_Amnesiac!_
Doctor Pollard, psychologist, seemed puzzled.
"This has happened before," he remarked.
"Too often," said the director of the laboratory.
Doctor Pollard nodded in silent agreement. He faced the well-dressed
man seated asprawl in the chair before him and asked, "You have never
heard of James Forrest Carroll?"
"No," said the other man.
"But you are James Forrest Carroll."
"No."
The laboratory director shrugged. "This is no place for me," he said.
"If I can do anything--?"
"You can do nothing, Majors. As with the others this case is almost
complete amnesia. Memory completely shot. Even the trained-in mode of
speech is limited to guttural monosyllables and grunts."
John Majors shook his head, partly in pity and partly in sheer
withdrawal at such a calamity.
"He was a brilliant man."
"If he follows the usual pattern, he'll never be brilliant again,"
Doctor Pollard continued. "From I.Q. one hundred and eighty down to
about seventy. That's tough to take--for his friends and associates,
that is. He'll be alone in the world until we can bring his knowledge
up to the low I.Q. he owns now. He'll have to make new friends for his
old ones will find him dull and he'll not understand them. His family--"
"No family."
"None? A healthy specimen like Carroll at thirty-three years? No wife,
chick nor child? No relations at all."
"Uncles and cousins only," sighed John Majors.
The psychologist shook his head. "Women friends?"
"Several but few close enough."
"Could that be it?" mused the psychologist. Then he answered his own
question by stating that the other cases were not devoid of spouse or
close relation.
"I am about to abandon the study of the Lawson Radiation," said Majors
seriously. "It's taken four of my top technicians in the last five
years. This--affliction seems to follow a set course. It doesn't happen
to people who have other jobs that I know of. Only those who are near
the top in the Lawson Laboratory."
"It might be sheer frustration," offered Dr. Pollard. "I understand
that the Lawson Radiation is about as well understood now as it was
when discovered some thirty years ago."
"Just about," smiled Majors wearily. "However, you know as well as
I that people going to work at the Lawson Laboratory are thoroughly
checked to ascertain and certify that frustration will not drive them
insane.
"Research is a study in frustration anyway, and most scientists are
frustrated by the ever-present inability of getting something without
having to give something else up for it."
"Perhaps I should check them every six months instead of every year,"
suggested the psychologist.
"Good idea if it can be done without arousing their fears."
"I see what you mean."
Majors took his hat from the rack and left the doctor's office. Pollard
addressed the man in the chair again.
"You are James Forrest Carroll."
"No."
"I have proof."
"No."
"Remove your shirt."
"No."
This was getting nowhere. There had to be a question that could not be
answered with a grunted monosyllable.
"Will you remove your shirt or shall I have it done by force?"
"Neither!"
That was better--technically.
"Why do you deny my right to prove your identity?"
This drew no answer at all.
"You deny my right because you know that you have your name, blood
type, birth-date and scientific roster number tattooed on your chest
below your armpit."
"No."
"But you have--and I know it because I've seen it."
"No."
"You cannot deny your other identification. The eye-retina pattern, the
Bertillion, the fingerprints, the scalp-pattern?"
"No."
"I thought not," said the doctor triumphantly. "Now understand,
Carroll. I am trying to help you. You are a brilliant man--"
"No." This was not modesty cropping up, but the same repeating of the
basic negative reply.
"You are and have been. You will be once again after you stop fighting
me and try to help. Why do you wish to fight me?"
* * * * *
Carroll stirred uneasily in his chair. "Pain," he said with a tremble
of fear in his voice.
"Where is this pain?" asked the doctor gently.
"All over."
The doctor considered that. The same pattern again--a psychotic denial
of identity and a fear of pain at the dimly-grasped concept of return.
Pollard turned to the sheets of notes on his desk. James Forrest
Carroll had been a brilliant theorist and excellent from the practical
standpoint too.
Thirty-three years old and in perfect health, his enjoyment of life
was basically sound and he was about as stable as any physicist in the
long list of scientific and technical men known to the Solar System's
scientists.
Yesterday he had been brilliant--working on a problem that had stumped
the technicians for thirty years. Today he was not quite bright,
denying his brilliance with a vicious refusal to help. He remembered
nothing of his work, obviously.
"You know what the Lawson Radiation is?"
"No," came the instant reply but a slight twinge of pain-syndrome
crossed his face.
"You do not want to remember because you think you will have to go back
to the Lawson Lab?"
"I--don't know it--" faltered James Forrest Carroll. It was obviously a
lie.
"If I promise that you will never be asked about it?"
"No," said Carroll uneasily. Then with the first burst of real
intelligence he had shown since his stumbling body had been picked up
by the Terran Police, Carroll added, "You cannot stop me from thinking
about it."
