“Walter,” he said without emotion or expression, hardly moving his thick lips. He was a smooth-faced, rosy-cheeked man with wisps of hair on his otherwise bald head, looking at him steadily, with bright gray eyes.
“Dr. Booey?”
The faint outcrop of white hairs that passed for eyebrows rose a little and there was frank puzzlement in the eyes. Then something happened behind the eyes and the man turned to the doorway and said, “Mr. Scott, if you please.” A man rose from a desk in the far corner of the room, moved to the anatomy chart with a pointer. Then Dr. Booey started down the hail, saying, “Come along.”
Sherwood followed him to a small, book-filled office where the doctor turned on the small plate beneath a small coffee pot before he turned to face him, studying him for a long moment before he said, “Sit down,” and sat himself behind a desk. Then he said gravely, “You didn’t know me out there?”
Sherwood sensed a power in this man, a strength that engendered trust. There had been no affectionate greeting, no shaking of hands, not even a smile, yet he felt the doctor’s concern. Sherwood said, “No, I didn’t know you.”
The eyes shifted somewhere inside the man, like lenses moving out of sight, and their brightness increased. Sherwood felt as if he were being resected on the spot. The doctor said, “When did it happen?”
“I don’t know.”
Booey’s eyes slid away. “I knew it would happen some day. You were hardly ready.”
Sherwood flushed. “I’m afraid I don’t know what you are talking about.”
“I suppose not.” Booey sighed. “We all wondered when it would come. You were always so tense, so…overly dedicated. It didn’t seem natural to any of us.”
“! stopped at the office and saw my record. I worked pretty hard, I guess.”
“How much do you remember?”
Sherwood’s eyes fell before those of the doctor who knew so much about him, and he studied his hands. “Eleven years is missing.”
“Eleven years?”
Sherwood jerked his head up, looked at the doctor squarely. “I can’t remember anything after May fifteenth, nineteen forty-six.” Suddenly he was sick of hearing it, thinking it, living it, saying it, wishing he could hand it to this man to struggle with.
“Yes, you can,” the doctor said.
“What?”
“You can remember our meeting in the hall.”
“Well, yes.”
“So you do remember some things. How far back does this go? If you knew the day…”
“I can remember back to July eleventh. I woke up in a motel in Los Angeles, remembering nothing for the previous eleven years.”
Booey was surprised. “That’s very strange, not remembering over such a long period.” He shook his head. “A pity, too. You were a brilliant man, did you know that? One of the best. Maybe that’s it. Maybe you were too brilliant. But as I say, many of us saw it coming. It seemed to be just a question of time.” The coffee hissed behind him and he twisted in his chair, brought out two mugs and set them side by side on the desk and poured the steaming coffee.
“What do you mean about it being a question of time?”
Booey shrugged. “You ran through here like a man possessed, grabbed your Doctor of Medicine on the fly, then settled down for a research on a fellowship in neurophysiology, if you can call shutting the door of a room on everything else settling down. You did that here. You were known as the Ryerson Recluse.”
The doctor picked up the mug, blew across the top of the coffee, sipped it. “You were like a wire with a turnbuckle at either end that you kept tightening. The wire was bound to break some time.”
“You think I’ve cracked up,” Sherwood said dismally.
“What else is there to think, considering your not remembering things, the classic flight from reality? I don’t suppose you remember why you were running.”
“Running?”
“Your dedication, the thing that makes what happened to you so transparent. It was your father and your experience with the medical corps in the army. You were obsessed with mental aberration and you were dedicated to doing something about it. You felt that if you understood the mind you might find a way to prevent such a thing, and you seemed to think you were the only man in the world working toward that end.” The doctor drank a little of the coffee and said gravely, “I think it’s obvious now that you were only racing against your own disintegration and that you lost the race. Don’t think me cruel, Walter, but there seems to be no other way to explain your condition.”
Sherwood said nothing, feeling himself sinking into a morass of bewilderment, seeing himself as a man running after his own shadow, a man who caught glimpses of his real self only out of the corners of his eyes. He thought: so this “is insanity! Then he caught himself at the edge of the precipice and struggled back to reason and said thickly, “I’m not insane, Doctor,” and made himself look Booey straight in the eye. “I don’t care what you think, I’m not off my rocker.”
“Have you had an examination?”
“I’ve been to a psychiatrist.”
“What did he say?”
“Dr. Trefethen thought I was playing a joke on him. He said because I could remember my early days so well I couldn’t have amnesia.”
Booey snorted. “He should go back to school. None of us can be sure about anything, least of all about things as nebulous as the brain.” After a moment he said quietly, “It’s ironic. The brain was your specialty.”
There was a pause, with Sherwood in a flush studying his hands again, Booey’s eyes on his face.
“You can take heart, however,” Booey said. “If it’s a simple amnesia you stand a chance of coming out of it. Even neuroses have a built-in self-limiting factor. Usually two years. For better or worse.” After another pause the doctor said gently. “You and I were close, Walter. As close as student and teacher could be. You saw things quickly and you were—well, damn interested, which is something few of the gooks we see here really are.” He added almost affectionately, “You never thought there was too much to learn,” and after a pause said, “What ever made you come to see me, Walter?”
