Orbit 10 - [Anthology]

by Edited by Damon Knight

  Then Putzman was there in the room, muttering about just hav­ing left his publisher and agent. “Think they’re screwing me but it’s the other way around, they’ll see soon!” He regarded Bruch with distaste, fell on the couch and launched into a recent dream that made Hieronymus Bosch seem Alice in Wonderland bowd­lerized. It was something perverted about childhood teasing of the neighbor’s schnauzer (why, Bruch shuddered, was therealways that clearly visible spray of saliva?), something new to Putzman’s confessional repertoire. Just as in the novels where all the protagonist’s weaknesses were blamed on the “sick society” to which his audience belonged, so here Bruch somehow became responsible for Putzman’s torment. The wildly exaggerated humor made Putzman’s confession too self-gratifying to be believable even as Putzman’s face became twisted with unhappiness. Every­thing the patient said was subject to the same skeptical—

  Unhappiness, thought Bruch with a sudden pang, this man was desperately unhappy, suffering something worse than anything he imposed on others. It was not proper procedure, but Bruch found himself breaking in to say softly: “Harvey, you don’t have to worry about that episode ever again.”

  “What the hell doesthat mean?” Putzman screamed, then craned around to stare at Bruch and relaxed. His head fell back as he sighed. “You’re a real paradox artist, Doctor, but you’re right! I never looked at it that way before.” He abruptly shifted into an attack on a high school English teacher who had wanted him to write more genteelly, but his voice was unusually calm and the attack petered out into praise of her kindness. “She did try, though, Dr. Bruch. God knows that dried-up old maid wanted me to have the success everything in her own life had denied her.”

  The analyst sank deeper into gloom. It was as if he were listen­ing to his very first patient twenty years ago, feeling each word like a whiplash, the way it had been before much of the process became distant if well-intentioned routine. As the hour went on Putzman, without once taking his eyes from the ceiling, seemed to draw new strength from that gloom.

  When the novelist left he had gained more emotional ground than in all previous sessions combined. Bruch called Grainger on the intercom and exclaimed: “It looks as if it’s working, unbeliev­able!”

  “What happened?”

  “Well-” The red light came on. “No time, Jack, next patient’s a little early but has a thing about being kept waiting. See you six fifteen.”

  After Putzman, Mrs. Crofton brought an almost healthy air of commonplace neurosis into the office. True, the thirty-five-year- old mother of two remained utterly frigid after eighteen months but, while she was of only average intelligence, her cultivated back­ground made their sessions together little islands of restrained decency in days awash with psychic sewerage. Now, without his saying a word, the restraint was gone even if the decency re­mained as strong as ever. Waves of sweet sympathy swept Bruch and he could feel each hurt she expressed as if it were his own. When she rose to leave there were tears in her eyes. “It’s chang­ing now,” she said. “I know I am starting to get better.”

  The two hours had been exhausting, leaving him bathed in sweat, but there was still Bernstein, the jittery furrier, to deal with. He came in chattering about the way his wife said he was meshugge last night because he refused to eat the vichyssoise and maybe he was, huh? The whole inane episode was then retold at a rising machine-gun rate, but once he arrived at the self-doubt part, he slowed down. By the time the hour ended and the story had been twice more repeated, Bernstein’s face had relaxed and for the first time all the forehead creases were smoothed away.

  At six when Bernstein was gone and Mrs. Parker, his nurse- secretary, had looked in to say she, too, was leaving, Bruch was slumped in his chair, too drained of energy to budge. “Anything the matter, Doctor?” she asked.

  “Oh, no!” he grinned.

  After a minute’s solitary contemplation of this strange mixture of weariness and triumph he pulled himself from the chair and walked upstairs to Grainger’s compact laboratory. Grainger, a short, intense-looking fellow, began pacing the floor as soon as Bruch came in. “You think it helped, you really think it—”

  “I’m sure of it.”

  “But when did you take the pill, Max?”

  “Fifteen minutes before Putzman. Finally got up nerve.”

  “I was sure that dosage would be harmless!” He leaned toward Bruch like an accusing attorney. “Exactly what happened?”

  With a tired smile Bruch shoved him away. “Give me a chance to rest. It’s exhausting, Jack, so putter around your crockery awhile.”

  Grainger, muttering, adjusted the flame beneath a small test tube and Bruch turned to stare out the window at the glorious blossoming of the solitary cherry tree in his garden, one of those little consolations hard-earned money could bring.

  How much more consolation now lay within his grasp! Yet five months ago the whole thing would have appeared preposterous.

  The inspiration had come from a biochemical journal that his old college pal, Jack Grainger, had brought him as a joke. It de­scribed worldwide experiments on Juno A, a powerful hormone trace first isolated in cow udders and later found to be universal in female mammals. Juno A increased in pregnant women, grew even stronger following parturition and ordinarily did not decline until long after the female climacteric. As a further anomaly, some childless women—nuns, nurses, governesses and teachers, most frequently-revealed even higher levels than mothers. Researchers had sometimes called Juno A the mother-love hormone, intimately associating it with woman’s capacity for devotion and endurance, even though, like many other sex-linked hormones, it appeared to a minuscule extent in men also.

