His charm was gone completely. “Please!” he wailed. “Those two are as mad as mad!”
“That can only be proven by an interview in depth with both of them. And WITHOUT you or your staff coaching or jabbing pins in them! Because I like you, Neht, and do NOT want to cause trouble for you, I will accord you this favor!”
“Oh, thank you,” he said in a faint voice and rather huntedly beckoned for a guard.
I swelled with elation. Investigative-reporter skills were absolutely fantastic!
Here came my next coup!
PART NINETY-TWO
ENVOI III
XVI
The hut was isolated. It stood upon a point which jutted like a finger from the cliffs above the sea. Two thousand feet, straight down, the Northern Ocean roared, battering its heavy green fury against the basalt barricade, using for battering rams great floating islands of white ice.
We had to go through a locked gate before we could enter upon the point. The guard used a plate to unfasten the bars. “It’s past noon,” he said. “The cleaning crew have probably just come and gone, so you will find them reasonably sanitary. It’s a good thing: usually you can smell that hut clear from here.”
We walked along a path between the two vertical cliffs. The wind from out of the northern pole moaned dismally. A flurry of snow beat at my mask. This was a gruesome place—think of being incarcerated here for nearly a century!
After a walk of a hundred yards, we arrived at the hut. It was rectangular, built of heavy insulating block like all these huts, a kind of a fortress standing lonely by itself in the teeth of icy winds. It had two doors on the shore side.
The guard approached the left-hand door. “I’ll let you see Number 69,000,000,201 first.” He consulted his list. “Yes, that’s somebody once named Crobe. Now you must be very careful, for both of these are quite mad. I’ve been here sometimes guarding the cleaning detail while they work and to ensure that nobody speaks to them.”
“Have they ever attacked anybody?” I said.
“Not that I recall.”
I became even more certain that this was what I said it was—political expediency. This guard had been coached by Neht, that was obvious. “You’re not going in with me,” I said. “My interview is technical but it may contain state secrets. So let me in there and stand well clear of the door.”
He looked a little uncomfortable. Then he hitched his greatcoat around him, dropped his stungun off his shoulder into his hand, put his plate against the door and gave it a shove. He glanced in and then, with another look at me and a shrug, walked off thirty feet.
I repressed a thrill of excitement. I was about to see the notorious Doctor Crobe!
I walked in.
My eyes adjusted to the sudden gloom.
The whole hut was really just one oblong room; dividing it in the center was a string of vertical bars.
I scanned the area I had entered. It was a very capacious room. It was even furnished. It had shelves of books.
Somebody was bent over a tub of some sort. He turned around.
IT WAS CROBE!
His nose was too long; so was his chin. His arms looked more like the legs of birds. He had no hair left at all. He was wearing a coat, but if the cleaning crew had given him a fresh one, it was already dirty.
“You’re just in time,” he said, as though my visit was a daily occurrence. “The fermentation is completed and I’ve just hooked up this tube. Let it drip a little longer into the canister and you can test it. I think it is the best I have ever made.”
“What is it?” I said.
“Home brew. I save half of my dinner every day and dump it in this tub. It ferments quite nicely.” I saw he had a lid over the tub and a tube came out of its center, going through several coils before it dripped a clear fluid out the end.
He removed the canister which had been receiving it, quickly putting another in its place. “Now,” he said, “sit down on that comfortable couch and try this.”
I was amazed. This was no madman. He was even smiling pleasantly. I sat down on the indicated couch and he handed me the canister, making a sign then that I should sip.
I was cautious. I removed my snow mask but I only pretended to drink.
“Oh, goodness, go ahead,” said Crobe. “You’re not depriving me! I have gallons and gallons of it.” And he indicated a rack of jugs on the far wall.
Well, it couldn’t kill me. I tossed it down.
PURE FIRE!
It scorched my throat like acid! I couldn’t talk!
He watched me carefully. Then he said, “Ah, no convulsions. Which means the fusel oil has distilled off. Can you still see?”
I coughed. “Of course, I can see. Good Gods! What is this?”
“The very finest Kentucky bourbon or possibly white mule. One of the many gifts to heavens from the planet Earth. I learned how to make it from a professor there in a higher institute of learning called Bellevue.”
A glow was springing out of my stomach. My alarm faded. Actually, I suddenly felt very good. I looked around. I said, “I see you also have a lot of books.”
He smiled at the shelf. “They’re a bit dog-eared now, but Noble Stuffy insisted they be brought for me from the townhouse long ago. He seemed to think I might need them.”
I stared at their titles. The letters didn’t make any sense.
“Psychology, psychiatry,” said Crobe, “and all the works of Sigmund Freud. All the basic texts of psychotherapy on Earth. But they won’t let me use it here. They are very unenlightened and retarded. I could clean out this whole asylum for them but every day they gag me before they let the cleaning crew in. However, I have lots of friends, such as yourself, dropping around all the time. Have another shot?”
