“I've made a mess of it, haven't I, doctor?” the old man said, in a surprisingly calm tone. “I thought I'd become so clever that I couldn't possibly make a mistake—but I guess that's something else the insulation's there to protect us from. It's not just the awful truth of our vile and vicious selves, but that ridiculous confidence in our own abilities, our own judgments. Who could have imagined that human nature was so ridiculous?"
“Actually,” Tom said, leaving the customary ten foot gap between himself and the would-be jumper, “it's not that surprising—not to me, at any rate. You've had a bit of a shock, I know, but your very confusion should tell you that it's not a good idea to jump. Given time, you can certainly get through this. I need to keep you under observation, though. Whatever you intended to do, and whatever your motive was, the simple fact is that you've overdosed on a dangerous drug. We need to get you back to bed."
“I just threatened to kill your nurse, Dr. Wharton,” Asherson said, bitterly. “I don't think going back to bed is going to set the matter to rest."
“Nobody knows about that but you, me, Simon, Patricia, and Sarah,” Tom told him. “If you can speak for Patricia, I can speak for the others. Nobody will make a complaint. You were under the influence of a powerful psychotropic substance. Nobody will hold it against you. It won't even go into your patient notes. You're hypersensitive to an experimental drug, and you had a bad reaction. It's no big deal. Nobody's been hurt."
“Nobody's been hurt!” Asherson repeated, his voice somewhere between a hiss and a shriek. “You don't know, Dr. Wharton—you really don't."
Asherson set one foot on the parapet, as if the probability of his taking the decision to jump had been increased rather than decreased by Tom's attempted reassurance. He also looked over the edge to measure the drop, though, and reflexive vertigo froze his limbs in position. Tom shivered as a slight gust of wind chilled his face. The sky was overcast and rain seemed likely to start falling at any moment. That would doubtless discourage Asherson from staying too long on the roof, but Tom had no idea how it would affect the probability of his taking the quicker route down.
“I mean that no one's been physically injured,” Tom said. “Nobody needs to be, if you'll just step away from the edge."
“I'm still thinking about it,” Asherson told him. “Still weighing it up. I'm seventy-five years old, doctor, and I have Alzheimer's. You say that I had a bad reaction to an experimental drug, but that's a lie. You're not a fool—you know what really happened."
“No, I don't,” Tom told him, “and neither do you. I realize that the effect must have seemed entirely beneficial to you, at first, when you got your memory back and discovered an ability to think that you'd never had before—but you still made mistakes, didn't you? You were still confused about certain things. There's always a downside to these dramatic effects, Mr. Asherson. We need to figure out what it is—and by we I mean both of us. You need to understand what happened, if you're to go forward from here, but the important thing is that you can go forward. The overwhelming probability is that you're not going to lose what you've gained, and I can certainly help you cope with whatever panicked you into thinking that you couldn't go on."
“You'll need more than vague promises, Dr. Wharton.” Asherson retorted. “I'm going to need you to put together a sound scientific argument for me, with all the evidence in place and every logical step filled in. That's what you demanded from me, remember?"
“Did I get it?” Tom countered.
“No,” Asherson conceded. “But you haven't got an alternative. You haven't got anyone to hold hostage instead, have you?"
“I wouldn't do that,” Tom told him, “even if there seemed to be no other way. As it happens, though, there is another way. I'll give you your sound scientific argument—with every i dotted and every t crossed, with logic so inexorable that you'll have to agree not to jump—if you'll tell me why you were so utterly determined to have that second dose, even though you couldn't find an argument of that sort to support your case."
“I think you've got your incentives a little confused,” Asherson told him. “And I suspect that you're just spinning this out—keeping me talking at any cost."
“Maybe,” Tom conceded, hugging himself as another gust of wind chilled him. “But you do want to hear my argument, don't you? And I certainly want to hear yours."
