“I see,” he said, nodding as though he did-which I expect was true enough. “I suppose you know,” he mentioned, “that your friend cannot be helped unless he is present.”
“He’s present, Sigfrid,” I said softly.
“Yes,” he said, “I rather thought he was.” The fingers were still now, and he leaned back as though there were a chair for him to lean against. “Suppose you tell me about it … and”-with a smile, which was the most welcome thing I had ever seen in my life-“this time, Robin, you may use technical terms if you wish.”
Behind me I heard Essie softly exhale, and realized both of us bad been trying to hold our breaths. I reached back for her hand.
“Sigfrid,” I said, beginning to hope, “as I understand it, the term fugue refers to a flight from reality. If a person finds himself in a double-bind situation-excuse me, I mean if he finds himself in a position when one very powerful drive is frustrated by another, so he can’t live with the conflict-he turns his back on it. He runs away. He pretends it doesn’t exist. I know I’m mixing up several different schools of psychotherapy here, Sigfrid, but have I got the general idea right?”
“Close enough, Robin. At least I understand what you are saying.”
“An example of that might be”-I hesitated-“perhaps someone very deeply in love with his wife, who finds out that she’s been having an affair with his best friend.” I felt Essie’s fingers tighten on mine. I hadn’t hurt her feelings; she was encouraging me.
“You confuse drives and emotions, Robin, but that doesn’t matter. What are you leading up to?”
I didn’t let him rush me. “Or another example,” I said, “might be religious. Someone with a heartfelt faith, who discovers there is no God. Do you follow me, Sigfrid? It’s been an article of faith with him, although he knows there are a lot of intelligent people who disagree-and then, little by little, he finds more and more support for their belief, and finally it’s overwhelming …
He nodded politely, listening, but his fingers had begun to writhe again.
“So finally he has to accept quantum mechanics,” I said.
And that was the second point at which it all could have gone right out the chute. I think it nearly did. The hologram flickered badly for a moment, and the expression on Sigfrid’s face changed. I can’t say what it changed to. It wasn’t anything I recognized; it was as though it had blurred and softened.
But when he spoke up his voice was steady. “When you talk about drives and fugues, Robin,” he said, “you are talking about human beings. Suppose the patient you are interested in isn’t human.” He hesitated, and then added, “Quite.” I made an encouraging noise, because I really didn’t know where to go from there. “That is to say, suppose he has these drives and emotions, ah, programmed into him, let us say, but only the way a human can be programmed to do something like speak a foreign language after he is fully grown. The knowledge is there, but it is imperfectly assimilated. There is an accent.” He paused. “We are not human,” he said.
Essie’s hand gripped mine tightly. A warning. “Albert is programmed with a human personality,” I said.
“Yes. As far as possible. Very far,” Sigfrid agreed, but his face was grave. “Albert is still not human, for no computer program is. I mention only that none of us can experience, for example, the TPT. When the human race is going mad with someone else’s madness, we feel nothing.”
The ground was very delicate now, thin ice crusted over a quagmire, and if I stepped too roughly what might we all fall into? Essie held my hand strongly; the others were hardly breathing. I said, “Sigfrid, human beings are all different, too. But you used to tell me that that didn’t matter a great deal. You said the problems of the mind were in the mind, and the cure for the problems was in there, too. All you did was help your patients bring them up to the surface, where they could deal with them, instead of keeping them buried, where they could cause obsessions and neuroses … and fugue.”
“It is true that I said that, yes, Robin.”
“You just kicked the old machine, Sigfrid, right? To jar it loose from where it was stuck?”
He grinned-a pale grin, but there. “That is close enough, I suppose.”
“Right. So let me try a theory on you. Let me suggest that this friend of mine”-I didn’t dare name him again just then-“this friend of mine has a conflict he can’t handle. He is very intelligent and extremely well informed. He has access to the best and latest knowledge of science in particular-all kinds of science-physics and astrophysics and cosmology and everything else. Since quantum mechanics is at the base of it he accepts quantum mechanics as valid-he couldn’t do the job he was programmed to do without it. That’s basic to his-programming.” I had almost said “personality.”
The grin was more pain than amusement now, but he was still listening.
“And at the same time, Sigfrid, he has another layer of programming. He has been taught to think like and behave like-to be, as much as he can be-a very intelligent and wise person who has been dead for a hell of a long time and who happened to believe very strongly that quantum mechanics was all wrong. I don’t know if that would be enough of a conflict to damage a human being,” I said, “but it might do a lot of harm to-well-a computer program.”
There were actual beads of perspiration on Sigfrid’s face now. He nodded silently, and I had a bright, painful flashback-the way Sigfrid looked to me now, was that how I had looked to Sigfrid in those long-ago days when he was shrinking me? “Is that possible?” I demanded.
“It is a severe dichotomy, yes,” he whispered.
And there I bogged down.
The thin ice had broken. I was ankle-deep in the quagmire. I wasn’t drowning yet, but I was stuck. I didn’t know where to go next.
It broke my concentration. I looked around helplessly at Essie and the others, feeling very old and very tired-and a lot unwell, too. I had been so wrapped up in the technical problem of shrinking my shrink that I had forgotten the pain in my belly and the numbness in my arms; but they came back on me now. It wasn’t working. I didn’t know enough. I was absolutely certain that I bad uncovered the basic problem that had caused Albert to fugue-and nothing had come of it!
I don’t know how long I would have sat there like a fool if I hadn’t got help. It came from two people at once. “Trigger,” whispered Essie urgently in my ear, and at the same moment Janie Yee-xing stirred and said tentatively:
“There must have been a precipitating incident, isn’t that right?”
Sigfrid’s face became blank. A hit. A palpable hit.
“What was it, Sigfrid?” I asked. No response. “Come on, Sigfrid, old shrinking machine, spit it out. What was the thing that pushed Albert out the airlock?”
He looked me straight in the eye, and yet I couldn’t read his expression, because his face became fuzzy. It was almost as though it was a picture on the PV and something was breaking down in the circuits so the image was fading.
Fading? Or fuguing? “Sigfrid,” I cried, “please! Tell us what scared Albert into running away! Or if you can’t do that, just get him here so we can talk to him!”
More fuzz. I couldn’t even tell if he was looking at me anymore. “Tell me!” I commanded, and from that fuzzy holographic shadow came an answer:
“The kugelblitz.”
“What? What’s a kugelblitz?” I stared around in frustration. “Damn it, get him here so he can tell us for himself.”
“Is here, Robin,” whispered Essie in my ear.
And the image sharpened again, but it wasn’t Sigfrid anymore. The neat Freud face had softened and widened into the gentle, pouchy German band leader, and the white hair crowned the sad eyes of my best and closest friend.
“I am here, Robin,” said Albert Einstein sorrowfully. “I thank you for your help. I don’t know if you’ll thank me, though.”
Albert was right about that. I didn’t thank him.
Albert was also wrong about that, or right for wrong reasons, because the reason I didn’t thank him was not merely that what he said was so grisly unpleasant, so scary incomprehensible, but also that I was in no position to when he had finished.
My position wasn’t much better when he began, because the letdown when he came back let me down all the way. I was drained. Exhausted. It was perfectly expectable that I should be exhausted, I told myself, because God knew it had been about as stressful a strain as I had ever been through, but it felt worse than simple exhaustion. It felt terminal. It wasn’t just my belly or my arms or my head; it was as though all the power were draining out of all my batteries at once, and it took all the concentration I could get together to pay attention to what he was saying.