The Mammoth Book of 20th Century SF II (74 page)

Render wondered.

Perhaps it could be done. It would be a difficult undertaking, though.

It might also make therapeutic history.

No one was really qualified to try it, because no one had ever tried it before.

But Eileen Shallot was a rarity – no, a unique item – for it was likely she was the only person in the world who combined the necessary technical background with the unique
problem.

He drained his glass, refilled it, refilled hers.

He was still considering the problem as the “RECOORDINATE” light came on and the car pulled into a cutoff and stood there. He switched off the buzzer and sat there for a long while,
thinking.

It was not often that other persons heard him acknowledge his feelings regarding his skill. His colleagues considered him modest. Offhand, though, it might be noted that he was aware that the
day a better neuroparticipant began practicing would be the day that a troubled homo sapien was to be treated by something but immeasurably less than angels.

Two drinks remained. Then he tossed the emptied bottle into the backbin.

“You know something?” he finally said.

“What?”

“It might be worth a try.”

He swiveled about then and leaned forward to recoordinate, but she was there first. As he pressed the buttons and the S-7 swung around, she kissed him. Below her dark glasses her cheeks were
moist.

The suicide bothered him more than it should have, and Mrs. Lambert had called the day before to cancel her appointment. So Render decided to spend the morning being pensive.
Accordingly, he entered the office wearing a cigar and a frown.

“Did you see . . . ?” asked Mrs. Hedges.

“Yes.” He pitched his coat onto the table that stood in the far corner of the room. He crossed to the window, stared down. “Yes,” he repeated, “I was driving by
with my windows clear. They were still cleaning up when I passed.”

“Did you know him?”

“I don’t even know the name yet. How could I?”

“Priss Tully just called me – she’s a receptionist for that engineering outfit up on the eighty-sixth. She says it was James Irizarry, an ad designer who had offices down the
hall from them – That’s a long way to fall. He must have been unconscious when he hit, huh? He bounced off the building. If you open the window and lean out you can see – off to
the left there – where . . .

“Never mind, Bennie. – Your friend have any idea why he did it?”

“Not really. His secretary came running up the hall, screaming. Seems she went in his office to see him about some drawings, just as he was getting up over the sill. There was a note on
his board. ‘I’ve had everything I wanted,’ it said. ‘Why wait around?’ Sort of funny, huh? I don’t mean
funny
. . .”

“Yeah. – Know anything about his personal affairs?”

“Married. Coupla kids. Good professional rep. Lots of business. Sober as anybody. – He could afford an office in this building.”

“Good Lord!” Render turned. “Have you got a case file there or something?”

“You know,” she shrugged her thick shoulders, “I’ve got friends all over this hive. We always talk when things go slow. Prissy’s my sister-in-law, anyhow –
”

“You mean that if I dived through this window right now, my current biography would make the rounds in the next five minutes?”

“Probably,” she twisted her bright lips into a smile, “give or take a couple. But don’t do it today, huh? – You know, it would be kind of anticlimactic, and it
wouldn’t get the same coverage as a solus.

“Anyhow,” she continued, “you’re a mind-mixer. You wouldn’t do it.”

“You’re betting against statistics,” he observed. “The medical profession, along with attorneys, manages about three times as many as most other work areas.”

“Hey!” She looked worried. “Go ’way from my window!

“I’d have to go to work for Dr. Hanson then,” she added, “and he’s a slob.”

He moved to her desk.

“I never know when to take you seriously,” she decided.

“I appreciate your concern,” he nodded, “indeed I do. As a matter of fact, I have never been statistic-prone – I should have repercussed out of the neuropy game four
years ago.

“You’d be a headline, though,” she mused. “All those reporters asking me about you . . . Hey, why do they do it, huh?”

“Who?”

“Anybody.”

“How should I know, Bennie? I’m only a humble psyche-stirrer. If I could pinpoint a general underlying cause – and then maybe figure a way to anticipate the thing – why,
it might even be better than my jumping, for – newscopy. But I can’t do it, because there is no single, simple reason – I don’t think.”

“Oh.”

