“All right,” Caswell said. “I’ll try.”
Up to now, he had been bathed in a warm glow of superiority. Everything the machine said had seemed mildly humorous. As a matter of fact, he had felt capable of pointing out a few things wrong with the mechanotherapist.
Now that sense of well-being evaporated, as it always did, and Caswell was alone, terribly alone and lost, a creature of his compulsions, in search of a little peace and contentment.
He would undergo anything to find them. Sternly he reminded himself that he had no right to comment on the mechanotherapist. These machines knew what they were doing and had been doing it for a long time. He would cooperate, no matter how outlandish the treatment seemed from his layman’s viewpoint.
But it was obvious, Caswell thought, settling himself grimly on the couch, that mechanotherapy was going to be far more difficult than he had imagined.
* * * *
The search for the missing customer had been brief and useless. He was nowhere to be found on the teeming New York streets and no one could remember seeing a red-haired, red-eyed little man lugging a black therapeutic machine.
It was all too common a sight.
In answer to an urgent telephone call, the police came immediately, four of them, led by a harassed young lieutenant of detectives named Smith.
Smith just had time to ask, “Say, why don’t you people put tags on things?” when there was an interruption.
A man pushed his way past the policeman at the door. He was tall and gnarled and ugly, and his eyes were deep-set and bleakly blue. His clothes, unpressed and uncaring, hung on him like corrugated iron.
“What do you want?” Lieutenant Smith asked.
The ugly man flipped back his lapel, showing a small silver badge beneath. “I’m John Rath, General Motors Security Division.”
“Oh… Sorry, sir,” Lieutenant Smith said, saluting. “I didn’t think you people would move in so fast.”
Rath made a noncommittal noise. “Have you checked for prints, Lieutenant? The customer might have touched some other therapy machine.”
“I’ll get right on it, sir,” Smith said. It wasn’t often that one of the operatives from GM, GE, or IBM came down to take a personal hand. If a local cop showed he was really clicking, there just might be the possibility of an Industrial Transfer.…
Rath turned to Follansby and Haskins, and transfixed them with a gaze as piercing and as impersonal as a radar beam. “Let’s have the full story,” he said, taking a notebook and pencil from a shapeless pocket.
He listened to the tale in ominous silence. Finally he closed his notebook, thrust it back into his pocket and said, “The therapeutic machines are a sacred trust. To give a customer the wrong machine is a betrayal of that trust, a violation of the Public Interest, and a defamation of the Company’s good reputation.”
The manager nodded in agreement, glaring at his unhappy clerk.
“A Martian model,” Rath continued, “should never have been on the floor in the first place.”
“I can explain that,” Follansby said hastily. “We needed a demonstrator model and I wrote to the Company, telling them—”
“This might,” Rath broke in inexorably, “be considered a case of gross criminal negligence.”
Both the manager and the clerk exchanged horrified looks. They were thinking of the General Motors Reformatory outside of Detroit, where Company offenders passed their days in sullen silence, monotonously drawing microcircuits for pocket television sets.
“However, that is out of my jurisdiction,” Rath said. He turned his baleful gaze full upon Haskins. “You are certain that the customer never mentioned his name?”
“No, sir. I mean yes, I’m sure,” Haskins replied rattledly.
“Did he mention any names at all?”
Haskins plunged his face into his hands. He looked up and said eagerly, “Yes! He wanted to kill someone! A friend of his!”
“Who?” Rath asked, with terrible patience.
“The friend’s name was—let me think—Magneton! That was it! Magneton! Or was it Morrison? Oh, dear.…”
Mr. Rath’s iron face registered a rather corrugated disgust. People were useless as witnesses. Worse than useless, since they were frequently misleading. For reliability, give him a robot every time.
“Didn’t he mention anything significant?”
“Let me think!” Haskins said, his face twisting into a fit of concentration.
Rath waited.
Mr. Follansby cleared his throat. “I was just thinking, Mr. Rath. About that Martian machine. It won’t treat a Terran homicidal case as homicidal, will it?”
“Of course not. Homicide is unknown on Mars.”
“Yes. But what will it do? Might it not reject the entire case as unsuitable? Then the customer would merely return the Regenerator with a complaint and we would—”
Mr. Rath shook his head. “The Rex Regenerator must treat if it finds evidence of psychosis. By Martian standards, the customer is a very sick man, a psychotic—no matter what is wrong with him.”
Follansby removed his pince-nez and polished them rapidly. “What will the machine do, then?”
“It will treat him for the Martian illness most analogous to his case. Feem desire, I should imagine, with various complications. As for what will happen once treatment begins, I don’t know. I doubt whether anyone knows, since it has never happened before. Offhand, I would say there are two major alternatives: the patient may reject the therapy out of hand, in which case he is left with his homicidal mania unabated. Or he may accept the Martian therapy and reach a cure.”
Mr. Follansby’s face brightened. “Ah! A cure is possible!”
“You don’t understand,” Rath said. “He may effect a cure of his nonexistent Martian psychosis. But to cure something that is not there is, in effect, to erect a gratuitous delusional system. You might say that the machine would work in reverse, producing psychosis instead of removing it.”
Mr. Follansby groaned and leaned against a Bell Psychosomatica.
“The result,” Rath summed up, “would be to convince the customer that he was a Martian. A sane Martian, naturally.”
Haskins suddenly shouted, “I remember! I remember now! He said he worked for the New York Rapid Transit Corporation! I remember distinctly!”
“That’s a break,” Rath said, reaching for the telephone.
Haskins wiped his perspiring face in relief. “And I just remembered something else that should make it easier still.”
“What?”
“The customer said he had been an alcoholic at one time. I’m sure of it, because he was interested at first in the IBM Alcoholic Reliever, until I talked him out of it. He had red hair, you know, and I’ve had a theory for some time about red-headedness and alcoholism. It seems—”
“Excellent,” Rath said. “Alcoholism will be on his records. It narrows the search considerably.”
As he dialed the NYRT Corporation, the expression on his craglike face was almost pleasant.
It was good, for a change, to find that a human could retain some significant facts.
* * * *
“But surely you remember your goricae?” the Regenerator was saying.
“No,” Caswell answered wearily.
“Tell me, then, about your juvenile experiences with the thorastrian fleep.”
“Never had any.”
“Hmm. Blockage,” muttered the machine. “Resentment. Repression. Are you sure you don’t remember your goricae and what it meant to you? The experience is universal.”
“Not for me,” Caswell said, swallowing a yawn.
He had been undergoing mechanotherapy for close to four hours and it struck him as futile. For a while, he had talked voluntarily about his childhood, his mother and father, his older brother. But the Regenerator had asked him to put aside those fantasies. The patient’s relationships to an imaginary parent or sibling, it explained, were unworkable and of minor importance psychologically. The important thing was the patient’s feelings—both revealed and repressed—toward his goricae.