Miss Lelache sat behind the screen of bookcases and files that semi-separated her semi-office from Mr. Pearl’s semi-office, and thought of herself as a Black Widow.
There she sat, poisonous; hard, shiny, and poisonous; waiting, waiting.
And the victim came.
A born victim. Hair like a little girl’s, brown and fine, little blond beard; soft white skin like a fish’s belly; meek, mild, stuttering. Shit! If she stepped on him he wouldn’t even crunch.
“Well I, I think it’s a, it’s a matter of, of rights of privacy sort of,” he was saying. “Invasion of privacy, I mean. But I’m not sure. That’s why I wanted advice.”
“Well. Shoot,” said Miss Lelache. The victim could not shoot. His stuttering pipe had dried up.
“You’re under Voluntary Therapeutic Treatment,” Miss Lelache said, referring to the note Mr. Esserbeck had sent in previously, “for infraction of Federal regulations controlling dispensation of medications at autodrugstores.”
“Yes. If I agree to psychiatric treatment I won’t get prosecuted.”
“That’s the gist of it, yes,” the lawyer said dryly. The man struck her as not exactly feeble-minded, but revoltingly simple. She cleared her throat.
He cleared his throat. Monkey see, monkey do. Gradually, with a lot of backing and filling, he explained that he was undergoing a therapy which consisted essentially of hypnotically induced sleep and dreaming. He felt that the psychiatrist, by ordering him to dream certain dreams, might be infringing upon his rights of privacy as defined in the New Federal Constitution of 1984.
“Well. Something like this came up last year in Arizona,” said Miss Lelache. “Man under VTT tried to sue his therapist for implanting homosexual tendencies in him. Of course the shrink was simply using standard conditioning techniques, and the plaintiff actually was a terrific repressed homo; he got arrested “for trying to bugger a twelve-year-old boy in broad daylight in the middle of Phoenix Park, before the case even got to court He wound up in Obligatory Therapy in Tehachapi. Well. What I’m getting at is that you’ve got to be cautious in making this sort of allegation. Most psychiatrists who get Government referrals are cautious men themselves, respectable practitioners. Now if you can provide any instance, any occurrence, that might serve as real evidence; but mere suspicions won’t do. In fact, they might land you in Obligatory, that’s the Mental Hospital in Linnton, or in jail.”
“Could they... maybe just give me another psychiatrist?”
“Well. Not without real cause. The Medical School referred you to this Haber; and they’re good, up there, you know. If you brought a complaint against Haber the men who heard it as specialists would very likely be Med School men, probably the same ones that interviewed you. They won’t take a patient’s word against a doctor’s with no evidence. Not in this kind of case.”
“A mental case,” the client said sadly.
“Exactly.”
He said nothing for a while. At last he raised his eyes to hers, clear, light eyes, a look without anger and without hope; he smiled and said, “Thank you very much, Miss Lelache. I’m sorry to have wasted your time.”
“Well, wait!” she said. He might be simple, but he certainly didn’t look crazy; he didn’t even look neurotic. He just looked desperate. “You don’t have to give up quite so easily. I didn’t say that you have no case. You say that you do want to get off drugs, and that Dr. Haber is giving you a heavier dose of phenobarb, now, than you were taking on your own; that might warrant investigation. Though I strongly doubt it. But defense of rights of privacy is my special line, and I want to know if there’s been a breach of privacy. I just said you hadn’t told me your case—if you have one. What, specifically, has this doctor done?”
“If I tell you,” the client said with mournful objectivity, “you’ll think I’m crazy.”
“How do you know I will?”
Miss Lelache was countersuggestible, an excellent quality in a lawyer, but she knew she carried it a bit far.
“If I told you,” the client said in the same tone, “that some of my dreams exert an influence over reality, and that Dr. Haber has discovered this and is using it ... this talent of mine, for ends of his own, without my consent... you’d think I was crazy. Wouldn’t you?”
Miss Lelache gazed at him a while, her chin on her hands. “Well. Go on,” she said at last, sharply. He was quite right about what she was thinking, but damned if she was going to admit it. Anyway, so what if he was crazy? What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?
He looked down at his hands for a minute, evidently trying to collect his thoughts. “You see,” he said, “he has this machine. A device like the EEG recorder, but it provides a kind of analysis and feedback of the brain waves.”
“You mean he’s a Mad Scientist with an Infernal Machine?”
The client smiled feebly. “I make it sound that way. No, I believe that he has a very good reputation as a research scientist, and that he’s genuinely dedicated to helping people. I’m sure he doesn’t intend any harm to me or anyone. His motives are very high.” He encountered the disenchanted gaze of the Black Widow a moment, and stuttered. “The, the machine. Well, I can’t tell you how it works, but anyway he’s using it on me to keep my brain in the d-state, as he calls it—that’s one term for the kind of special sleep you have when you’re dreaming. It’s quite different from ordinary sleep. He sends me to sleep hypnotically, and then turns this machine on so that I start dreaming at once—one doesn’t usually. Or that’s how I understand it. The machine makes sure that I dream, and I think it intensifies the dream-state, too. And then I dream what he’s told me to dream in hypnosis.”
“Well. It sounds like a foolproof method for an old-fashioned psychoanalyst to get dreams to analyze. But instead of that he’s telling you what to dream, by hypnotic suggestion? So I assume he’s conditioning you via dreams, for some reason. Now, it’s well established that under hypnotic suggestion a person can and will do almost anything, whether or not his conscience would permit it in a normal state: that’s been known since the middle of the last century, and legally established since Somerville v. Projansky in ‘88. Well. Do you have any grounds for believing that this doctor has been using hypnosis to suggest that you perform anything dangerous, anything you’d find it morally repugnant to do?”
The client hesitated. “Dangerous, yes. If you accept that a dream can be dangerous. But he doesn’t direct me to do anything. Only to dream them.”
“Well, are the dreams he suggests morally repugnant to you?”