The Year's Greatest Science Fiction & Fantasy 2

THE OTHER MAN by Theodore Sturgeon

How do you put together on anthology?

I read. When I find a story I like, I mark it for re-reading. (The Merril Theory of Lit’ry Criticism is simple: any story I can’t enjoy as much the second—or fourth—time as the first does not deserve to be printed more than once.)

But once in a while I finish a story with no mental reservations whatsoever. “The Other Man” was a good bit longer than I wanted, but my immediate response was to reach for the phone and find out for sure whether rights would be available.

Sturgeon was hesitant. Seems there was another one— and just half as long—he wanted me to see first. When I read it (“And Now the News . . .”) I appreciated his uncertainty, and cursed my own. If Tony Boucher had not made up my mind for me, by selecting the shorter story for his own anthology, I might be sitting there yet, looking from one to the other. . . .

When he saw her again, he all but yelled—a wordless, painful bleat, one concentrated syllable to contain five years of loneliness, fury, self-revilement and that agony peculiar to the victim of “the other man.” Yet he controlled it, throwing it with a practiced reflex to a tensing of his abdomen and the transient knotting of thigh muscles behind the desk, letting the impact strike as it should, unseen.

Outwardly, he was controlled. It was his job to know the language of eyelids, jaw muscles, lips, and it was his special skill to make them mute. He rose slowly as his nurse ushered her in and while she took the three short paces to meet him. He studied her with an impassive ferocity.

He might have imagined her in old clothes, or in cheap clothes. Here she was in clothes which were both. He had allowed, in his thoughts of her, for change, but he had not thought her nose might have been broken, nor that she might be so frighteningly thin. He had thought she would always walk like something wild . . . free, rather . . . but with stateliness, too, balanced and fine. And indeed she still did so; somehow that hurt him more than anything else could.

She stopped before the desk. He moved his hands behind him; her gaze was on them and he wanted her to look up. He waited until Miss Jarrell discreetly clicked the door shut.

“Osa,” he said at last.

“Well, Fred.”

The silence became painful. How long did that take—two seconds, three? He made a meaningless sound, part of a laugh, and came around the desk to shift the chair beside it. “Sit down, for heaven’s sake.”

She sat down and abruptly, for the first time since she had entered the office, she looked directly at him. “You look— you look well, Fred.”

“Thanks.” He sat down. He wanted to say something, but the only thing that would come readily to his lips was: “You’re looking well, too”—such a patent lie that he couldn’t tell it. And at last he found something else to say: “A lot has happened.”

She nodded and her gaze found a corner of the tooled-leather blotter frame on the desk. She studied it quietly.

“Five years,” she said.

Five years in which she must have known everything about him, at first because such a separation is never sharp, but ragged, raveled, a-crackle with the different snaps of different threads at different times; and later, because all the world knew what he was, what he had done. What he stood for.

For him, five years at first filled with a not-Osa, like a sheet of paper from which one has cut a silhouette; and after that, the diminishing presence of Osa as gossip (so little of that, because anyone directly involved in gossip walks usually in a bubble of silence); Osa as rumor, Osa as conjecture. He had heard that Richard Newell had lost—left—his job about the time he had won Osa, and he had never heard of him working again.

Glancing at Osa’s cheap clothes now, and the new small lines in her face, he concluded that whatever Newell had found to do, it could not have been much. Newell, he thought bitterly, is a man God made with only one victory in him and he’s used it up.

“Will you help me?” Osa asked stridently.

He thought, Was I waiting for this? Is this some sort of reward, her coming to me for help? Once he might have thought so. At the moment, he did not feel rewarded.

He sat looking at her question as if it were a tangible object, a box of a certain size, a certain shape, made of some special material, which was not to be opened until he had guessed its contents.

Will you help me? Money? Hardly—Osa may have lost a great deal, but her towering pride was still with her. Besides, money settles nothing. A little is never enough and helps only until it is gone. A little more puts real solutions a bit further into the future. A whole lot buries the real problem, where it lives like a cancer or a carcinogen.

Not money, then. Perhaps a job? For her? No, he knew her well. She could get her own jobs. She had not, therefore she didn’t want one. This could only mean she lived as she did for Newell’s sake. Oh, yes, he would be the provider, even if the illusion starved her.

Then a job for Newell? Didn’t she know he couldn’t be trusted with any responsible job and was not constituted to accept anything less? Of course she knew it.

All of which left only one thing. She must be sure, too, that Newell would accept the idea or she would not be here asking.

He said, “How soon can he start therapy?”

She flickered, all over and all at once, as if he had touched her with a high voltage electrode—the first and only indication she had evinced of the terrible tensions she carried. Then she raised her head, her face lit with something beyond words, something big enough, bright enough, to light and warm the world. His world. She tried to speak.

“Don’t,” he whispered. He put out his hand and then withdrew it. “You’ve already said it.”

She turned her head away and tried to say something else, but he overrode that, too.

“I’ll get paid,” he said bluntly. “After his therapy, he’ll earn more than enough—” (For both of us? For my bill? To pay you back for all he’s done to you?) “—for everything.”

“I should have known,” she breathed. He understood. She had been afraid he wouldn’t take Newell as a patient. She had been afraid, if he did take him, that he might insist on doing it free, the name of which was charity. She need not have worried. I should have known. Any response to that, from a shrug to a disclaimer, would destroy a delicacy, so he said nothing.

“He can come any time you say,” she told him. This meant, He isn’t doing anything these days.

He opened a desk book and riffled through it. He did not see it. He said, “I’d like to do some pretty intensive work with him. Six, eight weeks.”

“You mean he’d stay here?”

He nodded. “And I’m afraid—I’d prefer that you didn’t visit him. Do you mind very much?”

She hesitated. “Are you sure that . . .” Her voice trailed off.

“I’m sure I want to do it,” he said, suddenly rough. “I’m sure I’ll do everything I can to straighten him out, bar nothing. You wouldn’t want me to say I was sure of anything else.”

She got to her feet. “I’ll call you, Fred.” She watched his face for a moment. He did not know if she would want to shake his hand or—or not. She took one deep breath, then turned away and went to the door and opened it.

“Thank you . . .”

He sat down and looked at the closed door. She had worn no scent, but he was aware of her aura in the room, anyway. Abruptly he realized that she had not said ‘Thank you.”

He had.

Osa didn’t call. Three days, four, the phone ringing and ringing, and never her voice. Then it didn’t matter—rather, she had no immediate reason to call, because the intercom whispered, and when he keyed it, it said in Miss Jarrell’s clear tones, “A Mr. Newell to see you, Doctor.”

Stupidly he said, “Richard A. Newell?”

Bzz Psss Bzz. “That’s right, Doctor.”

“Send him in.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Send him in,” said the doctor. I thought that’s what I said. What did it sound like? He couldn’t remember. He cleared his throat painfully. Newell came in.

“We-ell, Freddy-boy.” (Two easy paces; cocked head, half smile.) “A small world.” Without waiting to be asked, he sat down in the big chair at the end of the desk.

At first glance, he had not changed; and then the doctor realized that it was the—what word would do?—the symphonic quality of the man, the air of perfect blending—it was that which had not changed.

Newell’s diction had always suited the clothes he chose and his movements were as controlled as his speech. He still wore expensive clothes, but they were years old—yet so good they hardly showed it. The doctor was immediately aware that under the indestructible creases and folds was a lining almost certainly frayed through; that the elegant face was like a cheap edition printed from worn plates and the mind behind it an interdependence of flimsy parts so exactly matched that in the weak complex there was no weakest component. A machine in that condition might run indefinitely—idling.

The doctor closed his eyes with a brief impatience and consigned the concepts to the limbo of oversimplified analogies. “What do you want?”

Newell raised his eyebrows a fraction. “I thought you knew. Oh, I see,” he supplemented, narrowing his eyes shrewdly. “One of those flash questions that are supposed to jolt the truth out of a man. Now let’s see, just what did pop into my head when you asked me that?” He looked at the top of the window studiously, then leaned forward and shot out a finger. “More.”

“More?”

“More—that’s the answer to that question. I want more money. More time to myself. More fun.” He widened his eyes and looked disconcertingly into the doctor’s. “More women,” he said, “and better. Just—more. You know. Can do?”

“I can handle only so much,” said the doctor levelly. His thighs ached. “What you do with what I give you will be up to you.... What do you know about my methods?”

“Everything,” said Newel off-handedly.

Without a trace of sarcasm, the doctor said, “That’s fine. Tell me everything about my methods.”

“Well, skipping details,” said Newell, “you hypnotize a patient, poke around until you find the parts you like. These you bring up by suggestion until they dominate. Likewise, you minimize other parts that don’t suit you and drive them underground. You push and you pull and blow up and squeeze down until you’re satisfied, and then you bake him in your oven—I’m using a figure of speech, of course—until he comes out just the proper-sized loaf. Right?”

“You—” The doctor hesitated. “You skipped some details.”

“I said I would.”

“I heard you.” He held Newell’s gaze soberly for a moment. “It isn’t an oven or a baking.”