  Putzman! Bruch had thought, only a mother drenched in such a hormone could love Putzman! And then it hit him: Suppose Juno A’s most active fraction were isolated and proved safe for males, and suppose a practicing therapist took it. Couldn’t he be a better healer for that?

  At first Grainger had ridiculed the question. “Juno A research is dying down, Max. It’s a relatively useless vestige of mammalian evolution, like the appendix in man.”

  But Grainger was a biochemist with a very inquiring mind and Max had seen the way to wear him down with the most tempting of offers. “I’ve got plenty of money for it, Jack. You could have my country place and all the cow udders your little heart and giant mind desired. And if you achieved an adequate supply you could bring it here for final concentration.” That had worked and, once hooked, Jack had proved almost frighteningly single-minded in his zeal.

  “Insane!” Jack was shouting, “absolutely insane—snoring ten minutes with your eyes open and me desperate to know what’s happened!”

  As a pink petal danced to the ground, Bruch’s eyes followed its exquisite swings along a strong air current until he was awake again. “Sorry, Jack, it’s terribly exhausting when youfeel every­thing the patient throws at you.”

  “Everything?”

  “That’s right.” He pulled himself from the chair, shaking his head in wonder. “I had the impression I understood their cases much better because of that. But their improvement involved still more. You see, they almost instantlysensed I was totally and more actively sympathetic. Couldn’t have been visual clues be­cause two of them didn’t even look at me during their transforma­tions!”

  The biochemist frowned. “You’re not trotting out any ESP garbage, Max?”

  “No, I don’t know what kind of two-way signals this stuff gen­erates. Come on downstairs and let’s see if I’ll live.”

  An hour later all the readings of short-term reactions were in; the pill, ten times stronger than anything they had consumed be­fore, involved no significant metabolic changes. “Just hope the patients do as well,” Bruch said.

  “They’re not taking the pill!”

  Max sighed. “It’s just that we’re dealing with something com­pletely new—”

  Grainger broke in. “Max, it’s not yet a shared risk-I’d like to try the full dose, too.”
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  “Look, Jack, I’m tired, the sympathy effect’s worn off, so I’ll lose my temper if we have to thrash this out once again. You dis­till Juno, you know how scarce it is and that if it works we’re go­ing to need every grain forprofessionals.”

  Jack’s frown was amiable. “All right, all right, you don’t have to worry I’ll ever dig in without your approval.”

  “Anyway, there’s no guarantee today’s success will be repeated.”

  But the next day it was. Once more after taking the pill he was bathed in a glow of compassion that did not hinder the practical use of his art. And in each case the patient showed all the grateful tenderness of someone secure in the knowledge of being loved. When his workday concluded, Bruch, exultant in the agony he had endured, felt as if he were descending from the cross back to human terra firma.

  The following afternoon Putzman meekly entered the office and sat on the edge of the couch, staring saucer-eyed at him. “You may have taken my writing talent from me,” he said. “But don’t get me wrong, Dr. Bruch, I’m glad. It’s as if I’d always seen every­thing through a stained and dirty window and now the dirt was gone and I saw the world itself, not the stains. That’s more im­portant than being admired for an inhuman pseudo-talent. I think I’m cured!”

  Within a week it was evident thatall his patients were. But not basically through the strategies Max devised, because he barely had a chance to apply his insights. Somehow his genuine concern did most of the work, leading each one to cure himself.

  “We’re tapping a force so fundamental, so powerful, it can change all human relationships!” Grainger exclaimed once. “As if everybody lived in a vast desert, miserably clustered around a few oases, and suddenly they discover all the water needed was under­foot everywhere all along! Max, I can expand our production now a little but if we made this public, let others join the search, there might be an unlimited supply!”

  “No! I haven’t even told Mrs. Parker, although she sees all my cases simultaneously terminated and is bewildered.”

  Jack glared at him. “Letme ask therapeutic questions for once.”

  Max shrugged. “Okay.”

  “So far have you had any adverse physical effect from the pill?”

  “No.”

  “Has there been any positive physical effect?”

  “I suppose, on balance, yes. It’s incredibly exhausting to listen so thoroughly to people all day but I always have the strength to endure it because Juno A gives that as well as sensitivity. And by evening tension is gone, leaving me with the pleasurable tired­ness of a job well done.”

  Jack was envious. “Is there any adverse psychological effect?”

  “None.”

  “Any positive psychological effect?”

  “Yes. As I said, the knowledge I’ve alleviated terrible suffer­ing.”

  “Then why the hell deny millions of other people that blessing now!”

  “I must be absolutely sure. I need as many cases as possible for twelve weeks.”

  “No, too long.”

  “Well—ten weeks at the least.”

  Grainger shook his head in disgust, then suddenly straightened from his hunched-over posture. “All right, Max, but only ten.”

