There was one of the more curious of the psychological curiosities. In private an individual may confess to highly intelligent sympathies, but when he gets on a board or a panel or a committee, he has not the courage to stand up against what he thinks to be the mass temper or mores.
Courage, that was the element lacking. The courage to fight for progress, enlightenment, against the belief that one's neighbors may not think the same way. The courage to fight over the issue, for the sake of the issue, rather than for the votes one's action is calculated to win.
And in that sense David Storm was not unimportant. Kingston confessed to himself, standing there in front of the window, that he had begun this gambit in a sort of petty defiance—defiance of the efforts of Moss and the rest of his staff to thwart his instructions, defiance of Miss Verity's efforts to make him into an important figurehead, defiance of the whole ridiculous dilemma that the Loyalty program had become.
He wondered if he had ever really intended to go through with his plan. Hadn't he kept the reservation, in the back of his mind, that as long as he hadn't signed the order, as long as it wasn't released for implementation, he could withdraw? Why make such an issue over such a triviality as this Storm fellow?
Yet wasn't that the essence? Wasn't that the question every true scientist had to ask himself every day? To buck the accepted and the acceptable, or to swing along with it and rush with the tide of man toward oblivion?
In the popular books courage was always embodied in a well-muscled, handsome, well-intentioned, and rather stupid young man. But what about that wispy little unhandsome fellow, behind the thick glasses perhaps, who, against ridicule, calumny, misunderstanding, poverty, ignorance, kept on with his intent to find an aspect of truth?
Resolutely he walked over to his desk, picked up his pen again, and signed the document. There! He was insane! The document said so! And the document was signed by the Chief Administrator of Psychiatric Division, Bureau of Science Co-ordination. That should be enough authority for anybody!
He tossed it into the outgoing basket, where it would be picked up by the mail clerk and routed for further handling. Rapidly now, he continued signing other papers, tossing them into the same basket, covering the vital one so that it was down in the middle of the stack, unlikely to call special attention to itself.
They came for him at six o'clock the next morning. That was what the order had stipulated, that they make the pickup at this early hour. Two of them walked into his room, through the door which he had left unlocked, and immediately separated so that they could come at him from either side. Two burly young men who had a job to do, and who knew how to do that job. He couldn't remember having seen either of them before, and there was no look of recognition on their faces either.
"What is the meaning of this intrusion?" he said loudly, in alarm. His intonation sounded like something from a rather bad melodrama. "How dare you walk into my room!" He sat up in bed and pulled the covers up around his neck.
"There, there, Buster," one of them said soothingly. "Take it easy now. We're not going to hurt you." With a lithe grace they moved into position. One of them stood near the foot of his bed, the other came up to the head, and with a swirling motion, almost too quick to follow, slipped his hands under Kingston's armpits.
"Time to get up, Buster," the man said, and propelled him upward and outward. The covers fell away from him, and he found himself standing on his feet, without quite knowing how he got there. The second man was already eying his clothes, which he had hung over a chair the night before. They were beautifully trained, he'd have to give Moss that much credit. It spoke well for the routine administration of the Q. S. wing if all the attendants were as experienced in being firm, yet gentle. It wasn't that psychiatry was intentionally sadistic, just mistaken in its idea of treatment.
"What is the meaning of this?" he spluttered again. "Do you know who I am?" He tried to draw himself up proudly, but found it somewhat difficult with his head being slipped through a singlet undershirt.
"Sure, sure, your majesty," one of them said soothingly. "Sure we know."
"I am not 'your majesty,' " Kingston said bitingly. "I am Dr. K. Heidrich Kingston!"
"Oh, pardon me," the fellow said apologetically, and flipped Kingston's feet into the air just long enough for his helper to slip trousers onto his legs. "I'm pleased to meet you."
"Kingston!" the other fellow said in an awed voice. "That's the big shot, the wheel, himself."
