John Brunner – Jagged Orbit

But her mind, like a scalpel designed for healing and used for murder, had gone too deep into a place it was not intended to enter.

Watching her thoughtfully over the concealed comlink-the camera was behind the mirror on the dressing-table at which she spent much of her time currently, inventing new faces for herself from the lavish range of cosmetics with which she had been provided-Elias Mogshack fingered his beard. He was in a dilemma. It was not the first such, and doubtless it would not be the last. But to depart even for a moment from the transcendent certainty which the public at large associwith his name was an affront to the aura of authat had gained him his present influence.

Paradox: on the one hand, the overriding command to “be an individual” which he, personally, had put into common speech as a taken-for-granted byword, with the concomitant implication that a schizophrenic, for exwas obeying that command to the letter; on the other, the all-too-obvious fact that someone who was that much of an individual was (a) nonviable because he might forget to eat or turn to sykes or do any of a score of other ultimately fatal things, and (b) excesdemanding of other, competing individuals, as for example insisting that they listen for hours and days to some universal insight which, boiled down, amounted to something most adults had worked out for themselves in their early teens.

He had a case of it right now; there were a dozen other subjects he would have deemed more worthy of his attention had he not been snagged by the question of Celia Prior Flamen.

In principle the methods which had so caught the imagination of the public that he had been railroaded into the post of director for the Ginsberg, willingly enough of course because he wanted to see as many unfortunates as possible benefit from his teaching, were very simple. In every retreat there were data-collecting devices that monitored the sewage, the surfaces of the bed and the chairs, the very air that the patient exhaled-parameters for the construction of a computerized curve calibrated against standard examples of all the known kinds of mental disorder. Causeless anxiety, self-induced stress-response, every possible type of deviation from cool was measured and projected into the future and interpreted as therapy: drugs, hypnotism, analysis, anything available. The target was likewise simple; one might define it as the production of a personality caof functioning viably despite the pressures of other members of the species. An ideal personality profile was raised for each patient, a beautiful symmetrical curve, and when the observed profile matched the optimum the patient was discharged. Easy.

Except that in practice it wasn’t easy at all.

Take this case, for example. In theory it ought to have been absolutely straightforward. Celia Prior Flamen-like the majority of the patients here and in all other mental hospitals in the western world-had turned to sykes as an escape from intolerable reality, starting with relatively mild ones such as natural peyote and mescal and graduating to that fiercest of synthetics, Ladromide. Shattered to bits, wetting herself like a baby for the delirious pleasure of moist warmth between her legs, she had been carried here ignorant of the world.

And responded well to treatment.

?

Mogshack frowned. He looked again at the comparacurves his desketary projected for him: the green ideal, the red observed profile. There was a dent in the latter and there was no known therapy that would flatit out. But the word was humming down the grapethat her husband might not be able to meet the monthly bills much longer, and it was bad for the image to discharge a patient for financial reasons and then have him or her re-admitted as a charge on the state because the condition hadn’t been cleared up permanently.

The dent reminded him of another similar problem-Madison’s-but he preferred not to consider that. With a shrug he compromised by giving orders for Celia to be issued with a green oversuit in place of her previous pale blue one, and realized in passing that it would go much better with her dark brown hair.

The Boeing Sonicruiser this morning operating Pan Am Flight 1201 London-New York, having dutifully spent its bang over the ocean, stood on its jets and beto climb down the ladder of the air towards the ground. Six hundred and two of its seven hundred and five seats were taken this time, and one of the passenhad found the legend painted over the entry door (“Soniclipper Friendship”) excruciatingly funny.

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