Platinum Pohl - The Collected Best Stories

by Frederik Pohl

  Dr. Shugart, after a moment’s pause: “Mmm. Maureen, do you have a reaction to all this?”

  Maureen, her eyes lively but her voice serious: “Oh, I’m sorry if I’ve made trouble. I didn’t think we were late. Honestly. If there was any displacement it was certainly on the subconscious level. I love you all. I think you’re the finest, friendliest Group I ever—and—Well, there just isn’t any ambivalence at all. Honestly.”

  Dr. Shugart, nodding: “Mmm.”

  The old man turned restlessly in his chair. Pretty soon, he thought with a familiar and tolerable ache, they would all start looking at him and prodding him to participate. All but Dr. Shugart; anyway; the psychiatrist didn’t believe in prodding, except in a minor emergency as a device to pass along the burden of talk from himself to one of the Group. (Though he always said he was part of the Group, not its master: “The analyst is only the senior patient. I learn much from our sessions.”) But the others would prod, they had no such professional hesitations, and Sidorenko didn’t like that. He was still turning over inside himself the morning’s fiasco; true, he should voice it, that was what the Group was for; but the old man had learned in nearly a century to live his life his own certain way, and he wanted to think it out for himself first. The best way to keep the Group off him was to volunteer a small remark from time to time. He said at the first opportunity: “I’m sorry, ladies and gentlemen. I didn’t mean to upset you.”

  Everyone looked at him.

  Ernie Atkinson scolded: “We’re not here to apologize, Sidorenko. We only want you to know your motives.”

  Marla Reynolds: “One wonders if all of us know just why we are here? One wonders how the rest of us are to get proper attention, if some of us get first crack at the doctor’s thought because they are more important.”

  Sidorenko said weakly: “Oh, Mrs. Reynolds—Maria—I’m sure there’s nothing like that. Is there, Dr. Shugart?”

  Dr. Shugart, pausing: “Mmm. Well, why are we here? Does anyone want to say?”

  The old man opened his mouth and then closed it. Some evenings he joined with these youngsters in the Group, as demanding and competitive as any of them, but this was not one of the nights. Energy simply did not flow. Sidorenko was glad when Sam Krabbe took over the answer.

  “We’re here,” said Sam pompously, “because we have problems which we haven’t been able to solve alone. By Group sessions we help each other discharge our basic emotions where it is safe to do so, thus helping each other to reduce our problems to dimensions we can handle.” He waited for agreement.

  “Parrot!” smirked Ernie Atkinson.

  “The doctor doesn’t like our using pseudo-psychiatric double-talk,” Marla Reynolds accused the air.

  “All right, let’s see you do better!” Sam flared.

  “Gladly! Easily!” cried Atkinson. He hooked a thumb in his lapel and draped a leg over the arm of the chair. “The institution is a place where very special and very concentrated help can be given to a very few.” (“Snob,” Nelson Amster hissed.) “I’m not a snob! It’s the plain truth. We get broad-spectrum therapy here, everything from hormones to hypnosynthesis. And the reason we get it is that we deserve it. Everybody knows Dr. Sidorenko. Amster created a whole new industry with mergers and stock manipulations. Marla Reynolds is one of the greatest composers—well, the greatest woman composers—of the century.” (“Damn some people!” grated Marla). “And I myself—well, I need not go on. We are worth treating, all of us. At any cost. That’s why the government put us here, in this very expensive, very thorough place.”

  “Mmm,” said Dr. Shugart, and considered for a moment. “I wonder,” he said.

  Ernie Atkinson suddenly shrank a good two sizes. His dark little face turned sallow. The leg slid off the arm of the chair. “What’s that, Doc?” he asked dismally.

  Dr. Shugart said: “I wonder if that’s a personal motivation.”

  “Oh, I see,” cried Atkinson, “it’s what each of us is here for that’s important, eh? Well, what about it? How about your motivations, Sidorenko?”

  The old man coughed.

  It always came to this, reliably. He would put out the weak decoy remarks but it would do no good, one of the Group would pounce past the decoys to reach his flesh. Well, there was no fighting it.

