A Reasonable World

6

One morning Dwayne Swarts called Italiano and asked her to lunch. “I warn you I want to ask for a favor,” he said.

They met in the staff dining room at one. “I’ll get right to the point,” said Swarts. “I have a patient I think you might help me with. His name is Geoffrey Barlow-Geller; he’s four years old. Emotional lability, inappropriate behavior in class, doesn’t interact with the other children. Intelligence tests are ambiguous because of his attention span, but my guess is he’s normal or above. They did a workup on him before they sent him to me; no physical problems.”

“I know the parents, and I’ve seen Geoffrey from a distance. What do they say?”

“He’s always been like this. Weepy, very dependent, hard to deal with. I asked them if there’s anything that seems to calm him down, and they told me he likes three things. He likes being held, he likes noisy toys, and he likes loud music. I’ve tried to persuade him to tell me what’s bothering him, and all he’ll say is, ‘Too much talking.’ I heard that the obvious way at first, but then it turns out that he says the same thing when he’s been crying in his room all by himself. What does that sound like to you, just offhand?”

“Paranoid schiz? Voices in his head?”

“It might be. If I can’t think of anything else, I’m going to have to start him on a course of carphenazine.”

“Well, Dwayne, what can I do?”

“You’ve hypnotized children, haven’t you?”

“Yes, occasionally.”

“Okay, I know it’s a long shot, but I’d like you to put him into trance and see if you can find out if he does hear voices. If that isn’t it, I don’t want to give him inappropriate medication. Can you do it—have you got time?”

“Yes, I’ll try.”

Geoffrey Barlow-Geller was an unattractive little boy —head too big for his body, nose runny, eyelids pink and swollen. He cried when his mother left him in Italiano’s office, and put his hands over his ears when she tried to talk to him. Eventually she got his attention with a toy robot that whirred and blinked its eyes. She let him play with it awhile, then put it on the desk and stopped the motor.

“See the robot, Geoffrey? Look how bright its eyes are. Look at the robot’s eyes, they’re getting brighter and brighter, aren’t they? Keep on looking at the robot’s eyes, and now you can feel that you’re getting sleepy. You’re getting sleepier and sleepier, and now you feel like closing your eyes. Yes, and now you’re getting sleepier, but you can still hear my voice ...”

She got him into light trance, gave him an induction cue, told him he would always feel good after these sessions, and brought him out of it.

The second session was much the same. In the third session, she was able to talk him down into deep trance, demonstrated by arm rigor and glove anesthesia.

She said, “Geoffrey, are you hearing voices in your head now?”

A pause. “Yes.”

“All right. In a moment, when I say ‘Begin,’ you’re going to find it’s very easy to tell me what the voices are saying. It doesn’t matter whether you understand them or not. If they talk too fast for you, you’ll just repeat as much as you can, and that’s all right. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“All right. Begin.”

Geoffrey’s lips parted. His voice was childish, but the words were not. “. . . this here one, onna otha hand, I could letcha have fuh fifty dollas . . . don’t you just try not to be such a son of a... sehpa zeenatrositay, sehteen soteez . . . over the last six months, about an eleven percent rise, but I think you’d best. . . soong poo cow jee, wo ming tyen lie kan ... get this terrible heartbum about half an hour after. . . tengaw see gemoo eetoo, selula deea makan nasee . . . thing I’d ever seen, and now she looks like a ...”

When the boy began to show signs of distress, Italiano gave him permission to stop. “Now when I count to three, you’re going to wake up. And you’ll wake up feeling good, and you’ll find out that the voices won’t bother you so much. You’ll still hear them, but you won’t have to pay attention. They’ll be just like voices in the next room, and you won’t have to listen. You can do whatever you want, talk, or listen to people who are really in the room, and the voices won’t bother you. One, two, three.” Geoffrey’s eyes opened.

“Feel all right?”

“Yes.” He smiled.

Alone in her office, Italiano played the recording back with a prickling of fear up her spine. Whatever this was, it was not like any auditory hallucination she had ever heard of. There was no delusional content, no relevance at all; the words were like random bits of holo conversations. She was especially puzzled by the parts that were not English; they were too structured to be random babbling or glossolalia. It was difficult to tell because of the childish accent, but one part sounded to her for all the world like French.

Through the computer she found a French-speaking detainee and played the recording for him. When it was done, she said, “Is there anything there that you recognized?”

“Yes, of course. ‘C’est pas une atrocity c’est une sottise. ’ That means, ‘It isn’t an atrocity, it is a stupidity.’ ”

“Are you sure?”

