Judith Merril - The Year's Greatest Science Fiction & Fantasy 2

The doctor stood suspended in thought for some time. Miss Jarrell gently arranged the patient’s blanket. It was not done dutifully nor as part of the busyness of waiting for his next move. For some reason, it touched the doctor deeply and pulled him out of his reverie. “Let’s have the P.T., Miss Jarrell.”

“Yes, Doctor.” She consulted the index and carefully set the controls. At his nod, she touched the master switch. Again the white noise, and then the deep moo of the 80-cycle tone.

The P.T.—pre-therapeutic—personality would be retained untouched throughout the treatment, right up until the final setting process in the psychostat, except, of course, for the basic post-hypnotic command which kept all segments under control of the audio spectrum. The doctor watched the sleeping face and was aware of a most unprofessional desire to have something other than that untouched P.T. appear.

He glanced at Miss Jarrell without turning his head. She should leave now, and ordinarily she would. But she was not behaving ordinarily just now.

The patient’s eyes half-opened and stayed that way for a time. It was like the soft startlement of a feline which is aware of something, undecided whether the something deserves more attention than sleep, and therefore simply waits, armed and therefore relaxed.

Then he saw the eyes move, though the lids did not. This was the feline taking stock, but deluding its enemies into thinking it still drowsy. The man changed like an aurora, which is ever the same while you watch, but something quite different if you look away and look back. I think in analogies, the doctor chided himself, when I don’t like the facts.

“Well, Freddy-boy,” drawled Richard A. Newell.

Behind him, he heard Miss Jarrell’s almost inaudible sigh and her brisk quiet footsteps as she turned on the speech recorder, crossed the room and closed the door behind her.

Newell said, “Nurse is an odd term for a woman built like that. How you doing, Freddy?”

“Depends,” said the doctor.

Newell sat up and stretched. He waved at the red eye of the recorder. “Everything I say is taken down and may be used against me, hm?”

“Everything is used, yes. Not—”

“Oh, spare me the homilies, Fred. Transcribe them yourself, do you?”

“I—no.” As he caught Newell’s thought, and knew exactly the kind of thing the man was going to do next, he felt himself filling up with impotent rage. It did not show.

“Fine, fine.” Projecting his voice a bit, Newell said over an elaborate yawn, “Haven’t waked up like this since I was a kid. You know, disoriented, wondering for a moment where I was. Last bed I was in wasn’t so lonesome. Missed thirty of those last forty winks, the way she was all over me. ‘Dick, oh, Dick, please ...’ “ he mimicked cruelly. “Told her to shut up and get breakfast.”

He laughed outright, obviously not at anything he had said, but at the writhing silent thing within the doctor, which he could not see but knew must be there.

He glanced again at the pilot light on the recorder and said, “Mentioning no names, of course,” and the doctor understood immediately that names would be mentioned, places, dates and interrelationships, whenever Newell chose . . . which would be when the suspense ceased to entertain him. Meanwhile, the doctor could prepare himself for the behind-the-back gossip, the raised eyebrows of the transcribing typist, the after-hours debates as to the ethical position of a doctor’s practicing on the man who had ... who was ...

The sequence spiraled down to a low level of his personal inferno and flickered there, hot and smokeless.

“You didn’t tell me,” said Newell. “How you doing? Find the secret of my success yet?”

The doctor shrugged easily, which was not easy to do. “We haven’t begun.”

“Thought not.” Newell snorted. “By the time you’re finished, you won’t have begun, either.”

“Why do you say that?”

“I extrapolate it. I come here, you give me a shot of knockout drops, I get a sound sleep and wake up rested and cheerful. Otherwise, nothing. Yet I know that you’ve taken my slumbering corpus, poked it, prodded it, checked it in and wrung it out, tooted on your tooters, punched cards and clicked out four miles of computer tape—for what? I’m still me, only rested up a little.”

“How do you know we did all that?”

“I read the papers.” When the doctor made no reply, Newell laughed again. “You and your push-button therapy.” He looked up in recall, as if reading words off the ceiling. “What’s the claim—82% of your patients cured?”

“Modulated.”

“Pretty word, modulated. Pretty percentage, too. What kind of a sieve do you use?”

“Sieve?”

“Don’t tell me you don’t select your patients!”

“No, we take them as they come.”

“Ha. You talk like the Lysenkoists. Remember them? Russian genetics experts fifty years back. They claimed results like that. They claimed non-selective methodology, too, even when some of the people supposed to be breeding split-kernel corn were seen splitting the kernels with a knife. Even the Communists rejected them after a while.” He flicked a wolfish glance at the recorder and grinned. “But then,” he said clearly, “no Communist would reject you, Freddy.”

Of the four possible responses which came to him, the doctor could find none that would sound unlike a guilty protest, so he said nothing. Newell’s widening grin informed him that his silence was just as bad.

“Ah, Fred, m’boy, I know you. I know you well. I knew a lot about you five years ago and I’ve learned a lot more since.” He touched the dark wiry tuft between his collarbones. “Like, for example, you haven’t a single hair on your chest. Or so I’ve been told.”

Again the doctor used silence as a rejoinder. He could examine his feelings later—he knew he would; he inescapably must. For now, he knew that any answer would fall into Newell’s quiver as new arrows. Silence was a condition Newell could not maintain nor tolerate; silence made Newell do the talking, take the offensive . . . inform on and expose his own forces. Silence Newell could use only sometimes; words, always.

Newell studied him for a moment and then, apparently deciding that in order to return to a target, it was necessary to leave it temporarily, looked at the compact control panel. “I’ve read a lot about that. Push one button, I’m a fighting engine. Push another, I lie down with the lamb. Who was it once said humanity will evolve into a finger and a button, and every time the finger wants anything, it will push the button—and that will be the end of humanity, because the finger will get too damn lazy to push the button?” He wagged his head. “You’re going to gadget yourself clear out of a living, Fred.”

“Did you read what was written over the entrance when you came here?” the doctor asked.

“I noticed there was something there,” said Newell amiably, “and no, I didn’t read it. I assumed it was some saw about the sanctity of the personality, and I knew I’d get all I could stand of that from you and your acolytes.”

“Then I think you ought to know a little more about what you call ‘push-button therapy,’ Newell. Hypnosis isn’t therapy and neither is the assigned audio-response technique we use. Hypnosis gives us access to the segments of personality and creates a climate for therapy, and that’s all. The therapy itself stands or falls on the ability of the therapist, which is true of my school as it is of all others short of the lobotomists.”

“Well, well, well. I goaded a real brag out of you at last. I didn’t know you had it in you.” Newell chuckled. “82% effective and you do it all your little self. Now ain’t you something? Tell me, able therapist, how do you account for the 18% who get by you?”