Braden put a pencil in it. The other hand reached. Braden fumbled in his pockets and found a scrap of paper. He offered that.
John Kingman looked aloofly into the far distance, not even glancing at what his hands did. But the fingers sketched swiftly, with practiced ease. It took only seconds. Then, negligently, he reached out and returned pencil and paper to Braden. He returned to his godlike indifference to mere mortals. But there was now the faintest possible smile on his face. It was an expression of contemptuous triumph.
Braden glanced at the sketch. There was design there. There was an unbelievable intricacy of relationship between this curved line and that, and between them and the formalized irregular pattern in the center. It was not the drawing of a lunatic. It was cryptic, but it was utterly rational. There is something essentially childish in the background of most forms of insanity. There was nothing childish about this. And it was obscurely, annoyingly familiar. Braden had seen something like it, somewhere, before. It was not in the line of psychiatry, but in some of the physical sciences diagrams like this were used in explanations.
An attendant came to return John Kingman to his ward. Braden folded the paper and put it in his pocket.
“It’s not in my line, John,” he told John Kingman. “I’ll have a check-up made. I think I’m going to be able to do something for you.”
John Kingman suffered himself to be led away. Rather, he grandly preceded the attendant, negligently preventing the man from touching him, as if such a touch Would be a sacrilege the man was too ignorant to realize.
Braden went to the record office. With the agitated clerk beside him, he traced John Kingman’s name to the earliest of the file of dead records. Handwriting succeeded typewriting as he went back through the years. Paper yellowed. Handwriting grew Spencerian. It approached the copperplate. But, in ink turned brown, in yellowed rag paper in the ruled record, books of the Eastern Pennsylvania Asylum—which was Meadeville Mental in 1850—there were the records of a patient named John Kingman for every year. Twice Braden came upon notes alongside the name. One was in 1880. Some staff doctor—there were no psychiatrists in those days—had written, “High fever.” There was nothing else. In 1853 a neat memo stood beside the name. “This man has six functioning fingers on each hand.” The memo had been made ninety-five years before.
Dr. Braden looked at the agitated clerk. The record of John Kingman was patently impossible. The clerk read it as a sign of inefficiency in his office and possibly on his part. He would be upset and apprehensible until the source of the error had safely been traced to a predecessor.
“Someone,” said Braden dryly—but he did not believe it even then—“forgot to make a note of the explanation. An unknown must have been admitted at some time as John Kingman. In time, he died. But somehow the name John Kingman had become a sort of stock name like John Doe, to signify an unidentified patient. Look in the death records for John Kingman. Evidently a John Kingman died, and that same year another unidentified patient was assigned the same name. That’s it!”
The clerk almost gasped with relief. He went happily to check. But Braden did not believe it. In 1853 someone had noted that John Kingman had six functioning fingers on each hand. The odds against two patients in one institution having six functioning fingers, even in the same century, would be enormous.
Braden went doggedly to the museum. There the devices used in psychiatric treatments in the days of New Bedlam were preserved, but not displayed. Meadeville Mental had been established in 1776 as New Bedlam. It was the oldest mental institution in the United States, but it was not pleasant to think of the treatment given to patients—then termed “madmen”—in the early days.
The records remained. Calf-leather bindings. Thin rag paper. Beautifully shaded writing, done with quill pens. Year after year, Dr. Braden searched. He found John Kingman listed in 1820. In 1801. In 1795. In 1785 the name “John Kingthan” was absent from the annual list of patients. Braden found the record of his admission in 1786. On the 21st of May, 1786—ten years after New Bedlam was founded, one hundred and sixty-two years before the time of his search—there was a neat entry:
“A poore madman admitted this day has been assigned the name of John Kingman because of his absurdly royal manner and affected dignity. He is five feet eight inches tall, appears to speak no English or any other tongue known to any of the learned men here about, and has six fingers on each hand, the extra fingers being perfectly formed and functioning. Dr. San Forde observed that he seems to have a high fever. On his left shoulder, when stripped, there appears a curious design which is not tattooing according to any known fashion. His madness appears to be so strong a conviction of his greatness that he will not condescend to notice others as being so much his inferiors, so that if not committed hee would starve. But on three occasions, when being examined by physicians, he put out his hand imperiously for writing instruments, and drew very intricate designs which all agree have no significance. He was committed as a madman by a commission consisting of Drs. San Forde, Smyth, Hale, and Bode.”
Young Dr. Braden read the entry a second time. Then a third. He ran his hands through his hair. When the clerk came back to announce distressedly that not in all the long history of the institution had a patient named John Kingman died, Braden was not surprised.
“Quite right,” said Braden to the almost hysterical clerk. “He didn’t die. But I want John Kingman taken over to the hospital ward. We’re going to look him over. He’s been rather neglected. Apparently he’s had actual medical attention only once in a hundred and sixty-two years. Get out his committal papers for me, will you? He was admitted here May 21st, 1786.”
Then Braden left, leaving behind him a clerk practically prostrated with shock. The clerk wildly suspected that Dr. Braden had gone insane. But when he found the committal papers, he decided hysterically that it was he who would shortly hold in one of the wards.
John Kingman manifested amusement when he was taken into the hospital laboratory. For a good ten seconds—Braden watched him narrowly—he glanced from one piece of apparatus to another. It was impossible to doubt that after one glance he understood the function and operation of every appliance in the ultramodern, super-scientifically-equipped laboratory of the hospital ward. But he was amused. In particular, he looked at the big X-ray machine and smiled with such contempt that the X-ray technician bristled.
“No paranoid suspicion,” said Braden. “Most paranoid patients suspect that they’re going to be tortured or killed when they’re brought to a place where there’s stuff they don’t understand.”
John Kingman turned his eyes to Braden. He put out his six-fingered hand and made the motion of writing. Braden handed him a pencil and a memo tablet. Negligently, contemptuously, he sketched. He sketched again. He handed the sketches to Braden and retreated into his enormous amused contempt for humanity.
Braden glanced at the scraps of paper. He jerked his bead, and the X-ray technician came to his side.
“This,” said Braden dryly, “looks like a diagram of an X-ray tube. Is it?”
The technician blinked.
“He don’t use the regular symbols,” he objected, “but … well . . yes. That’s what he puts for the target and this’s for the cathode— Hm-m-m. Yes—” Then he said suddenly: “Say! That’s not right.”
He studied the diagram. Then he said in abrupt excitement:
“Look! He’s put in a field like in a electron microscope! That’s an idea! Do that, and you’d get straightline electron flow and a narrower X-ray beam—”