"Well," the first one said, as he slipped suspenders over the shoulders, "at least he's not Napoleon." From somewhere underneath his uniform jacket he suddenly whipped out a canvas garment, a shapeless thing Kingston might not have recognized as a strait jacket if he hadn't been experienced. "You gonna cooperate, Dr. Kingston, or will we have to put this on you?"
"Oh, he's not so bad," the other fellow said. "This must be his up cycle. You're not going to give us any trouble at all, are you Dr. Kingston? You're going to go over to the hospital with us nicely, aren't you?" It was a statement, a soothing persuasive statement, not a question. "They need you over at the hospital, Dr. Kingston. That's why we came for you."
He looked at them suspiciously, craftily. Then he smoothed his face into arrogant lines of overweening ego.
"Of course," he said firmly. "Let's go to the hospital. They'll soon tell you over there who I am!"
"Sure they will, Dr. Kingston," the first attendant said. "We don't doubt it for a minute."
"Let's go," the other one said.
They walked him out the door, in perfect timing. They seemed relaxed, but their fingertips on his arms where they held him were tense, ready for an expected explosion of insane violence. They'd been all through this before, many times, and their faces seemed to say that you can always expect the unexpected. Why, he might even surprise them and go all the way to his cell without trying to murder six people in the process. It just depended on how long his up cycle lasted, and what period of the phase he was in when they came for him. Probably that was the real reason why the real Dr. Kingston had specified this early hour; probably knew when this nut was in and out of his phases.
"Wonder what it's like to be such a big shot that some poor dope goes nuts thinking he's you?" one of them asked the other as they took him out of the apartment house door and down the steps to the ambulance waiting at the curb.
"I don't think I'd like to find out," the other answered.
"I tell you for the last time, I am Dr. Kingston!" Kingston insisted and allowed the right amount of exasperation to mingle with a note of fear.
"I hope it's the last time, doctor," the first one said. "It gets kinda tiresome telling you that we already know who you are. You don't have to keep telling us, you know. We believe you."
The way they got him into the body of the ambulance couldn't exactly be called a pull and a push. At one instant they were standing on either side of him at the back door, and in the next instant one of them was in front of him and the other behind him—and there they were, all sitting in a row inside the ambulance. The driver didn't even look back at him.
He kept silent all the way over to the hospital buildings. He had made his point. He had offered the reactions of a normal man caught up in a mistake, but certain it would all get straightened out without making a fuss about it. They had responded to the reactions of an insane man, and they hoped they could get him all straightened out and nicely deposited in his cell before he began to kick up a fuss about it. It just depended on the framework from which you viewed it, and he neither wanted to overdo nor underplay his part or jar them out of their frame with discrepancies.
But the vital check point was yet to come. There was nothing in the commitment form about his being a Q. S. man, but he had assigned David Storm's cell number in the Q. S. wing. He'd had to check a half dozen hotels before he'd found one with an open room of the same number, so that the clerical error would stand up all the way down the line.
The guards of the Q. S. win
g were pretty stuffy about keeping non-Q. S. men out. He might still fail in the first phase of his solution to the problem, to provide David Storm with a doctor, one who might be able to help him.
The attendants wasted no time with red tape. The document didn't call for preexaminations, or quarantine, or anything. It just said put him into room number 1782. So they went through a side door and by-passed all the usual routines. They were good boys who always did what the coach said. And the document, signed by the Chief Coach, himself, Dr. Kingston, said put the patient in cell 1782. They were doing what they were told.
Would the two guards at the entrance of the Q. S. wing be equally good boys?
"You're taking me to my office, I assume," he said as they were walking down the corridor toward the cell wing.
"Sure, doctor," one of them said. "Nice warm cozy office. Just for you."
They turned a corner, and the two guards got up from chairs where they had been sitting at a hallway desk. One of the attendants pulled out the document from his inner jacket pocket and handed it to the guard.
