“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.
Miss Thomas said severely, “I know what you’re thinking about Hildy Jarrell, but don’t. That’s exactly what I did myself.” Again she made the uncharacteristic fluttery gesture. “Oh-h!” she breathed impatiently.
Because his impulses were kind, the doctor ignored most of this and picked up only, ‘Two hundred cycles. What do you get at the other frequencies?”
“Oh, that’s all right, all of it. Average response. Pre-therapeutic personality responds best at eighty cycles. Everywhere else, he’s nice and accessible. Anyway,” she said a little louder, obviously to drown out another soft sudden chuckle from behind the door, “I just wanted you to know that I’ve done what I can. I didn’t want you to think I’d skipped anything in the spectrum. I haven’t. It’s just that there’s a personality in the 200-cycle area that won’t dismantle.”
“Yet,” he corrected mildly.
“Oh, you can do it,” she said in rapid embarrassment. “I didn’t mean ... I only meant...”
She drew a deep breath and started over. “I just wanted you to be sure my job’s done. As to what you can do, you’ll handle it, all right. Only—”
“Only what, Miss Thomas?”
“It’s a pity, that’s all,” she blurted, and pushed past him to disappear around the corner.
He shook his head, puzzlement and laughter wrestling gently deep inside him. Only then did something she had said fully register with him: “...there’s a personality in the 200-cycle area that won’t dismantle.”
That woman, he thought, has the kind of precision which might be clouded by emotion, but nothing would eliminate it. If she said there’s a personality in the 200-cycle area, she meant just that. A personality, not a component or a matrix or a complex.
As she herself had put it, after catalysis a patient should resemble nothing more than a row of parts on a lab bench. Down through the levels of hypnosis, audible frequencies would arbitrarily be assigned to various parts of the personality, and by suggestion each part would respond to its frequency throughout the therapy. Any part could be summoned, analyzed, then minimized, magnified, stressed or quelled in the final modulation and made permanent in the psychostat. But at the stage Newell was in—should be in— these were parts, sub-assemblies at most. What did she mean “a personality” in the 200-cycle area?
She was wrong, of course. Oh, God, he thought, she’s wrong, isn’t she?
He opened the door.
Miss Jarrell did not see him. He watched for a long moment, then said, just loud enough to be heard over the soft thrumming of the 200-cycle note from the speakers, “Don’t stop, Miss Jarrell. I’d like to see a little more of this.”
Miss Jarrell flung up a scarlet face.
The doctor said again, quietly but with great force, “Go on, please.”
She turned away to the bed, her back held with a painful rigidity and her ears, showing through her hair, looking like the tips of bright little tongues.
“It’s all right,” soothed the doctor. “It’s all right, Miss Jarrell. You’ll see him again.”
She made a soft sound with her nostrils, grinned ruefully and went to the controls. She set one of them for the patient’s allotted sleep-command frequency and hit the master switch. There was a gentle explosion of sound—”white” noise, a combination of all audio frequencies, which served to disorient the dismantled patient, his reflexive obedience attempting to respond to all commands at once—for ten seconds, and then it automatically faded, leaving the 550-cycle “sleep” note. The patient’s face went blank and he lay back slowly, his eyes closing. He was asleep before his head reached the pillow.
The doctor stood suspended in thought for some time. Miss Jarrell gently arranged the patient’s blanket. It was not done dutifully nor as part of the busyness of waiting for his next move. For some reason, it touched the doctor deeply and pulled him out of his reverie. “Let’s have the P.T., Miss Jarrell.”
“Yes, Doctor.” She consulted the index and carefully set the controls. At his nod, she touched the master switch. Again the white noise, and then the deep moo of the 80-cycle tone.
The P.T.—pre-therapeutic—personality would be retained untouched throughout the treatment, right up until the final setting process in the psychostat, except, of course, for the basic post-hypnotic command which kept all segments under control of the audio spectrum. The doctor watched the sleeping face and was aware of a most unprofessional desire to have something other than that untouched P.T. appear.
He glanced at Miss Jarrell without turning his head. She should leave now, and ordinarily she would. But she was not behaving ordinarily just now.
The patient’s eyes half-opened and stayed that way for a time. It was like the soft startlement of a feline which is aware of something, undecided whether the something deserves more attention than sleep, and therefore simply waits, armed and therefore relaxed.
Then he saw the eyes move, though the lids did not. This was the feline taking stock, but deluding its enemies into thinking it still drowsy. The man changed like an aurora, which is ever the same while you watch, but something quite different if you look away and look back. I think in analogies, the doctor chided himself, when I don’t like the facts.
“Well, Freddy-boy,” drawled Richard A. Newell.
Behind him, he heard Miss Jarrell’s almost inaudible sigh and her brisk quiet footsteps as she turned on the speech recorder, crossed the room and closed the door behind her.
Newell said, “Nurse is an odd term for a woman built like that. How you doing, Freddy?”
“Depends,” said the doctor.
Newell sat up and stretched. He waved at the red eye of the recorder. “Everything I say is taken down and may be used against me, hm?”
“Everything is used, yes. Not—”
“Oh, spare me the homilies, Fred. Transcribe them yourself, do you?”
“I—no.” As he caught Newell’s thought, and knew exactly the kind of thing the man was going to do next, he felt himself filling up with impotent rage. It did not show.
“Fine, fine.” Projecting his voice a bit, Newell said over an elaborate yawn, “Haven’t waked up like this since I was a kid. You know, disoriented, wondering for a moment where I was. Last bed I was in wasn’t so lonesome. Missed thirty of those last forty winks, the way she was all over me. ‘Dick, oh, Dick, please ...’ “ he mimicked cruelly. “Told her to shut up and get breakfast.”