“I said that, too.”

“I was wondering why.”

Newell snorted—amusement, patronization, something like that. Not irritation or impatience. Newell had made a virtual career out of never appearing annoyed. He said, “I watch you work. Every minute, I watch you work; I know what you’re doing.”

“Why not?”

Newell laughed. “I’d be much more impressed in an atmosphere of mystery. You ought to get some incense, tapestries in here. Wear a turban. But back to you and your bake-oven, what-do-you-call-it—”

“Psychostat.”

“Yes, psychostat. Once you’ve taken a man apart and put him together again, your psychostat fixes him in the new pattern the way boiling water fixes an egg. Otherwise he’d gradually slip back into his old, wicked ways.”

He winked amiably.

Not smiling, the doctor nodded. “It is something like that. You haven’t mentioned the most important part, though.”

“Why bother? Everybody knows about that.” His eye flicked to the walls and he half-turned to look behind him. “Either you have no vanity or you have more than anyone, Fred. What did you do with all the letters and citations that any human being would frame and hang? Where’s all the plaques that got so monotonous on the newscasts?” He shook his head. “It can’t be no vanity, so it must be more than anyone. You must feel that this whole plant—you yourself— are your citation.” He laughed, the professional friendly laugh of a used-car salesman. “Pretty stuffy, Freddy.”

The doctor shrugged.

“I know what the publicity was for,” said Newell. “A fiendish plot to turn you into a personality kid for the first time in your life.” Again the engaging smile. “It isn’t hard to get you off the subject, Freddy-boy.”

“Yes, it is,” said the doctor without heat. “I was just making the point that what I do here is in accordance with an ethical principle which states that any technique resulting in the destruction of individual personality, surgical or otherwise, is murder. Your remarks on its being publicly and legally accepted now are quite appropriate. If you must use that analogy about taking a patient all apart and putting him together again in a different and better way, you should add that none of the parts are replaced with new ones and none are left out. Everything you have now you’ll have after your therapy.”

“All of which,” said Newell, his eyes twinkling, “is backed up by the loftiest set of ethics since Mohandas K. Gandhi.”

The twinkle disappeared behind a vitreous screen. The voice was still soft. “Do you suppose I’d be fool enough to put myself in your hands—your hands—if I hadn’t swallowed you and your legendary ethics down to here?” He jabbed himself on the chest. “You’re so rammed full of ethical conduct you don’t have room for an honest insult. You have ethics where most people carry their guts.”

“Why did you come here,” asked the doctor calmly, “if you feel that much animosity?”

“I’ll tell you why,” smiled Newell. “First, I’m enjoying myself. I have a sense of values that tells me I’m a better man than you are, law, fame and all, and I have seventy-odd ways —one of which you were once married to—to prove it. Why wouldn’t anyone enjoy that?”

“That was ‘first.’ You’ve got a ‘secondly’?”

“A beaut,” said Newell. “This one’s for kicks, too: I think I’m the toughest nut you’ve ever had to crack. I’m real happy about the way I am—all I want is more, not anything different. If you don’t eliminate my lovable character or any part of it—and you won’t; you’ve stacked the deck against yourself—you’ll wind up with just what you see before you, hi-fi amplified. And just for a little salt in the stew, I might as well tell you that I know you can’t operate well without hypnosis, and I can’t be hypnotized.”

“You can’t?”

“That’s right. Look it up in a book. Some people can’t be hypnotized because they won’t, and I won’t.”

“Why not?”

Newell shrugged and smiled.

“I see,” said the doctor. He rose and went to the wall, where a panel slid aside for him. He took up a shining hypodermic, snicked off the sterile sheath and plunged the needle into an ampoule. He returned to the desk, holding the hypodermic point upward. “Roll up your sleeve, please.”

“I also happen to know,” Newell said, complying readily, “that you’re going to have one hell of a time sorting out drug-reaction effects from true responses, even with neoscopolamine.”

“I don’t expect my work to be easy. Clench your fist, please.”

Newell did, laughing as the needle bit. The laugh lasted four syllables and then he slumped silently in his chair.

The doctor took out a blank case book and carefully entered Newell’s name and the date and a few preliminary notes. In the “Medication” column, he wrote, 10 cc neutral saline solution.

He paused then and looked at the “better” man and murmured, “So you can run a mile faster than Einstein.”

“All ready, Doctor.”

“Right away.”

He went to the rack in the corner and took down a white coat. Badge of office, he thought, cloak of Hippocrates, evolved through an extra outdoor duster we used to wear to keep the bodily humors off our street clothes . . . and worn today because, for patients, the generalization “doctor” is an easier departure point for therapeutics than the bewildering specific “man.” Next step, the ju-ju mask, and full circle.

He turned into the west corridor and collided with Miss Thomas, who was standing across from Newell’s closed door.

“Sorry!” they said in unison.

“Really my fault,” said Miss Thomas. “I thought I ought to speak to you first, Doctor. He—he’s not completely dismantled.”

“They very frequently aren’t.”

“I know. Yes, I know that.” Miss Thomas made a totally uncharacteristic, meaningless flutter of the hands and then welded them angrily to her starched flanks.

The doctor felt amusement and permitted it to show. Miss Thomas, his head technician, was neither human nor female during working hours, and the touch of color, of brightness in her lack of ease pleased him somehow.

She said, “I’m familiar with the—uh—unexpected, Doctor. Naturally. But after eighty hours of machine catalysis, I don’t expect a patient to resemble anything but a row of parts laid out on a laboratory bench.”

“And what does this patient resemble?”

There was a sudden, soft peal of delighted feminine laughter from the closed door. Together they looked at its bland surface and then their eyes met.

“Two hundred cycles,” said Miss Thomas. “Listen to her.”

They listened: Miss Jarrell’s voice, a cooing, inarticulate Miss Jarrell, was saying, “Oh . . . you!” And more laughter.

Miss Thomas said severely, “I know what you’re thinking about Hildy Jarrell, but don’t. That’s exactly what I did myself.” Again she made the uncharacteristic fluttery gesture. “Oh-h!” she breathed impatiently.

Because his impulses were kind, the doctor ignored most of this and picked up only, ‘Two hundred cycles. What do you get at the other frequencies?”

“Oh, that’s all right, all of it. Average response. Pre-therapeutic personality responds best at eighty cycles. Everywhere else, he’s nice and accessible. Anyway,” she said a little louder, obviously to drown out another soft sudden chuckle from behind the door, “I just wanted you to know that I’ve done what I can. I didn’t want you to think I’d skipped anything in the spectrum. I haven’t. It’s just that there’s a personality in the 200-cycle area that won’t dismantle.”

“Yet,” he corrected mildly.

“Oh, you can do it,” she said in rapid embarrassment. “I didn’t mean ... I only meant...”

She drew a deep breath and started over. “I just wanted you to be sure my job’s done. As to what you can do, you’ll handle it, all right. Only—”

“Only what, Miss Thomas?”

“It’s a pity, that’s all,” she blurted, and pushed past him to disappear around the corner.

He shook his head, puzzlement and laughter wrestling gently deep inside him. Only then did something she had said fully register with him: “...there’s a personality in the 200-cycle area that won’t dismantle.”

That woman, he thought, has the kind of precision which might be clouded by emotion, but nothing would eliminate it. If she said there’s a personality in the 200-cycle area, she meant just that. A personality, not a component or a matrix or a complex.

As she herself had put it, after catalysis a patient should resemble nothing more than a row of parts on a lab bench. Down through the levels of hypnosis, audible frequencies would arbitrarily be assigned to various parts of the personality, and by suggestion each part would respond to its frequency throughout the therapy. Any part could be summoned, analyzed, then minimized, magnified, stressed or quelled in the final modulation and made permanent in the psychostat. But at the stage Newell was in—should be in— these were parts, sub-assemblies at most. What did she mean “a personality” in the 200-cycle area?

She was wrong, of course. Oh, God, he thought, she’s wrong, isn’t she?

He opened the door.

Miss Jarrell did not see him. He watched for a long moment, then said, just loud enough to be heard over the soft thrumming of the 200-cycle note from the speakers, “Don’t stop, Miss Jarrell. I’d like to see a little more of this.”

Miss Jarrell flung up a scarlet face.

The doctor said again, quietly but with great force, “Go on, please.”

She turned away to the bed, her back held with a painful rigidity and her ears, showing through her hair, looking like the tips of bright little tongues.

“It’s all right,” soothed the doctor. “It’s all right, Miss Jarrell. You’ll see him again.”

She made a soft sound with her nostrils, grinned ruefully and went to the controls. She set one of them for the patient’s allotted sleep-command frequency and hit the master switch. There was a gentle explosion of sound—”white” noise, a combination of all audio frequencies, which served to disorient the dismantled patient, his reflexive obedience attempting to respond to all commands at once—for ten seconds, and then it automatically faded, leaving the 550-cycle “sleep” note. The patient’s face went blank and he lay back slowly, his eyes closing. He was asleep before his head reached the pillow.

