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

“How does this—if true—explain the way I’ve been mucking around with my life?”

Looking for an image, the doctor paused. “You might say you’ve been cantilevered out from a common center. Way out. Now your alter—we call him Anson—is, as I’ve said, a very nice fellow. His blind strugglings have been almost all toward something—call it an aura, if you like—in people around you. The pressures are everything that’s warm and lovable and good to be with.

“But you—man, you felt invaded! You could never reach out toward anything; Anson was there ahead of you, pressing and groping. You had to react, immediately and with all your might, in the opposite direction. Isn’t it true that all your life you’ve rejected and tramped on anything that attracted you—and at the same time you’ve taken only things you couldn’t really care about?”

“Well, I___”

“Just hold onto the idea. This speech I’m making is for your intellectual understanding; I don’t expect you to buy it first crack out of the barrel.”

“But I haven’t always ... I mean what about Osa? Are you telling me I didn’t really want Osa?”

“That’s the cantilever effect, Dick. Anson never felt about Osa the way you did. I think she must have some confining effect on him; he doesn’t like to be confined, does he, Miss Thomas?” He chuckled. “She either leaves him cold or makes him angry. So angry that it’s beyond belief. But it’s an infant’s anger, Dick—blind and furious and extreme. And what happens then, when you react in the opposite direction?”

“Oh, my God,” breathed Newell. “Osa ...” He turned his suddenly illuminated gaze up. “You know, sometimes I— we—it’s like a big light that . . .”

“I know, I know,” said the doctor testily. “Matter of fact, that’s happening right now. Turn off the ten-five, please, Miss Thomas.”

“Yes, Doctor.”

“That high note,” the doctor explained. “It’s for Anson— induced anger. You’re being pretty decent at the moment, Newell. You realize that?”

“Well, why wouldn’t I? You’ve done a lot for me.”

The note faded. Newell closed his eyes and opened them again. There was a long, tense silence.

Finally Newell said in his most softly insulting tone, “You spin a pretty tale, Freddy-boy. But I’m tired of listening. Shall I blackmail you the hell out of here?”

“Five-fifty, Miss Thomas.”

“Yes, Doctor.” She turned Newell off.

Back in the office again, Miss Thomas jittered in indecision. She tried to speak and then looked at the doctor with mute pleading.

“Go ahead,” he encouraged.

She shook her head. “I don’t know what comes next. Morton Prince was wrong; there are no multiple egos, just multiple siblings sharing the same body, the same brain.” She halted, waiting for him to take it from there.

“Well?” he said.

“I know you’re not going to sacrifice one for the other; that’s why you never handled these cases before. But”— she flapped her hands helplessly—”even if Newell could carry the equipment around, I’d never sleep nights, thinking that Anson had to go through the agony of that ten-five note just so Newell would be a decent human being. Or even, for that matter, vice versa.”

“It wouldn’t be either humane or practical,” he said. “Well?”

“Do they take turns being dominant, one day on, one day off?”

“That still would be sacrificing each half the time.”

“Then what? You said it would be ‘Newell, meet Anson. Anson, meet Newel.’ But you don’t have the same problem you’d have with Siamese twins or the same solution.”

“Which is?”

“Separating them without killing either one. All these two have is a single brain to share and a single body. If you could cut them free—”

“I can’t,” he said bluntly. “I don’t intend to.”

“All right,” she conceded in defeat. “You’re the doctor. You tell me.”

“Just what you said—the Morton Prince cases were in communication.”

“And Newell and Anson are, just because we gave Anson a vocabulary? What about that cantilever effect you explained to Newell? You can’t let them go through life counterbalancing each other—Newell pulling violently to the other side of Anson’s reactions, Anson doing the same with Newell’s. Then what?” she repeated almost angrily. “If you know, why put me through this guessing game?”

“To see if you’d come up with the same answer,” he said candidly. “A check on my judgment. Do you mind?”

She shook her head again, but this time with a little complimentary smile. “It’s a painful way to get co-operation, only it works, damn you.” She frowned then, considering. “The two of them are compartmented. Are they different in that way from the other multiples?”

“Some, yes—the ones that are detected because there is communication. But not the others. And those cases rate treatment (because all people in difficulty do) and Newell-Anson, if we work it out properly, will show us how to help them. There’s an obvious answer, Miss Thomas. I’m hoping—almost desperately—that you come up with the one I thought of.”

She made a self-impatient gesture. “Not the psychostat. Definitely not eliminating one or the other. Not making them take turns.” She looked up with a questioning awe on her face. “The opposite of treating Siamese twins?”

“Like what?” he asked urgently, leaning forward.

“Don’t separate them. Join them. Make a juncture.”

“Keep going,” he pressed. “Don’t stop now.”

“Surgical?”

“Can’t be done. It isn’t one lobe for Newell, the other for Anson, or anything that simple. What else?”

She thought deeply, began several times to say something, dismissed each intended suggestion with a curt head-shake. He waited with equally deep intensity.

She nodded at last. “Modulate them separately.” She was no longer asking. ‘Then modulate them in relation to each other so they won’t be in that awful cantilever balancing act.”

“Say it!” he nearly yelled.

“But that isn’t enough.”

“No!”

“Audio response.”

“Why?” he rapped out. “And which?”

“Sixty cycles—the AC tone they’ll be hearing almost all the time. Assign it to communication between them.”

The doctor slumped into a chair, drained of tension. He nodded at her, with the tiredest grin she had ever seen.

“All of it,” he whispered. “You got everything I thought of . . . including the 60 cycles. I knew I was right. Now I know it. Or doesn’t that make sense?”

“Of course it does.”

“Then let’s get started.”

“Now?” she asked, astonished. “You’re too tired—”

“Am I?” He jacked himself out of the chair. “Try stopping me and see.”

They used the EEG resultants, made two analogs and another, and used all three as the optimum standard for the final fixing process in the psychostat. It was a longer, more meticulous process than it had ever been and it worked; and what shook the doctor’s hand that last day was an unbelievable blend—all of Newell’s smoothness and a new strength, the sum of powers he had previously exhausted in the dual struggle that neither had known of; and, with it, Anson’s bright fascination with the very act of drawing breath, seeing colors, finding wonderment in everything.

“We’re nice guys,” said Richard Anson Newell, still shaking the doctor’s hand. “We’ll get along great.”

“I don’t doubt it a bit,” the doctor said. “Give my best to Osa. Tell her . . . here’s something a little better than a wet handkerchief.”