The Year's Greatest Science Fiction & Fantasy 2 - [Anthology]

by Edited By Judith Merril

  The doctor had steered this course of impossible choices by such willing and such orientation; and again he felt it, the urge that this way is right now and there is the thing to do next. The miracle to him was not the feeling, but that it had come back to him while he watched the films and heard the tapes with Miss Thomas, who had said nothing, given no evaluation or advice. They were the same films he had studied, run in the same sequence. The difference was only in not being alone any more.

  “Where are you going?” Miss Thomas asked him.

  From the coat closet, he said, “File that material and lock it up, will you, Miss Thomas? I’ll call you as soon as I return.” He went to the door and smiled back at her. It hurt his face. “Thanks.”

  Miss Thomas opened her mouth to speak, but did not. She raised her right hand in a sort of salute and turned around to put the files away.

  The doctor called from a booth near the Newell apartment. “Did I wake you, Osa? I’m sorry. Sometimes I don’t know how late it gets.”

  “Who . . . Fred? Is that you, Fred?”

  “Are you up to some painful conversation?”

  Alarmed, she cried, “Is something the matter? Is Dick—”

  He mentally kicked himself for his clumsiness. What other interpretation could she have put on such a remark? “He’s okay. I’m sorry. I guess I’m not good at the light banter. . . . Can I see you?”

  She paused for a long moment. He could hear her breathing. “I’ll come out. Where are you?”

  He told her.

  She said, “There’s a cafe just around the corner, to your left. Give me ten minutes.”

  He put up the phone and went to the corner. It was on a dingy street which seemed to be in hiding. On the street, the cafe hid. Inside the cafe, booths hid. In one of the booths, the doctor sat and was hidden. It was all he could do to keep himself from assuming a fetal posture.

  A waiter came. He ordered Collinses, made with light rum. He slumped then, with his forearms on the table and his chin on them, and watched bubbles rise in the drinks and collect on the underside of the shaved ice, until the glasses frosted too much for him to see. Then he closed his eyes and attempted to suspend thought, but he heard her footsteps and sprang up.

  “Here I am,” he said in a seal-like bark far louder than he had intended.

  She sat opposite him. “Rum Collins,” she said, and only then did he remember that it had always been the drink they shared, when they had shared things. He demanded of himself, Now why did I have to do that? and answered, You know perfectly well why.

  “Is he really all right?” she asked him.

  “Yes, Osa. So far.”

  “I’m sorry.” She turned her glass around, but did not lift it. “I mean maybe you don’t want to talk about Dick.”

  “You’re very thoughtful,” he said, and wondered why it had never occurred to him to see her just for himself. “But you’re wrong. I did want you to talk about him.”

  “Well... if you like, Fred. What, especially?”

  He laughed. “I don’t know. Isn’t that silly?”

  He sipped his drink. He was aware that she did the same. They never used to say “cheers” or “skoal” or anything else, but they always took that first sip together.

  He said, “I need something that segmentation or hypnosis or narcosynthesis just won’t give me. I need to flesh out a skeleton. No, it’s more refined than that. I need tints for a charcoal portrait.” He lifted his hands and put them down again. “I don’t know what I need. I’ll tell you when I get it.”

  “Well, of course I’ll help if I can,” she said uncertainly.

  “All right. Just talk, then. Try to forget who I am.”

  He met her eyes and the question there, and elaborated, “Forget I’m his therapist, Osa. I’m an interested stranger who has never seen him, and you’re telling me about him.”

  “Engineering degree, and where he comes from, and how many sisters?”

  “No,” he said, “but keep that up. You’re bound to stumble across what I want that way.”

  “Well, he’s . . . he’s been sick. I think I’d tell a stranger that.”

  “Good! What do you mean, sick?”

  She glanced quickly at him and he could follow the thought behind it: Why don’t you tell me how sick he is? And then: But you really want to play this game of the interested stranger. All right.

  She stopped looking at him and said, “Sick. He can’t be steered by anything but his own—pressures, and they-—they aren’t the pressures he should have. Not for this world.”

  “Why do you suppose that is?”

  “He just doesn’t seem to care. No,” she denied forcefully, “I don’t mean that, not at all. It’s more like—I think he would care if he—if he was allowed to, and he isn’t allowed to.” She got his eyes again. “This is very hard to do, Fred.”

  “I know and I’m sorry. But do go on; you’re doing fine. What do you mean, he isn’t allowed to care about the world and the way it wags? Who won’t allow him?”

  “It isn’t a who; it’s a—I don’t know. You’d have a term for it. I’d call it a monster on his back, something that drives him to do things, be something he really isn’t.”

  “We strangers don’t have any terms for anything,” he reminded her gently.