“About thirty-five years ago it was the ninth leading cause of death in the United States. Now it’s number six for North and South America. I think it’s seventh in
Europe.”

“And nobody will ever really know why Irizarry jumped?”

Render swung a chair backward and seated himself. He knocked an ash into her petite and gleaming tray. She emptied it into the waste-chute, hastily, and coughed a significant cough.

“Oh, one can always speculate,” he said, “and one in my profession will. The first thing to consider would be the personality traits which might predispose a man to periods of
depression. People who keep their emotions under rigid control, people who are conscientious and rather compulsively concerned with small matters . . .” He knocked another fleck of ash into
her tray and watched as she reached out to dump it, then quickly drew her hand back again. He grinned an evil grin. “In short,” he finished, “some of the characteristics of people
in professions which require individual, rather than group performance – medicine, law, the arts.”

She regarded him speculatively.

“Don’t worry though,” he chuckled, “I’m pleased as hell with life.”

“You’re kind of down in the mouth this morning.”

“Pete called me. He broke his ankle yesterday in gym class. They ought to supervise those things more closely. I’m thinking of changing his school.”

“Again?”

“Maybe. I’ll see. The headmaster is going to call me this afternoon. I don’t like to keep shuffling him, but I do want him to finish school in one piece.”

“A kid can’t grow up without an accident or two. It’s – statistics.”

“Statistics aren’t the same thing as destiny, Bennie. Everybody makes his own.

“Statistics or destiny?”

“Both, I guess.”

“I think that if something’s going to happen, it’s going to happen.”

“I don’t. I happen to think that the human will, backed by a sane mind can exercise some measure of control over events. If I didn’t think so, I wouldn’t be in the racket
I’m in.”

“The world’s a machine – you know – cause, effect. Statistics do imply the prob – ”

“The human mind is not a machine, and I do not know cause and effect. Nobody does.”

“You have a degree in chemistry, as I recall. You’re a scientist, Doc.”

“So I’m a Trotskyite deviationist,” he smiled, stretching, “and you were once a ballet teacher.” He got to his feet and picked up his coat.

“By the way, Miss DeVille called, left a message. She said: ‘How about St. Moritz?’”

“Too ritzy,” he decided aloud. “It’s going to be Davos.”

Because the suicide bothered him more than it should have, Render closed the door to his office and turned off the windows and turned on the phonograph. He put on the desk
light only.

How has the quality of human life been changed
, he wrote,
since the beginnings of the industrial revolution?

He picked up the paper and reread the sentence. It was the topic he had been asked to discuss that coming Saturday. As was typical in such cases he did not know what to say because he had too
much to say, and only an hour to say it in.

He got up and began to pace the office, now filled with Beethoven’s Eighth Symphony.

“The power to hurt,” he said, snapping on a lapel microphone and activating his recorder, “has evolved in a direct relationship to technological advancement.” His
imaginary audience grew quiet. He smiled. “Man’s potential for working simple mayhem has been multiplied by mass-production; his capacity for injuring the psyche through personal
contacts has expanded in an exact ratio to improved communication facilities. But these are all matters of common knowledge, and are not the things I wish to consider tonight. Rather, I should like
to discuss what I choose to call autopsychomimesis – the self-generated anxiety complexes which on first scrutiny appear quite similar to classic patterns, but which actually represent
radical dispersions of psychic energy. They are peculiar to our times . . .”

He paused to dispose of his cigar and formulate his next words.

“Autopsychomimesis,” he thought aloud, “a self-perpetuated imitation complex – almost an attention-getting affair. – A jazzman, for example, who acted hopped-up
half the time, even though he had never used an addictive narcotic and only dimly remembered anyone who had – because all the stimulants and tranquilizers of today are quite benign. Like
Quixote, he aspired after a legend when his music alone should have been sufficient outlet for his tensions.

“Or my Korean War Orphan, alive today by virtue of the Red Gross and UNICEF and foster parents whom he never met. He wanted a family so badly that he made one up. And what then? – He
hated his imaginary father and he loved his imaginary mother quite dearly – for he was a highly intelligent boy, and he too longed after the half-true complexes of tradition. Why?