Asherson, who didn't seem to be feeling the wind's effects at all, shrugged his shoulders. His limbs weren't rigid any more, but he hadn't looked down again. That seemed to Tom to be a good sign. “I haven't got much to trade,” the old man confessed, a trifle shamefacedly. “My reasons weren't scientific at all. They were personal, and stupid. I was convinced—convinced, mind—that I needed an extra dose to clear away the residual confusion, to cut through the veil of uncertainty. There were other things, but the kicker was that I was so sure I'd been in the SAS. I knew that if only I could clarify my memory, I'd have every last detail at my beck and call, to prove it to myself and everyone else."
“But you weren't in the SAS,” Tom supplied. “You were a secondary schoolteacher for your entire working life, once you'd completed your National Service. All the second dose revealed to you was the extent of your own self-delusion."
“All?” Asherson repeated. “All it revealed. Oh, if only you knew, Dr. Wharton—if only you knew."
“So tell me,” Tom said.
“Don't be an idiot,” Asherson retorted. “If I've spent an entire lifetime hiding it from myself, because I couldn't even tolerate me knowing, I'm hardly going to spill it all to you, am I? Don't give me any of that crap about confession being good for the soul, or the necessity of recovering our repressed memories so that we can deal with them. Deal with them! Why do you think God gave us the protein whose miraculous dissolution is enabled by your precious LAW-1917? Because life would we unbearable if we couldn't cover things up. It ensures that all we can remember is the fact and not the event, and sometimes not even that. Well, I remember now, doctor. I remember everything—and I really do have to go, doctor. I really do have to get out of here, to see a man about a scythe."
“Sick sick sick,” Tom quoted.
That struck a nerve. Asherson straightened up—but he didn't step back from the parapet. If anything, he seemed even more inclined to jump—but he was curious, and while he was curious he wasn't going to do anything stupid.
“Have I been saying that out loud?” Asherson asked. “I've been repeating it internally all my life, without even knowing what it meant. You'd be astonished by the number of subtle everyday sounds that repeat in threes. You probably don't notice them at all—but I do. And to me, they don't say tick tick tick or cluck cluck cluck. They say sick sick sick, even when I slur them into six six six—which isn't really much less ominous, is it? I never said it aloud—not, at any rate, until I began to lose my mind and couldn't keep it in any longer—but it's always been there, eating away at me, judging me, for as long as I can remember ... well, almost. I don't think I hated myself quite so much before...."
“I'm afraid I don't know what you mean, Mr. Asherson,” Tom said, softly.
“Of course you don't. If you did, I'd have to kill you—or myself. If I gave you the explanation you want, you see, I'd have to kill myself. I might anyway, simply because I know what I mean. Purely as a matter of interest, though, do you have any medication that can undo what LAW-1917 has done to me? Could you put the muffler back, if I decided not to go?"
“Of course I have,” Tom assured him. “The methods might be a trifle crude, but they'd do the trick. Thorazine would probably take care of it in the short term. If the protein doesn't begin to regenerate naturally, we may have to improvise a little, but we'll work our way through it. You'll be in far better shape when we do than you were the day before yesterday. You'll be back to your real old self—the one without Alzheimer's."
“Promises, promises,” Asherson said. “Sorry, Dr. Wharton—I don't believe a word of it."
“That'
s a coincidence,” Tom said. “I don't believe you, either. I don't believe it can be half as unbearable as you pretend it is merely to discover the truth about yourself. A bit of a shock, maybe—a reflexive paroxysm of humiliation—but not unbearable. And I don't mean to imply that I can't believe you've never done anything terrible. What I mean is that even if you were Hitler, Stalin, or Pol Pot, with millions of deaths on your conscience and countless instances of torture against your account, I don't believe that mere self-confrontation would be enough to deliver you irredeemably into Hell."
“And yet,” Asherson retorted, “God or natural selection gave us that protein to spare us all the necessity. Are you really so sure, Dr. Wharton, that you could bear to remember all your own follies and evil deeds?"
“Pretty sure,” Tom said. “And that's not unjust hot air, Bill—I certainly intend to try. Now I've seen what LAW-1917 can really do, I'll have to try it."