The doctor stood suspended in thought for some time. Miss Jarrell gently arranged the patient’s blanket. It was not done dutifully nor as part of the busyness of waiting for his next move. For some reason, it touched the doctor deeply and pulled him out of his reverie. “Let’s have the P.T., Miss Jarrell.”

“Yes, Doctor.” She consulted the index and carefully set the controls. At his nod, she touched the master switch. Again the white noise, and then the deep moo of the 80-cycle tone.

The P.T.—pre-therapeutic—personality would be retained untouched throughout the treatment, right up until the final setting process in the psychostat, except, of course, for the basic post-hypnotic command which kept all segments under control of the audio spectrum. The doctor watched the sleeping face and was aware of a most unprofessional desire to have something other than that untouched P.T. appear.

He glanced at Miss Jarrell without turning his head. She should leave now, and ordinarily she would. But she was not behaving ordinarily just now.

The patient’s eyes half-opened and stayed that way for a time. It was like the soft startlement of a feline which is aware of something, undecided whether the something deserves more attention than sleep, and therefore simply waits, armed and therefore relaxed.

Then he saw the eyes move, though the lids did not. This was the feline taking stock, but deluding its enemies into thinking it still drowsy. The man changed like an aurora, which is ever the same while you watch, but something quite different if you look away and look back. I think in analogies, the doctor chided himself, when I don’t like the facts.

“Well, Freddy-boy,” drawled Richard A. Newell.

Behind him, he heard Miss Jarrell’s almost inaudible sigh and her brisk quiet footsteps as she turned on the speech recorder, crossed the room and closed the door behind her.

Newell said, “Nurse is an odd term for a woman built like that. How you doing, Freddy?”

“Depends,” said the doctor.

Newell sat up and stretched. He waved at the red eye of the recorder. “Everything I say is taken down and may be used against me, hm?”

“Everything is used, yes. Not—”

“Oh, spare me the homilies, Fred. Transcribe them yourself, do you?”

“I—no.” As he caught Newell’s thought, and knew exactly the kind of thing the man was going to do next, he felt himself filling up with impotent rage. It did not show.

“Fine, fine.” Projecting his voice a bit, Newell said over an elaborate yawn, “Haven’t waked up like this since I was a kid. You know, disoriented, wondering for a moment where I was. Last bed I was in wasn’t so lonesome. Missed thirty of those last forty winks, the way she was all over me. ‘Dick, oh, Dick, please ...’ “ he mimicked cruelly. “Told her to shut up and get breakfast.”

He laughed outright, obviously not at anything he had said, but at the writhing silent thing within the doctor, which he could not see but knew must be there.

He glanced again at the pilot light on the recorder and said, “Mentioning no names, of course,” and the doctor understood immediately that names would be mentioned, places, dates and interrelationships, whenever Newell chose . . . which would be when the suspense ceased to entertain him. Meanwhile, the doctor could prepare himself for the behind-the-back gossip, the raised eyebrows of the transcribing typist, the after-hours debates as to the ethical position of a doctor’s practicing on the man who had ... who was ...

The sequence spiraled down to a low level of his personal inferno and flickered there, hot and smokeless.

“You didn’t tell me,” said Newell. “How you doing? Find the secret of my success yet?”

The doctor shrugged easily, which was not easy to do. “We haven’t begun.”

“Thought not.” Newell snorted. “By the time you’re finished, you won’t have begun, either.”

“Why do you say that?”

“I extrapolate it. I come here, you give me a shot of knockout drops, I get a sound sleep and wake up rested and cheerful. Otherwise, nothing. Yet I know that you’ve taken my slumbering corpus, poked it, prodded it, checked it in and wrung it out, tooted on your tooters, punched cards and clicked out four miles of computer tape—for what? I’m still me, only rested up a little.”

“How do you know we did all that?”

“I read the papers.” When the doctor made no reply, Newell laughed again. “You and your push-button therapy.” He looked up in recall, as if reading words off the ceiling. “What’s the claim—82% of your patients cured?”

“Modulated.”

“Pretty word, modulated. Pretty percentage, too. What kind of a sieve do you use?”

“Sieve?”

“Don’t tell me you don’t select your patients!”

“No, we take them as they come.”

“Ha. You talk like the Lysenkoists. Remember them? Russian genetics experts fifty years back. They claimed results like that. They claimed non-selective methodology, too, even when some of the people supposed to be breeding split-kernel corn were seen splitting the kernels with a knife. Even the Communists rejected them after a while.” He flicked a wolfish glance at the recorder and grinned. “But then,” he said clearly, “no Communist would reject you, Freddy.”

Of the four possible responses which came to him, the doctor could find none that would sound unlike a guilty protest, so he said nothing. Newell’s widening grin informed him that his silence was just as bad.

“Ah, Fred, m’boy, I know you. I know you well. I knew a lot about you five years ago and I’ve learned a lot more since.” He touched the dark wiry tuft between his collarbones. “Like, for example, you haven’t a single hair on your chest. Or so I’ve been told.”

Again the doctor used silence as a rejoinder. He could examine his feelings later—he knew he would; he inescapably must. For now, he knew that any answer would fall into Newell’s quiver as new arrows. Silence was a condition Newell could not maintain nor tolerate; silence made Newell do the talking, take the offensive . . . inform on and expose his own forces. Silence Newell could use only sometimes; words, always.

Newell studied him for a moment and then, apparently deciding that in order to return to a target, it was necessary to leave it temporarily, looked at the compact control panel. “I’ve read a lot about that. Push one button, I’m a fighting engine. Push another, I lie down with the lamb. Who was it once said humanity will evolve into a finger and a button, and every time the finger wants anything, it will push the button—and that will be the end of humanity, because the finger will get too damn lazy to push the button?” He wagged his head. “You’re going to gadget yourself clear out of a living, Fred.”

“Did you read what was written over the entrance when you came here?” the doctor asked.

“I noticed there was something there,” said Newell amiably, “and no, I didn’t read it. I assumed it was some saw about the sanctity of the personality, and I knew I’d get all I could stand of that from you and your acolytes.”

“Then I think you ought to know a little more about what you call ‘push-button therapy,’ Newell. Hypnosis isn’t therapy and neither is the assigned audio-response technique we use. Hypnosis gives us access to the segments of personality and creates a climate for therapy, and that’s all. The therapy itself stands or falls on the ability of the therapist, which is true of my school as it is of all others short of the lobotomists.”

“Well, well, well. I goaded a real brag out of you at last. I didn’t know you had it in you.” Newell chuckled. “82% effective and you do it all your little self. Now ain’t you something? Tell me, able therapist, how do you account for the 18% who get by you?”

“Why do you want to know?”

“I might alter the figures for you. Who are these sturdy souls?”

“Organic defectives,” said the doctor. And certain others . . . but he kept that to himself.

Newell shouted, “Touché!” and fell back with a roar of appreciative laughter. But the doctor saw his eyes before he closed them, little windows with all the faces of hate looking out.

The doctor was delighted. He braced himself for the reaction against his own pleasure which he could always expect from his austere professionalism, but it did not come. He put this fact away with the others he knew he must examine later.

Newell was saying, “You can’t have it both ways, Fred. About hypnosis not being therapy, I mean. What’s this I heard somewhere about certain frequencies having certain effects, no matter who you are?”

“Oh, that. Yes, some parts of the audio spectrum do affect most people. The subsonics—fourteen to around twenty cycles, for example, if you use enough amplitude—they scare people. And beat-frequencies between two tones, where the beat approaches the human pulse, sometimes have peculiar psychological effects. But these are byways, side phenomena. We use the ones we can rely on and ignore or avoid the others. Audio frequencies happen to be convenient, accurate and easy for patient and therapist to identify.

“But they’re not essential. We could probably do the same thing with spoken commands or a spectrum of odors. Audio is best, though; the pure electronic tone is unfamiliar to most people and so has no associations except the ones we give it. That’s why we don’t use 60 cycles—the hum you’re surrounded by all your life from AC devices.”

“And what about if you’re tone-deaf?” asked Newell, with an underlay of gloating which could only mean that he was talking about himself.

“Nobody’s that tone-deaf, except the organic defectives.”

“Oh,” said Newell disappointedly, then returned to the half-sneering search for information. “And so the patient walks out of here prepared for the rest of his life to go into a state of estrus every time an English horn sounds A-440?”

“You know better than that,” retorted the doctor, for once not concealing his impatience. “That’s what the psychostat is for. Every frequency the patient responds to is recorded there”—he waved at the controls—”along with its intensity. These are analyzed by a computer and compared by another one with a pattern which shows which segments are out of line—like too much anger or unwarranted fear, in terms of the patient’s optimum. The psychostat applies dampers on the big ones and amplifies the atrophied ones until the response matches the master pattern. When every segment is at optimum—the patient’s, mind you; no one else’s—the new pattern is fixed by an overall posthypnotic which removes every other suggestion that has been applied.”

“So the patient does go out of here hypnotized!”

“He walks in here hypnotized,” said the doctor. “I’m surprised at you, Newell. For a man who knows so much about my specialty, you shouldn’t need to be lectured on the elementals.”

