God was good. I loved God.
Now the days with Major Sung were no longer torture. I was literally in the presence of my maker… in fact, I was being made.
I was a man named Harvey Sanders.
I was Captain Harvey Sanders.
I was Captain Harvey Sanders of the United States Army.
I was Captain Harvey Sanders who had been born in New York.
I was Captain Harvey Sanders, psychiatrist.
Day by day, week by week, I grew. I can remember it all, or at least most of it. I remember getting my name, and my rank, and my country, and my family. My infancy, my childhood, my adolescence, the years in college…
Brick by brick, memory by memory, Major Sung ping Lee built up a replica of the personality he had destroyed; carefully, almost lovingly, like an expert restoring some ancient tapestry.
Why all this was done, I still cannot understand. Sung learned nothing of importance from me, since there was nothing important that I knew. Did he do it just for his own sadistic amusement? But that makes no sense either. There was no pain at all.
And if it was an important experiment, why did he let me remember how he did it, when he could’ve obliterated the memory completely?
The Communists, we are told, never do anything without a reason. I wonder…
There was a time, I think, when I did know the answer. I vaguely remember Sung telling me something, something ugly, and laughing. I remember feeling fear, and hate…
There is a whole week that I do not remember, the week when he told me… whatever that fiendish something was. Sung made me forget. It was not very difficult.
He left me with only one sentence out of that whole week in my memory. Did he do it to taunt me? It seems so meaningless: “The subtlest weapon is a sword that thinks ifs a plowshare.” Now what could he have meant by that?
At any rate, he was finally finished. The day came when I walked out of that room the same man that I had been so many weeks before. At least, I feel that I am the same man. There is, of course, no way to be sure. The Harvey Sanders who first met Sung ping Lee was obliterated. Completely. Perhaps there are some small differences.
But of course, I shall never know.
I never saw Major Sung again. A few years later, the war was over.
And I was repatriated.
Of course, I was gone over by Army psychiatrists before I was discharged. But it was really all quite superficial-more of an extended coffee-klatch than a rigorous psychological examination. After all, I was one of them, a member of the club, so to speak.
Still, there was that one peculiar incident…
I was speaking with a Colonel Destry, the head of the processing center, and a psychiatrist who I respected professionally. He had asked me about the methods of the camp interrogators. Understand, I had not told anyone of Major Sung. First of all, I was not likely to be believed, and secondly, if I was believed, I might very well spend the next few years under observation. The Army might conceivably be quite reluctant to release a man who had been taken apart and put back together again by the Chinese.
Still, at that point, I really did want to get it off my chest, and Destry seemed like a man I could talk to.
“Well,” I began, “one of the interrogators, a man called S—” The strangest thing happened. I could not pronounce Sung’s name. The word stuck in my throat like a piece of wet dough. Understand, I knew the name I wanted to say, and I knew how to say it. But I just couldn’t. Something was blocking me.
“Yes Captain?” said Destry, looking somewhat perplexed.
“Er… one of the interrogators, Major Su Ling” I said, dredging the fictitious name up from somewhere, “used a—”
Again, there was a block. I could not describe Sung’s apparatus or what happened in that room. I remembered it all, except, of course, for that week I’ve mentioned, and yet something was stopping me from speaking about it. Had l been conditioned against it?
Destry eyed me in a very peculiar manner, as well he might.
“He used a rubber hose, and beat the bottom of my feet with it, and…” And I reeled off a whole catalogue of non-existent atrocities and tortures until I was sure Destry was satisfied.
Now perhaps you are thinking that I should’ve found some way of telling someone about Sung. That’s all very well from your point of view. Yes, I admit that the episode worried me a bit at the time.
No doubt about it, Sung had conditioned me against revealing anything about what had happened. But after all, it was an experiment, wasn’t it? I can certainly understand his wanting to keep it secret.
And from my point of view,… well if I wanted to be discharged from the Army, I had to keep my mouth shut.
So, after a few more preliminaries, I was discharged.
As a young psychiatrist just starting out, I got a job in a large public mental institution. Electroshock therapy was a fairly common practice in the hospital, and for obvious reasons, I became engrossed in the subject.
Quite frankly, no one in the United States seemed to know as much about the subject as Major Sung did. For decades, shock therapy had been used on certain difficult cases. A large percentage seemed untouched by the therapy. About an equal percentage showed some improvement. A smaller number were “cured,” at least overtly.
But no one really knew why. They knew that electroshock therapy had certain results—they could observe them. How it worked was a mystery, and until that mystery was solved, there was no real way of increasing the rate of cures. You just plugged a patient in and hoped.
But I knew how and I knew why.
One of the more reasonable hypotheses had been that the electroshock acted as a negative stimulus, suppressing the disturbing psychic elements, driving them deep down into the subconscious, so that the overt behavior of the patient improved. But this was not really a cure. The disease, the conflict, was still there, lurking somewhere in the subconscious.
