“Go ahead,” he encouraged.
She shook her head. “I don’t know what comes next. Morton Prince was wrong; there are no multiple egos, just multiple siblings sharing the same body, the same brain.” She halted, waiting for him to take it from there.
“Well?” he said.
“I know you’re not going to sacrifice one for the other; that’s why you never handled these cases before. But”— she flapped her hands helplessly—”even if Newell could carry the equipment around, I’d never sleep nights, thinking that Anson had to go through the agony of that ten-five note just so Newell would be a decent human being. Or even, for that matter, vice versa.”
“It wouldn’t be either humane or practical,” he said. “Well?”
“Do they take turns being dominant, one day on, one day off?”
“That still would be sacrificing each half the time.”
“Then what? You said it would be ‘Newell, meet Anson. Anson, meet Newel.’ But you don’t have the same problem you’d have with Siamese twins or the same solution.”
“Which is?”
“Separating them without killing either one. All these two have is a single brain to share and a single body. If you could cut them free—”
“I can’t,” he said bluntly. “I don’t intend to.”
“All right,” she conceded in defeat. “You’re the doctor. You tell me.”
“Just what you said—the Morton Prince cases were in communication.”
“And Newell and Anson are, just because we gave Anson a vocabulary? What about that cantilever effect you explained to Newell? You can’t let them go through life counterbalancing each other—Newell pulling violently to the other side of Anson’s reactions, Anson doing the same with Newell’s. Then what?” she repeated almost angrily. “If you know, why put me through this guessing game?”
“To see if you’d come up with the same answer,” he said candidly. “A check on my judgment. Do you mind?”
She shook her head again, but this time with a little complimentary smile. “It’s a painful way to get co-operation, only it works, damn you.” She frowned then, considering. “The two of them are compartmented. Are they different in that way from the other multiples?”
“Some, yes—the ones that are detected because there is communication. But not the others. And those cases rate treatment (because all people in difficulty do) and Newell-Anson, if we work it out properly, will show us how to help them. There’s an obvious answer, Miss Thomas. I’m hoping—almost desperately—that you come up with the one I thought of.”
She made a self-impatient gesture. “Not the psychostat. Definitely not eliminating one or the other. Not making them take turns.” She looked up with a questioning awe on her face. “The opposite of treating Siamese twins?”
“Like what?” he asked urgently, leaning forward.
“Don’t separate them. Join them. Make a juncture.”
“Keep going,” he pressed. “Don’t stop now.”
“Surgical?”
“Can’t be done. It isn’t one lobe for Newell, the other for Anson, or anything that simple. What else?”
She thought deeply, began several times to say something, dismissed each intended suggestion with a curt head-shake. He waited with equally deep intensity.
She nodded at last. “Modulate them separately.” She was no longer asking. ‘Then modulate them in relation to each other so they won’t be in that awful cantilever balancing act.”
“Say it!” he nearly yelled.
“But that isn’t enough.”
“No!”
“Audio response.”
“Why?” he rapped out. “And which?”
“Sixty cycles—the AC tone they’ll be hearing almost all the time. Assign it to communication between them.”
The doctor slumped into a chair, drained of tension. He nodded at her, with the tiredest grin she had ever seen.
“All of it,” he whispered. “You got everything I thought of . . . including the 60 cycles. I knew I was right. Now I know it. Or doesn’t that make sense?”
“Of course it does.”
“Then let’s get started.”
“Now?” she asked, astonished. “You’re too tired—”
“Am I?” He jacked himself out of the chair. “Try stopping me and see.”
They used the EEG resultants, made two analogs and another, and used all three as the optimum standard for the final fixing process in the psychostat. It was a longer, more meticulous process than it had ever been and it worked; and what shook the doctor’s hand that last day was an unbelievable blend—all of Newell’s smoothness and a new strength, the sum of powers he had previously exhausted in the dual struggle that neither had known of; and, with it, Anson’s bright fascination with the very act of drawing breath, seeing colors, finding wonderment in everything.
“We’re nice guys,” said Richard Anson Newell, still shaking the doctor’s hand. “We’ll get along great.”
“I don’t doubt it a bit,” the doctor said. “Give my best to Osa. Tell her . . . here’s something a little better than a wet handkerchief.”
“Whatever you say,” said Richard Anson Newell.
He waved to Miss Thomas, who watched from the corridor, and behind her, Hildy Jarrell, who wept, and he went down the steps to the street.
“We’re making a mistake, Doctor,” said Miss Thomas, “letting him—them—go.”
“Why?” he asked, curious.
“All that brain power packed in one skull . . .”
The doctor wanted to laugh. He didn’t. “You’d think so, wouldn’t you?” he agreed.
“Meaning it’s not so at all,” she said suspiciously. “Why not?”
“Because it isn’t twice the amount of brains any individual has. It’s only as much as any two distinct individuals have. Like you and me, for instance. Mostly we supplement each other—but just here and there, not everywhere, adding up to a giant double brain. Same with Newell and Anson. And any two people can be counted on to jam one another occasionally. So will they—but not like before treatment.”
They watched until Richard Anson Newell was out of sight, then went back to check the multiple personality cases that Miss Jarrell had dug out of the files.
Four months later, the doctor got a letter:
Dear Fred,
I’ll write this because it will do me good to get it off my chest. If it doesn’t do enough good, I’ll send it. If that doesn’t help, I don’t know what I’ll do. Yes, I do. Nothing.
Dick is...incredible. He takes care of me, Fred, in ways I’d never dreamed of or hoped for. He cares. That’s it, he cares—about me, about his work. He learns new things all the time and loves old things over again. It’s . . . could I say miracle?
But, Fred—this is hateful of me, I know—the thing I told you about, the thing I used to wish for and live to remember, no matter what. . . it’s gone. That’s probably good, because of what happened between times.
But sometimes I’d trade my perfect husband for that louse and a wet handkerchief, if I could have the other thing along with it somehow.
There, I’ve said it.
Osa
The doctor galloped through the clinic until he found his head technician in the electrical lab.
“Tommie,” he said jovially, “did you ever go out and get drunk with a doctor?”
The tears were streaming down his face. Miss Thomas went out and got drunk with the doctor.