“I just like the sound of your voice,” Newell said acidly, but the acid was dilute. “What do you mean, the patient walks in here hypnotized?”

“Most people are, most of the time. In the basic sense, a man is under hypnosis whenever any one of his senses does not respond to a present stimulus, or when his attention is diverted even slightly from his physical surroundings. You’re under hypnosis when you read a book, or when you sit and think and don’t see what you’re staring at, or when you bark your shin on a coffee-table you didn’t see under bright lights.”

“That’s so much hair splitting.” Newell didn’t even pause before his next sentence, which came from quite a different area than his scoffing incredulity. “Why didn’t you tell me all this when I said I couldn’t be hypnotized?”

“I preferred to believe you when you said you knew it all.”

Every pretense of joviality disappeared. “Listen, you,” Newell grated, in the ugliest tone of voice the doctor had ever heard, “you better watch what you’re doing.”

It was time again for silence and the doctor used it. He gave Newell no choice but to lie there and stare at his own words. He watched the man regaining his poise, laboriously, hand over hand, then resting, testing, waiting to be sure he could speak again.

“Well,” Newell said at length, and the doctor almost admired him for the smoothness of his tone, “it’s been fun so far and it’ll wind up more so. If you really can do what you say, I’ll make it right with you, Freddy-boy. I’ll really pay off.”

“That’s nice,” said the doctor guardedly.

“Nice? Just nice? Man, I’ll give you a treasure you couldn’t get any other way. You could never get,” he amended. He looked up into the doctor’s face brightly. “Nearly five solid years a-building and it’s all yours. Me, I’ll start a new one.”

“What are you talking about?”

“My little black book. Got everything in it from pig to princess. Whoever you are, however you feel from time to time, there’s a playmate in there for you. You could really use it, Freddy. You must have stored up quite a charge since you-know-what,” he said, grinning at the recording machine. “Fix me up, I fix you up. Fair enough?”

The silence this time was unplanned. The doctor walked to the controls, dialed 550 and hit the master. The 80-cycle note died, the white noise took over, and then the 550-cycle sleep command. The doctor felt that gleaming grin leave the room like a pressure off his back.

He is a patient, the doctor thought at last, out of his hard-held numbness. He is a patient in a therapeutic environment as detached from the world as a non-Euclidean theorem. There is no Newell; there is only a patient. There is no Fred, only a doctor. There is no Osa, only episodes. Newell will be returned to the world because he has a personality and it has an optimum, because that is what I do here and that is what I am for.

He touched the annunciator control and said, “Miss Jarrell, I want you.”

She opened the door almost immediately; she must have been waiting in the corridor. “Oh, Doctor, I am sorry! I know I shouldn’t do anything like that. It’s just—well, before I knew it. . .”

“Don’t apologize, Miss Jarrell. I mean it—don’t. You may even have done some good. But I have to know exactly what influences were . . . no, don’t explain,” he said when she tried to speak. “Show me.”

“Oh, I couldn’t! It’s so—silly!”

“Go on, Miss Jarrell. It isn’t silly at all.”

Flushing, she passed him with her eyes averted and went to the controls. She dialed a frequency and activated the master, and as the white noise roared out, she went to the foot of the bed, waiting. The audio faded, all but a low, steady thrum—200 cycles.

The patient opened his eyes. He smiled. It was a smile the like of which the doctor had never seen before, though he might have imagined one. Not, however, on the face of Richard A. Newell. There was nothing conceivable in Richard A. Newell to co-exist with such an expression.

The patient glanced down and saw Miss Jarrell. Ecstatic recognition crossed his face. He grasped the covers and whipped them over his head, and lay stiff and still as a pencil.

“You . . . !” crooned Miss Jarrell, and the blanket was flung down away from the patient’s head, and he gurgled with laughter. She snatched at his toes, and he bucked and chortled, and covered up again. “The bumble bee—” she murmured, and he quivered, a paroxysm of delighted anticipation—”goes round the tree...and goes bzz ... bzzz . .. BZZ!” and she snatched at his toes again.

He whipped the blanket away from his face and gave himself up to an explosion of merriment which was past vocalization—in fact, but for that soft and intense chuckle, he had made hardly a sound.

“You . . .”

The doctor watched and slowly felt a vacuum in the scene somehow, and a great tugging to fill it with understanding, and the understanding would not come until the word “ridiculous” slipped through his mind . . . and that was it: This should be ridiculous, a grown man reacting like a seven-month infant. What was extraordinary was that it was not ridiculous and that it was indeed a grown man, not a mere infantile segment.

It was a thing to be felt. There was a—a radiance in these bursts of candid merriment which, though certainly childlike, were not childish. It was a quality to be laughed with, not laughed at.

He glanced at the audio selector. Yes, this was the 200-cycle response that Miss Thomas had mentioned. “A personality—” He began to see what she had meant. He began, too, to be afraid.

He went to the wall rack where the technician’s response-breakdown was clipped. It was a standard form, one column showing the frequencies arbitrarily assigned to age levels (700 cycles and the command suggestion: “You are eleven years old”) and another column with the frequencies assigned to emotional states (800 cycles and “You are very angry”; 14 cycles, “You are afraid”).

Once the patient was completely catalyzed, response states could readily be induced and their episodic material extracted—fear at age three, sexuality at fourteen, fear plus anger plus gratification at age six, or any other combination.

The 200-cycle area was blotchy with Miss Thomas’s erasures, but otherwise blank.

The doctor inwardly shook himself and got a firm grip. He went to the bed and stood looking down at that sensitive, responsive face.

“Who are you?” he asked.

The patient looked at him, eyes bright, a glad, anticipatory smile on his lips. The doctor sensed that the man did not understand him, but that he was eager to; further, that from the bottom of his heart the man was prepared to be delighted when he did understand. It filled the doctor with an almost tender anxiety, a protectiveness. This creature could not be disappointed—that would be inartistic to the point of gross injustice.

“What’s your name?” the doctor pursued.

The patient smiled at him and sat up. He looked into the doctor’s eyes with an almost unbearable attention and a great waiting, ready to treasure whatever might come next if only—if only he could identify it.

One thing’s certain, mused the doctor: this was no infantile segment. Child, yes, but not quite child.

“Miss Jarrell.”

“Yes, Doctor.”

“The initial, the middle initial on the chart. It’s ‘A.’ What does that stand for?”

After a moment, “Anson,” she said.

To the patient, he said. “I’m going to call you Anson. That will be your name.” He put his hand on the patient’s chest. “Anson.”

The man looked down at the hand and up, expectantly, at the doctor.

The doctor said, touching his white coat, “Doctor. Doctor.” He pointed at Miss Jarrell. “Miss—”

“Hildy,” said Miss Jarrell quickly.

The doctor could not help it; he grinned briefly. This elicited a silent burst of glee from the patient, which was shut off instantly, to be replaced by the anticipation, the watchful and ready attentiveness. He burdened the doctor with his waiting and the necessity to appreciate. Yet what burden was it, really? This creature would appreciate the back of a hand across the face or two choruses of the Londonderry Air.

The doctor poised over the bed, waiting for an answer, and it came:

The burden lay in the necessity not to please this entity, but to do this thing properly, in ways which would never have to be withdrawn later. He trusts me—there, in three words, was the burden.

The doctor took the patient’s hand and put the fingertips close to his lips. “An-son,” he said. Then he put the hand to the patient’s own mouth, nodding encouragingly.

The patient obviously wanted to do it right, too—more, even, than the doctor. His lips trembled. Then, “An-son,” he said.

Across the room, Miss Jarrell clapped her hands and laughed happily.

“That’s right,” smiled the doctor, pointing. “Anson. You’re Anson.” He touched his own chest. “Doc-tor.” He pointed again. “Miss Hildy.”

The man in the bed sat up slowly, his eyes on the doctor’s face. “An-son. Anson.” And then a light seemed to flood him. He hit his chest with his knuckles. “Anson!” he cried. He felt his own biceps, his face, and laughed.

“That’s right,” said the doctor.

“Doc . . . tok,” said Anson with difficulty. He looked wistful, almost distraught.

“That’s okay. That’s good. Doctor.”

“Doc-tor.” Anson turned brightly to Miss Jarrell and pointed. “Miss Hildy!” he sang triumphantly.

“Bless you,” she said, saying it like a blessing.

While Anson grinned, the doctor stood for a moment grinning back like a fool and feeling frightened and scratching his head.

Then he went to work.

“Richard,” he said sharply, and watched for a reaction.

There was none, just the happy eagerness.

“Dick.”

Nothing.

“Newell.”

Nothing.

“Hold up your right hand. Close your eyes. Look out of the window. Touch your hair. Let me see your tongue.”

Anson did none of these things.

The doctor wet his lips. “Osa.”

Nothing.

He glanced at Miss Jarrell. “Anson,” he said, and Anson increased his attention. It was startling; the doctor hadn’t known he could. “Anson, listen.” He pulled back his sleeve and showed his watch. “Watch. Watch.” He held it close, then put it to Anson’s ear.

