The Bicentennial Man and Other Stories

Marching In

Jerome Bishop, composer and trombonist, had never been in a mental hospital before.

There had been times when he had suspected he might be in one, someday, as a patient (who was safe?), but it had never occurred to him that he might ever be there as a consultant on a question of mental aberration. A consultant.

He sat there, in the year 2001, with the world in pretty terrible shape, but (they said) pulling out of it, and then rose as a middle-aged women entered. Her hair was beginning to turn gray, and Bishop was thankfully conscious of his own hair still in full shock and evenly dark.

"Are you Mr. Bishop?" she asked.

"Last time I looked."

She held out her hand. "I'm Dr. Cray. Won't you come with me?"

He shook her hand, then followed. He tried not to be haunted by the dull beige uniforms worn by everyone he passed.

Dr. Cray put a finger to her lip, and motioned him into a chair. She pressed a button and the lights went out, causing a window, with a light behind it, to spring into view. Through the window, Bishop could see a woman in something that looked like a dentist's chair, tilted back. A forest of flexible wires sprang from her head, a thin narrow beam of light extended from pole to pole behind her, and a somewhat less narrow strip of paper unfolded upward.

The light went on again; the view vanished.

Dr. Cray said, "Do you know what we're doing in there?"

"You're recording brain waves? Just a guess."

"A good guess. We are. It's a laser recording. Do you know how that works?"

"My stuff's been recorded by laser," said Bishop, crossing one leg over the other, "but that doesn't mean I know how it works. It's the engineers who know the details…Look, Doc, if you have an idea I'm a laser engineer, I'm not."

"No, I know you're not," said Dr. Cray hurriedly. "You're here for something else…Let me explain it to you. We can alter a laser beam very delicately; much more rapidly and much more precisely than we can alter an electric current, or even a beam of electrons. That means that a very complex wave can be recorded in far greater detail than has ever been imagined before. We can make a tracing with a microscopically narrow laser beam and get a wave we can study under a microscope and get accurate detail invisible to the naked eye and unobtainable in any other fashion."

Bishop said,,.It that's what you want to consult me about, then all I can say is that it doesn't pay to get all that detail. You can only hear so much. It you sharpen a laser recording past a certain amount, you bring up the expense but you don't bring up the effect. In fact, some people say you get some kind of buzz that begins to drown out the music. I don't hear it myself, but I tell you that if you want the best, you don't narrow the laser beam all the way…Of course, maybe it's different with brain waves but what I told you is an I can tell you, so I'll go and there's no charge except for carfare."

He made as though to get up, but Dr. Cray was shaking her head vigorously.

"Please sit down, Mr. Bishop. Recording brain waves is different. There we do need all the detail we can get. Till now, all we've ever had out of brain waves are the tiny, overlapping effects of ten billion brain cells, a kind of rough average that wipes out everything but the most general effects."

"You mean like listening to ten billion pianos all playing different tunes a hundred miles away?"

"Exactly."

"All you get is noise?"

"Not quite. We do get some information-about epilepsy, for instance. With laser recording, however, we begin to get the fine detail; we begin to hear the individual tunes those separate pianos are playing; we begin to hear which particular pianos may be out of tune."

Bishop lifted his eyebrows. "So you can tell what makes a particular crazy person crazy?"

"In a way of speaking. Look at this." In another corner of the room a screen flashed to life, with a thin wavering line over it. "Do you see this, Mr. Bishop?" Dr. Cray pressed the button of an indicator in her hand and one little blip in the line reddened. The line moved along past the lighted screen and red blips appeared periodically.

"That's a microphotograph," said Dr. Cray. "Those little red discontinuities are not visible to the unaided eye and wouldn't be visible with any recording device less delicate than the laser. It appears only when this particular patient is in depression. The markings are more pronounced, the deeper the depression."

Bishop thought about it for a while. Then he said, "Can you do anything about it? So far, it just means you can tell by that blip there's a depression, which you can tell by just listening to the patient."

"Quite right, but the details help. For instance, we can convert the brain waves into delicately flickering light waves and, what's more, into the equivalent sound waves. We use the same laser system that is used to record your music. We get a sort of dimly musical hum that matches the light flicker. I would like you to listen to it by earphone."

"The music from that particular depressive person whose brain produced that line?"

"Yes, and since we can't intensify it much without losing detail, we will ask you to listen by earphone."

