I said, “Just a moment. You have records of the earlier attempts?”
“Of course.”
“Let’s play them over first. I want to come up to date.”
He hesitated, then answered, “If you wish. Mrs. Nivens, I suggest that you wait in my office. No, it will take quite a long time; suppose I send for you later?”
It was probably just the contrary mood that I was in; bucking the Old Man had gotten me hiked up with adrenaline. “Let’s find out first if she wants to leave.”
Steelton looked surprised. “You don’t know what you are suggesting. These records would be emotionally disturbing to your wife, even harmful.”
Hazelhurst put in, “Very questionable therapy, young man.”
I said, “This isn’t therapy and you know it. If therapy had been your object you would have used eidetic recall technique instead of drugs.”
Steelton looked worried. “There was not time for that. We had to use rough methods for quick results. I’m not sure that I can authorize the subject to see the records.”
Hazelhurst put in, “I agree with you. Doctor.”
I exploded. “Damn it, nobody asked you to authorize anything and you haven’t got any authority in the matter. Those records were snitched right out of my wife’s head and they belong to her. I’m sick of you people trying to play God. I don’t like it in a slug and I don’t like it any better in a human being. She’ll make up her own mind whether or not she wants to see them and whether or not I or anybody else will see them. Now ask her!”
Steelton said, “Mrs. Nivens, do you wish to see your records?”
Mary answered, “Yes, Doctor, I’d like very much to see them.”
He seemed surprised. “Uh, to be sure. Do you wish to see them by yourself?” He glanced at me.
“My husband and I will see them. You and Dr. Hazelhurst are welcome to remain, if you wish.”
Which they did. Presently a whole stack of tape spools were brought in, each labeled with attributed dates and ages. It would have taken us hours to go through them all, so I discarded those which concerned Mary’s life after about 1991. I could not see how they could affect the problem and Mary could see them later if she wished.
We started out with her very early life. Each record started with the subject—Mary, that is—choking and groaning and struggling the way people always do when they are being forced back on a memory track which they would rather not follow, then would come the reconstruction, both in Mary’s voice and in other voices. What surprised me most was Mary’s face—in the tank, I mean. We had the magnification stepped up so that the stereo image of her face was practically in our laps and one could follow every change of expression.
First her face became that of a little girl—oh, her features were the same grown-up features but I knew that I was seeing my darling as she must have been when she was very small. It made me hope that we would have a little girl ourselves.
Then her expression would change to match when other actors out of her memory took over. It was like watching an incredibly able monologist playing many parts.
Mary took it with apparent serenity but her hand stole into mine. When we came to the terrible part when her parents changed, became not her parents but slaves of slugs, she clamped down on my fingers so hard that it would have crushed a hand less hamlike than my own. But she controlled herself.
I skipped over the spools marked “period of suspended animation”. I was surprised to find that there were a great many of them; I would have thought that there was nothing to dig out of the memory of a person in such a condition. Be that as it may, I could not see how she could have learned anything during that period which would tell us how the slugs had died, so I left them out and proceeded to the group concerned with the time from her resuscitation to the group concerned with her rescue from the swamps.