A Piece of Martin Cann

  “Any experience will try to change you, yes. Some of them will try to kill you.”

  * * *

  “No one can really understand, this early. From the outside…but we’ll have a chance to improve our knowledge now.” Sure the technicians were watching, the other side of the fade-wall, he made a hand signal. Five seconds passed.

  The room went black, went soundless. The world…Changed.

  Also by Laurence M. Janifer

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  A PIECE OF MARTIN CANN

  Laurence M. Janifer

  BELMONT BOOKS • NEW YORK CITY

  A PIECE OF MARTIN CANN

  A BELMONT BOOK - June 1968

  Published by Belmont Productions, Inc.

  1116 First Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10021

  Copyright © 1968 by Laurence M. Janifer

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OP AMERICA

  For Rosemary, in spite of

  Rosemary: for Gail Wendroff, patient and responsive: and, with appreciation, for

  Dr. Lewis L. Robbins,

  Dr. Verne Peterson, and Coley: along with all the rest, not forgotten.

  Down with yonder trees, the Lord of hosts says, and build siege-works about Jerusalem; here is a city that must be called to account for all the oppression that is harbored there. Never cistern kept its waters so fresh, as she her stores of wickedness; no news from her but of wrong and waste, no sight I see there but distress and violence. Jerusalem, be warned in time; else my love thou shalt forfeit, and I will make a ruin of thee, a land uninhabited.

  Jeremiah 6:6—8 from the Holy Bible as translated by Fr. Ronald Knox

  And wherever they will not receive you or listen to your words, shake off the dust from your feet as you leave that city or that house; I promise you, it shall go less hard with the land of Sodom and Gomorrah at the day of judgment, than with that city.

  Matthew 10:14-5 from the Holy Bible as . translated by Fr. Ronald Knox

  “I shall not venture to tell you that this new technique is safe. You have studied it carefully enough to know that it is not. Nor, of course, do I want to spend useless time here’ discussing its workings. You have all covered that so very recently in your classes that you could, in all probability, do a better job of explaining the technique than I might in its mechanical aspects, at any rate. But, as I hope to emphasize, the technique is not entirely a question of workmanship or of mechanical knowledge…

  “No, I want only to restate a very few facts, and by that means to put them, as I hope, into high relief. When using this technique, in cooperation with psychiatrists, specialists and aides, you will, quite literally, enter the mind of a severely troubled patient, a patient who can not satisfactorily be reached by any other method. In so doing, you will be entering a world—and one which is, for all practical purposes, quite as real’ as the world in which you have been living all of your lives. The laws of this new world may or may not bear any consistent relation to the laws of the world with which you are familiar (though as the theoreticians among you will remind me, some such relation must ultimately be capable of derivation); the objects in this new world may be objects, may have properties, of which you cannot now conceive. It is easy enough to say, as many continue to say, that the entered world is merely a ‘symbolic abstraction in terms of the patient’s disturbance’—it is usually easy to spade up long words, hook them together, and become convinced that they are meaningful. But that ‘symbolic abstraction,’ while you are within it, will be real to you. What you do will affect it in terms of its own laws and its own structure—laws and structures which you will have to discover once again for each new patient, for each new world.

  “And what that world does will affect you. Not only in the way which is perhaps easiest to accept —the rule that you will become, without your own full permission, a different being in every different world. No. Instead, we must continue to restate and to emphasize this: that if you are hurt there, you will carry the injury back to the normal’ world; that if you die there, you will be dead. You are entering a jungle without maps…

  —Excerpts from a speech by G. Gordon Wence,

  M.D., E.E., PhD., before the graduating class of

  American Memorial Nursing Academy, which class included Miss Lenore Annell, in June of 2060.

  ONE

  1

  “There are many forms of therapy,” and despite herself she stopped for a second to listen to the recorded voice—a tall, pale girl as she was then, a functionary whose ritual whites emphasized slimness, perhaps distance. The visitors in from tire neighboring clusters—relatives of patients, she supposed, future interns and nurses, curiosity-prones—were stickily gathered around a show-and-tell board which lit up every few seconds, showing a new scene as the voice went booming on. Odd that she suddenly wondered who it was had made the recording, whether he knew that it was still in use—whether, in fact, tire person behind the fact-certain voice was still alive. Preoccupation with survival, of course, but…well, yes. It would be simpler having a religion, retreating back (as she felt) into the ritual rapport of orthodoxy; but that sort of decision was not, could never be, the sort a sane person could deliberately make—or having by some miracle made—live with for more than a day or two. Like…well, like falling in love. Though at one time human beings had made of that, too, a deliberative process. At one time or another, in fact, human beings had done very nearly anything which any mind might 10 ever conceivably imagine; which made a given action neither better nor worse, ancestry being no proof of virtue. Whatever you did, you were not alone. Preoccupation with survival, for instance, had been the basis of a good many societies; or preoccupation with…And a deep breath made no difference, not then. The words pattered on evenly through her mind, interfering with the great recorded exterior voice. “The particular needs of the individual patient must of course determine…