What I had been taught by Major Sung was that whole diseased aspects of a personality, indeed, the disturbed personality itself, could be destroyed. By proper use of electroshock, the disturbed personality could be broken down into primeval formlessness, and then rebuilt.
And who knew this better than I?
It would be pointless to recount the trials and tribulations of my long, careful campaign to put my method into practice. The problem was that I dared not tell anyone that I had experimental proof, that I was experimental proof.
A plan was even then, in the beginning, forming in my mind. This new technique could be more than a cure for mental illness, it could cure social neuroses as well…
But I had to go slow. Build up my professional reputation in the conventional way. Publish a tentative paper on the history of shock therapy; then the beginnings of my new theory; then a subtle piece on the psychology of brainwashing; step by step, I led the proper people down the path from what they knew to what I knew.
Without any particular step being too big, too radical, without any big jolts along the way…
And finally, as I had planned, as I had spent years pointing towards, the day came. I was asked to apply my theory to a patient.
I was asked. That was important. I had never demanded the right to use my new therapy. It was much better to wait to be asked. That way, I could be sure that the profession was ready to accept it, without undue clamor. I wanted no publicity… the plan that had been forming in my mind, the plan for a better society, demanded discreetness.
But the day did finally come.
It was a boy named Tom. Of course, that isn’t his real name. Ethics of the profession, you know.
Tom was twenty, withdrawn, rebellious, hostile, suicidal. A hard-core, severe neurotic. He had been given up on by three analytical therapists, and the new therapy seemed the only alternative.
It was decided that I should be given the chance.
Like so many other neurotics in this country, Tom had been rather brilliant. Learned to read at three, out of
high school at fifteen… almost a prodigy.
And like so many other intelligent young people, unwilling to conform to the will of society. A runaway as a boy, a delinquent as an adolescent, a severe neurotic as a young man.
At eighteen, he had tried to kill himself for the first time. He tried several more times before he was committed to an institution.
In so many ways, a typical case.
Which was why I was so interested in applying my therapy to Tom in the first place—his was a typical case. Typical of what I had come to consider “the American Neurosis.”
Naturally, generalizations do not apply to all individuals within a culture, but in general, certain nations seem to develop more or less prevalent attitudes among their citizens—call them national neuroses. The German is obsessed with a drive for meticulous order. The Oriental, at least until very recently, worshipped the past. The Russians are afflicted with social paranoia and xenophobia.
And the American is a rebel.
Most Americans of any intelligence have always, in one way or another, been rebels against society. The American fears order. He distrusts control.
And, at the bottom, he is unwilling to put his faith in authority and society. Any authority, any social order.
The American sees himself as a unique individual. Rules are for others, not for him. He has built a whole philosophy around this unrealistic attitude.
Of course, if you look at it logically, this is an unrealistic attitude. It is really society which counts. Men who continually flout the current social order, whatever it may be, will be continually kicked in the teeth by reality.
In short, they end up as unhappy neurotics.
Like Tom.
One thing that must be said for the Communists; they understand the relationship between the individual and society. Society, being the sum of all individuals, is more important than any of them. When an individual starts to believe that he is more important than his society, he begins to become a neurotic.
And he ends up like Tom.
I certainly don’t want you to get the wrong idea, though. I’m no Communist. After all, I fought in a war against them, didn’t I? I was a prisoner of the Communists, was I not?
At any rate, you can see the significance of Tom’s case as a test. If I could cure Tom’s neurosis, if I could mold a new personality for him that would willingly conform to the social order, that would accept authority, then I would eventually be able to do the same for the millions of other Americans afflicted with this disease of individualism. Perhaps you find this thought repulsive. It’s understandable. After all, you too, to some degree or other, are afflicted.
But try to look at it rationally. What is so wrong about the individual living for the good of society? What is really so sacred about the “rights of the individual”? What rights?
The right to be a neurotic? The right to be unhappy?
The important thing is for the individual to accept the rules of the society he lives in. No matter what they happen to be. Ideology aside, the man who willingly accepts order, control, rules, will stay happy, no matter what conditions he finds himself living under. He will be free of neuroses.
And is there anything that’s really worth being unhappy for?
So perhaps you think that there is. “Dignity,” you may say, “freedom,” “honor,” “Democracy”… Are these really anything more than empty words?
Now you think that they are worth being unhappy for.
But then, you haven’t been cured yet, have you?
I knew what I had to do. I had been planning this moment for years. I would cure Tom. I would erase his previous personality entirely, and build a new, healthy personality in its place.
A whole new personality, a personality that would think it was the same Tom as before, but that would really be an entirely new ego.
I remember him lying there, thin and drawn. There was a strange look in his eyes, a look that was sullen and resigned.
“Tom,” I said, “I’m going to help you.”
“You’re going to help me,” he said. He said it like a machine. Or did the very flatness of his tone constitute an insult?