Anson gurgled delightedly. “Tk tk,” he mimicked. He cocked his head and listened carefully to the doctor repeating the word. Then. “Wats. Watts. Watch,” he said, and clapped his hands exactly as Miss Jarrell had done before.

“All right, Miss Jarrell. That’s enough for now. Turn him off.”

He heard her intake of breath and thought she was going to speak. When she did not, he faced her and smiled. “It’s all right, Miss Jarrell. We’ll take good care of him.”

She looked for the sarcasm in his face, between his words, back in recall, anywhere, and did not find it. She laughed suddenly and heartily; he knew she was laughing at herself, spellbound as she had been, anxious for the shining something which hid in the 200-cycle area.

“I could use a little therapy myself, I guess,” she said wonderingly.

“I would recommend it to you if you had reacted any other way.”

She went to the door and opened it. “I like working here,” she said, blushed, and went out.

The doctor’s smile disappeared with the click of the latch. He glanced once at the patient, then moved blindly to the controls. He locked them and went back to his office.

Miss Thomas knocked. Getting no answer, she entered the doctor’s office. “Oh, I beg your pardon, I thought—”

The expression on his face halted her. She took the reports she carried and put them down on the desk. He did not move. She went to the cabinet, which slid open for her, and shook two white pills from a vial. She broke a beam with a practiced flick of the wrist. A paper cup dropped and filled with ice-water. She took it to the doctor. “Here.”

He said rapidly, “What? What? What?” and, seeking, looked the wrong way to find her voice. He turned again, saw her. “What?” and put his hand for a moment over his eyes. “Oh, Miss Thomas.”

“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.”

“Start it on rats first.”

I am, he said, fortunately to himself. He considered her remark further and decided not to answer it, knowing how deeply she must regret saying it.

She said, “Hildy Jarrell will quit when she finds this out.”

“She will not quit,” said the doctor immediately and positively.

“And as for me—”

“Yes?”

Their gazes locked like two steel rods placed tip to tip, pressing, pressing, knowing that some slight wavering, some side drift, must come and must make a break and a collision.

But instead, she broke. She closed her eyes against tears and clasped her hands. “Please,” she whispered, “do you have to go through with this? Why? Why?”

Oh, God, he thought, I hate this. “I can’t discuss it.” That, he thought painfully, is altogether the truth.

She said heavily, “I don’t think you should.” He knew it was her last word.

“It is a psychological decision, Miss Thomas, and not a technological one.” He knew it was unfair to fall back on rank and specialty when he no longer had an argument he could use. But this had to stop.

She nodded. “Yes, Doctor.” She went out, closing the door too quietly. He thought, What do you have to be to a person so you can run after someone crying, Come back! Come back! Don’t hate me! I’m in trouble and I hurt!

It took Miss Jarrell about forty minutes to get to the office. The doctor had figured it at about thirty-five. He was quite ready for her.

She knocked with one hand and turned the knob with the other and flew in like an angry bee. Her face was flushed and there was a little pale tension-line parenthesizing each nostril. “Doctor—”

“Ah, Miss Jarrell,” he said with a huge joviality. “I was just about to call you. I need your help for a special project.”

“Well, I’m sorry about that,” she began. Her eyes were wide and aflame, and the rims were slightly pink. He wished he could magic a few minims of azacyclonol into her bloodstream; she could use it. “I’ve come to—”

“The Newell case.”

“Yes, the Newell case. I don’t think—”

He had almost to shout this time. “And I think you’re just the one for the job. I want that 200-cycle entity—you know, Anson—I want him educated.”

“Well, I think it’s just—what?” And as the angry syllable ricocheted around the office, she stared at him and asked timidly, “I beg your pardon?”

“I’d like to relieve you of your other duties and put you with Anson full time. Would you like that?”

“Would I like . . . what will I do?”

“I want to communicate with him. He needs a vocabulary and he needs elementary instruction. He probably doesn’t know how to hold a fork or blow his nose. I think you can do a good job of teaching him.”

“Well, I—why, I’d love to!”

“Good. Good,” he said like a department-store Santa Claus. “Just a few details. I’ll want every minute on sound film, from white noise to white noise, and I’ll want to review the film every day. And, of course, I’d have to ask you not to discuss this with anyone, on or off the staff. It’s a unique case and a new therapy, and a lot depends on it. On you.”

“Oh, you can depend on me, Doctor!”

He nodded agreement. “We’ll start tomorrow morning. I’ll have the first word-lists and other instructions ready for you by then. Meanwhile, I’ve got some research to do. Contact the Medical Information Service in Washington and have them key in Prince, Morton, and Personality, Multiple, on their Big Brain. I want abstracts of everything that has been published in the last fifty years on the subject. No duplicates. An index. Better order microfilm and send it by telefax, AA priority.”

“Yes, Doctor,” said Miss Jarrell eagerly. “Foreign publications too?”

“Everything any researcher has done. And put a Confidential on the order as well as the delivery.”

“Really secret.”

“Really.” He concealed the smile which struggled to show itself; in his mind, he had seen the brief image of a little girl hiding jelly-beans. “And get me the nurses’ duty-list. I have some juggling to do.”

“Very well, Doctor. Is that all?”

“All for now.”

She nearly skipped to the door. He saw a flash of white as she opened it; Miss Thomas was standing in the outer office. He could not have been more pleased if she had been there by his explicit orders, for Miss Jarrell said, as she went out, “And thank you, Doctor—thank you very much.”

Chew on that, Thomas, he thought, feeling his own small vindictiveness and permitting himself to enjoy it for once.

And: Why am I jumping on Thomas?

Well, because I have to jump on somebody once in a while and she can take it.

Why don’t I tell her everything? She has a good head. Might have some really good ideas. Why not?

Why not? he asked again into a joyless void. Because I could be wrong. I could be so wrong. That’s why not.

The research began, and the long night work. In addition to the vast amount of collateral reading—there was much more material published on the subject of multiple personality than he had realized—he had each day’s film to analyze, notes to make, abstracts to prepare for computer-coding, and then, after prolonged thought, the next day’s lessons to outline.

The rest of the clinic refused to stop and wait for this job to be done, and he had an additional weight of conscience as he concealed his impatience with everything else but the Newell case. He was so constituted that such a weight made him over-meticulous in the very things he wished to avoid, so that his ordinary work took more time rather than less.

As for the research, much of it was theory and argumentation; the subject, like reincarnation, seemed to attract zealots of the most positive and verbose varieties, both pro and con. Winnowing through the material, he isolated two papers of extreme interest to him. One was a theory, one an interim report on a series of experiments which had never been completed due to the death of the researcher.

The theory, advanced by one Weisbaden, was based on a search through just such material as this. Indeed, Weisbaden seemed to have been the only man besides himself who had ever asked the Medical Information Service for this complete package.

From it he had abstracted statistics, weighted them to suit his theory, and come up with the surprising opinion that multiple personality was a twinning phenomenon, and that if a method were found for diagnosing all such cases, a correspondence would be found between the incidence of multiple births and the incidence of multiple personalities. So many births per thousand are twins, so many per hundred thousand are triplets, and the odds with quads and quints are in the millions.

So, too, said Weisbaden, would be the statistical expectation for the multiple personality phenomenon, once such cases stopped being diagnosed as schizoids and other aberrates.

Weisbaden had not been a medical man—he was some sort of actuary—but his inference was fascinating. How many twins and triplets walked the Earth in single bodies, without any organic indication that they were not single entities? How many were getting treatment for conditions they did not have; how many Siamese twins were being penalized because they would not walk like other quadrupeds; how many separate entities were being forced to spend their lives in lockstep?

Some day, thought the doctor—as so many doctors have thought before—some day, when we can get closer to the genetic biologists, when psychology becomes a true science, when someone devises a cross-reference system between the disciplines which really works . . . and some day, when I have the time—well, maybe I could test this ingenious guess. But it’s only a guess, based on neither observation nor experiment. Intriguing, though—if only it could be tested.

The other paper was of practical value. A certain Julius Marx—again not a medical man, but a design engineer with, apparently, hobbies—had built an electro-encephalograph for two (would anyone ever write a popular song about that?) which graphed each of the patients through a series of stimuli, and at the same time drew a third graph, a resultant.

Marx was after a means of determining brain-wave types, rather than individual specimens, and had done circuitry on machines which would handle up to eight people at once. In a footnote, with dry humor, he had qualified his paper for this particular category: “Perhaps one day the improbable theories of Dr. Prince might approach impossibility through the use of this device upon a case of multiple personality.”

Immediately on reading this, the doctor ordered EEGs on both Anson and Newell, and when he had both before him, he wished fervently that Julius Marx had been there with him; he suspected that the man enjoyed a good laugh, even on himself. The graphs were as different as such graphs can possibly be.

The confirmation of his diagnosis was spectacular, and he left a note for Miss Jarrell to track down every multiple personality case he had rejected for the past eight years and see what could be done about some further tests. What would come after the tests, he did not know—yet.

