“Well, in the crudest possible terms, what would you say was the abnormality suffered by one Siamese twin?”
‘The other Siamese twin.”
“Mmm. And by the same analogy, what’s the name of Newell’s disorder?”
“My goodness!” gasped Miss Thomas. “We better not tell Hildy Jarrell.”
“That isn’t the only thing we’ll have to keep from her— for a while, at least,” said the doctor. “Listen: did you run my notes on Newell?”
“All of them.”
“You remember the remark she made that bothered me, about Anson’s being only and altogether good, and the trouble I had with the implication that Newell was only and altogether bad?”
“I remember it.”
“It’s a piece of childishness that annoys me wherever I find it and I was damned annoyed to be thinking at all along those lines. The one reason for its being in the notes at all is that I had to decant it somewhere. Well, I’ve been euchred, Miss Thomas. Because Anson appeared in our midst shining and unsullied, I’ve leaned over backward trying to keep away from him the corruptions of anger, fear, greed, concupiscence and all the other hobbies of real mankind. By the same token, it never occurred to me to analyze what kindness, generosity, sympathy or empathy might be lurking in Newell. Why bother in such a—what was the term you used?”
“Heel,” said Miss Thomas without hesitation.
“Heel. So what we have to do first is to give each of these—uh—people the privilege of entirety. If they are mon
sters, then let us at least permit them to be whole monsters.”
“You don’t mean you’ll—”
“We,” he corrected, smiling.
She said, through her answering smile, “You don’t mean we’ll take poor Anson and—”
He nodded.
“Offhand, I don’t see how you’re going to do it, Doctor. Anson has no fear. He’d laugh as he walked into a lion’s cage or a high-tension line. And I can’t imagine how you’d make him angry. You of all people. He—he loves you. As for . . . oh, dear. This is awful.”
“Extremes are awful,” he agreed. “We’ll have to get pretty basic, but we can do it. Hence, I suggest Miss Jarrell be sent to Kalamazoo for a new stove or some such.”
“And then what?”
“It is standard practice to acquaint a patient with the name and nature of his disorder. In our field, we don’t tell him, we show him, and when he absorbs the information, we call it an insight. Anson, meet Newell. Newell, meet Anson.”
“I do hope they’ll be friends,” said Miss Thomas unhappily.
In a darkness within a darkness in the dark, Anson slept his new kind of sleep, wherein he now had dreams. And then there was his own music, the deep sound which lit the darkness and pierced the dark envelopes, one within the other; and now he could emerge to the light and laughter and the heady mysteries of life and communication with Miss Hildy and Doctor Fred, and the wonder on wonder of perception. Gladly he flung himself back to life to—
But this wasn’t the same. He was here, in the bed, but it wasn’t the same at all. There was no rim of light around the ceiling, no bars of gold pouring in a sunlit window; this was the same, but not the same—it was dark. He blinked his eyes so hard he made little colored lights, but they were inside his eyes and did not count.
There was noise, unheard-of, unbearable noise in the form of a cymbal-crash right by his head in the dark. He recoiled from it and tried to bounce up and run, and found he could not move. His arms were bound to his sides, his legs to the bed, by some wide formless something which held him trapped. He fought against it, crying, and then the bed dropped away underneath him and stopped with a crash, and rose and dropped again. There was another noise—not a noise, though it struck at him like one: this was a photo-flash, though he could not know it.
Blinded and sick, he lay in terror, waiting for terror again.
He heard a voice say softly, ‘Turn down the gain,” and his music, his note, the pervasive background to all his consciousness, began to weaken. He strained toward it and it receded from him. Thumpings and shufflings from somewhere in the dark threatened to hide it away from him altogether. He felt, without words, that the note was his life and that he was losing it. For the first time in his conscious life, he became consciously afraid of dying.
He screamed, and screamed again, and then there was a blackness blacker than the dark and it all ceased.
“He’s fainted. Lights, please. Turn off that note. Give him 550 and we’ll see if he can sleep normally. God, I hope we didn’t go too far.”
They stood watching the patient. They were panting with tension.
“Help me with this,” said the doctor. Together, he and Miss Thomas unbuckled the restraining sheet. They cleared away the flash-gun, the cymbals, and readjusted the bed-raising control to its normal slow operation.
“He’s all right, physically anyway,” said the doctor after a swift examination. “I told you it would work if we got basic enough. He wouldn’t fear a lion because he doesn’t know what a lion is. But restraint and sudden noise and falling—he doesn’t have to know what they are. Okay, button him up again.”
“What? You’re not going to—”
“Come on, button him up,” he said brusquely.
She frowned, but she helped him replace the restraining sheet. “I still think—” she began, and earned a “Sh!”
He set up the 200-cycle note again at its usual amplitude and they waited. There was a lag in apparent consciousness this time. The doctor realized that the patient was awake, but apparently afraid to open his eyes.
“Anson . . .”
Anson began to cry weakly.
“What’s the matter, Anson?”
“D-Doctor Fred, Doctor Fred ... the big noise, and then I couldn’t move and all the black and white smash lights.” He wept again.
The doctor said nothing. He simply waited. Anson’s sobs stopped abruptly and he tried to move. He gasped loudly and tried again.
“Doctor Fred!” he cried in panic.
Still the doctor said nothing.
Anson rolled his head wildly, fell back, tried again. “Make it so I can get up,” Anson called piteously.
“No,” said the doctor flatly.
“Make so I—”
“No.”
Piercingly, Anson shrieked. He surged upward so powerfully that for a second the doctor was afraid for the fastenings on the restraining sheet. But they held.
For nearly ten minutes, Anson fought the sheet, screaming and drooling. Fright turned to fury, and fury to an intense, witless battle. It was a childish tantrum magnified by the strength and staying power of an adult.
At about the second minute, the doctor keyed in a supplementary frequency, a shrill 10,500 cycles which had been blank on the index. Whenever Anson paused for breath, the doctor intoned, “You are angry. You are angry.” Grimly he watched until, a matter of seconds before the patient had to break, he released him to sleep.
“I couldn’t stand another minute of that,” said Miss Thomas. Her lips were almost gray. She moistened a towel and gently bathed the sleeping face. “I didn’t like that at all.”
“You’ll like the rest of it,” promised the doctor. “Let’s get rid of this sheet.”
They took it off and stored it.
“How’d you like me to hit the ten-five cycles with that sheet off?” he asked.
“Build him a cage first,” she breathed in an awed tone.
He grinned suddenly. “Hit eighty cycles for me, will you?”
She did and they watched Richard Newell wakening. He groaned and moved his head gingerly. He sat up suddenly and yelped, and covered his face for a moment with both hands.
“Hello, Newell. How do you feel?”
“Fred! What’ve you been doing to me?”