“I was following a thread. I met a man in the hall with a label on his pocket that said he was Max Rankel. He greeted me like a long lost brother and when I asked him whom I ought to look up, he suggested you.”
“Max was a good friend of yours,” Booey said, nodding. “A sort of balance wheel for you.” Then he said firmly, “Walter, you’ll have to have treatment. There are ways of getting around what’s wrong with you. Hypnosis, for example. Helps fill in the missing areas until the mind accepts the reality that was.”
Sherwood shook his head. “No, I’m not undergoing any treatment until I find out everything. I know roughly what happened between nineteen forty-six and nineteen fifty-one. I’ve followed it that far. I’ll have to bring it up to date. Then if it all doesn’t come back I’ll start treatment.”
“You say you don’t remember anything prior to your waking up in a motel in Los Angeles?”
“Yes.”
“What were you doing there?”
“I don’t know…I grew up out there.”
“You used to talk about it in the rare times you did any talking. But it was your father that bothered you mostly, as I’ve said. That plus the business of the army. Anyway, when you got out you decided one night to become a doctor, a brain specialist, and once you got started nothing could stop you. You loved medicine, lived medicine, breathed it, married it. Evidently you finally pushed yourself too far.” Booey looked sourly into his coffee cup, swirled the grounds. “It could have happened to any of us under the same circumstances.”
“I wish,” Sherwood said crisply, “that you wouldn’t talk as if I were out on pass from an asylum.”
Booey looked at him sharply.
Sherwood went on, “I think you’re wrong. I don’t think it’s anything at all like that. There are some odd things about it. Except for the eleven m
issing years, everything else is normal. Too normal, it seems to me.”
“Odd things, Walter? What odd things?”
Sherwood told him in detail about waking up with the girl in the room, about the billfold and the name he found in it, the fact that there was no such address as 1213 Summit Avenue in Webster.
“I’m not so far gone that I couldn’t follow the thread here, Doctor Booey. And I saw with my own eyes there was no house in Webster. Then there is the matter of accounting for my complete physical description on the papers in my billfold. Try explaining that.”
“It does have strange overtones,” Booey conceded. “That is, if everything you say is true.”
“It’s all true.”
The doctor scowled at Sherwood for a long moment, then rose from the chair, shoved it into the desk and put his hands on the back of it, staring down at him. “I must confess you don’t talk like a man with amnesia.”
“How am I supposed to talk?”
“You’re too aware of your surroundings, Walter. You’re too aware of what you’re doing and who you are. Let me ask you something: “Did you know who you were when you woke up out there in the motel?”
“Of course.”
“Then you looked at the billfold and saw the name Fisher?”
“Yes.”
“You didn’t think you were this Fisher?”
“No. Not for a minute.”
Booey nodded. “That’s where it doesn’t jibe. A true amnesic wouldn’t have known who he was. He’d have been convinced he was Fisher.” He squinted his eyes in thought. “This Trefethen may have had a point. You remember some things too well. You follow a thread too well.”
“And I’ll continue following it past Ryerson, Doctor.”
Booey nodded. “Maybe the real Sherwood isn’t gone after all. You’ve got to know, you say. Well, that’s what you always used to say.” He smiled now, for the first time and Sherwood saw his horse teeth. Booey sat down, reached into a drawer, brought out an ash tray and a pack of cigarettes. “Let’s have a smoke on your analytical mind, Dr. Sherwood, for you are a doctor, you know, even though your interest lies in neurophysiology.” He passed the pack over. “And let’s hope your probing pierces that hidden area of your mind. I’ll help you all I can.”
“Dr. Trefethen said something I didn’t understand,” Sherwood said. “He said he suddenly remembered my name from somewhere. At the time I thought maybe I had made headlines or something.”
Booey gestured to include all the books and magazines on the shelves. “Where else but in a journal? Psychological Abstracts, Journal of Psychiatric Quarterly, EEG Journal, a dozen bulletins. You were always writing about something, stirring things. You were an upstart. Not too many agreed with you, though they listened. Maybe this Trefethen read something of yours he didn’t like.” He reached over, ran a thick finger down a stack of publications, pulled one out, thumbed through it studiously, found what he was looking for and shoved it across the desk to Sherwood, saying, “There’s one.”
Sherwood glanced at an article entitled, “Certain Aspects of the Integrative Action of the Nervous System,” and it was bylined “Dr. Walter Evan Sherwood.” Another one Booey threw at him concerned Sherwood’s views on the Rahm Stimulator, whatever that was, and still another was entitled, “An Exploration of the Parietal Cortex and Its Somaesthetic Sensitivity.”
He shook his head. “It means nothing to me.”
“Of course it doesn’t. Not now. But doesn’t it help you to know you did it?”
Sherwood considered it, then said, “I’m not sure. It makes me feel maybe the loss is too great, that I’ll never make it back.”
“Don’t you suppose you still have it?”
Sherwood said dubiously, “I don’t know.”