The other valuable nudge he got from the Marx paper was the idea of a resultant between two dissimilar electro-encephalograms. He made one from the Newell-Anson EEGs —without the use of anything as Goldbergian as Marx’s complicated device, but with a simple computer coupling. He kept it in his top desk drawer, and every few days he would draw it out and he would wonder ...

Therapy for Anson wasn’t therapy. Back at the very beginning, Miss Thomas had said that his was a personality that wouldn’t dismantle; she had been quite right. You can’t get episodic material from an entity which has had no subjective awareness, no experience, which has no name, no sense of identity, no motility, no recall.

There were many parts to that strange radiance of Anson’s and they were all in the eye of the beholder, who protected Anson because he was defenseless, who was continually amazed at his unselfconsciousness as if it were an attribute rather than a lack. His discovery of the details of self and surroundings was a never-ending delight to watch, because he himself was delighted and had never known the cruel penalties we impose on expressed delight, nor the masking idioms we use instead: Not a bad sunset there. Yeah. Real nice.

“He’s good,” Miss Jarrell said to the doctor once. “He’s only good—nothing else.”

Therapy for Newell was, however, therapy, and not rewarding. The properly dismantled and segmented patient is relatively simple to handle.

Key in anger (1200 cycles) and demand “How old are you?” Since anger does not exist unsupported, an episode must emerge; the anger has an object, which existed at a time and place; and there’s your episode. “I’m six,” says your patient. Key in the “You are six years old” note for reinforcement and you’re all ready for significant recall. Or start with the age index: “You are twelve years old.” When that is established, demand, “How do you feel?” and if there is significant material in the twelfth year, it will emerge. If it is fear, add the “fear” note and ask “Where are you?” and you’ll have the whole story.

But not in Newell’s case. There was, of course, plenty of conflict material, but somehow the conflicts seemed secondary; they were effects rather than causes. By far the largest category of traumas is the unjustified attack—a severe beating, a disease, a rejection. It is traumatic because, from the patient’s point of view, it is unjustified. In Newell’s case, there was plenty of suffering, plenty of defeat; yet in every single episode, he had earned it. So he was without guilt. His inner conviction was that his every cruelty was justified.

The doctor had an increasing sense that Newell had lived all his life in a books-balanced, debts-paid condition. His episodes had no continuity, one to the other. It was as if each episode occurred at right angles to the line of his existence; once encountered, it was past, like a mathematical point. The episodes were easy to locate, impossible to relate to one another and to the final product.

The doctor tried hard to treat Anson and Newell in his mind as discrete, totally unconnected individuals, but Miss Jarrell’s sentimental remark kept echoing in his mind: “He’s good; he’s only good—nothing else,” and generating an obverse to apply to Newell: He’s evil, he’s only evil—nothing else.

This infuriated him. How nice, how very nice, he told himself sarcastically, the spirits of good and evil to be joined together to make a whole man, and how tidily everything fits; black is totally black and white is white, and together the twain shall make gray. He found himself telling himself that it wasn’t as simple as that, and things did not work out according to moral evaluations which were more arbitrary even than his assigned audio.

It was about this time that he began to doubt the rightness of his decision, the worth of his therapy, the possibility of the results he wanted, and himself. And he had no one to advise him. He told that to Miss Thomas.

It was easy to do and it surprised both of them. He had called her in to arrange a daily EEG on both facets of the Newell case and explain about the resultant, which he also wanted daily. She said yes, Doctor, and very well, Doctor, and right away, Doctor, and a number of other absolutely correct things. But she didn’t say why, Doctor? or that’s good, Doctor, and suddenly he couldn’t stand it.

He said, “Miss Thomas, we’ve got to bury the hatchet right now. I could be wrong about this case, and if I am, it’s going to be bad. Worse than bad. That’s not what bothers me,” he added quickly, afraid she might interrupt, knowing that this must spill over or never emerge again. “I’ve been through bad things before and I can handle that part of it.”

Then it came out, simple and astonishing to them both: “But I’m all alone with it, Tommie.”

He had never called her that before, not even to himself, and he was overwhelmed with wonderment at where it might have come from.

Miss Thomas said, “No, you’re not,” gruffly.

“Well, hell,” said the doctor, and then got all his control back. He dropped a film cartridge into the viewer and brought out his notes. Using them as index, he sat with his hand on the control, spinning past the more pedestrian material and showing her the highlights. He presented no interpretations while she watched and listened.

She heard Newell snarling, “You better watch what you’re doing,” and Anson pointing about the room, singing, “Floor, flower, book, bed, bubble. Window, wheel, wiggle, wonderful.” (He had not known at that stage what a wonderful was, but Miss Jarrell said it almost every hour on the hour.) She saw Newell in recall, aged eleven, face contorted, raging at his fifth-grade teacher, “I’ll bomb ya, y’ole bitch!” and at thirteen, coolly pleased at something best unmentioned concerning a kitten and a centrifuge.

She saw Anson standing in the middle of the room, left elbow in right hand, left thumb pressed to the point of his chin, a stance affected by the doctor when in perplexity: “When I know everything there is to know,” Anson had said soberly, “there’ll be two Doctor Freds.”

At this, Miss Thomas grunted and said, “You wouldn’t want a higher compliment than that from anybody, anytime.” The doctor shushed her, but kindly. The first time he had seen that sequence, it made his eyes sting. It still did. He said nothing.

She saw it all, right up to yesterday’s viewing, with Newell in a thousand pieces from what appeared to be a separate jigsaw puzzle for each piece, and Anson a bright wonder, learning to read now, marveling at everything because everything was new—teaspoons and music and mountains, the Solar System and sandwiches and the smell of vanilla.

And as he watched, doors opened in the doctor’s mind. They did not open wide, but enough for him to know that they were there and in which walls. How to describe the indescribable feeling of expertness?

It is said that a good truck driver has nerve-endings which extend to the bumper and tail light, tire tread to overhead. The virtuoso pianist does not will each separate spread and crook of each finger; he wills the notes and they appear.

The doctor had steered this course of impossible choices by such willing and such orientation; and again he felt it, the urge that this way is right now and there is the thing to do next. The miracle to him was not the feeling, but that it had come back to him while he watched the films and heard the tapes with Miss Thomas, who had said nothing, given no evaluation or advice. They were the same films he had studied, run in the same sequence. The difference was only in not being alone any more.

“Where are you going?” Miss Thomas asked him.

From the coat closet, he said, “File that material and lock it up, will you, Miss Thomas? I’ll call you as soon as I return.” He went to the door and smiled back at her. It hurt his face. “Thanks.”

Miss Thomas opened her mouth to speak, but did not. She raised her right hand in a sort of salute and turned around to put the files away.

The doctor called from a booth near the Newell apartment. “Did I wake you, Osa? I’m sorry. Sometimes I don’t know how late it gets.”

“Who . . . Fred? Is that you, Fred?”

“Are you up to some painful conversation?”

Alarmed, she cried, “Is something the matter? Is Dick—”

He mentally kicked himself for his clumsiness. What other interpretation could she have put on such a remark? “He’s okay. I’m sorry. I guess I’m not good at the light banter. . . . Can I see you?”

She paused for a long moment. He could hear her breathing. “I’ll come out. Where are you?”

He told her.

She said, “There’s a cafe just around the corner, to your left. Give me ten minutes.”

He put up the phone and went to the corner. It was on a dingy street which seemed to be in hiding. On the street, the cafe hid. Inside the cafe, booths hid. In one of the booths, the doctor sat and was hidden. It was all he could do to keep himself from assuming a fetal posture.

A waiter came. He ordered Collinses, made with light rum. He slumped then, with his forearms on the table and his chin on them, and watched bubbles rise in the drinks and collect on the underside of the shaved ice, until the glasses frosted too much for him to see. Then he closed his eyes and attempted to suspend thought, but he heard her footsteps and sprang up.

“Here I am,” he said in a seal-like bark far louder than he had intended.

She sat opposite him. “Rum Collins,” she said, and only then did he remember that it had always been the drink they shared, when they had shared things. He demanded of himself, Now why did I have to do that? and answered, You know perfectly well why.

“Is he really all right?” she asked him.

“Yes, Osa. So far.”

“I’m sorry.” She turned her glass around, but did not lift it. “I mean maybe you don’t want to talk about Dick.”

“You’re very thoughtful,” he said, and wondered why it had never occurred to him to see her just for himself. “But you’re wrong. I did want you to talk about him.”

“Well... if you like, Fred. What, especially?”

He laughed. “I don’t know. Isn’t that silly?”

He sipped his drink. He was aware that she did the same. They never used to say “cheers” or “skoal” or anything else, but they always took that first sip together.

He said, “I need something that segmentation or hypnosis or narcosynthesis just won’t give me. I need to flesh out a skeleton. No, it’s more refined than that. I need tints for a charcoal portrait.” He lifted his hands and put them down again. “I don’t know what I need. I’ll tell you when I get it.”

“Well, of course I’ll help if I can,” she said uncertainly.

“All right. Just talk, then. Try to forget who I am.”

He met her eyes and the question there, and elaborated, “Forget I’m his therapist, Osa. I’m an interested stranger who has never seen him, and you’re telling me about him.”

