“Good. Good,” he said like a department-store Santa Claus. “Just a few details. I’ll want every minute on sound film, from white noise to white noise, and I’ll want to review the film every day. And, of course, I’d have to ask you not to discuss this with anyone, on or off the staff. It’s a unique case and a new therapy, and a lot depends on it. On you.”
“Oh, you can depend on me, Doctor!”
He nodded agreement. “We’ll start tomorrow morning. I’ll have the first word-lists and other instructions ready for you by then. Meanwhile, I’ve got some research to do. Contact the Medical Information Service in Washington and have them key in Prince, Morton, and Personality, Multiple, on their Big Brain. I want abstracts of everything that has been published in the last fifty years on the subject. No duplicates. An index. Better order microfilm and send it by telefax, AA priority.”
“Yes, Doctor,” said Miss Jarrell eagerly. “Foreign publications too?”
“Everything any researcher has done. And put a Confidential on the order as well as the delivery.”
“Really secret.”
“Really.” He concealed the smile which struggled to show itself; in his mind, he had seen the brief image of a little girl hiding jelly-beans. “And get me the nurses’ duty-list. I have some juggling to do.”
“Very well, Doctor. Is that all?”
“All for now.”
She nearly skipped to the door. He saw a flash of white as she opened it; Miss Thomas was standing in the outer office. He could not have been more pleased if she had been there by his explicit orders, for Miss Jarrell said, as she went out, “And thank you, Doctor—thank you very much.”
Chew on that, Thomas, he thought, feeling his own small vindictiveness and permitting himself to enjoy it for once.
And: Why am I jumping on Thomas?
Well, because I have to jump on somebody once in a while and she can take it.
Why don’t I tell her everything? She has a good head. Might have some really good ideas. Why not?
Why not? he asked again into a joyless void. Because I could be wrong. I could be so wrong. That’s why not.
The research began, and the long night work. In addition to the vast amount of collateral reading—there was much more material published on the subject of multiple personality than he had realized—he had each day’s film to analyze, notes to make, abstracts to prepare for computer-coding, and then, after prolonged thought, the next day’s lessons to outline.
The rest of the clinic refused to stop and wait for this job to be done, and he had an additional weight of conscience as he concealed his impatience with everything else but the Newell case. He was so constituted that such a weight made him over-meticulous in the very things he wished to avoid, so that his ordinary work took more time rather than less.
As for the research, much of it was theory and argumentation; the subject, like reincarnation, seemed to attract zealots of the most positive and verbose varieties, both pro and con. Winnowing through the material, he isolated two papers of extreme interest to him. One was a theory, one an interim report on a series of experiments which had never been completed due to the death of the researcher.
The theory, advanced by one Weisbaden, was based on a search through just such material as this. Indeed, Weisbaden seemed to have been the only man besides himself who had ever asked the Medical Information Service for this complete package.
From it he had abstracted statistics, weighted them to suit his theory, and come up with the surprising opinion that multiple personality was a twinning phenomenon, and that if a method were found for diagnosing all such cases, a correspondence would be found between the incidence of multiple births and the incidence of multiple personalities. So many births per thousand are twins, so many per hundred thousand are triplets, and the odds with quads and quints are in the millions.
So, too, said Weisbaden, would be the statistical expectation for the multiple personality phenomenon, once such cases stopped being diagnosed as schizoids and other aberrates.
Weisbaden had not been a medical man—he was some sort of actuary—but his inference was fascinating. How many twins and triplets walked the Earth in single bodies, without any organic indication that they were not single entities? How many were getting treatment for conditions they did not have; how many Siamese twins were being penalized because they would not walk like other quadrupeds; how many separate entities were being forced to spend their lives in lockstep?
Some day, thought the doctor—as so many doctors have thought before—some day, when we can get closer to the genetic biologists, when psychology becomes a true science, when someone devises a cross-reference system between the disciplines which really works . . . and some day, when I have the time—well, maybe I could test this ingenious guess. But it’s only a guess, based on neither observation nor experiment. Intriguing, though—if only it could be tested.
The other paper was of practical value. A certain Julius Marx—again not a medical man, but a design engineer with, apparently, hobbies—had built an electro-encephalograph for two (would anyone ever write a popular song about that?) which graphed each of the patients through a series of stimuli, and at the same time drew a third graph, a resultant.
Marx was after a means of determining brain-wave types, rather than individual specimens, and had done circuitry on machines which would handle up to eight people at once. In a footnote, with dry humor, he had qualified his paper for this particular category: “Perhaps one day the improbable theories of Dr. Prince might approach impossibility through the use of this device upon a case of multiple personality.”
Immediately on reading this, the doctor ordered EEGs on both Anson and Newell, and when he had both before him, he wished fervently that Julius Marx had been there with him; he suspected that the man enjoyed a good laugh, even on himself. The graphs were as different as such graphs can possibly be.
The confirmation of his diagnosis was spectacular, and he left a note for Miss Jarrell to track down every multiple personality case he had rejected for the past eight years and see what could be done about some further tests. What would come after the tests, he did not know—yet.
The other valuable nudge he got from the Marx paper was the idea of a resultant between two dissimilar electro-encephalograms. He made one from the Newell-Anson EEGs —without the use of anything as Goldbergian as Marx’s complicated device, but with a simple computer coupling. He kept it in his top desk drawer, and every few days he would draw it out and he would wonder ...
Therapy for Anson wasn’t therapy. Back at the very beginning, Miss Thomas had said that his was a personality that wouldn’t dismantle; she had been quite right. You can’t get episodic material from an entity which has had no subjective awareness, no experience, which has no name, no sense of identity, no motility, no recall.
There were many parts to that strange radiance of Anson’s and they were all in the eye of the beholder, who protected Anson because he was defenseless, who was continually amazed at his unselfconsciousness as if it were an attribute rather than a lack. His discovery of the details of self and surroundings was a never-ending delight to watch, because he himself was delighted and had never known the cruel penalties we impose on expressed delight, nor the masking idioms we use instead: Not a bad sunset there. Yeah. Real nice.
“He’s good,” Miss Jarrell said to the doctor once. “He’s only good—nothing else.”
Therapy for Newell was, however, therapy, and not rewarding. The properly dismantled and segmented patient is relatively simple to handle.