"And watch the light, too?"

"That's not necessary. You can close your eyes. Enough of the flicker will penetrate the eyelids to affect the brain."

Bishop closed his eyes. Through the hum, he could hear the tiny wail of a complex beat, a complex, sad beat that carried all the troubles of the tired old world in it. He listened, vaguely conscious of the dim light beating on his eyeballs in flickering time.

He felt his shirt pulled at strenuously. "Mr. Bishop-Mr. Bishop-"

He took a deep breath..'Thanks!" he said, shuddering a little. "That upset me, but I couldn't let go."

"You were listening to brain-wave depression and it was affecting you. It was forcing your own brain-wave pattern to keep time. You felt depressed, didn't you?"

"All the way."

"Well, if we can locate the portion of the wave characteristic of depression, or of any mental abnormality, remove that, and play all the rest of the brain wave, the patient's pattern will be modified into normal form."

"For how long?"

"For a while after the treatment is stopped. For a while, but not long. A few days. A week. Then the patient has to return."

"That's better than nothing."

"And less than enough. A person is born with certain genes, Mr. Bishop, that dictate a certain potential brain structure. A person suffers certain environmental influences. These are not easy things to neutralize, so here in this institution we've been trying to find more efficient and long-lasting schemes for neutralization…And you can help us, perhaps. That's why we've asked you to come here."

"But I don't know anything about this, Doc. I never heard about recording brain waves by laser." He pushed his hands apart, palms down. "I've got nothing for you."

Dr. Cray looked impatient. She pushed her hands deep into the pockets of her jacket and said, "Just a while ago, you said that the laser recorded more detail than the ear could hear."

"Yes. I stand by that."

"I know. One of my colleagues read an interview with you in the December 2000 issue of High Fidelity magazine, in which you said that. That's what attracted our attention. The ear can't get the laser detail, but the eye can, you see. It's the flickering light that alters the brain pattern to the norm, not the wavering sound. The sound alone will do nothing. It will, however, reinforce the effect when the light is working."

"You can't complain about that."

"We can. The reinforcement isn't good enough. The gentle, delicate, almost infinitely complex variations produced in the sound by laser recording is lost on the ear. Too much is present and it drowns out the portion that is reinforcing."

"What makes you think that a reinforcing portion is there?"

"Because occasionally, more or less by accident, we can produce something that seems to work better than the entire brain wave, but we don't see why. We need a musician. Maybe you. If you listen to both sets of brain waves, perhaps you can figure out by some insight a beat that will fit the normal set better than the abnormal one. Then that could reinforce the light, you see, and improve the effectiveness of the therapy."

"Hey," said Bishop in alarm, "that's putting a lot of responsibility on me. When I write music, I'm just caressing the ear and making the muscles jump. I'm not trying to cure an ailing brain."

"All we ask is that you caress the ears and make the muscles jump, but do it so that it fits the normal music of the brain waves…And I assure you that you need fear no responsibility, Mr. Bishop. It is quite unlikely that your music would do harm, and it might do so much good. And you'll be paid, Mr. Bishop, win or lose."

Bishop said, "Well, I'll try, though I don't promise a thing."

He was back in two days. Dr. Cray was pulled out of conference to see him. She looked at him out of tired, narrowed eyes.

"Do you have something?"

"I have something. It may work. "

"How do you know?"

"I don't. I just have the feel of it…Look, I listened to the laser tapes you gave me; the brain-wave music as it came from the patient in depression and the brain-wave music as you've modified it to normal. And you're right; without the flickering light it didn't affect me either way. Anyway, I subtracted the second from the first to see what the difference was."

"You have a computer?" Dr. Cray said, wondering.

"No, a computer wouldn't have helped. It would give me too much. You take one complicated laser-wave pattern and subtract another complicated laser-wave pattern and you're left with what is still a pretty complicated laser-wave pattern. No, I subtracted it in my mind to see what kind of beat was left…That would be the abnormal beat that I would have to cancel out with a counter-beat."

"How can you subtract in your head?"

Bishop looked impatient. "I don't know. How did Beethoven hear the Ninth Symphony in his head before he wrote it down? The brain's a pretty good computer, too, isn't it?"

"I guess it is." She subsided. "Do you have the counterbeat there?"