  Concensual validation, then, would be the beginning of an answer, though it wasn’t quite so simple; call it a sense, instead, of the group—a need for, an acceptance of, the reassurance of the group (so that as the cities became irrelevant and slowly died, the clusters, suburbs, townships took their place; as half the world’s religions died the others moved all-at-once to reaffirm believers in their orthodoxy)…and Miss Annell, grimacing as she halted, saw without surprise or novelty how peculiarly hard to break was any habit of thought. Instance: this endless self-analysis, her inbuilt motion, so that no action could ever simply be itself, but all had interpretations interpolating, interacting, interfering…true, of course, since no action had meaning only in terms of a simplistic purpose, but still…

  “Details of a given fantasy,” and she shook off the preoccupation with…with whatever-it-was, firmly she told herself—and walked on, through the lobby, passing the knots of spectators whose backs were to her, flat-white flat-tap shoes clicking to the far right archway and efficiently, briskly, as if she had neither a thought in her head nor the need for one, beyond it toward the elevators hidden by the arch. The nearest set of doors handily slid open as she approached, and Miss Annell stepped inside, put her ID plate in the left-hand usual slot and punched Four. The elevator clicked twice, itself, shut its doors, popped the ID plate back up to her waiting hand. She put the plate in her reticule, blessedly without conscious thought. As the elevator carried her up she was trying to focus all of her mind on the patient, trying to adjust herself to his imagined needs, his imagined structures. And realizing at the same time that it was not enough to try, since (so well she knew this) black-space failure for the treatment, for the patient, for the team…she had to su
cceed, had to …failure for the team. For herself.

  And was brought back to analyzing that preoccupation of hers with survival, with the group, with death. All quite abnormal, in fact, and all, themselves, meaning something else, which was…

  The sentence had, for her, no end, suspended in it, she saw the elevator doors his open, and she clicked automatically out of that box and into a green-white corridor with no discernible odor at all; the place seemed very clean, which meant (for once an objective deduction, a checkable, consensually-validated deduction, she thought with great relief) that the Vacustat had been repaired since her departure. Thirty-six hours was long enough for a job of that sort, certainly, but it was never quite possible to tell what some doctor-in-charge was going to consider more important. At any rate, her whites would last through the day (if anything did, if she herself did…stop that) and, quite possibly, longer than that. Domed, tunnelled, neither the city cluster where she worked, nor the suburb in which she lived was a problem, but inside American Memorial Hospital a few patients could create a good deal of uncontrolled dirt.

  No…her mind was wandering. After all, she was on the fourth floor, where the problem of uncontrolled dirt was not going to arise. On an Active Therapy floor, perhaps—but not on Four. The patients on Four were physically very well controlled. So well controlled that no one could tell whether death might not wait behind a given door, a given acceptance…

  Well. Perhaps, then, the Vacustat hadn’t been repaired at all, and…

  What difference did it make?

  Standing in the corridor, she became eyeshut, trying to breathe herself at the same time back to (if not relaxation, not so high a hope on such a morning) at least efficiency, to calm. But her mind went back to the voice downstairs, to the listeners there.

  Of course she had known from the beginning what she was avoiding. Naming it, even in the darkness, was nevertheless slight relief. She had been hooked into the network before, as a nurse-in-training, but that had made her no more than an observer. And now she was going to join a full group. Dr. Herne had seemed quite sure of her; she was in no more danger than any other member—less, in all probability, since none of the others were first-timers and she would be watched, she knew, with great care throughout. But all that made matters, emotionally, no easier; her feelings might very well be silly but they remained her feelings. She could not, or she would not, push them under, pretend they were not happening. In that escape lay only the destruction of (she remembered) the “normal” world for her, the acceptance of some other, private, riven and dangerous existence. In quite a different position regarding any hospital…

  Well. They’d warned her about the fright—Dr. Heme and Dr. Tempar and Miss Moore, each in a different manner (clinically, awkwardly perhaps, lightly)—but she’d heard no more than words. The actual feeling was as always something else, something new. And there was, for her, for that time, no escape…

  Miss Annell said in a fairly quiet voice the single word: “No.” She opened her eyes and took one more breath and went down the bright green-white odorless corridor to the very end, where it angled left and showed her a long line of shut, translucent doors. Last walk, last mile…but she was not going to think about that any longer.

  She reminded herself—the others had all survived. The others had lived through a network treatment, perhaps a good many network treatments (Dr. Heme, for one, had, of necessity, a lengthy record)—they had all survived. And though her training told her (and lying in the bunks at night, wondering about the fate of an isolating, indifferent family left behind in some other cluster while she went on to that necessity, the help of others)—though training insisted that everyone changed, even as the patient changed, perhaps the shift was not noticeable; perhaps it was all to tire good. The others…

  But they could not stay in her mind, she thought about the patient, and her fear swelled instantly. So that she had to force herself to push the plate beside the door of Room 412 and as it irised open for her click tap-heeled in, letting the door squeeze shut with its faint, insistent whisper. She took a chair, sat, waited. There was no further place for her to go, not with her body.