  “I—” he began, and stopped, and passed a hand over his face. Maureen was close beside him, her eyes warm and intent. “I know I shouldn’t apologize,” he apologized, “but it has been a bad day. You know about it. The thing is, I’m an old man, and even Dr. Shugart tells me that the old cells aren’t in quite the shape they used to be. There was,” he said mildly, as though he were reading off a dossier from a statistical sample, “a stroke a few years ago. Fortunately it limited itself; they’re not operable, you know, when you get to a certain age. The blood vessels turn into a kind of rotten canvas and, although you can clamp off the hemorrhage, it only makes it pop again on the other side of the clamp, and—I’m wandering. I apologize,” he finished wryly.

  “Mmm,” Dr. Shugart said. “There’s no such thing as totally undirected speech.”

  “Of course. All right. But that’s why I apologize, because I’m not getting around very rapidly to an answer.

  “I had my—trouble—a few years ago. I don’t remember much about it, except that I gather I was delusional. Thought I was God, was the way it was expressed to me once. Well, if I had been a younger man I suppose I could have been treated more easily. I don’t know. I’m not. Time was, I know, when most doctors wouldn’t bother with a man of ninety-five, even if he did happen to be,” he said wryly, “celebrated not only for his scientific attainments but for his broad love for mankind. I mean, there’s a point of obsolescence. Might as well let the old fool die.”

  He choked and coughed raspingly for a second. The nurse reached for him, but he waved her off.

  “Mmm,” said Dr. Shugart.

  And the nurse whispered in a hard bright voice: “I love you, Noah Sidorenko.”

  He sat up straight, suddenly struck to the heart.

  “I love you,” she said stubbornly, “and I’ll make you get well. It can’t hurt you if I tell you I love you. I’m not asking for anything. It’s a free gift.”

  The old man swallowed.

  “Don’t argue with me, old sport,” she said tenderly, and patted his creased cheek. “Now, how about some psychodrama? Let’s do the big one! The slum you lived in, Doctor—remember? The night you were so scared. The accident. Stretch out,” she ordered, wheeling him to a couch and helping him onto it. He went along, dazed. She scolded: “No, curl up more. You’re four years old, remember? Marla, pull that chair over and be the mother. Ernie, Sam. Let’s go out in the hall. We’ll be cars speeding along the elevated highway outside the window. And let’s make some noise! Honk, honk! Aooga!”

  But it hadn’t been like that at all, he told himself a few hours later, trying to go to sleep. It had been a big frightening experience in his childhood. Very possibly it was the thing that had caused his later troubles (though he couldn’t remember the troubles well enough to be sure). But it was not what they were portraying in psychodrama. They were showing a frightened child, and the old man was stubbornly certain there was more to it than that. But very likely it was lost forever.

  It was only natural that at the age of ninety-five a great many experiences should be lost forever. (Such as meeting a sophomore who asked for an autograph, when you could have had no idea that the sophomore would grow up to be president.)

  He thought of the white man, wondered who the white man was, and shifted restlessly in the bed. He could feel his old muscles tensing up.

  Curse the fool thing, the old man said to himself, referring to his own body; it has lost the knack of living. But it wasn’t the body that was at fault, really. It was the brain. The body was only crepe and brittle sticks, true, but the heart still beat, blood flowed, stomach acids leached the building-blocks they needed from the food he ate. The body worked. But th
e brain worked against it; it was brain not body, that tautened his muscles and shortened his breath.

  That fantastic girl, the old man thought ruefully, she had said: I love you. Well. Let’s interpret what she meant, he commanded, it could only have been an expression of the natural affection a nurse has for a patient. Still, it was ridiculous, the old man told himself, striving to catch a free and comfortable breath.

  That was the worst thing about the tension. You couldn’t breathe. With much effort Noah Sidorenko wedged his elbows under him and raised his chest cage a trifle, not quite off the mattress, but resting lightly on it, relieving some of the pressure his shriveled body exerted. It helped, but it didn’t help enough. He thought wistfully of free fall. Rocket jockies, he dreamed, floated endlessly with no pressure at all; how deeply they must be able to breathe! But, of course, he couldn’t live to get there, not through rocket acceleration.

  He was wandering, when he wanted most particularly to think clearly.