"Then you do know it?"
Carroll relapsed instantly. "No," he said sullenly.
Dr. Pollard nodded. "Tomorrow?" he pleaded.
"Why?"
Pollard knew that the wish to aid Carroll would fall on deaf ears.
Carroll did not care to be helped. There were other ways.
"Because I must do my job or I shall be released," said Pollard. "You
must permit me to try, at least. Will you?"
"I--yes."
"Good. No one will know that I am not trying hard. But we'll make it
look good?"
"Yes."
"Do you know where your home is?" asked Pollard with his mental fingers
crossed.
"No."
Pollard sighed.
"Then you stay here. Miss Farragut will show you a quiet room where you
can sleep. Tomorrow we'll find your home from the files. Then you can
go home."
Pollard got out of there. He knew that Carroll would not leave--could
not leave. He prescribed a husky sedative to be put in Carroll's last
drink of water for the night and went home himself, his mind humming
with speculation.
* * * * *
The conference was composed of Pollard, Majors, and most of the other
key men in the Lawson Laboratory. Pollard spoke first.
"James Carroll is a victim of a rather deep-seated amnesia," he said.
"Amnesia is, of course, a mechanism of the mind set up to avoid
some bitter reality. In Carroll's case, not only is the amnesia
passive--some warning agency in Carroll's amnesiac mind warns him that
regaining his true identity will result in great pain.
"It is something concerned with his work. We'd like to know what about
the study of the Lawson Radiation could produce such a painful reality."
"We all get a bit fed up at times," remarked Tom Jackwell. "It's
heartbreaking to sit daily and try things that never do anything."
"We are like an aborigine, born on an isolated island three hundred
yards in diameter who has just discovered that certain blackish rocks
tend to attract one another and point north. Amusing for a time, but
what is it good for and what ungodly mechanism causes it?" said Majors
with a shrug.
"Just what is the latest theory on the Lawson Radiation?" asked Pollard.
"You guess," said John Majors ruefully. "We've had too many theories
already. The Lawson Radiation is a strange creation out of Boötes by
Arcturus, and borne like Zephyr on the wind.
"Certain elemental minerals, when in contact with other minerals,
produce a pulsing radiofrequency current which can be detected after
more amplification than the human mind can contemplate sensibly.
"The frequency output depends upon the type of minerals used, and it is
completely random so far as any consistent pattern goes. Some elemental
minerals are no good, some are excellent."
"You've made determinant charts?"
"Naturally. But there's no determinant. After I said elemental
minerals, I should have said that this was the original premise. Now
we have a detector working with helium gas surrounding a block of lead
bromide.
"Lead and helium are no good, helium and bromine equally poor. Lead
and bromide are no good--as long as it lasts. Now don't ask me if the
combination of the elements interferes. One good detector operates so
wonderfully all the time, that a bit of yellow phosphorus is forming
phosphorus pentoxid because it is suspended in an atmosphere of pure
oxygen."
"No apparent determining factors, hey?"
"None. You might as well pick out the elements with six-letter names.
The periodic chart looks like the scatter-pattern of an open-choke
shotgun. Water works fine when it is contained in a glass vessel, but
in anything else we know of--no dice."
"You seem to have covered a multitude of things," said Dr. Pollard
approvingly.
"We've had a corps of brilliant, imaginative technicians working on the
theory and practise for thirty years. Every one of them has come up
with a number of elemental detecting combinations. We're now working on
four and five element permutations.
"With and without plain and complex electrostatic and magnetic
fields--and mixtures of both. We've gone logically as far as we can
under a system that demands that we try everything. In each set of
permutations, we cover all. You know our motto."
Majors finished with a slight laugh. He pointed to the end of the
conference room, where, lettered on the wall above the blackboard was--
LEAVE NO TURN UNSTONED!
"Where does it come from?" asked Pollard innocently.
"Take a fifteen-degree angle from the middle of Boötes. Maybe Arcturus
for all we know. Somewhere within fifteen degrees of an arbitrary point
up there. A total conic solid angle of thirty degrees will encompass
all but wisps of the stuff that filter through once in a year or so."
"And the velocity of propagation?"
"That's the simplest thing to check. The pulses from the Lawson
Radiation follow random patterns. A segment printed along a time-scale
can be matched to another segment of the same radiation taken from the
other side of the solar system.
"It's never perfect enough to do more than approximate the answer, but
we've got to get a lot more dispersion than the breadth of the orbit
of the planet Pluto before we can detect any time-delay--and if we go
too far the synchronization of our test equipment gets more and more
difficult. You guess."