"Got another customer for you," he said laconically. "For office number 1782." He winked broadly.
"That cell's … er … office's already occupied," the guard said instantly. "Must be a mistake."
"Maybe they're starting to double them up, now," the attendant said. "You wanna go up to the Big Chief's office and tell him he's made a mistake? He signed it, you know."
"I don't know what you men are up to!" Kingston burst out. "This whole thing is a mistake. I tell you I am Dr. Kingston. I'll have all your jobs for this … this … this practical joke! You are not taking me any farther! I refuse to go any farther!"
He laid them out for five minutes, calling upon strings of profanity, heard again and again from the lips of uncontrolled minds, that would make an old time mariner blush for shame. The four of them looked at him at first with admiration, then with disgust.
"You'd better get him into his cell," one of the guards mumbled to the attendants. "Before he really blows his stack."
"Yeah," the attendant agreed. "Looks like he's going into phase two, and we have not as yet got phase one typed. No telling what phase three might be like."
The guards stepped back. The attendants took him on down the hall of the Q. S. wing.
All the way up the elevator, to the seventeenth floor, and down the hall to the doorway of Storm's cell, Kingston kept wondering if any of them had ever heard of the Uncle Remus story of Bre'r Rabbit and the Briar Patch. "Oh don't throw me in the briar patch, Bre'r Fox. Don't throw me in the briar patch!"
Stupid people resist clever moves but willingly carry out stupid patterns. These guards and attendants were keyed to keeping out anyone who tried to get in—but if someone tried to keep out, obviously he must be forced to go in.
There hadn't even been a question about a lack of Q. S. rating on the form. His vitriolic diatribe had driven it out of their minds for a moment, and if they happened to check it before they stamped the order completed, well, the damage would already have been done.
He would have talked with David Storm.
But Storm was not quite that cooperative. His eyes flared with wild resentment, suspicion, when the attendants ushered Kingston into the cell.
"You see, doctor," one of the attendants said with soothing irony, and not too concealed humor, "we provide you with a patient and everything. We'll move in another couch, and you two can just lie back, relax, and just tell each other all about what's in your subconscious."
"Oh, no you don't," Storm said instantly, and backed into a corner of the cell with an attitude of exaggerated rejection. "That's an old trick. Pretending to be a cell mate so you can learn my secret. That's an old trick, an old, old, old, old, o-l-d—" His lips kept moving, but the sound of his voice trailed away.
"You needn't think you're going to make me listen to your troubles," Kingston snapped at him. "I've got troubles of my own."
Storm's lips ceased moving, and he stared at Kingston without blinking.
"You big-shot scientists try to get along with one another," one of the attendants said as they went out the door.
"Scientists just argue," the other attendant commented. "They never do anything."
But Kingston hardly heard them, and hardly noticed them when, a few minutes later, they brought in a cot for him and placed it on the opposite side of the cell from Storm's cot. He was busy analyzing Storm's first reactions. Yes, the pattern was disturbed, possibly demented, certainly regressive—and yet, it was not so much irrational as adolescent, the bitterness of the adolescent when he first begins to really realize that the merchandise of humanity is not living up to the advertising under which it has been sold to him.
Under the attendants' watchful eyes, Kingston changed into the shapeless garments of the inmates. He flared up at them once again, carrying out his pattern of indignation that they should do this to him, but he didn't put much heart into it. No point in overdoing the act.
"Looks like he might have passed his peak," one of the attendants muttered. "He's calming down again. Maybe he won't be too hard to handle." They went out the door again with the admonishment: "Now you fellows be quiet, and you'll get breakfast pretty soon. But if you get naughty—" With his fist and thumb he made an exaggerated motion of working a hypodermic syringe. Storm cowered back into his corner of the cell.
"I've given up trying to convince you numskulls," Kingston said with contempt. "I'll just wait now until my office hears about this."
"Yeah," the attendant said. "Yeah, you just sit tight and wait. Just keep waiting—and quiet!"