  The following week brought a score of new patients. Mrs. Parker was quite nervous about it. “That’s a terrible burden to assume—”

  “No burden,” he smiled, touched by her solicitude. It was less than an hour after ingesting a Juno pill and, as he felt her anxiety rise within him, he could see her reciprocally relaxing.

  “Could I say something more, Dr. Bruch?”

  “Certainly.”

  Her eyes were misty. “I’ve always thought you the most dedi­cated of doctors—”

  “Oh, no, please—”

  “—and many times I’ve said it to my husband whom I love so I’m not getting any adolescent crush when I say it but—but lately you’ve been so wonderful it’s almost like being with a—a saint!” She fled back to the outer office.

  Embarrassed by the fervor of her outburst, Max leaned back in his office chair. More and more he was being treated like a holy figure while under Juno A’s influence. Waves of love would almost smother him as each person’s burden of suffering was shifted to his granite shoulders. “I’m only a man,” he told the row of framed diplomas on the facing wall, “a man, not a junior Jesus. I don’t have the right to claim more.”

  But then his next patient was entering and he knew any attempt to dissipate the childlike adulation in her eyes would only delay the release from her private hell. Through twenty years of mar­riage she had been cleaning her apartment over and over each day. “Yesterday I only picked up a dust rag once!” she was exult­ing. “Suddenly things don’t look filthy endlessly!”

  She was on the way to being cured and by the end of the follow­ing week not only had such compulsive symptoms disappeared but the generating root complaint itself. In fact, by thenall the new patients were cured and the only tiny qualm Bruch had about them was their wildly adoring gratitude.

  “I am not Jesus orany prophet,” he told one patient, an aging, hard-bitten tax lawyer who certainly should have realized this on his own, “only a human scientist.”

  “Only? You may not be the Christ, Doctor, but to me you’re barely lower than the angels—a, a Christling, that’s how I’d put it, yes, sir!”

  The wages of virtue are hard, Bruch was forced to concede, but the best thing evidently was to leave this excessive father- transference alone since so much good went with it and in the months ahead it was bound to fade. Meanwhile, there was the next list of distraught people to start considering, and this time there would be even more of them.

  Again within two weeks they were cured and again there was the same mad display of gratitude to emphasize the depth of the cures. He reached the end of each working day drained of physical energy but even that quickly revived as the Juno dose faded, and he always faced the next morning adequate to the tasks ahead.

  With the increasing workload he saw less of his partner. Any­way, Jack was spending more of his time in the country labora­tory. He seemed very distant during their rare meetings, utterly preoccupied with his work. One evening Max said as much.

  Jack looked with unblinking eyes at him, then asked: “Still no side effects, right?”

  “Right!”

  “Great, Max, because I’m now certain there’ll be several ways for the big pharmaceutical houses to synthesize the pure, potent fraction cheaply. An unlimited supply is assured!” Even Bruch was surprised to find himself so unreassured. “What’s the mat­ter now, Max? The greatest boon to humanity in unlimited—”

  “Don’t get me wrong, Jack, I’m terribly pleased. It’s just that the idea of an unlimited, uncontrollable supply of anything makes me uneasy.”

  “Meaning,” Grainger snapped, closing the discussion, “that there are no real problems—and won’t be!”

  But within three days this prophecy was proved doubly wrong.

  On Sunday there was the call from the answering service, right in the middle of a Menuhin recording of an unaccompanied Bach partita. “You know this is the one day I’m not to be disturbed,” Bruch protested.

  “I really tried not to,” explained the girl, “but this Mr. Putz­man has phoned a dozen times and he’s threatening, violent, so really mean, Doctor, that I almost called the police!”

  “Thank you, miss, and good-bye!”

  The record player clicked off, all that beauty unheard, and the old Putzman-inspired disgust returned; there had been no Juno A pill today.

  The novelist’s immediate reaction to Bruch’s call was: “Took your own sweet time, didn’t you?” The question mark soared into a whine. “I’ve got to see you now!”

  “Perhaps you could explain—”

  “No! I’ve got to be with you, AT&T isn’t my doctor. I’m in misery and you’re like every other medico-shyster when the fees stop, aren’t you? Don’t worry, I’ll pay.”


  Bruch tried once more.

  “I said misery, Doctor, misery caused, not cured, by you. Well?”

  “All right, I’ll be waiting.”

  “You damned well’d better be!”

  Profoundly depressed, Bruch broke a Juno in two and swal­lowed the half dose without even a mouthful of water. Was Putz­man’s cure a failure?

  He arrived in a fine spray of saliva. “I feel lousy. You said I’d feel better, you said—”

  “Please, Harvey, sit down and tell me everything.”

  “Well-” His indignation collapsed. “Nothing serious anymore. I’d just like to talk to you awhile.”

  An hour later he was grinning and reluctantly followed Max to the door. “You’re the most reassuring person I’ve ever seen, Doc, but of course I should stand on my own two feet, not yours.” Here he began to wheedle pitifully. “I wouldn’t want ever to be a burden.”