After a moment, “Anson,” she said.
To the patient, he said. “I’m going to call you Anson. That will be your name.” He put his hand on the patient’s chest. “Anson.”
The man looked down at the hand and up, expectantly, at the doctor.
The doctor said, touching his white coat, “Doctor. Doctor.” He pointed at Miss Jarrell. “Miss—”
“Hildy,” said Miss Jarrell quickly.
The doctor could not help it; he grinned briefly. This elicited a silent burst of glee from the patient, which was shut off instantly, to be replaced by the anticipation, the watchful and ready attentiveness. He burdened the doctor with his waiting and the necessity to appreciate. Yet what burden was it, really? This creature would appreciate the back of a hand across the face or two choruses of the Londonderry Air.
The doctor poised over the bed, waiting for an answer, and it came:
The burden lay in the necessity not to please this entity, but to do this thing properly, in ways which would never have to be withdrawn later. He trusts me—there, in three words, was the burden.
The doctor took the patient’s hand and put the fingertips close to his lips. “An-son,” he said. Then he put the hand to the patient’s own mouth, nodding encouragingly.
The patient obviously wanted to do it right, too—more, even, than the doctor. His lips trembled. Then, “An-son,” he said.
Across the room, Miss Jarrell clapped her hands and laughed happily.
“That’s right,” smiled the doctor, pointing. “Anson. You’re Anson.” He touched his own chest. “Doc-tor.” He pointed again. “Miss Hildy.”
The man in the bed sat up slowly, his eyes on the doctor’s face. “An-son. Anson.” And then a light seemed to flood him. He hit his chest with his knuckles. “Anson!” he cried. He felt his own biceps, his face, and laughed.
“That’s right,” said the doctor.
“Doc . . . tok,” said Anson with difficulty. He looked wistful, almost distraught.
“That’s okay. That’s good. Doctor.”
“Doc-tor.” Anson turned brightly to Miss Jarrell and pointed. “Miss Hildy!” he sang triumphantly.
“Bless you,” she said, saying it like a blessing.
While Anson grinned, the doctor stood for a moment grinning back like a fool and feeling frightened and scratching his head.
Then he went to work.
“Richard,” he said sharply, and watched for a reaction.
There was none, just the happy eagerness.
“Dick.”
Nothing.
“Newell.”
Nothing.
“Hold up your right hand. Close your eyes. Look out of the window. Touch your hair. Let me see your tongue.”
Anson did none of these things.
The doctor wet his lips. “Osa.”
Nothing.
He glanced at Miss Jarrell. “Anson,” he said, and Anson increased his attention. It was startling; the doctor hadn’t known he could. “Anson, listen.” He pulled back his sleeve and showed his watch. “Watch. Watch.” He held it close, then put it to Anson’s ear.
Anson gurgled delightedly. “Tk tk,” he mimicked. He cocked his head and listened carefully to the doctor repeating the word. Then. “Wats. Watts. Watch,” he said, and clapped his hands exactly as Miss Jarrell had done before.
“All right, Miss Jarrell. That’s enough for now. Turn him off.”
He heard her intake of breath and thought she was going to speak. When she did not, he faced her and smiled. “It’s all right, Miss Jarrell. We’ll take good care of him.”
She looked for the sarcasm in his face, between his words, back in recall, anywhere, and did not find it. She laughed suddenly and heartily; he knew she was laughing at herself, spellbound as she had been, anxious for the shining something which hid in the 200-cycle area.
“I could use a little therapy myself, I guess,” she said wonderingly.
“I would recommend it to you if you had reacted any other way.”
She went to the door and opened it. “I like working here,” she said, blushed, and went out.
The doctor’s smile disappeared with the click of the latch. He glanced once at the patient, then moved blindly to the controls. He locked them and went back to his office.
Miss Thomas knocked. Getting no answer, she entered the doctor’s office. “Oh, I beg your pardon, I thought—”
The expression on his face halted her. She took the reports she carried and put them down on the desk. He did not move. She went to the cabinet, which slid open for her, and shook two white pills from a vial. She broke a beam with a practiced flick of the wrist. A paper cup dropped and filled with ice-water. She took it to the doctor. “Here.”
He said rapidly, “What? What? What?” and, seeking, looked the wrong way to find her voice. He turned again, saw her. “What?” and put his hand for a moment over his eyes. “Oh, Miss Thomas.”
“Here,” said the technician again.
“What is it?” He seemed to be trying to identify the cup, as if he had never seen one before.
Because she was kind, Miss Thomas took it another way. “Dexamyl.”
“Thank you.” He took them, swallowed water, and looked up at her. “Thank you,” he said again. “I seem to be . . .”
“It’s all right,” said Miss Thomas firmly. “Everything’s all right.”
Some of his control returned and he chuckled a little. “Using my own therapy on me?”
“Everything is all right, far as I know,” she said, in the grumpy tone under which she so often concealed herself. She folded her arms with an all but audible snap and glared out of the window.
The doctor glanced up at her rigid back and, in spite of himself, was amused. She was daring him to order her out, challenging him not to tell her what the trouble was. He recalled, then, that she was doubtlessly gnawed like the Spartan boy by the fox of curiosity she was hiding under her starch. There’s a personality in the 200-cycle area that won’t dismantle . . . oh, you can do it, but. . . it’s a pity, that’s all, he recalled.
He said, “It’s one of those things of Prince’s.”
She was quiet for so long that she might not have heard him and I’m damned, he thought, if I’m going to spell it out for her.
But she said, “I don’t believe it,” and, into his continued silence, “Morton Prince’s alternate-personality idea might be the only explanation for some cases, but it doesn’t explain this one.”
“It doesn’t?”
“Two personalities in one mind—three or more sometimes. One of his case histories was of a woman who had five distinct egos. I’m not quarreling with the possibility, Doctor.”
Every time Miss Thomas surprised him, it was in a way that pleased him. He would, he thought, think that through some day.
“Then why quarrel with this one?” he asked.
Unasked and unabashed, she sat down in the big chair. They sat for a time in a companionable, cerebral quiet.
Then she said, “Prince’s case histories show a lot of variation. I mean one ego will be refined, educated, another rough and stupid. Sometimes the prime was aware of the others, sometimes not; sometimes they hated each other. But there was this denominator: If the condition existed at all, it existed because the alternate ego could communicate and did. Had to.”
“Morton Prince wasn’t equipped for segmentation under tertiary hypnosis.”
“I think that’s beside the point,” Miss Thomas said flatly. “I’ll say it again: Prince’s alternate egos had to emerge. I think that’s the key. If an ego can’t communicate and won’t emerge unless you drag it out by the scruff of the neck, I don’t think it deserves to be called an ego.”
“You can say that and yet you’ve seen Ans—the alternate?”