No matter. I was ready to begin.
“What is your name?”
Shock.
“What is your name?”
Shock.
“What is your name?”
Just as Major Sung had led me down the path to dissolution, I led Tom. Not, of course, for the same unfathomable purpose. As the days and weeks passed, name, family, memory dissolved, and as it had come to me, the ultimate moment came to Tom.
“What are you?”
“I am!”
Shock.
“What are you?”
“I am…”
Shock.
“What are you?”
Blankness.
He lay there, his eyes passively closed, dreaming the truly innocent dreams of the foetus.
Lying there on the table before me was a raw, formless… ego would be too structured a term… The primeval id, or something even more primitive, without memory, form, or even desire. Human clay, waiting for my hands.
For a moment, I knew what it felt like to be God.
For one ridiculous moment, I thought of Sung. And I thought of myself, years ago, lying there, like Tom was lying there now, formless human clay…
Finally, this inevitable moment of doubt passed.
“You hear me,” I said.
“Hear…”
“Do you know who I am?”
“Who you are…”
I took a deep breath. Now I would take the first step down a long road, the road back for people like Tom, the road to a healthier, better-adjusted American psyche…
“I am God,” I said.
That was many years ago. Tom was the first. It was a complete success.
After Tom, there were others, thousands of others. And now, other psychiatrists, by the hundreds, are learning the method.
American society is now in the process of being quietly transformed. Actually, it is not merely society which is being changed, it is the nature of the American psyche itself.
The new American will be a very different breed. He will be happy.
He will be happy no matter what changes his society undergoes in the future. His content will come from within, it will be unshakable. He will be able to adapt, indeed, he will not even be conscious of adapting. It will be as natural as breathing.
All he will require will be some social order to conform to. What that social order will be will not be significant. Ideology will no longer be important to him.
When he reads in his history books (if he bothers to trouble himself with such things at all) about the great and meaningless ideological conflicts of the twentieth century, it will all be nonsense to him.
Whatever ideology eventually triumphs—democracy, socialism, fascism, communism, some new ism as yet unborn—he will accept it without question; he will accept it with enthusiasm.
And whoever his rulers may be, he will be happy.
And the sweet irony of it all is that all this will come about as the result of a pointless experiment in a Korean prisoner of war camp. Truly, this is one of those rare cases when a sword has really been turned into a plowshare, is it not?
Not that I don’t have personal doubts, once in a while. After all, I’m human, am I not?
It’s really quite silly to worry about Major Sung, and the first crude beginnings of my technique, isn’t it?
After all, all that is in the past. The Korean War is long over.
And we won that war…
Didn’t we?
Neutral Ground
A bolt of jagged blue lightning rent the rolling red clouds, leaving a gash of orange-yellow in its wake that faded in a few moments and then disappeared.
Visual effect? Tyson wondered. Just some kind of after-image, or did the lightning or whatever it was cause some kind of unstable chemical change in the atmosp
here?
He willed his disembodied ego forward, toward the base of the sheer black cliffs that towered in the distance, hard and majestic over the endless, featureless yellow sands.
There was a… something lurking by the cliffs. Tyson was viscerally sure of it. It was the same something that he had felt briefly before, in three of the other Places. He felt a curious mixture of fear and curiosity at the texture of the somethingness in his mind…
Something, call it curiosity perhaps, was pulling him toward the cliffs. But there was also a force in his mind holding him back, a force that increased in direct proportion to his nearness to the cliffs. He recognized the repelling force for what it was—fear.
He had felt the fear before, three times before, the same three times he had felt the presence of the something. He had felt it in the Place that was all stars and hardened brown lava fields, in the Place where ten great suns illuminated an endless, blinding plain of glare ice, in the Place of thousand-foot-tall trees.
The fear was fear of the unknown something. It was not fear of the unknown as such, for all Voyages were into the unknown, and no Voyager had yet experienced the same Place twice.
It was the alienness of the something, an alienness that was as foreign to the Places as Tyson was. He could feel it, and it was that awareness which filled him with cold dread. What waited at the base of the black cliffs was no more a part of this reality than he was.
Mentally gritting his non-corporeal teeth, the point of view that was Tyson willed itself once more toward the cliffs. The yellow sands flowed under him, from the point of view of a man walking, though in the Places Tyson had neither feet nor legs. It was as if his ego were clinging desperately to the ghost of bodyness, though Tyson’s body was far, far away.
Yet the closer he came, the slower he moved, for the fear was building up with his approach like the bow-wave of a boat moving not through water but through some thick syrup…
Now the sands seemed to grow misty, vague, like melting mists. The black cliffs seemed to evaporate into billows of black smoke… The smoke began to drift, dissipate…
He knew the signs well. He was coming out of it. Another Voyage, another Place… Another encounter with the some-thing…
The Last Hurrah of the Golden Horde Page 16