He poured me one from a jug and then took one himself. He shuddered as it went down. He said, “Gods!” and after a second, “but that’s good.” Then he sighed. “I wish they’d let me have some retorts, for without them I can’t make LSD. So you’ll just have to be content. Drink up.”
I threw down the second drink. It sizzled like the first. But shortly, the room looked quite rosy.
“Well, we’ve wasted enough time,” said Crobe, glancing at his wrist where he had no watch. “I have other patients coming in, so you’ll just have to rush it a bit. Now lie down on the couch and start talking.”
I lay back. I said, “What about?”
“Does it matter?” he said. “We will simply begin by free association. You leave it to me. Just say anything that jumps into your head.”
Well, of course, the first thing that jumped into my head was the continual plotting of my family to manage my life for me. I said, “If my book is not a success, I am finished utterly. My uncles will crush me into some awful job or I’ll have to marry that ghastly Lady Corsa and spend my life, much like you, in a cultural desert, Modon, an exile.”
“Ah,” he said, “trouble with your mother!”
“How did you know?” I said.
“Obvious,” he said. “Sigmund Freud covered it like a blanket. An Oedipus complex! I can get to the bottom of your case at once. It is a classic example of psychopathology. You see, there is the anal passive, followed by the anal erotic. Then there is the oral passive, followed by the oral erotic. There is also the genital stage but no one ever really reaches that. These are ALL the mental stages there are. Everything is based on sex. Sex is the single and only motivation for all behavior. So there you are.”
I thought maybe it was the white mule. “I don’t quite understand.”
“That’s because you have yet to achieve insight into your condition,” said Crobe. “But it is VERY plain to me. Your mother did not let you play with her nipples when you were a baby. Correct?”
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“You see? And that inhibited your natural sexual outlets! ALL your trouble with your family comes from that. This will inhibit you from freedom of expression and movement. The cure is simple. Just face up t
o the fact—and you MUST face up to it—that you are arrested in the oral erotic stage. You will NEVER find any remission of symptoms unless you ride roughshod over your repression and find yourself a nice young man and practice, unremittingly, fellatio.”
I stared at him.
“I see I am being too technical for a layman. I am giving you pure Freud. Your insanity can be cured only by a life of dedication to making love only to young boys and men—orally, of course. Now, I am sorry,” and he glanced at his watchless wrist, “but your appointment is over for the day. However, you are now cured so you need not come back. My calendar is overfull.”
XVII
I rose up from the couch. “Well, I certainly thank you for your therapy,” I said. “And I can understand how busy you must be, but do you mind if I ask you for your professional opinion?”
“About what?” said Crobe.
I got out some puffsticks—I had taken to smoking them since I had seen that all the reporters did at the Ink Club. I offered one to Crobe and was about to light it for him when he ate it. I didn’t know they were comestible. I lit my own.
“Doctor Crobe,” I said, “you may very well have been illegally incarcerated here.”
“I’ve said so all the time,” he replied. “These barbarians do not appreciate professional technology.”
“Do you know the man who put you here?”
“I certainly do. I saw him issue the order. I would have run away at once the way I am supposed to, but they restrained me.”
“So you know that it was Jettero Heller.”
He flinched a little, looked around. We were still alone. He nodded.
“What is your professional opinion of that man?”
Crobe sat back. He rubbed his overlong nose. He stroked his overlong chin. Finally, he said, “You can appreciate that I have made a considerable study of Jettero Heller. Our doctor-patient relationship goes back many years. He disregarded my earliest advices to him and so, you understand, I cannot be held responsible for his mental state. Had I been permitted to give him true professional help—his physiomental composition was entirely wrong for Mission Earth—none of this ever would have happened.”
He sighed and then he tapped the top of his radio. “I have, of course, followed his subsequent career, but anything I have heard of him only confirms my first spontaneous analysis.” He shook his head sadly. Then he got busy fortifying himself with a long gurgle of white mule, after which he sat and stared out into space.
“What was that analysis?” I prompted.
Crobe recalled himself. “Of what?” he said.
“Jettero Heller,” I prompted, eagerly.
“Oh, him. Well, I can tell you but you must remind me to explain if I go in too deep for a layman to follow. It is a very difficult case, not well covered in some points by the textbooks.
“To begin with, he likes height. This is very grave, for it is a deviation from normal alto-phobia. I know, therefore, that he suffers from alto-libido.”
I stared.
“Yes, very grave,” said Crobe. “But that is far from all. He likes to go very fast. This is a condition of velocitus-libido.
“The next symptom is no less strange. Everyone knows that people are just riffraff, yet—and I witnessed this myself in the early days when he was my patient—he is pleasant to people. This shows that he has urbanus-populi-libido. Very bad.