“I wish you the best of luck,” said Asherson, steeling himself to look over the parapet at the long drop to the parking lot for a second time. This time, he maintained his composure and didn't freeze up. “Maybe it won't work on you,” he added. “Maybe I was uniquely unlucky."
“Nobody's unique,” Tom told him, taking a precautionary step forward. “Especially not in the matter of unluckiness. Okay—forget the deal I offered you earlier. I'll go first. I'll give you the sound scientific reason why you can't possibly jump. I'll prove to you, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that you can't jump. Okay?"
“You don't need my permission,” Asherson said. “Go right ahead. Why can't I jump, now that my head's finally clear?"
“Because this isn't about you. This isn't about whatever it is you remembered you did, or how horrible it made you feel. All that's pretty much irrelevant. This is about the trial. You stopped being William Asherson when your daughter signed that release form, and you became Patient K. You might think you resigned from the trial when you forced me to give you that second dose, and it's true that you'll have to be eliminated from the Phase One sample, but that doesn't nullify the trial. The trial has to go on—and we both know, now, exactly how much hangs on its results. We both know that we need to understand exactly what LAW-1917 does, and how. Even if it is a ticket to Hell—especially if it's a ticket to Hell—we need to know what it does and how to control what it does. The trial isn't over, Mr. Asherson—it's hardly begun. Phase One can still continue, especially if what happened in that room downstairs is carefully omitted from my research notes. There's only one thing that could stop Phase One in its tracks and bring investigation of LAW-1917 to an abrupt halt, Mr. Asherson. That will happen if, and only if, you actually jump off that parapet. That's why you can't do it—because this is not about you. It's about LAW-1917. It's about the trial. It's about science. You cannot jump off that parapet, Mr. Asherson, because the trial needs you to step back. You're a teacher—you understand that."
“I understand how little it means to be a teacher,” Asherson said, bitterly. “I understand that I could never pay it back, never redeem myself, if I'd worked for a thousand years instead of forty. I understand what really matters—I think, in a way, the Alzheimer's did that for me. Even before I got my memory back, it had forced me to zero in on the one thing I ever did that made me what I am, and destroyed any hope I ever had of being a good man."
“Think about what you just said, Mr. Asherson,” Tom said, softly. “It was the Alzheimer's that got you hung up on something, and blew it up out of all proportion. When you suddenly got your memory and calculative ability back, it was still blown out of all proportion—but it won't stay that way. All you have to do is give it time, and you'll get your equilibrium back. I can't imagine what kind of shock you got when all those layers of repression were stripped away and you were able to remember all the horrid things you'd contrived to forget that you ever did, but I do know that you can see the force of my argument. I know that you know exactly what I mean when I say that this about the trial, not you—about science, not your past sins. You can't jump, Mr. Asherson. You simply cannot jump, no matter how much you hate whatever it is you did while you were on National Service in 1949."
“It was 1950,” Asherson retorted, quietly and rather ominously. “How much more have you figured out?"
“Nothing much,” Tom admitted. “I assume that there must have been an officer involved—someone who went to Sandhurst. And something that made a triple ticking noise. My guess is that those are just incidentals, though—trivia gathered in by association, which have come to stand in place of the event itself, helping to mask it even while they provided incessant reminders of it. You haven't said a word about the thing itself. The muffler was still in place, with regard to your speech, even when the Alzheimer's took hold. All you could do was beat around the bush. I still don't believe that it was as bad as you think, but that really doesn't matter. As a biology teacher, you must understand that what's important is discovering exactly what LAW-1917 does. The trial has to go on."
“There was no trial,” Asherson whispered. “There should have been, but there wasn't. That Sandhurst idiot just let it go, as if it had never happened. He judged us, though—he sure as hell judged us. The way he looked ... just stood there, silently, with that stupid bloody ceiling-fan going sick, sick, sick. Not really, of course—it was just a noise, just a wordless noise. But that's the way I heard it, and that's the way I've heard every noise like it, ever since, without ever knowing why."