  “That’s a little refreshing,” she said with a wan half-smile. “I like...mystified ... people. They make me feel like one of the crowd. You know who’s lucky?” she asked, her voice suddenly wild and strained and, by its tone, changing the subject. “Psychotics are lucky. The nuts, the real buggy ones. (I talk like this to layman strangers.) The ones who see butterflies all the time, the ones who think the President is after them.”

  “Lucky!” he exploded.

  “Yes, lucky. They have a name for the beast that’s chewing on them. Sometimes they can see it themselves.”

  “I don’t quite—”

  “I mean this,” she said excitedly. “If I see grizzly bears under every lamp post, I’m seeing something. It has a name, a shape; I could draw a picture of it. If I do something irrational, the way some psychos do—run a nonexistent railroad or shoot invisible pheasants with an invisible gun, I’m doing something. I can describe it and say how it feels and write letters about it. See, these are all things plaguing the insane. Labels, handles. Things that you can hold up to reality to demonstrate that they don’t coincide with it.”

  “And that’s lucky?”

  She nodded miserably. “A mere neurotic—Dick, for example—hasn’t a thing he can name. He acts in ways we call irrational, and has a sense of values nobody can understand, and does things in a way that seems consistent to him but not to anyone else. It’s as if there were a grizzly bear, after all, but we’d never heard of grizzly bears—what they are, what they want, how they act. He’s driven by some monster without a name, something that no one can see and that even he is not aware of. That’s what I mean.”

  “Ah.”

  They sat for minutes, silent and careful.

  Then, “Osa—”

  “Yes, Fred.”

  “Why do you love him?”

  She looked at him. “You really meant it when you said this would be a painful conversation.”

  “Never mind that. Just tell me.”

  “I don’t think it’s a thing you can tell.”

  “Then try this: What is it you love in him?”

  She made a helpless gesture. “Him.”

  He sat without responding until he knew she felt his dissatisfaction with the answer.

  She frowned and then closed her eyes. “I couldn’t make you understand, Fred. To understand, you’d have to be two things: a woman, and—Osa.” Still he sat silent. Twice she looked up to his face and away, and at last yielded.

  She said in a low voice, “It’s a ... tenderness you wouldn’t believe, no matter how well you know him. It’s a gentle, loving something that no one ever born ever had before and never will again. It’s ... I hate this
, Fred!”

  “Go on, for heaven’s sake! This is exactly what I’m looking for.”

  “It is? Well, then ... But I hate talking like this to you. It doesn’t seem right.”

  “Go on!”

  She said, almost in a whisper, “Life is plain hell sometimes. He’s gone and I don’t know where, and he comes back and it’s just awful. Sometimes he acts as if he were alone in the place—he doesn’t see me, doesn’t answer. Or maybe he’ll be the other way, after me every second, teasing and prodding and twisting every word until I don’t know what I said or what I should say next, or who I am, or . . . anything, and he won’t leave me alone, not to eat or to sleep or to go out. And then he—”

  She stopped and the doctor waited, and this time realized that waiting would not be enough. “Don’t stop,” he said.

  She shook her head.

  “Please. It’s impor—”

  “I would, Fred,” she burst out frantically. “I’m not refusing to. I can’t, that’s all. The words won’t—”

  “Don’t try to tell me what it is, then,” he suggested. “Just say what happens and how it makes you feel. You can do that.”

  “I suppose so,” she said, after considering it.

  Osa took a deep breath, almost a sigh, and closed her eyes again.

  “It will be hell,” she said, “and then I’ll look at him and he...and he...well, it’s there, that’s all. Not a word, not a sign sometimes, but the room is full of it. It’s ... it’s something to love, yes, it’s that, but nobody can just love something, one-way, forever. So it’s a loving thing, too, from him to me. It suddenly arrives and everything else he is doing, the cruelty, the ignoring, whatever might be happening just then, it all stops and there’s nothing else but the— whatever it is.”

  She wet her lips. “It can happen any time; there’s never a sign or a warning. It can happen now, and again a minute from now, or not for months. It can last most of a day or flash by like a bird. Sometimes he goes on talking to me while it happens; sometimes what he actually says is just nothing, small-talk. Sometimes he just stands looking at me, without saying anything. Sometimes he—I’m sorry, Fred—he makes love to me then and that’s . . . Oh, dear God, that’s . . .”

  “Here’s my handkerchief.”

  “Thank you. He—does that other times, too, when there’s nothing loving about it. This—this thing-to-love, it—it seems to have nothing to do with anything else, no pattern. It happens and it’s what I wait for and what I look back on; it’s all I have and all I want.”

  When he was quite sure she had no more to say, he hazarded, “It’s as if some other—some other personality suddenly took over.”

  He was quite unprepared for her reaction. She literally shouted, “No!” and was startled herself.