“Today, everyone is sophisticated enough to understand the timehonored patterns of psychic disturbance. Today, many of the reasons for those disturbances have been removed – not as
radically as my now-adult war orphan’s, but with as remarkable an effect. We are living in a neurotic past. – Again, why? Because our present times are geared to physical health,
security, and well-being. We have abolished hunger, though the backwoods orphan would still rather receive a package of food concentrates from a human being who cares for him than to obtain a warm
meal from an automat unit in the middle of the jungle.

“Physical welfare is now every man’s right in excess. The reaction to this has occurred in the area of mental health. Thanks to technology, the reasons for many of the old social
problems have passed, and along with them went many of the reasons for psychic distress. But between the black of yesterday and the white of tomorrow is the great gray of today, filled with
nostalgia and fear of the future, which cannot be expressed on a purely material plane, is now being represented by a willful seeking after historical anxiety-modes . . .”

The phone-box buzzed briefly. Render did not hear it over the Eighth.

“We are afraid of what we do not know,” he continued, “and tomorrow is a very great unknown. My own specialized area of psychiatry did not even exist thirty years ago. Science
is capable of advancing itself so rapidly now that there is a genuine public uneasiness – I might even say ‘distress’ – as to the logical outcome: the total mechanization of
everything in the world . . .”

He passed near the desk as the phone buzzed again. He switched off his microphone and softened the Eighth.

“Hello?”

“Saint Moritz,” she said.

“Davos,” he replied firmly.

“Charlie, you are most exasperating!”

“Jill, dear – so are you.”

“Shall we discuss it tonight?”

“There is nothing to discuss!”

“You’ll pick me up at five, though?”

He hesitated, then:

“Yes, at five. How come the screen is blank?”

“I’ve had my hair fixed. I’m going to surprise you again.”

He suppressed an idiot chuckle, said, “Pleasantly, I hope. Okay, see you then,” waited for her “good-bye,” and broke the connection.

He transpared the windows, turned off the light on his desk, and looked outside.

Gray again overhead, and many slow flakes of snow – wandering, not being blown about much – moving downward and then losing themselves in the tumult . . .

He also saw, when he opened the window and leaned out, the place off to the left where Irizarry had left his next-to-last mark on the world.

He closed the window and listened to the rest of the symphony. It had been a week since he had gone blindspinning with Eileen. Her appointment was for one o’clock.

He remembered her fingertips brushing over his face, like leaves, or the bodies of insects, learning his appearance in the ancient manner of the blind. The memory was not
altogether pleasant. He wondered why.

Far below, a patch of hosed pavement was blank once again; under a thin, fresh shroud of white, it was slippery as glass. A building custodian hurried outside and spread salt on it, before
someone slipped and hurt themself.

Sigmund was the myth of Fenris come alive. After Render had instructed Mrs. Hedges, “Show them in,” the door had begun to open, was suddenly pushed wider, and a
pair of smoky yellow eyes stared in at him. The eyes were set in a strangely misshapen dog-skull.

Sigmund’s was not a low canine brow, slanting up slightly from the muzzle; it was a high, shaggy cranium making the eyes appear even more deep-set than they actually were. Render shivered
slightly at the size and aspect of that head. The muties he had seen had all been puppies. Sigmund was full-grown, and his gray-black fur had a tendency to bristle, which made him appear somewhat
larger than a normal specimen of the breed.

He stared in at Render in a very un-doglike way and made a growling noise which sounded too much like, “Hello, doctor,” to have been an accident.

Render nodded and stood.

“Hello, Sigmund,” he said. “Come in.”

The dog turned his head, sniffing the air of the room – as though deciding whether or not to trust his ward within its confines. Then he returned his stare to Render, dipped his head in an
affirmative, and shouldered the door open. Perhaps the entire encounter had taken only one disconcerting second.

Eileen followed him, holding lightly to the double-leashed harness. The dog padded soundlessly across the thick rug – head low, as though he were stalking something. His eyes never left
Render’s.