Pollard thought for a moment. "I can't hope to know all the angles," he
said. "This is sufficient until I have to know more about it. Now tell
me what might drive a man into instability?"
"You tell us," laughed Majors shortly. His laugh was not genuine for he
felt the loss of Carroll deeply.
"Is there any insoluble dilemma in this at all?"
"Not that we know of."
Pollard nodded. "People are always confronted with insoluble dilemmas
of one sort or another, but most of them could be avoided entirely by
a slight change in personal attitude. The man who cannot get a job
because of inexperience, and can get no experience for lack of job is
in an insoluble dilemma.
"But it is usually resolved before the subject gets too deeply involved
with his whirly. Someone always turns up needing some sort of help at
any cost, and that gives the required experience which can be magnified
by the applicant.
"Is it safe to assume that all of these four people who have turned
up with the same affliction might have turned up with some terrific
answer that drove them into a tizzy?" asked Pollard.
"Who knows?" grumbled Majors irritably. "Might be."
"What sort of answer would drive a man insane?" asked Jackwell. "If a
man is seeking an answer to a specific question, and he has no penalty
for not answering, what then?"
* * * * *
Majors wrinkled his forehead. "If the answer meant danger--of any sort?"
"No," said Pollard positively. "If it were social danger he would call
for aid and tell the authorities. If it were personal danger, he'd run,
and use his mind to avoid it."
"And if it could not be averted?"
Pollard still shook his head. "Men of Carroll's stability do not go
insane when faced with personal danger or even certain death. How about
his notes?"
"Nothing in them that seems out of line," said Majors. "Just the same
'no effect' or 'no improvement' conclusions."
"See here," said Pollard. "Do you have to use these improved detectors
on the natural radiation?"
"Of course," said Majors. "We don't know what the Lawson Radiation is,
and therefore we have no way of simulating it in our lab. What has us
stumped is that the detectors go on detecting Lawson Effects while
they're sitting on a fission-pile with no increase in noise-level or
signal." Majors smiled unhappily.
"That is, they do until the nuclear bombardment transmutes one of the
detector-elements into another one that is ineffective. So far nothing
we can pour into any of them will result in an indication."
Dr. Pollard shook his head. "This has been of some help," he said. "But
the big job of gaining his confidence and bringing him back is still
ahead of me. I think this will be all for now. May I count on your
co-operation again?"
"Any time," said Majors. "We need Carroll--which is quite aside from
the fact that we all like him and it hurts to see him as he is now."
The conference broke up, and Dr. Pollard left the Lawson Laboratory
and headed slowly toward the hospital where James Carroll was still
sleeping.
He was praying for a miracle. A mere human, he felt ignorant, helpless,
blind against the sheer disinterest that emanated from Carroll's
blacked-out intelligence. Not so much for the problem of the Lawson
Radiation would Pollard like to bring James Carroll back to himself
as for the benefit of the man--and mankind--for Carroll had been a
definite asset.
And then Pollard stopped thinking on the subject, for he found himself
rolling around in a tight circle in the problem. Did he want Carroll or
did he want to find out what Carroll had learned that drove him crazy?
To bring him back to full usefulness--that was admitting that his
interest was as much for the benefit of science as for the man. Science
in Carroll's case meant years and years of intense study of that one
particular field.
He was rationalizing, he knew, and he went further by admitting that
bringing Carroll back to full intelligence again meant that, unless the
man regained his ability to remember and work on the Lawson Radiation,
his return was incomplete. Would he bring Carroll back--only to have
the man return to this rare state of amnesia at the first touch of
something--and who knew what?
Pollard closed his mind and returned to the hospital.
But the days passed with no hope. Carroll was forced to admit his
identity and that was all. His mind meticulously avoided any contact
with the Lawson Radiation. In fact, any minor gains Pollard made were
lost instantly when any phase of Carroll's former studies was mentioned.
Eventually James Carroll went home. Pollard could keep him there no
longer. The former physicist returned daily, and Pollard helped the man
to make plans for the future. That hurt deeply, for Pollard had to sit
there, helpless to do anything about the man's lack of intellect.
Things that a normal man would take for granted in his daily life
Pollard had to outline in detail as planning. Luckily Carroll had
financial independence--or unluckily, perhaps, for maybe a job of some
sort might have been good therapy.
The trouble was that Pollard could not make his own mental adjustment
to see the former, very brilliant James Forrest Carroll working for a
pittance by digging ditches or slogging away his life in a menial job.
As the days grew into weeks the pattern of Carroll's new life became
fixed in the man's mind and he found it unnecessary to return daily to
the hospital for advice.
And Dr. Pollard gave up, himself a fine case of frustration.