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

“Why do you want to know?”

“I might alter the figures for you. Who are these sturdy souls?”

“Organic defectives,” said the doctor. And certain others . . . but he kept that to himself.

Newell shouted, “Touché!” and fell back with a roar of appreciative laughter. But the doctor saw his eyes before he closed them, little windows with all the faces of hate looking out.

The doctor was delighted. He braced himself for the reaction against his own pleasure which he could always expect from his austere professionalism, but it did not come. He put this fact away with the others he knew he must examine later.

Newell was saying, “You can’t have it both ways, Fred. About hypnosis not being therapy, I mean. What’s this I heard somewhere about certain frequencies having certain effects, no matter who you are?”

“Oh, that. Yes, some parts of the audio spectrum do affect most people. The subsonics—fourteen to around twenty cycles, for example, if you use enough amplitude—they scare people. And beat-frequencies between two tones, where the beat approaches the human pulse, sometimes have peculiar psychological effects. But these are byways, side phenomena. We use the ones we can rely on and ignore or avoid the others. Audio frequencies happen to be convenient, accurate and easy for patient and therapist to identify.

“But they’re not essential. We could probably do the same thing with spoken commands or a spectrum of odors. Audio is best, though; the pure electronic tone is unfamiliar to most people and so has no associations except the ones we give it. That’s why we don’t use 60 cycles—the hum you’re surrounded by all your life from AC devices.”

“And what about if you’re tone-deaf?” asked Newell, with an underlay of gloating which could only mean that he was talking about himself.

“Nobody’s that tone-deaf, except the organic defectives.”

“Oh,” said Newell disappointedly, then returned to the half-sneering search for information. “And so the patient walks out of here prepared for the rest of his life to go into a state of estrus every time an English horn sounds A-440?”

“You know better than that,” retorted the doctor, for once not concealing his impatience. “That’s what the psychostat is for. Every frequency the patient responds to is recorded there”—he waved at the controls—”along with its intensity. These are analyzed by a computer and compared by another one with a pattern which shows which segments are out of line—like too much anger or unwarranted fear, in terms of the patient’s optimum. The psychostat applies dampers on the big ones and amplifies the atrophied ones until the response matches the master pattern. When every segment is at optimum—the patient’s, mind you; no one else’s—the new pattern is fixed by an overall posthypnotic which removes every other suggestion that has been applied.”

“So the patient does go out of here hypnotized!”

“He walks in here hypnotized,” said the doctor. “I’m surprised at you, Newell. For a man who knows so much about my specialty, you shouldn’t need to be lectured on the elementals.”

“I just like the sound of your voice,” Newell said acidly, but the acid was dilute. “What do you mean, the patient walks in here hypnotized?”

“Most people are, most of the time. In the basic sense, a man is under hypnosis whenever any one of his senses does not respond to a present stimulus, or when his attention is diverted even slightly from his physical surroundings. You’re under hypnosis when you read a book, or when you sit and think and don’t see what you’re staring at, or when you bark your shin on a coffee-table you didn’t see under bright lights.”

“That’s so much hair splitting.” Newell didn’t even pause before his next sentence, which came from quite a different area than his scoffing incredulity. “Why didn’t you tell me all this when I said I couldn’t be hypnotized?”

“I preferred to believe you when you said you knew it all.”

Every pretense of joviality disappeared. “Listen, you,” Newell grated, in the ugliest tone of voice the doctor had ever heard, “you better watch what you’re doing.”

It was time again for silence and the doctor used it. He gave Newell no choice but to lie there and stare at his own words. He watched the man regaining his poise, laboriously, hand over hand, then resting, testing, waiting to be sure he could speak again.

“Well,” Newell said at length, and the doctor almost admired him for the smoothness of his tone, “it’s been fun so far and it’ll wind up more so. If you really can do what you say, I’ll make it right with you, Freddy-boy. I’ll really pay off.”

“That’s nice,” said the doctor guardedly.

“Nice? Just nice? Man, I’ll give you a treasure you couldn’t get any other way. You could never get,” he amended. He looked up into the doctor’s face brightly. “Nearly five solid years a-building and it’s all yours. Me, I’ll start a new one.”

“What are you talking about?”

“My little black book. Got everything in it from pig to princess. Whoever you are, however you feel from time to time, there’s a playmate in there for you. You could really use it, Freddy. You must have stored up quite a charge since you-know-what,” he said, grinning at the recording machine. “Fix me up, I fix you up. Fair enough?”

The silence this time was unplanned. The doctor walked to the controls, dialed 550 and hit the master. The 80-cycle note died, the white noise took over, and then the 550-cycle sleep command. The doctor felt that gleaming grin leave the room like a pressure off his back.

He is a patient, the doctor thought at last, out of his hard-held numbness. He is a patient in a therapeutic environment as detached from the world as a non-Euclidean theorem. There is no Newell; there is only a patient. There is no Fred, only a doctor. There is no Osa, only episodes. Newell will be returned to the world because he has a personality and it has an optimum, because that is what I do here and that is what I am for.

He touched the annunciator control and said, “Miss Jarrell, I want you.”

She opened the door almost immediately; she must have been waiting in the corridor. “Oh, Doctor, I am sorry! I know I shouldn’t do anything like that. It’s just—well, before I knew it. . .”

“Don’t apologize, Miss Jarrell. I mean it—don’t. You may even have done some good. But I have to know exactly what influences were . . . no, don’t explain,” he said when she tried to speak. “Show me.”

“Oh, I couldn’t! It’s so —silly!”

“Go on, Miss Jarrell. It isn’t silly at all.”

Flushing, she passed him with her eyes averted and went to the controls. She dialed a frequency and activated the master, and as the white noise roared out, she went to the foot of the bed, waiting. The audio faded, all but a low, steady thrum—200 cycles.

The patient opened his eyes. He smiled. It was a smile the like of which the doctor had never seen before, though he might have imagined one. Not, however, on the face of Richard A. Newell. There was nothing conceivable in Richard A. Newell to co-exist with such an expression.

The patient glanced down and saw Miss Jarrell. Ecstatic recognition crossed his face. He grasped the covers and whipped them over his head, and lay stiff and still as a pencil.

“You . . . !” crooned Miss Jarrell, and the blanket was flung down away from the patient’s head, and he gurgled with laughter. She snatched at his toes, and he bucked and chortled, and covered up again. “The bumble bee—” she murmured, and he quivered, a paroxysm of delighted anticipation—”goes round the tree...and goes bzz ... bzzz . .. BZZ!” and she snatched at his toes again.