The sound of their steps receded down the hallway. Kingston lay back on his couch and said nothing. He knew Storm's eyes were on him, watching him, as nervous, excited, and wary as an animal. The cell was barren, containing only the cots covered with a tough plastic which defied tearing with the bare fingers, and a water closet. There wasn't a seat on the latter because that can be torn off and used as a weapon either against one's self or others. In the wards there would be books, magazines, games, implements of various skills and physical therapies, all under the eyes of watchful attendants; but in these cells there was nothing, because there weren't enough attendants to watch the occupants of each cell.
Kingston lay on his couch and waited. In a little while Storm came out of his corner and sat down on the edge of his own couch. His attitude was half wary, half belligerent.
"You needn't be afraid of me," Kingston said softly, and kept looking upward at the ceiling. "I really am Dr. Heidrich Kingston. I'm a psychiatrist. And I already know all about you and your secrets."
He heard a faint whimper, the rustling of garments on the plastic couch cover, as if Storm were shrinking back against the wall, as if he expected this to be the prelude to more punishment for having such secret thoughts. Then a form of reasoning seemed to prevail, and Kingston could feel the tension relaxing in the room.
"You're as crazy as I am," Storm said loudly. There was relief in his voice, and yet regret.
Kingston said nothing. There was no point in pushing it. If his luck held, he would have several days. Miss Verity could be counted on to cut her vacation short and come back ahead of time, but even with that, he should have at least three days. And while Storm was badly disoriented, he could be reached.
"And that's an old, old trick, too," Storm said in a bitter singsong. "Pretending you already know, so I'll talk. Well I'm not a commie! I'm not a traitor! I'm not any of those things. I just think—" He broke off abruptly. "Oh, no you don't!" he exclaimed. "You can't trick me into telling you what I think. That's an old, old, old, old—"
It was quite clear why the therapies used by Moss hadn't worked. Storm was obsessed with guilt. He had been working in the highest echelons of Loyalty and at the same time had been harboring secret doubts that the framework was right. The Moss therapies then were simply punishments for his guilt, punishments which he felt he deserved, punishments which confirmed his wrong
doing. And Moss would be so convinced that Storm's thoughts were entirely wrong, that he couldn't possibly use the technique of agreement to lead Storm out of his syndrome. That was why Moss' past was stainless, why the Security Board trusted him with a Q. S., he was as narrow in his estimate of right and wrong as they.
"Old, old, old, old—" Storm kept repeating. He was stuck in the adolescent groove of bitter cynicism, not yet progressed to the point of realizing that in spite of its faults and hypocrisies, there were some elements in humanity worth a man's respect and faith. Even a thinking man.
It was a full day later before Kingston attempted the first significant move in reaching through to Storm. The previous day had confirmed the pattern of the attendants: a breakfast of adequate but plain food. Moss would never get caught on the technicality so prevalent in many institutions where the inmates can't help themselves—chiseling on food and pocketing the difference. After breakfast a clean-up of the cells and their persons. Four hours alone. Lunch. Carefully supervised and highly limited exercise period. Back to the cell again for another four hours. Supper. And soon, lights out.
It varied, somewhat, from most mental hospital routine; but these were all Q. S. men, each bearing terrible secrets which had snapped their minds. They mustn't be allowed to talk to one another. It varied, too, from patient to patient. It varied mainly in that the cells were largely soundproof; they had little of the screaming, raging, cursing, strangling, choking bedlam common in many such institutions.
Moss was a good administrator. He had his wing under thorough control. It was as humane as his limited point of view could make it. There were too few attendants, but then that was always the case in mental hospitals. In this instance it worked in Kingston's favor. There would be little chance of interruption, except at the planned times. In going into another person's mind that was a hazard to be guarded against, as potentially disastrous as a disruption of a major operation.
Sci Fiction Classics Volume 2 Page 29