“He also erects a façade of pretending to be fair to others—an utter sham, but it takes many people in, since it is, in fact, a fixation. An utterly craven insistence on justice for others. This detects that he has justitious-libido.
“Now his record—although it is very confidential, he is no longer my patient and I can disclose it to you—shows that he is very athletic. He runs and jumps and exercises and engages in sports. This reveals deep-seated lascivus-libido—roughly translated from professional language, a love of sports. Damning.
“Libido means a desire, craving or love of something. But in Heller’s case, it is a deviation since it is NOT confined to sex. As the word libido is used constantly by Freud to describe the gravest mental conditions, you can begin to see where this is leading us with Heller.
“Now, were it to stop there, possibly we could classify the man only as extremely neurotic. But unfortunately, it doesn’t. A résumé of his career discloses that he persists until he gets a job done. This puts us in very dangerous waters. According to the best texts, it means,” and he paused and frowned, “that he is achiever-oriented!
“Nor is this all: unlike the normal person, he does not get confused or dispersed easily. According to the most exacting psychology authorities, this is equally bad. He is GOAL-ORIENTED!”
Crobe sat back and sadly looked at the floor. “Actually, I hate to tell you the last and worst thing, it is so very awful.”
“Oh, you must,” I said.
“Well, it is pretty technical,” said Crobe. “While it is just standard Earth psychology, it may exceed your grasp. Now let me define the word schizo for you: it means split or divided like two of something. Do you follow that?”
I said that I did.
“Very well,” continued Crobe, “then you must realize that schizophrenia is a very dreadful psychosis. A schizophrenic is an insane person, as any psychologist or psychiatrist on Earth will tell you.
“And so, to return to the case we are examining, you are aware that he once called himself Jettero Heller.”
“That’s right,” I said.
“But NOW,” said Crobe, with a meaningful look, “he calls himself the Duke of Manco! TWO NAMES! TWO IDENTITIES! SCHIZOPHRENIA!”
He sat back and shook his head. “So we are forced, then, to conclude that the man in question is totally, utterly and completely insane!
“HE should be the one in here. Not I!”
He sat for some time, lost in thought. Then he said, “But I should not be spending my valuable time discussing this with a layman. It is a matter only understood, in its awful enormity, by fully trained Earth professionals. You must excuse me now. I have to get busy making more white mule.”
He started to get out of his chair.
XVIII
I stopped him from rising. “Wait!” I said. “My business is not done.” I pointed at the bars which divided the room.
It was very dark in the other half and I had not been able to see clearly.
There was a swivel glowplate at the top of the couch. I tipped it up so it would shine through the bars into the gloom.
A shadowy shape was sitting there, a sort of small mountain on the floor. The chin lifted and the light struck into yellow eyes.
LOMBAR HISST!
His hair was totally gray. His skin was so deeply wrinkled it seemed to have chasms. The face looked blank.
“Oh, him,” said Crobe. “I gave him ninety-some years of psychoanalysis, but for the last five or so, he refuses to talk. Actually, it is a psychiatric case and requires the expertise of a neurosurgeon. You see, the frontal lobe has become too involved with the parietal lobe of the brain, causing the inevitable biofeedback predicted by the magnificent Earth scientist Snorbert Weener in his work, Stybernetics, based on his constant association with pigs at the Massachusetts Institute of Wrectology. Believe me, it would cause Weener to absolutely squeal with rage and wiggle his tail if he knew his vital work was not being applied. Ah well, the mighty are often forgotten.
“Now, it so happens that I am certified by no less august a body than the American Meddle Association—the group that is dedicated to making all the money for medical doctors possible, no matter how—to perform this simple operation. It is textbook, done constantly on Earth. In fact, it is mandatory! But these unenlightened barbarians here are denying me my tools.
“Factually, I only need one tool. It is the standard one employed by all psychiatrists everywhere for this elementary and vital operation. It is called an ice pick and it isn’t even expensive to buy: one can be purchased in any hardware store.
“All the psychiatrist has to do—he must be qualified of course, but that’s easy, one just hangs a piece of paper on the wall—is insert the ice pick up under the left eyelid, shove it all the way up and sweep it from left to right. Then one slides it up under the right eyelid and does the same. It severs the nerves of the prefrontal lobe quite effectively. And so simple. Why, one day, at Bellevue, I asked for a demonstration and the leading neurosurgeon there simply rushed out into the waiting room, said ‘Watch!’ and in a trice he had operated on over fifty people: they were impoverished black people, charity cases. Only a small percentage, no more than seventy, died on the spot. The remaining fifteen never gave anyone any trouble after that. Economical, too, they only lived a couple of years. Saves the state money! Earth psychiatry is nothing if not practical. They trained me well!”
The Doomed Planet Page 28