The Year's Greatest Science Fiction & Fantasy 2 - [Anthology]

by Edited By Judith Merril

  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 ex
actly 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.