“Anson. Hildy Jarrell told me about the christening. Yes, I can say that.”
He looked at her levelly and she dropped her eyes. He remembered again their encounter in the corridor in front of Newell’s door. Don’t blame Hildy Jarrell—that’s exactly what I did myself.
“Miss Thomas, why are you trying to herd me away from this case?”
“Doctor!”
He closed his eyes and said, “You find a segment that you can’t break. It’s a particularly—well, let’s say that whatever it is, you like it.” He paused and, exactly in time, said, “Don’t interrupt me. You know very well that the rock bottom of my practice is that personality is inviolate. You know that if this is a genuine case of alternate ego, I wouldn’t touch it—I couldn’t, because the man has only one body, and to normalize him, I’d have to destroy one ego or the other.
“Now you knew perfectly well that I’d discover the alternate. So the first thing you do is call my attention to it, and the next thing you do is give me an argument about it, knowing I’d disagree with you, knowing that if there was any doubt in my mind, it would disappear in the argument.”
“Why on earth would I do at thing like that?” she challenged.
“I told you—so I’d get off the case—reset the P.T. and discharge him.”
“Damn it,” said Miss Thomas bitterly.
“That’s the trouble with knowing too much about a colleague’s thought processes,” he said into midair. “You can’t manipulate somebody who understands you.”
“Which one of us do you mean?” she demanded.
“I really don’t know. Now are you going to tell me why you tried this, or shall I tell you?”
“I’ll tell you,” said Miss Thomas. “You’re tired. I don’t want anything to happen to that Anson. As soon as I found him, I knew exactly what would happen if you went ahead with Newell’s therapy. Anson would be the intruder. I don’t care how—how beautiful an intruder he might be, he could only show up as an aberration, something extraneous. You’d pack him down to pill size and bury him so deep in a new-model Newell that he’d never see daylight again. I don’t know how much consciousness he has, but I do know I couldn’t bear to have him buried alive.
“And supposing you committed therapy on Anson alone, brought him up like a shiny young Billy Budd and buried that heel Newell—if you’ll pardon the unprofessional term, Doctor—down inside him somewhere? You think Anson would be able to defend himself? You think he could take a lane in the big rat race? This world is no place for cherubim.
“So there isn’t a choice. I don’t know what Anson shares with Newell and I never will. I do know that however Anson has existed so far, it hasn’t spoiled him, and the only chance he has to go on being what he is is to be left alone.”
“Quod erat demonstrandum,” said the doctor, spreading his hands. “Very good. Now you know why I’ve never treated alternate ego cases. And perhaps you also know how useless your little machination was.”
“I had to be sure, that’s all. Well, I’m glad. I’m sorry.”
He smiled briefly. “I follow that.” He watched her get up, her face softened by content and her admiration of him unconcealed.
She bent an uncharacteristically warm gaze on him and moved toward the door. She looked back once on the way, and once there, she stopped and turned to face him. “Something’s the matter.”
There were, he knew, other ways to handle this, but at the moment he had to hurt something. There were several ways to do the hurt, too, and he chose the worst one, saying nothing.
Miss Thomas became Miss Thomas again, her eyes like one-way mirrors and her stance like a soldier. She looked out of herself at him and said, “You’re going on with the therapy.”
He did not deny it.
“Are you going to tell me which one gets it?”
“Depends on what you mean by ‘gets it,’” he said with grim jocularity.
She treated the bad joke as it deserved to be treated and simply waited for it to go away.
He said, “Both.”
She repeated the word in exactly his inflection, as though she could understand it better if it were as near as her own lips. Then she shook her head impatiently. “You can apply just so much therapy and then there’s a choice to make.”
“There’s this choice to make,” he said, in a constricted tone that hurt his throat. “Newell lives in a society he isn’t fit for. He’s married to a woman he doesn’t deserve. If it is in my power to make him more fit and more deserving, what is the ethical choice?”
Miss Thomas moved close to the desk. “You implied that you’d turned down cases like this before. You sent them back into society, untreated.”
“Once they sent lepers back untreated,” he snapped. ‘Therapy has to start somewhere, with someone.”
“Start it on rats first.”
I am, he said, fortunately to himself. He considered her remark further and decided not to answer it, knowing how deeply she must regret saying it.
She said, “Hildy Jarrell will quit when she finds this out.”
“She will not quit,” said the doctor immediately and positively.
“And as for me—”
“Yes?”
Their gazes locked like two steel rods placed tip to tip, pressing, pressing, knowing that some slight wavering, some side drift, must come and must make a break and a collision.
But instead, she broke. She closed her eyes against tears and clasped her hands. “Please,” she whispered, “do you have to go through with this? Why? Why?”
Oh, God, he thought, I hate this. “I can’t discuss it.” That, he thought painfully, is altogether the truth.
She said heavily, “I don’t think you should.” He knew it was her last word.
“It is a psychological decision, Miss Thomas, and not a technological one.” He knew it was unfair to fall back on rank and specialty when he no longer had an argument he could use. But this had to stop.
She nodded. “Yes, Doctor.” She went out, closing the door too quietly. He thought, What do you have to be to a person so you can run after someone crying, Come back! Come back! Don’t hate me! I’m in trouble and I hurt!
It took Miss Jarrell about forty minutes to get to the office. The doctor had figured it at about thirty-five. He was quite ready for her.
She knocked with one hand and turned the knob with the other and flew in like an angry bee. Her face was flushed and there was a little pale tension-line parenthesizing each nostril. “Doctor—”
“Ah, Miss Jarrell,” he said with a huge joviality. “I was just about to call you. I need your help for a special project.”
“Well, I’m sorry about that,” she began. Her eyes were wide and aflame, and the rims were slightly pink. He wished he could magic a few minims of azacyclonol into her bloodstream; she could use it. “I’ve come to—”
“The Newell case.”
“Yes, the Newell case. I don’t think—”
He had almost to shout this time. “And I think you’re just the one for the job. I want that 200-cycle entity—you know, Anson—I want him educated.”
“Well, I think it’s just—what?” And as the angry syllable ricocheted around the office, she stared at him and asked timidly, “I beg your pardon?”
“I’d like to relieve you of your other duties and put you with Anson full time. Would you like that?”
“Would I like . . . what will I do?”
“I want to communicate with him. He needs a vocabulary and he needs elementary instruction. He probably doesn’t know how to hold a fork or blow his nose. I think you can do a good job of teaching him.”
“Well, I—why, I’d love to!”