And Now the News

by Theodore Sturgeon

  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 coexist 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 face, 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 on 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 … tor,” 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 an
d 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 you were still—”

  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 in 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.

  Unmasked and unabashed, she sat down in the big chair. They sat for some 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 a 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, 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 hand. “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.