“Well, you do,” Booey said, tapping his forehead. “There are two hemispheres for remembering: each of the temporal lobes, each with an equal value for retention. One of them can be removed without evidence of marked memory loss or interference with the capacity of perceptual interpretation. So you’re doubly insured. Only temporarily short-circuited.”
“I hope you’re right.”
Booey’s eyes narrowed ever so little. “There is one great difference between you and mc at the moment.”
“What’s that?”
“I know I’m right,” he said evenly.
“And I, in my condition, cannot be sure,” Sherwood said miserably. “Is that it?”
“That is a matter of fact. But I wouldn’t let that self-pity creep in there. It doesn’t become you. It can even defeat you.”
Sherwood knew Booey was right. He must not bewail the man he had been, must not think of possible failure. In fact, there could be no real failure, for he could start all over again at Midwest, couldn’t he? Couldn’t he move right up to Ryerson again? The same man taking the same courses because he had forgotten them? It wouldn’t make sense to anyone else, but it was a possible route if he should finally fail to lift the curtain of his mind.
There was something else. All during the talk with Booey he had a feeling of increased unreality, and he had only discovered in the last few moments why. Booey was talking to him as if he had known him for years, which he had, acting on the basis of a friendship long ago formulated by a Sherwood that Sherwood himself didn’t even know, talking to him easily, without guile, as a friend, while Sherwood could only answer as a stranger, thinking as a stranger. That was the unreality and the reason for it.
Booey was saying, “Of course you’ll want to know what you did when you left here; that’s natural. Well, I wish I could help you, but I can’t tell you very much. I have your address here in a book somewhere.” Booey shifted papers on his desk, lifting books and paper weights, finally picking up a red leather notebook and flicking its pages. “Here it is. Three forty-seven Walnut Street, Merrittville, Michigan.”
“Michigan?”
Booey slanted a look at him. “That mean something to you?”
“No. I was surprised. I wonder how I ever got there.”
“And what you were doing there, which is more important.” Booey sighed, put the book down. “You left here in a hurry at the end of nineteen fifty-one. Earlier I had received some inquiries about you from some department of the government. I think it was the Investigation Division of the Civil Service Commission, or one of the other departments.”
When Sherwood looked puzzled. he went on, “Such inquiries have become a general thing. Walter. An executive order created a federal employee loyalty program in nineteen forty-seven for critical positions. You had applied for such a position or someone—certainly not I—referred your name to a government agency. All I know is you left here for research, but just exactly what it was I don’t know, though it would be in your specialty, of course. I was sorry to see you go.”
“Max mentioned something about how you thought I might stay on for an assistantship.”
“It was a blow when you left, but I recovered.”
“So I started working for a secret government project somewhere. Is that right?”
“Secret?” Booey grunted in amusement. “I doubt it. There’s not much secrecy in medical research; it’s a lot different from atomic research, unless of course it would be in a vital area of defense or attack, and I rather doubt that. You probably worked on something that interested you very much, something like an exact measurement of electrical impulses along a nerve. You had a flair for combining electronics and neurology. They are similar, in a way.”
“But even though I was doing research that interested me, I’d still be working for the government?”
“Not necessarily. In Merrittville, Michigan, there is a research center not far from town, I understand, but nobody knows very much about it. At least not me. And not because it’s so secret or anything like that. It’s simply because it’s in such an out-of-the-way place half way between Traverse City and Frankfort, up there near Michigan’s little finger, which is exactly why it was placed the
re away from the beaten track, so it would be quiet and fellows like you could get your work done. I fancy it is rather well-equipped. It’s run by a man named Schlessenger. Don’t know much about him.”
“I should have invited you up there,” Sherwood said, smiling. “It’s the least I could have done after what you must have done for me down here.”
“You did, but we could never get together on the date; you know how that is. I was frankly curious about your work, but you never wrote about that. My guess is you were either working on a graduate fellowship or on an outright grant from the National Science Foundation, or for one of the research outfits for the armed forces, maybe even for the Department of Defense itself, bypassing the services. It’s a toss-up which one, though I think the latter ones are hardly likely.”
Booey folded a piece of paper absently. “I know a lot of men who are quite happy with research. I’ve had temptations myself. There are a lot of theories of mine I’d like to go into but like a newspaperman who has an idea for a book he never gets written, I never get around to working on anything strictly my own. I feel I owe something to these knuckleheads we get in here every year, I guess. If everybody was doing research, there’d be nobody left to teach the kids. Then where’d we be?”
“Well,” Sherwood said, “that seems to settle what happened to me after Ryerson.”
“For a while it wasn’t so nice in research,” Booey went on. “It was touch and go when the Senate subcommittees started to ferret out anyone who had ever heard of Karl Marx. But there is more freedom now. It turned out nearly everybody had heard the name at some time or other. More coffee?”
“No, thanks. I’d like to have that address and be on my way. It looks like the answer to everything.”
“Here,” Booey said, tearing off an unused sheet of paper. “I’ll write it down for you. I don’t envy you going up there, a place you don’t even remember.”
The Seventh Science Fiction Megapack Page 27
