­lerized. It was something perverted about childhood teasing of the neighbor’s schnauzer (why, Bruch shuddered, was there always that clearly visible spray of saliva?), something new to Putzman’s confessional repertoire. Just as in the novels where all the protagonist’s weaknesses were blamed on the “sick society” to which his audience belonged, so here Bruch somehow became responsible for Putzman’s torment. The wildly exaggerated humor made Putzman’s confession too self-gratifying to be believable even as Putzman’s face became twisted with unhappiness. Every­thing the patient said was subject to the same skeptical—

Unhappiness, thought Bruch with a sudden pang, this man was desperately unhappy, suffering something worse than anything he imposed on others. It was not proper procedure, but Bruch found himself breaking in to say softly: “Harvey, you don’t have to worry about that episode ever again.”

“What the hell does that mean?” Putzman screamed, then craned around to stare at Bruch and relaxed. His head fell back as he sighed. “You’re a real paradox artist, Doctor, but you’re right! I never looked at it that way before.” He abruptly shifted into an attack on a high school English teacher who had wanted him to write more genteelly, but his voice was unusually calm and the attack petered out into praise of her kindness. “She did try, though, Dr. Bruch. God knows that dried-up old maid wanted me to have the success everything in her own life had denied her.”

The analyst sank deeper into gloom. It was as if he were listen­ing to his very first patient twenty years ago, feeling each word like a whiplash, the way it had been before much of the process became distant if well-intentioned routine. As the hour went on Putzman, without once taking his eyes from the ceiling, seemed to draw new strength from that gloom.

When the novelist left he had gained more emotional ground than in all previous sessions combined. Bruch called Grainger on the intercom and exclaimed: “It looks as if it’s working, unbeliev­able!”

“What happened?”

“Well-” The red light came on. “No time, Jack, next patient’s a little early but has a thing about being kept waiting. See you six fifteen.”

After Putzman, Mrs. Crofton brought an almost healthy air of commonplace neurosis into the office. True, the thirty-five-year-old mother of two remained utterly frigid after eighteen months but, while she was of only average intelligence, her cultivated back­ground made their sessions together little islands of restrained decency in days awash with psychic sewerage. Now, without his saying a word, the restraint was gone even if the decency re­mained as strong as ever. Waves of sweet sympathy swept Bruch and he could feel each hurt she expressed as if it were his own. When she rose to leave there were tears in her eyes. “It’s chang­ing now,” she said. “I know I am starting to get better.”

The two hours had been exhausting, leaving him bathed in sweat, but there was still Bernstein, the jittery furrier, to deal with. He came in chattering about the way his wife said he was meshugge last night because he refused to eat the vichyssoise and maybe he was, huh? The whole inane episode was then retold at a rising machine-gun rate, but once he arrived at the self-doubt part, he slowed down. By the time the hour ended and the story had been twice more repeated, Bernstein’s face had relaxed and for the first time all the forehead creases were smoothed away.

At six when Bernstein was gone and Mrs. Parker, his nurse-secretary, had looked in to say she, too, was leaving, Bruch was slumped in his chair, too drained of energy to budge. “Anything the matter, Doctor?” she asked.

“Oh, no!” he grinned.

After a minute’s solitary contemplation of this strange mixture of weariness and triumph he pulled himself from the chair and walked upstairs to Grainger’s compact laboratory. Grainger, a short, intense-looking fellow, began pacing the floor as soon as Bruch came in. “You think it helped, you really think it—”

“I’m sure of it.”

“But when did you take the pill, Max?”

“Fifteen minutes before Putzman. Finally got up nerve.”

“I was sure that dosage would be harmless!” He leaned toward Bruch like an accusing attorney. “Exactly what happened?”

With a tired smile Bruch shoved him away. “Give me a chance to rest. It’s exhausting, Jack, so putter around your crockery awhile.”