  She recoiled and glanced guiltily around the cafe. “I don’t know why,” she said, sounding frightened, “but that was just—just awful, what you said. Fred, if you can give any slightest credence to the idea of feminine intuition, you’ll get that idea right out of your head. I couldn’t begin to tell you why, but it just isn’t so. What loves me that way may be part of Dick, but it’s Dick, not anybody or anything else. I know that’s so, that’s all. I know it.”

  Her gaze was so intense that it all but made him wince. He could see her trying and trying to find words, rejecting and trying again.

  At last, “The only way I can say it that makes any sense to me is that Dick could be such a—a louse so much of the time and still walk a straight line without something just as extreme in the other direction. It’s—it’s a great pity for the rest of the world that he only shows that side to me, but there it is.”

  “Does he show it only to you?” He touched her hand and released it. “I’m sorry, but I must ask that.”

  She smiled and a kind of pride shone from her face. “Only to me. I suppose that’s intuition again, but it’s as certain as Sunday.” The pride disappeared and was replaced by a patient agony. “I don’t delude myself, Fred—he has other women; plenty of them. But that particular something is for me. It isn’t something I wonder about. I just—know.”

  He sat back wearily.

  She asked, “Is all this what you wanted?”

  He gave her a quick, hurt glance and saw, to his horror, her eyes filling with tears.

  “It’s what I asked for,” he said in a flat voice.

  “I see the difference.” She used his handkerchief. “May I have this?”

  “You can have—” But he stopped himself. “Sure.” He got up. “No,” he said, and took the damp handkerchief out of her hand. “I’ll have something better for you.”

  “Fred,” she said, distressed, “I—”

  “I’m going, forgive me and all that,” he said, far more angrily than he had thought he would. But polite talk and farewells were much more than he could stand. “The layman stranger has to have a long interview with a professional acquaintance. I don’t think I’d better see you again, Osa.”

  “All right, Fred,” she said to his back.

  He had hurt her, he knew, but he knew also that his stature in her cosmos could overshadow the hurt and a hundred more like it. He luxuriated in the privilege and stamped out, throwing a bill to the waiter on the way.

  He drove back and plodded up the ramp to the clinic. For some obscure reason, the inscription over the door caught his attention. He had passed it hundreds of times without a glance; he had ordered it put there and he was satisfied with it, and why should it matter now? But it did. What was it that Newell had said about it? Some saw about the sanctity of personality. A very perceptive remark, thought the doctor, considering that Newell hadn’t read it:

  ONLY MAN CAN FATHOM MAN

  It was from Robert Lindner and was the doctor’s answer to the inevitable charges of “push-button therapy.” But he wondered now if the word “Man” was really inclusive enough.

  He shook off the conjecture and let himself into the building.

  Light gleamed from the translucent door of his office at the far end of the corridor. He walked down the slick flooring toward it, listening to his heels and not thinking otherwise, his mind as purposively relaxed as a fighter’s body between rounds. He opened the door.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Waiting,” said Miss Thomas.

  “Why?”

  “Just in case.”

  Without answering, he went to the closet and hung up his coat. Back at his desk, he sat down and straightened his tired spine until it crackled. Then he looked at Miss Thomas in the big chair. She put her feet under her and he understood that she was ready to leave if he wished her to.

  He said, “Hypothesis: Newell and Anson are discrete personalities.”

  While he spoke, he noticed Miss Thomas’s feet move outward a little and then cross at the ankles. His inner thought was. Of all the things I like about this woman, the best is the amount of conversation I have with her without talking.

  “And we have plenty of data to back that up,” he continued. “The EEGs alone prove it. Anson is Anson and Newell is Newell, and to prove it, we’ve crystallized them for anyone to see. We’ve done such a job on them that we know exactly what Anson is like without Newell. We’ve built him up that way, with that in mind. We haven’t done quite the same with Newell, but we might as well have. I mean we’ve investigated Newell as if Anson did not exist within him. What it amounts to is this: In order to demonstrate a specimen of multiple personality, we’ve separated and isolated the components.

  “Then we go into a flat spin because neither segment looks like a real human being . . . Miss Thomas?”

  “Yes?”

  “Do you mind the way I keep on saying ‘we’?”

  She smiled and shook her head. “Not at the moment.”

  “Further,” he said, answering her smile but relentlessly pursuing his summation, “we’ve taken our two personalities and treated each like a potentially salvable patient—one neurotic, one retarded. We’ve
operated under the assumption that each contained his own disorder and could be treated by separate therapies.”

  “We’ve been wrong?”

  “I certainly have,” said the doctor. He slapped the file cabinet at his left. “In here there’s a very interesting paper by one Weisbaden, who theorizes that multiple personalities are actually twins, identical twins born of the same egg-cell and developing within one body. One step, as it were, into the microcosm from foetus in foetu.”

  “I’ve read about that,” said Miss Thomas. “One twin born enclosed in the body of another.”