"I think so. I have it here on an ordinary tape recording because it doesn't need anything more. It goes something like-dihdihdihDAH -dihdihdihDAH-dihdihdihDAHDAHDAHdihDAH-and so on. I added a tune to it and you can put it through the earphones while she's watching the flickering light that's matched to the normal brain-wave pattern. If I'm right, it will reinforce the living daylights out of it."

"Are you sure?"

"If I were sure, you wouldn't have to try it, would you, Doc?"

Dr. Cray was thoughtful for -a moment. "I'll make an appointment with the patient. I'd like you to be here."

"If you want me. It's part of the consultation job, I suppose."

"You won't be able to be in the treatment room, you understand, but I'd want you out here."

"Anything you say."

The patient looked careworn when she arrived. Her eyelids drooped and her voice was low and she mumbled.

Bishop's glance was casual as he sat quietly, unnoticed, in the corner. He saw her enter the treatment room and waited patiently, thinking: What if it works? Why not package brainwave lights with appropriate sound accompaniment to combat the blues-to increase energy-to heighten love? Not just for sick people but for normal people, who could find a substitute for all the pounding they'd ever taken with alcohol or drugs in an effort to adjust their emotions-an utterly safe substitute based on the brain waves themselves…And finally, after forty-five minutes, she came out.

She was placid now, and the lines had somehow washed out of her face.

"I feel better, Dr. Cray," she said, smiling. "I feel much better."

"You usually do," said Dr. Cray quietly.

"Not this way," said the woman. "Not this way. This time it's different. The other times, even when I thought I felt good, I could sense that awful depression in the back of my head just waiting to come back the minute I relaxed. Now-it's just gone."

Dr. Cray said, "We can't be sure it will always be gone. We'll make an appointment for, say, two weeks from now but you'll call me before then if anything goes wrong, won't you? Did anything seem different in the treatment?"

The woman thought a bit. "No," she said hesitantly. Then: "The flickering light, though. That might have been different. Clearer and sharper somehow."

"Did you hear anything?"

"Was I supposed to?"

Dr. Cray rose. "Very well. Remember to make that appointment with my secretary."

The woman stopped at the door, turned, and said, "It's a happy feeling to feel happy," and left.

Dr. Cray said, "She didn't hear anything, Mr. Bishop. I suppose that your counter-beat reinforced the normal brainwave pattern so naturally that the sound was, so to speak, lost in the light…And it may have worked, too."

She turned to Bishop, looking him full in the face. "Mr. Bishop, will you consult with us on other cases? We'll pay you as much as we can, and if this turns out to be an effective therapy for mental disease, we'll see that you get all the credit due you."

Bishop said, "I'll be glad to help out, Doctor, but it won't be as hard as you may think. The work is already done."

"Already done?"

"We've had musicians for centuries. Maybe they didn't know about brain waves, but they did their best to get the melodies and beats that would affect people, get their toes tapping, get their muscles twitching, get their faces smiling, get their tear ducts pumping, get their hearts pounding. Those tunes are waiting. Once you get the counter-beat, you pick the tune to fit."

"Is that what you did?"

"Sure. What can snap you out of depression like a revival hymn? It's what they're meant to do. The beat gets you out of yourself. It exalts you. Maybe it doesn't last long by itself, but if you use it to reinforce the normal brain-wave pattern, it ought to pound it in."

"A revival hymn?" Dr. Cray stared at him, wide-eyed.

"Sure. What I used in this case was the best of them all. I gave her 'When the Saints Go Marching In.' "

He sang it softly, finger-snapping the beat, and by the third bar, Dr. Cray's toes were tapping.

This next one was requested by Bell Telephone Magazine over an excellent lunch. What they wanted was a 3,000-word story centering on a problem in communications. There were two broad requirements; first, that it be farther out than any of the methods of communication now under development by Bell Telephone, and, second, that I not postulate an end to the requirements for communications corporations.

As it happened, Kim Armstrong, the editor of the magazine, who was at the lunch, was an extraordinarily charming woman, but I would have agreed to tackle the story anyway, because before the lunch was over I had a plot outline safely tucked away in my head. [People ask me sometimes if I keep a notebook on me at all times to jot down ideas. I do, but it's inside my head, and therefore never gets mislaid.] I got to work on it on October 19, 1975. Ms. Armstrong liked it when it was done, and it appeared in the February 1976 issue of the magazine.