“Engineering degree, and where he comes from, and how many sisters?”

“No,” he said, “but keep that up. You’re bound to stumble across what I want that way.”

“Well, he’s . . . he’s been sick. I think I’d tell a stranger that.”

“Good! What do you mean, sick?”

She glanced quickly at him and he could follow the thought behind it: Why don’t you tell me how sick he is? And then: But you really want to play this game of the interested stranger. All right.

She stopped looking at him and said, “Sick. He can’t be steered by anything but his own—pressures, and they-—they aren’t the pressures he should have. Not for this world.”

“Why do you suppose that is?”

“He just doesn’t seem to care. No,” she denied forcefully, “I don’t mean that, not at all. It’s more like—I think he would care if he—if he was allowed to, and he isn’t allowed to.” She got his eyes again. “This is very hard to do, Fred.”

“I know and I’m sorry. But do go on; you’re doing fine. What do you mean, he isn’t allowed to care about the world and the way it wags? Who won’t allow him?”

“It isn’t a who; it’s a—I don’t know. You’d have a term for it. I’d call it a monster on his back, something that drives him to do things, be something he really isn’t.”

“We strangers don’t have any terms for anything,” he reminded her gently.

“That’s a little refreshing,” she said with a wan half-smile. “I like...mystified ... people. They make me feel like one of the crowd. You know who’s lucky?” she asked, her voice suddenly wild and strained and, by its tone, changing the subject. “Psychotics are lucky. The nuts, the real buggy ones. (I talk like this to layman strangers.) The ones who see butterflies all the time, the ones who think the President is after them.”

“Lucky!” he exploded.

“Yes, lucky. They have a name for the beast that’s chewing on them. Sometimes they can see it themselves.”

“I don’t quite—”

“I mean this,” she said excitedly. “If I see grizzly bears under every lamp post, I’m seeing something. It has a name, a shape; I could draw a picture of it. If I do something irrational, the way some psychos do—run a nonexistent railroad or shoot invisible pheasants with an invisible gun, I’m doing something. I can describe it and say how it feels and write letters about it. See, these are all things plaguing the insane. Labels, handles. Things that you can hold up to reality to demonstrate that they don’t coincide with it.”

“And that’s lucky?”

She nodded miserably. “A mere neurotic—Dick, for example—hasn’t a thing he can name. He acts in ways we call irrational, and has a sense of values nobody can understand, and does things in a way that seems consistent to him but not to anyone else. It’s as if there were a grizzly bear, after all, but we’d never heard of grizzly bears—what they are, what they want, how they act. He’s driven by some monster without a name, something that no one can see and that even he is not aware of. That’s what I mean.”

“Ah.”

They sat for minutes, silent and careful.

Then, “Osa—”

“Yes, Fred.”

“Why do you love him?”

She looked at him. “You really meant it when you said this would be a painful conversation.”

“Never mind that. Just tell me.”

“I don’t think it’s a thing you can tell.”

“Then try this: What is it you love in him?”

She made a helpless gesture. “Him.”

He sat without responding until he knew she felt his dissatisfaction with the answer.

She frowned and then closed her eyes. “I couldn’t make you understand, Fred. To understand, you’d have to be two things: a woman, and—Osa.” Still he sat silent. Twice she looked up to his face and away, and at last yielded.

She said in a low voice, “It’s a ... tenderness you wouldn’t believe, no matter how well you know him. It’s a gentle, loving something that no one ever born ever had before and never will again. It’s ... I hate this, Fred!”

“Go on, for heaven’s sake! This is exactly what I’m looking for.”

“It is? Well, then ... But I hate talking like this to you. It doesn’t seem right.”

“Go on!”

She said, almost in a whisper, “Life is plain hell sometimes. He’s gone and I don’t know where, and he comes back and it’s just awful. Sometimes he acts as if he were alone in the place—he doesn’t see me, doesn’t answer. Or maybe he’ll be the other way, after me every second, teasing and prodding and twisting every word until I don’t know what I said or what I should say next, or who I am, or . . . anything, and he won’t leave me alone, not to eat or to sleep or to go out. And then he—”

She stopped and the doctor waited, and this time realized that waiting would not be enough. “Don’t stop,” he said.

She shook her head.

“Please. It’s impor—”

“I would, Fred,” she burst out frantically. “I’m not refusing to. I can’t, that’s all. The words won’t—”

“Don’t try to tell me what it is, then,” he suggested. “Just say what happens and how it makes you feel. You can do that.”

“I suppose so,” she said, after considering it.

Osa took a deep breath, almost a sigh, and closed her eyes again.

“It will be hell,” she said, “and then I’ll look at him and he...and he...well, it’s there, that’s all. Not a word, not a sign sometimes, but the room is full of it. It’s ... it’s something to love, yes, it’s that, but nobody can just love something, one-way, forever. So it’s a loving thing, too, from him to me. It suddenly arrives and everything else he is doing, the cruelty, the ignoring, whatever might be happening just then, it all stops and there’s nothing else but the— whatever it is.”

She wet her lips. “It can happen any time; there’s never a sign or a warning. It can happen now, and again a minute from now, or not for months. It can last most of a day or flash by like a bird. Sometimes he goes on talking to me while it happens; sometimes what he actually says is just nothing, small-talk. Sometimes he just stands looking at me, without saying anything. Sometimes he—I’m sorry, Fred—he makes love to me then and that’s . . . Oh, dear God, that’s . . .”

“Here’s my handkerchief.”

“Thank you. He—does that other times, too, when there’s nothing loving about it. This—this thing-to-love, it—it seems to have nothing to do with anything else, no pattern. It happens and it’s what I wait for and what I look back on; it’s all I have and all I want.”

When he was quite sure she had no more to say, he hazarded, “It’s as if some other—some other personality suddenly took over.”

He was quite unprepared for her reaction. She literally shouted, “No!” and was startled herself.

She recoiled and glanced guiltily around the cafe. “I don’t know why,” she said, sounding frightened, “but that was just—just awful, what you said. Fred, if you can give any slightest credence to the idea of feminine intuition, you’ll get that idea right out of your head. I couldn’t begin to tell you why, but it just isn’t so. What loves me that way may be part of Dick, but it’s Dick, not anybody or anything else. I know that’s so, that’s all. I know it.”

Her gaze was so intense that it all but made him wince. He could see her trying and trying to find words, rejecting and trying again.

At last, “The only way I can say it that makes any sense to me is that Dick could be such a—a louse so much of the time and still walk a straight line without something just as extreme in the other direction. It’s—it’s a great pity for the rest of the world that he only shows that side to me, but there it is.”

“Does he show it only to you?” He touched her hand and released it. “I’m sorry, but I must ask that.”

She smiled and a kind of pride shone from her face. “Only to me. I suppose that’s intuition again, but it’s as certain as Sunday.” The pride disappeared and was replaced by a patient agony. “I don’t delude myself, Fred—he has other women; plenty of them. But that particular something is for me. It isn’t something I wonder about. I just—know.”

He sat back wearily.

She asked, “Is all this what you wanted?”

He gave her a quick, hurt glance and saw, to his horror, her eyes filling with tears.

“It’s what I asked for,” he said in a flat voice.

“I see the difference.” She used his handkerchief. “May I have this?”

“You can have—” But he stopped himself. “Sure.” He got up. “No,” he said, and took the damp handkerchief out of her hand. “I’ll have something better for you.”

“Fred,” she said, distressed, “I—”

“I’m going, forgive me and all that,” he said, far more angrily than he had thought he would. But polite talk and farewells were much more than he could stand. “The layman stranger has to have a long interview with a professional acquaintance. I don’t think I’d better see you again, Osa.”

“All right, Fred,” she said to his back.

He had hurt her, he knew, but he knew also that his stature in her cosmos could overshadow the hurt and a hundred more like it. He luxuriated in the privilege and stamped out, throwing a bill to the waiter on the way.

He drove back and plodded up the ramp to the clinic. For some obscure reason, the inscription over the door caught his attention. He had passed it hundreds of times without a glance; he had ordered it put there and he was satisfied with it, and why should it matter now? But it did. What was it that Newell had said about it? Some saw about the sanctity of personality. A very perceptive remark, thought the doctor, considering that Newell hadn’t read it:

ONLY MAN CAN FATHOM MAN

It was from Robert Lindner and was the doctor’s answer to the inevitable charges of “push-button therapy.” But he wondered now if the word “Man” was really inclusive enough.

He shook off the conjecture and let himself into the building.

Light gleamed from the translucent door of his office at the far end of the corridor. He walked down the slick flooring toward it, listening to his heels and not thinking otherwise, his mind as purposively relaxed as a fighter’s body between rounds. He opened the door.

“What are you doing?”

“Waiting,” said Miss Thomas.

“Why?”

“Just in case.”

Without answering, he went to the closet and hung up his coat. Back at his desk, he sat down and straightened his tired spine until it crackled. Then he looked at Miss Thomas in the big chair. She put her feet under her and he understood that she was ready to leave if he wished her to.