  He turned on one side and pressed the tip of his nose lightly with a finger. Sometimes opening the nostrils wide helped to get a breath. He thought of what the microphones taped to rib and throat must be recording, and grinned faintly. Funny, though, he thought, that Maureen hadn’t come in to check on him. The purpose of the microphones was to warn the nurse when he needed attention. Surely he needed attention now.

  He listened critically to his thumping heart. Ka-bump, ka-bump, ka-bump. It made a little tune:

  The bear went over the moun-tain

  The song was very disturbing to him, though he did not even now know why. Somehow it was connected with that scene in his youth, the crashing cars and the white man. The old man sighed. He had come very close to remembering all of it once. They had put him in silence. “Silence” was an acoustically dead chamber, twenty feet cubed, hung with muffling fabric and strung with spiderwebs of the felt; there was no echo and no sound from outside could come in. It was a conventional tool of study for mental disorders; strapped in a canvas cot, hung in the center of the cube, eyes closed, hearing deadened, a subject began very quickly to seek within himself. Fantasies came, delusions came. And ultimately knowledge came, if the subject could stand it; but three out of five reached hysteria before they reached any worthwhile insight, and the old man was one of the three. He had nearly died…

  He paused to count the times he had nearly died under therapy of one kind or another, but it was too hard. And besides, he was beginning to think that he was nearly dying again. He pushed himself back on his elbows and fought once more for breath.

  This one was very bad.

  He slumped back on the bed and reached out for the intercom button. “Maureen,” he whispered.

  She slept in the room next to him, and though he seldom woke in the night—there was something in the evening cocoa to make sure of that—when it happened that he did, if he called, she was there promptly, sometimes in a pink wrapper, once or twice in lounging pajamas. But not tonight. “Maureen,” he whispered to the intercom again, but there was no answer.

  The old man, with an effort, rolled onto his side. The movement dislodged one of the taped microphones. He felt it tear his skin and, simultaneously, heard the sharp alarm ping in Maureen’s room. But the alarm didn’t bring her.

  The old man opened his eyes wide and stared at the intercom. “I have to get up,” he told it reasonably, “because if I lie here I think I will die.”

  It was impossible, of course. But what could he lose by trying? He pushed himself to the edge of the bed. The chair was within reach, but very remote to Noah Sidorenko, who had not stood on his own feet in years…

  And then he was in the chair. Somehow he had made it! He sat erect and gasping, for a moment. The pain was bad, but it was better sitting up. Then his hand found the buttons of the little electric motors.

  He spun slowly, navigated the straits between the nurse’s desk and the corner of the bed, went out the door, as it opened quietly before him.

  Maureen’s room was empty. The outer door opened too. That was good, he thought; he hadn’t been sure it would open; it was never very clear to him whether he was a prisoner or not. It was, after all, a sort of madhouse he was in…But it opened.

  The hall was empty and silent. He listened for the familiar grunch, grunch of Ernie Atkinson grinding his teeth in his sleep, but even that was stilled tonight. He rolled on. The lift rose silently to meet him.

  He let it carry him gently down, and turned inward. The lower hall was blindingly bright. He made his way to Dr. Shugart’s office.

  He paused. There were voices.

  No wonder he hadn’t heard Ernie Atkinson’s grinding teeth! Here was Atkinson, his voice coming plain as day: “I don’t care what you say, we weren’t getting through to him, No. The Group and psychodrama aren’t working.”

  And Dr. Shugart’s voice: “They have to work.” Yes, the old man thought dazedly, it was Shugart’s voice all right. But where was the hesitation, the carefully balanced noncommittal air? It cracked sharp as a whip!

  And Maureen’s voice: “Do I have to go on building up this emotional involvement with him?”

  Shugart crackled: “Is it so distasteful?”

  “Oh, no!” (The old man sighed. He found he had stopped breathing until she answered.) “He’s an old dear, and I do love him. But I’d like to give him little presents because I want to, not because it’s part of his therapy.”

  Shugart rasped: “It’s for his own good. This is one of the finest brains in the world, and it’s falling apart. We’ve tried everything. Radical procedures—silence, psychosurgery, chemotherapy—are too much for him to take. Remember what happened when Dr. Reynolds tried electroshock? So we’ve got to work with what we’ve got.”

