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

“Here,” said the technician again.

“What is it?” He seemed to be trying to identify the cup, as if he had never seen one before.

Because she was kind, Miss Thomas took it another way. “Dexamyl.”

“Thank you.” He took them, swallowed water, and looked up at her. “Thank you,” he said again. “I seem to be . . .”

“It’s all right,” said Miss Thomas firmly. “Everything’s all right.”

Some of his control returned and he chuckled a little. “Using my own therapy on me?”

“Everything is all right, far as I know,” she said, in the grumpy tone under which she so often concealed herself. She folded her arms with an all but audible snap and glared out of the window.

The doctor glanced up at her rigid back and, in spite of himself, was amused. She was daring him to order her out, challenging him not to tell her what the trouble was. He recalled, then, that she was doubtlessly gnawed like the Spartan boy by the fox of curiosity she was hiding under her starch. There’s a personality in the 200-cycle area that won’t dismantle . . . oh, you can do it, but. . . it’s a pity, that’s all, he recalled.

He said, “It’s one of those things of Prince’s.”

She was quiet for so long that she might not have heard him and I’m damned, he thought, if I’m going to spell it out for her.

But she said, “I don’t believe it,” and, into his continued silence, “Morton Prince’s alternate-personality idea might be the only explanation for some cases, but it doesn’t explain this one.”

“It doesn’t?”

“Two personalities in one mind—three or more sometimes. One of his case histories was of a woman who had five distinct egos. I’m not quarreling with the possibility, Doctor.”

Every time Miss Thomas surprised him, it was in a way that pleased him. He would, he thought, think that through some day.

“Then why quarrel with this one?” he asked.

Unasked and unabashed, she sat down in the big chair. They sat for a time in a companionable, cerebral quiet.

Then she said, “Prince’s case histories show a lot of variation. I mean one ego will be refined, educated, another rough and stupid. Sometimes the prime was aware of the others, sometimes not; sometimes they hated each other. But there was this denominator: If the condition existed at all, it existed because the alternate ego could communicate and did. Had to.”

“Morton Prince wasn’t equipped for segmentation under tertiary hypnosis.”

“I think that’s beside the point,” Miss Thomas said flatly. “I’ll say it again: Prince’s alternate egos had to emerge. I think that’s the key. If an ego can’t communicate and won’t emerge unless you drag it out by the scruff of the neck, I don’t think it deserves to be called an ego.”

“You can say that and yet you’ve seen Ans—the alternate?”

“Anson. Hildy Jarrell told me about the christening. Yes, I can say that.”

He looked at her levelly and she dropped her eyes. He remembered again their encounter in the corridor in front of Newell’s door. Don’t blame Hildy Jarrell—that’s exactly what I did myself.

“Miss Thomas, why are you trying to herd me away from this case?”

“Doctor!”

He closed his eyes and said, “You find a segment that you can’t break. It’s a particularly—well, let’s say that whatever it is, you like it.” He paused and, exactly in time, said, “Don’t interrupt me. You know very well that the rock bottom of my practice is that personality is inviolate. You know that if this is a genuine case of alternate ego, I wouldn’t touch it—I couldn’t, because the man has only one body, and to normalize him, I’d have to destroy one ego or the other.

“Now you knew perfectly well that I’d discover the alternate. So the first thing you do is call my attention to it, and the next thing you do is give me an argument about it, knowing I’d disagree with you, knowing that if there was any doubt in my mind, it would disappear in the argument.”

“Why on earth would I do at thing like that?” she challenged.

“I told you—so I’d get off the case—reset the P.T. and discharge him.”

“Damn it,” said Miss Thomas bitterly.

“That’s the trouble with knowing too much about a colleague’s thought processes,” he said into midair. “You can’t manipulate somebody who understands you.”

“Which one of us do you mean?” she demanded.

“I really don’t know. Now are you going to tell me why you tried this, or shall I tell you?”

“I’ll tell you,” said Miss Thomas. “You’re tired. I don’t want anything to happen to that Anson. As soon as I found him, I knew exactly what would happen if you went ahead with Newell’s therapy. Anson would be the intruder. I don’t care how—how beautiful an intruder he might be, he could only show up as an aberration, something extraneous. You’d pack him down to pill size and bury him so deep in a new-model Newell that he’d never see daylight again. I don’t know how much consciousness he has, but I do know I couldn’t bear to have him buried alive.

“And supposing you committed therapy on Anson alone, brought him up like a shiny young Billy Budd and buried that heel Newell—if you’ll pardon the unprofessional term, Doctor—down inside him somewhere? You think Anson would be able to defend himself? You think he could take a lane in the big rat race? This world is no place for cherubim.

“So there isn’t a choice. I don’t know what Anson shares with Newell and I never will. I do know that however Anson has existed so far, it hasn’t spoiled him, and the only chance he has to go on being what he is is to be left alone.”

“Quod erat demonstrandum,” said the doctor, spreading his hands. “Very good. Now you know why I’ve never treated alternate ego cases. And perhaps you also know how useless your little machination was.”

“I had to be sure, that’s all. Well, I’m glad. I’m sorry.”

He smiled briefly. “I follow that.” He watched her get up, her face softened by content and her admiration of him unconcealed.

She bent an uncharacteristically warm gaze on him and moved toward the door. She looked back once on the way, and once there, she stopped and turned to face him. “Something’s the matter.”

There were, he knew, other ways to handle this, but at the moment he had to hurt something. There were several ways to do the hurt, too, and he chose the worst one, saying nothing.

Miss Thomas became Miss Thomas again, her eyes like one-way mirrors and her stance like a soldier. She looked out of herself at him and said, “You’re going on with the therapy.”

He did not deny it.

“Are you going to tell me which one gets it?”

“Depends on what you mean by ‘gets it,’” he said with grim jocularity.

She treated the bad joke as it deserved to be treated and simply waited for it to go away.

He said, “Both.”

She repeated the word in exactly his inflection, as though she could understand it better if it were as near as her own lips. Then she shook her head impatiently. “You can apply just so much therapy and then there’s a choice to make.”

“There’s this choice to make,” he said, in a constricted tone that hurt his throat. “Newell lives in a society he isn’t fit for. He’s married to a woman he doesn’t deserve. If it is in my power to make him more fit and more deserving, what is the ethical choice?”

Miss Thomas moved close to the desk. “You implied that you’d turned down cases like this before. You sent them back into society, untreated.”

“Once they sent lepers back untreated,” he snapped. ‘Therapy has to start somewhere, with someone.”