“Please come with me, Mr. Asherson,” Tom said. “Just give yourself a little time. I can medicate it, if you'll let me."
“All those years,” Asherson continued, having drifted into a reverie again. “Why did I tell the poor little sod that I'd been in the SAS? Why? Why couldn't I tell him that I'd helped to educate ten thousand students? Why couldn't I tell him something true? Why did I have to make up such a stupid, stinking lie? Sergeant-Major! I should have been ashamed to be a bloody corporal! How could I do that, Dr. Wharton?"
The fact that the question had been asked told Tom that he had won, even though he didn't know the answer to it. “I don't know,” he said, truthfully, “I could probably help you to find out, if I weren't going to be so busy, but I'm going to have one hell of a workload now that the trial's taken such an unexpected turn."
Asherson shook his head, and contrived the faintest smile imaginable. “You were right,” he said, as if it were cause for wholehearted astonishment. “I can see that. Who'd have thought it?"
“I did,” Tom reminded him. “Will you come back to your room now? I really need to start monitoring you properly. There are a lot of tests I ought to do. I need to know what's happening inside your head—biochemically, of course. You and I have so much work to do."
Asherson took his foot off the parapet, and came away. He went past Tom, ignoring the arm Tom extended by way of offering support, and headed back to the stairwell under his own steam. He paused, looking uncertainly at the broken door.
“It's okay,” Tom assured him. “I'll get rid of them.” He went to the door and held it slightly ajar. He instructed the people waiting behind it to clear the corridor and the staircases, and to go about their everyday business as though nothing had happened. He closed the door again, as best he could.
While they waited for that to happen, Asherson said, “I used to tell my kids—the ones I taught, that is, not my kids—that maintaining National Service after the war had been a terrible mistake. I told them that it had taught an entire generation of young men to lie, cheat, steal, and skive as a matter of pride as well as habit, and had instilled a lasting contempt for all authority. I didn't tell them the worst of it, though. I lied by omission."
“It was National Service,” Tom told him. “It wasn't the Red Army marching through the ruins of Germany in 1945. It wasn't Auschwitz. Whatever you did, other people had done far, far worse only a few years earlier—and other people have done worse since."
Asherson reached out and put a gnarled hand on the doctor's sh
oulder, roughly forcing him to meet his eyes. “No, doctor,” he said. “If it really is all about the trial, about science, that's something you need to understand. There isn't any excuse, and even if there were, other people have done far worse couldn't even begin to provide it. It's the other way around. Every sin, every crime, every evil deed, is an adequate damnation in itself. No matter what other people might have done, or how often, your action is your curse, and the thing that you cover up is the thing that you can't bear. You have to understand that, if you're going to put yourself on trial by taking LAW-1917. It won't be anywhere near as easy as you suppose. You have to understand what we'll be doing, if we carry this thing forward. If we take away the ability, or the right, that people have to blot out what we all need to blot out, the physical pain we'll remember all too clearly won't be the worst of it. Each of us lives his life like a cartoon character who's run off the edge of a cliff, but who's safe from falling as long as he doesn't realize it. You're right about it being about science, doctor, about the need to find out what this drug of yours can do—but you have to understand that it's not going to be an easy ride, by any stretch of the imagination."
Tom nodded his head sympathetically. “But now we know,” he said, “we have to face up to it, don't we? However challenging its effects might be, we can't just forget that it ever existed, can we? Natural selection might have favored that solution, but we can't. We have to be strong enough to face the truth, if we're to count ourselves true human beings."
Asherson released Tom's shoulder, and nodded assent. Then he pulled himself together, hoisting his shoulders like a military man on parade or a PE teacher leading a class, ready for anything and determined to fulfil his purpose.
There was yet another gust of wind, this one carrying raindrops, which caused Tom to flinch as well as shiver. It made the ill-latched door vibrate, and the broken lock clicked three times in quick succession. After a slight pause, it did it again.
Asimov's SF, July 2007 Page 5