  The old man stirred.

  Old as he might be, and insane if they liked, but he wasn’t going to linger out here and listen. A quarter after one in the morning, and the whole Institute was gathered here in Shugart’s office, plotting the recovery of himself.

  “All right,” he gasped, rolling in “what is this?”

  They gaped at him.

  “All of you!” he said strongly. “What are you doing to me? Is it a hoax?”

  Shugart moved restlessly. Marla Reynolds reached up to pat her hair, avoiding his eyes.

  “You, Doctor Reynolds? Want to explain? I mean—I mean,” he said in a changed tone, no longer gasping, “there seems to be only one explanation. There’s a conspiracy of some sort, and I’m the target.”

  Maureen got up and walked toward him. “Come in, Doctor,” she said, in a voice of resignation tinged with pleasure. “Maybe it’s better this way. We’re not going to get very far continuing to lie to you, are we? So I guess we’ll have to tell you the truth.”

  The tune rocked crazily through his head. The old man spun his chair and turned pleadingly to Maureen. “Of course, Doctor,” she said, understanding without words, and fetched him a fizzy drink. “Only a little stimulant,” she coaxed.

  The old man glanced at Dr. Shugart. Shugart laughed. “Who do you think has been prescribing for you? There isn’t a human being in the Institute without a first-rate degree. Maureen’s our internist—with, of course, a thorough grounding in psychology.”

  The old man drank reproachfully, looking at Maureen. She said, clouding: “I know. It isn’t fair, but we had to get you well.”

  “Why?”

  Maureen said somberly: “A brain like yours doesn’t come along to often. I’m not a physicist, but as I understand it Congruence comes close to doing what Einstein tried with the unified field theory. You were on the point of doing something more when you—when you—”

  “When I went crazy,” the old man said crudely. She shook her head. “All right, I used a bad word. But that’s it, isn’t it?” The girl nodded. “I see.”

  But the stimulant wasn’t doing much good. Ninety-five years, he thought confused, and perhaps I won’t see that other mountain. It was hard to accept, hard to believe he h
ad been hoaxed, hard to believe that it wasn’t working, that the delusions would not be cured. “I’m flattered,” he whispered hoarsely, and tried to hand the glass back to Maureen. It clattered to the floor and bounced without breaking. Marla with her schizoid detachment, Ernie with his worries, Sam Krabbe and his surly anger—doctors acting parts? The room swooped around Sidorenko; he was cut off from his reference points. And they were all afraid; he could see it, it was a gamble they had taken, that he would never find out, and now they didn’t know what would happen. And he—

  He didn’t know either.

  “I’m sorry to be so much trouble,” he gasped.

  “You mustn’t feel personal guilt,” Dr. Shugart said anxiously. “These personality disorders—personality traits—go with greatness. Sir Oliver Lodge swore he believed in levitation. Think of Newton, sleepless and paranoid. Think of Einstein. Religious mania is very common,” the doctor assured him, “and you were spared that, at least. Well, almost—of course, certain aspects of your—”

  “Shut up!” cried Maureen, and reached for the old man’s wrist. He stared up at her, touched by the worry in her face, trying to find words to tell her there was nothing to worry about, nothing to fear. He felt his heart lunging against his ribs and his breathing seemed, oddly, to have stopped. He made a convulsive effort and drew an enormous, loud breath. Why, that was almost—what did they call it?—a death rattle. He did it again.

  “Doctor!” moaned the nurse, but he found the strength to shake his wrist free of her. This was interesting. He was beginning to remember something, or to imagine something—

  They were all coming toward him.

  “Leave me alone,” he croaked. He held them off while he practiced breathing again; it wasn’t hard; he could do it. He closed his eyes. He heard Maureen catch her breath and opened them to glare at her, then closed them again.

  Noah Sidorenko’s brain was perfectly lucid.

  He saw—or remembered? But it was as though he were seeing it with an internal eye—all of his previous life, the childhood, the government office where he had received the first scholarship, the four professors quizzing him for his doctor’s, even the cloudy days of therapy and breakdown.