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.

“He’s all right, physically anyway,” said the doctor after a swift examination. “I told you it would work if we got basic enough. He wouldn’t fear a lion because he doesn’t know what a lion is. But restraint and sudden noise and falling—he doesn’t have to know what they are. Okay, button him up again.”

“What? You’re not going to—”

“Come on, button him up,” he said brusquely.

She frowned, but she helped him replace the restraining sheet. “I still think—” she began, and earned a “Sh!”

He set up the 200-cycle note again at its usual amplitude and they waited. There was a lag in apparent consciousness this time. The doctor realized that the patient was awake, but apparently afraid to open his eyes.

“Anson . . .”

Anson began to cry weakly.

“What’s the matter, Anson?”

“D-Doctor Fred, Doctor Fred ... the big noise, and then I couldn’t move and all the black and white smash lights.” He wept again.

The doctor said nothing. He simply waited. Anson’s sobs stopped abruptly and he tried to move. He gasped loudly and tried again.

“Doctor Fred!” he cried in panic.

Still the doctor said nothing.

Anson rolled his head wildly, fell back, tried again. “Make it so I can get up,” Anson called piteously.

“No,” said the doctor flatly.

“Make so I—”

“No.”

Piercingly, Anson shrieked. He surged upward so powerfully that for a second the doctor was afraid for the fastenings on the restraining sheet. But they held.

For nearly ten minutes, Anson fought the sheet, screaming and drooling. Fright turned to fury, and fury to an intense, witless battle. It was a childish tantrum magnified by the strength and staying power of an adult.

At about the second minute, the doctor keyed in a supplementary frequency, a shrill 10,500 cycles which had been blank on the index. Whenever Anson paused for breath, the doctor intoned, “You are angry. You are angry.” Grimly he watched until, a matter of seconds before the patient had to break, he released him to sleep.

“I couldn’t stand another minute of that,” said Miss Thomas. Her lips were almost gray. She moistened a towel and gently bathed the sleeping face. “I didn’t like that at all.”

“You’ll like the rest of it,” promised the doctor. “Let’s get rid of this sheet.”

They took it off and stored it.

“How’d you like me to hit the ten-five cycles with that sheet off?” he asked.

“Build him a cage first,” she breathed in an awed tone.

He grinned suddenly. “Hit eighty cycles for me, will you?”

She did and they watched Richard Newell wakening. He groaned and moved his head gingerly. He sat up suddenly and yelped, and covered his face for a moment with both hands.

“Hello, Newell. How do you feel?”

“Fred! What’ve you been doing to me?”

“How do you feel?”

“Like the output of a garbage disposal unit. I haven’t felt like this since the day I rowed a boat for fourteen hours.”

“It’s all right, Newell. All in a day’s work.”

“Work is right. I know—you’ve had me out pulling a plow while I was hypnotized. Slave labor. Lowers the overhead. Damn it, Fred, I’m not going to take much more of this.”

“You’ll take as much as I choose to give you,” snapped the doctor. “This is my party now, Dicky-boy.”

Miss Thomas gasped. Newell slowly swung his legs out and sat looking at the doctor, an ominous and ugly half-smile on his face.

“Miss Thomas,” said the doctor, “ten-five, please.”

With his amusement deeply concealed, he watched Miss Thomas sidle to the controls and dial for the 10,500 supplementary note. He knew exactly what was going on in her mind. Ten-five was a fury motif, the command to Anson to relive the state of unbearable anger he had been in just moments ago.

“Miss Thomas,” said Newell silkily, “did I ever tell you the story of my life? Or, for that matter, the story of the doctor’s life?”

“Why—no, Mr. Newell.”

“Once upon a time,” said Newell, “there was a doctor who . . . who . . .” As the shrill note added itself to the bumble of the 80-cycle tone, Newell’s voice faltered. Behind him, the doctor heard the rustle of Miss Thomas’s starch as she braced herself.

Newell looked at the doctor with astonishment. “What the hell am I up to?” he murmured. “That isn’t a funny story. ‘Scuse me, Miss Thomas.” He visibly relaxed, swung his feet back up on the bed and rested on one elbow. “I haven’t felt like this since . . . Where’s Osa?” he asked.

“Home. Waiting for you.”

“God. Hope she doesn’t have to wait much longer. Is she all right?”

“She’s fine. So are you, pretty near. I think we have the thing whipped. Like to hear about it?”

“Talk about me,’” Newell quoted. “Talk nice if you can, but talk about me.’”

The doctor saw Miss Thomas staring incredulously at the controls, checking to be sure she had keyed the right note. He laughed. Newell laughed with him; it was one of the most pleasant of imaginable sounds. And it wasn’t Anson’s laugh, either—not even remotely. This was Richard Newell to the life, but warm, responsive, considerate.

The doctor said, “Did Osa ever tell you she thought you had a nameless monster pushing you around?”

“Only a couple hundred times.”

“Well, you have. I’m not joking, Dick—you really have. Only you’ve never suspected it and you don’t have a name to call it by.”

“I don’t get you.” He was curious, anxious to learn, to like and be liked. It was in the way he spoke, moved, listened. Miss Thomas stood with her hand frozen near the controls, ready to shut him off at the first sign of expected violence.

“You will. Now here’s the picture.” And in simple terms, the doctor told him the story of Anson, the theory of multiple personality as a phenomenon of twinning, and at last his theory of the acrobatic stabilization the two entities had achieved on their own.

“Why acrobatic?” asked Newell.

“You know you act like a heel most of the time, Dick.”

“You might say so.” It was said quite without resentment.

“Here’s why. (Just listen, now; you can test it any way you like after you’ve heard it all.) Your alter ego (to coin a phrase) has been walled in, excluded from consciousness and expression and even self-awareness, ever since you were born. I won’t attempt to explain that; I don’t know. Anyway, there it lay, isolated but alive, Dick, alive—and just as strong as you!”

“I. . . can’t picture such a thing.”

“It isn’t easy. I can’t either, completely. It’s like trying to get into the mind of another species, or a plant, if you can imagine such a thing. I do know, though, that the thing is alive, and up until recently had nothing—no knowledge, no retained experience, no mode of expression at all.”

“How do you know it’s there, then?”

“It’s there all right,” said the doctor. “And right this very minute, it’s blowing its top. You see, all your life it’s lived with you. It has had a blind, constant urge to break through, and it never could make it until it popped up here and we drew it out. It’s a fascinating entity, Dick. I won’t go into that now; you’ll know it—him—thoroughly before you leave. But believe it or not, it’s pretty nice. More than nice: it’s positively angelic. It’s lain there in the dark all these years like a germinated seed, pushing up toward the light. And every time it came near—you batted it down again.”

“I did?”

“For good sound survival reasons, you did. But like a lot of survival impulses, yours was pretty irrational. A lion roars, a deer runs. Good survival. But if he runs over a cliff? What I’m getting at is that there’s room for both of you in Richard Anson Newell. You’ve co-existed fairly well, considering, as strangers and sometime enemies. You’re going to do a lot better as friends and partners. Brothers, if you want the true term, because that’s just what the two of you are.”

“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.”

“Whatever you say,” said Richard Anson Newell.

He waved to Miss Thomas, who watched from the corridor, and behind her, Hildy Jarrell, who wept, and he went down the steps to the street.

“We’re making a mistake, Doctor,” said Miss Thomas, “letting him—them—go.”

“Why?” he asked, curious.

“All that brain power packed in one skull . . .”

The doctor wanted to laugh. He didn’t. “You’d think so, wouldn’t you?” he agreed.

“Meaning it’s not so at all,” she said suspiciously. “Why not?”

“Because it isn’t twice the amount of brains any individual has. It’s only as much as any two distinct individuals have. Like you and me, for instance. Mostly we supplement each other—but just here and there, not everywhere, adding up to a giant double brain. Same with Newell and Anson. And any two people can be counted on to jam one another occasionally. So will they—but not like before treatment.”

They watched until Richard Anson Newell was out of sight, then went back to check the multiple personality cases that Miss Jarrell had dug out of the files.

Four months later, the doctor got a letter:

Dear Fred,

I’ll write this because it will do me good to get it off my chest. If it doesn’t do enough good, I’ll send it. If that doesn’t help, I don’t know what I’ll do. Yes, I do. Nothing.

Dick is...incredible. He takes care of me, Fred, in ways I’d never dreamed of or hoped for. He cares. That’s it, he cares—about me, about his work. He learns new things all the time and loves old things over again. It’s . . . could I say miracle?

But, Fred—this is hateful of me, I know—the thing I told you about, the thing I used to wish for and live to remember, no matter what. . . it’s gone. That’s probably good, because of what happened between times.

But sometimes I’d trade my perfect husband for that louse and a wet handkerchief, if I could have the other thing along with it somehow.

There, I’ve said it.

Osa

The doctor galloped through the clinic until he found his head technician in the electrical lab.

“Tommie,” he said jovially, “did you ever go out and get drunk with a doctor?”

The tears were streaming down his face. Miss Thomas went out and got drunk with the doctor.