  All the others looked up. Dr. Heme said at once in a deep slow voice, “We’ll take a little time to get ready.” She wanted to assure him that she was all right. But she was instead shaky, very shaky. She knew he could see that and she said nothing. One of the attendants—she didn’t even know the name of the attendants on Four, which was a terrifying fact out of all reason—began to move in behind her. The rest of the group was already wired and helmeted in but Dr. Herne said, with absolutely no effect of repetition, “Let’s give it a few minutes, shall we?”, and the attendant moved away, into her view again. The chair was very large and, she imagined, quite comfortable, as well, if you didn’t know what it was for. Dr. Heme asked her, “Do you want to take a brief visual?”

  She nodded; without speech, another attendant moved silently to the wall at her left and slapped a panel. The wall faded into its semitransparent state. In Room 413, Martin Cann lay in a suspensive liquid, already blocked for every sense but sight. His eyes were blankly opened under the surface of that foetal pool; the ceiling glowed with a faint warm light but he was not looking at it, or at anything in the room. His eyes were open and that was all. Detailed records on Martin Cann (she could think of the event in no other way) slipped into her mind; he was the patient, nothing else mattered. A few seconds had ticked by.

  “I’m ready now.” A perfectly even voice.

  “All right,” Dr. Heme said, almost casually. “We’ll take it slowly—no need to hurry here, after all. We’ll take it as slowly as we like.” And behind her the attendant was moving again. The one at the wall had readjusted it, she saw, and vision faded slowly; but she hadn’t even noticed. She had been thinking, instead, about Martin Cann. About…

  No. About her patient. A comforting difference; she would not allow herself to wonder whether or not the comfort was entire illusion.

  The attendant—he lowered the helmet, began to fix it in place. Miss Annell glanced down at the stopwatch she wore, quite small and plain, a graduation gift from Thomas, but Thomas had wanted…Thomas was back in the cluster and she had left…

  Never mind all that.

  Nine-fourteen. Dr. Heme (at the comer of her eye, when she looked up again) was smiling at her, firm, confident, experienced. And then for them all the light in Room 412 faded; she felt the first prick of the thirty wires. Nine-twenty and the lights were very low; she was entirely in the circuit. Nothing beyond the room visibility arrangement had been activated.

  The real world, the normal world. “Let’s have a little background,” Dr. Heme said, as calmly as if he were in the staff dining room. “The patient’s name is Martin Cann…

  TWO

  1

  And where had the dream begun, and in what place, for what reasons? Always now questions spun whirl-winding in the wind-full world; oh, he never minded that any more, never at all.

  There had been times through which he had survived, surrounded as he had been there by white walls, white faces, all the reaching noises, all tire smell and taste and balance of a world that was not his there (he remembered), there was a time—himself forced into speech, that slow old medium, that helpless hesitant hash of sound-why, words floated like shaking globes, shiverskin purple, wrinkled, in the air, each bursting to leave behind a mist. Danger, but that was not what he meant at all. Because tire white faces stared at him with expressions he was not to read; they shaped words of their own to shiver and burst leaving behind them—nothing at all. For he did not have to understand—that was a different time and the world was not his own. He might say long ago—if time really existed, though that was not his world either, but theirs—the clocks and schedules, the on-time, mealtime, pill-time world was theirs; and so perhaps, by contraries, there was in his world nothing to tick around him like a wall, to bar his passage and to raise up threats—long ago, perhaps, he had l
ived in their world; but he had known better than that. Even in the beginning; for words were old and slow, and all the other faces wore masks of death.

  It had sometimes occurred to him (if he had ever really had time) that the faces had bodies, that the bodies moved, the faces changed, in part-response to minds that thought and planned; but he knew, in such occurrence, the very voice of the adversary. Everything, after all, everything and all the spinning world was the adversary; he had proved that to himself, and he did not need to show it ever to anyone else. Because there was never to be anyone else? There were illusions, no more. No more. And though even an illusion might harm he was free, since in his own world he would be safe, in his fine endless world without words—without their silly ballooning eyes that stared, or the long reachy fingers that tried always and always to clutch and hold. He had thrown off the illusion in some illusionary past; he had not returned; he was getting better. The faces, the words, had told him that, once, but he had not believed. Some strange experience, some illusion of seconds flashing and gone, and he found that he wished to believe; that he wished to get from the faces, hands, bodies what he needed. Which was themselves, and all behind them. Which could be nothing less. Sooner or later…

  Well…sooner or later. But if time did not really exist? How if time did not really exist? And the old, old voice that said: “Martin, Marty, sit you up, look here,” and its echoes, all the booming unforgotten echoes (3Direction, inperson teacher, stranger met and friend demanded, work- ing-people, all)—those, too, had to be his. He had to own the illusions—that was the only method known to defeat the adversary, the only method (he told himself silently, bothering no more with the slow words which did not do any good) ever known. The adversary had even been in the voices. “Martin, Marty, sit you up, now be a good boy, you and I alone, grow big and strong, you, Marty, because…The very first of them, original for all the rest. The…