“Oh, yes. It was very clear.”

“Was there anything else that you recognized, except for the English?”

“No, but I heard one part that I think is an Oriental language. Perhaps more than one.”

“Thank you, Mr. Lagritte.”

Through the computer again, she found a Chinese-American businessman who had spent a good deal of time in the Far East. She played the recording for him. “Did you recognize any of that, Mr. Sun?”

“Oh, yes. ‘Send notice by mail, tomorrow I come see you.’ ”

“What language is that?”

“Chinese. Mandarin.”

“Anything else?”

“Yes. Another part is either Indonesian or Malaysian. ‘Look at Fatty, he’s always eating.’ ” He giggled. “Not very nice.”

In subsequent sessions, some of them attended by Dwayne Swarts, she got more of the same kind of material, and sent recordings to linguists ashore. One passage turned out to be Finnish, another Russian; there were still others that nobody could identify.

“I think it’s clear,” she told Dr. Owen, “that this is some kind of telepathy. I know how that sounds, but the other hypotheses are absolutely ruled out.”

“We have a polyglot population here, not to mention what he could have been exposed to earlier.”

“Yes, I know, and there have been cases where a trance subject has been able to reproduce written materials in other languages, sometimes with astonishing accuracy, just from having glimpsed them in a book somewhere, but this isn’t like that. From all we can find out, Geoffrey is hearing these voices in his head pretty much all the time, and that’s what’s the matter with him.”

“So you think these are real voices, in some sense— he’s picking up people’s thoughts as they speak?”

“That’s what it looks like.”

“Any idea who the speakers are?”

“No. There was one case where the speaker was complaining of heartburn after meals, and I checked with the MDs on board. None of them had had a patient with heartburn on that day, although it’s a common complaint. We don’t have anybody on board who speaks Finnish or Russian. And there was something about sending a message by mail. There hasn’t been any mail service in the U.S. for ten years, and we certainly don’t have it here. In itself, that’s not surprising; all the studies show that telepathy doesn’t depend on distance. But there has never been any report of telepathy taking this extended auditory form. People hear their name called, or they get hunches, or see visions, but this is like being plugged into a phone system with crossed wires. No wonder the poor kid is desperate.”

“You said you’d given him suggestions that he won’t mind the voices so much. How has that worked out?”

“Not very well. He’s doing a little better in school and at home, but he still cries a lot.”

“All right, Dorothy, this is interesting, but why is it important?”

Italiano hesitated. “Geoffrey was born right around the time the new outbreak of McNulty’s started. He may be a primary host, and if he is, this may be the kind of thing we’re going to see more of.”

“That’s two maybes, but I see your point. You’re right, of course. We ought to study him carefully, if only to anticipate things that may happen in the primary host population later on. Do you have any suggestions?”

“I’d like to test him for other paranormal abilities. We don’t know yet that this is the only thing he can do. And of course we ought to run all the other tests we can think of—EEG, basal, and so on. Poor thing, he’s going to be a busy little boy.”

“Maybe it will take his mind off the voices.”

After three attempts, Geller succeeded in getting Owen on the phone.

“Hello, Mr. Geller,” she said. “I understand there’s some problem about Geoffrey.”

“Some problem! They told us to get him ready for brain surgery!”

“Please be calm, Mr. Geller. What we’re proposing is a very simple, safe procedure. It’s been performed on thousands of people for therapy and even for recreational use.”

“I don’t care how many—”

“All we’re going to do is to insert an electrode into Geoffrey’s auditory center so that we can blank out those voices he’s hearing—or rather, so that he can do it himself, just by pressing a button. We’re trying to help him, Mr. Geller and Ms. Barlow.”

“We believe that’s for us to decide,” Barlow said. Her lips were thin. “We’d like to make a formal request for all three of us to be discharged so that we can take Geoffrey to our own doctors.”

“That will be denied. Honestly, Ms. Barlow, he is getting far better medical attention here than you could ever afford to pay for on the mainland. Why not just let us do what’s best for him?”

“We won’t give our consent.”

“I’m sorry to hear that, but I’m afraid the operation will have to go forward anyhow. Now let me be very frank. If you refuse, it will be necessary for security to come and get Geoffrey, and take you into custody if you resist. You can imagine for yourselves how much easier it will be for Geoffrey if you cooperate.”

Geoffrey came back from the operating room with a little ceramic knob on his head. A wire led from the knob to a metal box with a pushbutton, which Geoffrey had been told to keep in his shirt pocket. When he pushed the button, the voices went away. He pushed the button all the time, and the children in his class called him “Boxhead.”