“Scampy. They all—Scampy?”
“That’s right,” he says bluntly.
Rocked, you cover your face. “By God! I can remember now, thinking back in detail over my whole life—it started in the bus that day I passed the entrance exams. What is it? Please, what is it?”
“Well, if you want me to get technical, they call it Dell’s hypothesis. It was formulated way back in the middle of the 20th century by Dudley Dell, which was one of the pseudonyms of a magazine editor. As I remember it, he later became a lay analyst and—”
“Please, Colonel!” You’re in trouble.
“Okay, okay,” he says soothingly. “Well, up to that time, psychologists—particularly analyists—had been banging their heads against a stone wall in certain cases, and sometimes banging up the patient in the process. Those early therapists knew that childish feelings and motivations were interfering with adult efficiency and happiness. When a man would slam out of his house and do a lousy day’s work after a fight with his wife, the doctor would tell him, ‘You’re acting as if you were a child rejected by its mother,’ and this was—”
“Colonel, sir, are you going to please tell me what the hell’s with me?”
“I am,” he answers calmly. “This, as I was beginning to explain, was all wrong because the ‘as if’ concept made the patient disbelieve in this active eight-year-old within him —a very viable, hard-fighting, eight-year-old it was, too. So when behaviour got more infantile, the doc would pull his beard, or chin, and say, ‘Mm-hmm, schizophrenia,’ thereby scaring the liverwurst out of the patient. Dell stopped all that.”
“Dell stopped all that,” you repeat, suffering.
“It was a little thing, that hypothesis of his—little like E = MC2 or Newton’s apple—but, oh, my, what happened!”
“Oh, my,” you agree. “What happened?”
“Dell began directing therapy to the infantile segment, treating it as a living, thinking, feeling organism. It responded so excellently that it changed the face of psychoanalysis. Now in your case—you’re not going to interrupt?”
You shake your head blankly but obediently.
“Good. In your case, an extension of Dell’s hypothesis was used. The sum total of your life up until you took your entrance examinations to this Base was arrested at the age of 15. A hypnotic barrier was erected so that you could have no access to any of this. You—all of you cadets— literally start a new life here, with no ties whatever to an earlier one. Your technical education very deliberately has no reference factors to anything but itself. You learn quickly because your minds are uncluttered. You never miss your past because we’re careful never to reactivate it.
“When this approach was first tried, the subjects were graduated with memories only of their training. Well, it didn’t work. Childhood conditioning is too important to the entire human being to be wiped out without diminishing the subject in just about every emotional way. So we developed this new system. That’s what we used on you.
“But we discovered a peculiar thing. Even in untrained adults—as opposed to the sharp division of pre- and post-entrance you have here—even untrained adults suffer to greater or lesser degree from internal strife between childhood and adult interpretations and convictions. An exaggerated example would be a child’s implicit belief in Santa Claus and the Easter bunny, existing at one and the same time with the adult’s realization that these are only legends. The inner child—the child within the adult—still exists, according to Dell and to all tests since, and will fight like the very devil for survival, beliefs and all especially one whose beliefs and natural feelings and reactions had been made grounds for punishment or ridicule.
“The schism between you and Scampy was extreme; you were, in effect, born on different planets. To be a complete human being, you had to be rejoined; but to be integrated successfully, you and Scampy had to learn how to get along together. For Scampy, this was not difficult—you, even in injustice and cruelty, were a real live hero-image. But the adult you had a stonier path. Somewhere within yourself, though, you somehow found an element of tolerance and empathy, and used it to bridge the gap.
“I may say,” the Colonel adds severely, “that it takes a particularly fine kind of person to negotiate this difficult merger. You are not usual, Cadet; not usual at all.”
“Scampy,” you murmur. Impulsively, you pull your shirt away from your chest and look down as if there were something hiding there. “But he talked to me! Don’t tell me you’ve secretly invented a telepathic converter with bandpass filters!”
“Of course not. When the barrier was erected between you and Scampy, Scampy was conditioned to speak sub-vocally—that is, back in the throat and virtually without lip movement. You have a subminiature transmitter placed surgically in your pharynx. The button on your bulkhead activated it. There had to be a button, you see; we couldn’t have the two of you speaking at the same time, which is what persons in the same room invariably do. You can’t subvocalize and talk simultaneously. It would have tipped you off. Hence the button.”
“I can’t get used to it,” you complain. “I can’t! I practically saw the boy! Listen, Colonel—can I keep my built-in transmitter and have the same rig on my starship?”
He smiles, although you think it hurts his face. “You really want it left as is?”
“He’s a good kid.”
“Very well—Commander. Dismissed.” He marches away.
You look after him, shaking your head. Then you duck into the space can. You stare at the bulkhead and at the button and at the scoring on the plate where you came that close to filling your cabin with your hydrazine supply. You shudder.
“Hey,” you call softly. “Scamp!”
You push the button. You hear the carrier. Then, “I’m thirsty,” says Scampy.
You cut out of there and go down to the rec area and into the short-order bar.
“A beer,” you say. “And put a lump of vanilla ice cream in it. And two straws.”
“You crazy?” asks the man.
“No,” you say. “Oh, no!”
SENSE FROM THOUGHT DIVIDE
by Mark Clifton
A million- (billion?-) dollar voyage to nowhere is high-priced psychotherapy. Mark Clifton, who spent twenty or so years in industrial engineering and personnel work before he turned to s-f writing, takes us back to the comparative miserliness of an ordinary cost-plus Gov’t, contract, and the pragmatic psychology of a hard-working personnel director.
No problems, this time, about selling a new idea to a reluctant public; no theories or abstractions about souls, psyches, ids or egos. Just the practical business-world problem of getting people to do their jobs as efficiently as possible—in this case, persuading a cloak-and-turban-ed Swami to help get levitation onto the production line.
“Remembrance and reflection, how allied; What thin partitions sense from thought divide.”
Pope
When I opened the door to my secretary’s office, I could see her looking up from her desk at the Swami’s face with an expression of fascinated skepticism. The Swami’s back was toward me, and on it hung flowing folds of a black cloak. His turban was white, except where it had rubbed against the back of his neck.