“So the patient does go out of here hypnotized!”
“He walks in here hypnotized,” said the doctor. “I’m surprised at you, Newell. For a man who knows so much about my specialty, you shouldn’t need to be lectured on the elementals.”
“I just like the sound of your voice,” Newell said acidly, but the acid was dilute. “What do you mean, the patient walks in here hypnotized?”
“Most people are, most of the time. In the basic sense, a man is under hypnosis whenever any one of his senses does not respond to a present stimulus, or when his attention is diverted even slightly from his physical surroundings. You’re under hypnosis when you read a book, or when you sit and think and don’t see what you’re staring at, or when you bark your shin on a coffee-table you didn’t see under bright lights.”
“That’s so much hair splitting.” Newell didn’t even pause before his next sentence, which came from quite a different area than his scoffing incredulity. “Why didn’t you tell me all this when I said I couldn’t be hypnotized?”
“I preferred to believe you when you said you knew it all.”
Every pretense of joviality disappeared. “Listen, you,” Newell grated, in the ugliest tone of voice the doctor had ever heard, “you better watch what you’re doing.”
It was time again for silence and the doctor used it. He gave Newell no choice but to lie there and stare at his own words. He watched the man regaining his poise, laboriously, hand over hand, then resting, testing, waiting to be sure he could speak again.
“Well,” Newell said at length, and the doctor almost admired him for the smoothness of his tone, “it’s been fun so far and it’ll wind up more so. If you really can do what you say, I’ll make it right with you, Freddy-boy. I’ll really pay off.”
“That’s nice,” said the doctor guardedly.
“Nice? Just nice? Man, I’ll give you a treasure you couldn’t get any other way. You could never get,” he amended. He looked up into the doctor’s face brightly. “Nearly five solid years a-building and it’s all yours. Me, I’ll start a new one.”
“What are you talking about?”
“My little black book. Got everything in it from pig to princess. Whoever you are, however you feel from time to time, there’s a playmate in there for you. You could really use it, Freddy. You must have stored up quite a charge since you-know-what,” he said, grinning at the recording machine. “Fix me up, I fix you up. Fair enough?”
The silence this time was unplanned. The doctor walked to the controls, dialed 550 and hit the master. The 80-cycle note died, the white noise took over, and then the 550-cycle sleep command. The doctor felt that gleaming grin leave the room like a pressure off his back.
He is a patient, the doctor thought at last, out of his hard-held numbness. He is a patient in a therapeutic environment as detached from the world as a non-Euclidean theorem. There is no Newell; there is only a patient. There is no Fred, only a doctor. There is no Osa, only episodes. Newell will be returned to the world because he has a personality and it has an optimum, because that is what I do here and that is what I am for.
He touched the annunciator control and said, “Miss Jarrell, I want you.”
She opened the door almost immediately; she must have been waiting in the corridor. “Oh, Doctor, I am sorry! I know I shouldn’t do anything like that. It’s just—well, before I knew it. . .”
“Don’t apologize, Miss Jarrell. I mean it—don’t. You may even have done some good. But I have to know exactly what influences were . . . no, don’t explain,” he said when she tried to speak. “Show me.”
“Oh, I couldn’t! It’s so—silly!”
“Go on, Miss Jarrell. It isn’t silly at all.”
Flushing, she passed him with her eyes averted and went to the controls. She dialed a frequency and activated the master, and as the white noise roared out, she went to the foot of the bed, waiting. The audio faded, all but a low, steady thrum—200 cycles.
The patient opened his eyes. He smiled. It was a smile the like of which the doctor had never seen before, though he might have imagined one. Not, however, on the face of Richard A. Newell. There was nothing conceivable in Richard A. Newell to co-exist with such an expression.
The patient glanced down and saw Miss Jarrell. Ecstatic recognition crossed his face. He grasped the covers and whipped them over his head, and lay stiff and still as a pencil.
“You . . . !” crooned Miss Jarrell, and the blanket was flung down away from the patient’s head, and he gurgled with laughter. She snatched at his toes, and he bucked and chortled, and covered up again. “The bumble bee—” she murmured, and he quivered, a paroxysm of delighted anticipation—”goes round the tree...and goes bzz ... bzzz . .. BZZ!” and she snatched at his toes again.
He whipped the blanket away from his face and gave himself up to an explosion of merriment which was past vocalization—in fact, but for that soft and intense chuckle, he had made hardly a sound.
“You . . .”
The doctor watched and slowly felt a vacuum in the scene somehow, and a great tugging to fill it with understanding, and the understanding would not come until the word “ridiculous” slipped through his mind . . . and that was it: This should be ridiculous, a grown man reacting like a seven-month infant. What was extraordinary was that it was not ridiculous and that it was indeed a grown man, not a mere infantile segment.
It was a thing to be felt. There was a—a radiance in these bursts of candid merriment which, though certainly childlike, were not childish. It was a quality to be laughed with, not laughed at.
He glanced at the audio selector. Yes, this was the 200-cycle response that Miss Thomas had mentioned. “A personality—” He began to see what she had meant. He began, too, to be afraid.
He went to the wall rack where the technician’s response-breakdown was clipped. It was a standard form, one column showing the frequencies arbitrarily assigned to age levels (700 cycles and the command suggestion: “You are eleven years old”) and another column with the frequencies assigned to emotional states (800 cycles and “You are very angry”; 14 cycles, “You are afraid”).
Once the patient was completely catalyzed, response states could readily be induced and their episodic material extracted—fear at age three, sexuality at fourteen, fear plus anger plus gratification at age six, or any other combination.
The 200-cycle area was blotchy with Miss Thomas’s erasures, but otherwise blank.
The doctor inwardly shook himself and got a firm grip. He went to the bed and stood looking down at that sensitive, responsive face.
“Who are you?” he asked.
The patient looked at him, eyes bright, a glad, anticipatory smile on his lips. The doctor sensed that the man did not understand him, but that he was eager to; further, that from the bottom of his heart the man was prepared to be delighted when he did understand. It filled the doctor with an almost tender anxiety, a protectiveness. This creature could not be disappointed—that would be inartistic to the point of gross injustice.
“What’s your name?” the doctor pursued.
The patient smiled at him and sat up. He looked into the doctor’s eyes with an almost unbearable attention and a great waiting, ready to treasure whatever might come next if only—if only he could identify it.
One thing’s certain, mused the doctor: this was no infantile segment. Child, yes, but not quite child.
“Miss Jarrell.”
“Yes, Doctor.”
“The initial, the middle initial on the chart. It’s ‘A.’ What does that stand for?”