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

He said, “Hypothesis: Newell and Anson are discrete personalities.”

While he spoke, he noticed Miss Thomas’s feet move outward a little and then cross at the ankles. His inner thought was. Of all the things I like about this woman, the best is the amount of conversation I have with her without talking.

“And we have plenty of data to back that up,” he continued. “The EEGs alone prove it. Anson is Anson and Newell is Newell, and to prove it, we’ve crystallized them for anyone to see. We’ve done such a job on them that we know exactly what Anson is like without Newell. We’ve built him up that way, with that in mind. We haven’t done quite the same with Newell, but we might as well have. I mean we’ve investigated Newell as if Anson did not exist within him. What it amounts to is this: In order to demonstrate a specimen of multiple personality, we’ve separated and isolated the components.

“Then we go into a flat spin because neither segment looks like a real human being . . . Miss Thomas?”

“Yes?”

“Do you mind the way I keep on saying ‘we’?”

She smiled and shook her head. “Not at the moment.”

“Further,” he said, answering her smile but relentlessly pursuing his summation, “we’ve taken our two personalities and treated each like a potentially salvable patient—one neurotic, one retarded. We’ve operated under the assumption that each contained his own disorder and could be treated by separate therapies.”

“We’ve been wrong?”

“I certainly have,” said the doctor. He slapped the file cabinet at his left. “In here there’s a very interesting paper by one Weisbaden, who theorizes that multiple personalities are actually twins, identical twins born of the same egg-cell and developing within one body. One step, as it were, into the microcosm from foetus in foetu.”

“I’ve read about that,” said Miss Thomas. “One twin born enclosed in the body of another.”

“But not just partly—altogether enclosed. Whether or not Weisbaden’s right, it’s worth using as a test hypothesis. That’s what I’ve been doing, among other things, and I’ve had my nose stuck so far into it that I wasn’t able to see a very important corresponding part of the analogy: namely, that twinning itself is an anomaly, and any deviation in a sibling of multiple origin is teratological.”

“My,” said Miss Thomas in mock admiration.

The doctor smiled. “I should have said ‘monstrous,’ but why drag in superstitions? This thing is bad enough already. Anyway, if we’re to carry our twinning idea as an analogy, we have got to include the very likely possibility that our multiple personalities are as abnormal as Siamese twins or any other monstrosity—I hate to use that word!”

“I’m not horrified,” said Miss Thomas. “Abnormal in what way?”

“Well, in the crudest possible terms, what would you say was the abnormality suffered by one Siamese twin?”

‘The other Siamese twin.”

“Mmm. And by the same analogy, what’s the name of Newell’s disorder?”

“My goodness!” gasped Miss Thomas. “We better not tell Hildy Jarrell.”

“That isn’t the only thing we’ll have to keep from her— for a while, at least,” said the doctor. “Listen: did you run my notes on Newell?”

“All of them.”

“You remember the remark she made that bothered me, about Anson’s being only and altogether good, and the trouble I had with the implication that Newell was only and altogether bad?”

“I remember it.”

“It’s a piece of childishness that annoys me wherever I find it and I was damned annoyed to be thinking at all along those lines. The one reason for its being in the notes at all is that I had to decant it somewhere. Well, I’ve been euchred, Miss Thomas. Because Anson appeared in our midst shining and unsullied, I’ve leaned over backward trying to keep away from him the corruptions of anger, fear, greed, concupiscence and all the other hobbies of real mankind. By the same token, it never occurred to me to analyze what kindness, generosity, sympathy or empathy might be lurking in Newell. Why bother in such a—what was the term you used?”

“Heel,” said Miss Thomas without hesitation.

“Heel. So what we have to do first is to give each of these—uh—people the privilege of entirety. If they are mon

sters, then let us at least permit them to be whole monsters.”

“You don’t mean you’ll—”

“We,” he corrected, smiling.

She said, through her answering smile, “You don’t mean we’ll take poor Anson and—”

He nodded.

“Offhand, I don’t see how you’re going to do it, Doctor. Anson has no fear. He’d laugh as he walked into a lion’s cage or a high-tension line. And I can’t imagine how you’d make him angry. You of all people. He—he loves you. As for . . . oh, dear. This is awful.”

“Extremes are awful,” he agreed. “We’ll have to get pretty basic, but we can do it. Hence, I suggest Miss Jarrell be sent to Kalamazoo for a new stove or some such.”

“And then what?”

“It is standard practice to acquaint a patient with the name and nature of his disorder. In our field, we don’t tell him, we show him, and when he absorbs the information, we call it an insight. Anson, meet Newell. Newell, meet Anson.”

“I do hope they’ll be friends,” said Miss Thomas unhappily.

In a darkness within a darkness in the dark, Anson slept his new kind of sleep, wherein he now had dreams. And then there was his own music, the deep sound which lit the darkness and pierced the dark envelopes, one within the other; and now he could emerge to the light and laughter and the heady mysteries of life and communication with Miss Hildy and Doctor Fred, and the wonder on wonder of perception. Gladly he flung himself back to life to—

But this wasn’t the same. He was here, in the bed, but it wasn’t the same at all. There was no rim of light around the ceiling, no bars of gold pouring in a sunlit window; this was the same, but not the same—it was dark. He blinked his eyes so hard he made little colored lights, but they were inside his eyes and did not count.

There was noise, unheard-of, unbearable noise in the form of a cymbal-crash right by his head in the dark. He recoiled from it and tried to bounce up and run, and found he could not move. His arms were bound to his sides, his legs to the bed, by some wide formless something which held him trapped. He fought against it, crying, and then the bed dropped away underneath him and stopped with a crash, and rose and dropped again. There was another noise—not a noise, though it struck at him like one: this was a photo-flash, though he could not know it.

Blinded and sick, he lay in terror, waiting for terror again.

He heard a voice say softly, ‘Turn down the gain,” and his music, his note, the pervasive background to all his consciousness, began to weaken. He strained toward it and it receded from him. Thumpings and shufflings from somewhere in the dark threatened to hide it away from him altogether. He felt, without words, that the note was his life and that he was losing it. For the first time in his conscious life, he became consciously afraid of dying.

He screamed, and screamed again, and then there was a blackness blacker than the dark and it all ceased.

“He’s fainted. Lights, please. Turn off that note. Give him 550 and we’ll see if he can sleep normally. God, I hope we didn’t go too far.”

They stood watching the patient. They were panting with tension.

“Help me with this,” said the doctor. Together, he and Miss Thomas unbuckled the restraining sheet. They cleared away the flash-gun, the cymbals, and readjusted the bed-raising control to its normal slow operation.