Beyond Bedlam Read online

  Beyond Bedlam

  Wyman Guin

  BEYOND BEDLAM

  by Wyman Gain

  THE OPENING afternoon class for Mary Walden's ego-shift

  was almost over, and Mary was practically certain the teacher

  would not call on her to recite her assignment, when Carl

  Blair got it into his mind to try to pass her a dirty note.

  Mary knew it would be a screamingly funny Ego-Shifting

  Room limerick and was about to reach for the note when

  Mrs. Harris's voice crackled through the room.

  "Carl Blair! I believe you have an important message.

  Surely you will want the whole class to hear it. Come forward,

  please."

  As he made his way before the class, the boy's blush-cov-

  ered freckles reappeared against his growing pallor. Halting-

  ly and in an agonized monotone, he recited from the note:

  "There was a young hyper named Phil,

  Who kept a third head for a thrill.

  Said he. It's all right,

  I enjoy my plight.

  I shift my third out when it's chill."'

  The class didn't dare laugh. Their eyes burned down at

  their laps in shame. Mary managed to throw Carl Blair a

  compassionate glance as he returned to his seat, but she in-

  stantly regretted ever having been kind to him.

  "Mary Walden, you seemed uncommonly interested in read-

  ing something just now. Perhaps you wouldn't mind reading

  your assignment to the class"

  There it was, and just when the class was almost over.

  Mary could have scratched Carl Blair. She clutched her paper

  grimly and strode to the front.

  "Today's assignment in Pharmacy History is, 'Schizophrenia

  since the Ancient Pre-pharmacy days.' " Mary took enough

  breath to get into the first paragraph.

  "Schizophrenia is where two or more personalities live m

  the same brain. The ancients of the 20th Century actually

  looked upon schizophrenia as a disease! Everyone felt it was

  very shameful to have a schizophrenic person in the family,

  and, since children lived right with the same parents who had

  borne them, it was very bad. If you were a schizophrenic

  child in the 20th Century, you would be locked up behind

  bars and people would call you"

  Mary blushed and stumbled over the daring word"crazy".

  "The ancients locked up strong ego groups right along with

  weak ones. Today we would lock up those ancient people."

  The class agreed silently.

  "But there were more and more schizophrenics to lock up.

  By 1950 the prisons and hospitals were so full of schizophren-

  ic people that the ancients did not have room left to lock

  up any more. They were beginning to see that soon everyone

  would be schizophrenic.

  "Of course, in the 20th Century, the schizophrenic people

  were almost as helpless and 'crazy' as the ancient Modern

  men. Naturally they did not fight wars and lead the silly life

  of the Moderns, but without proper drugs they couldn't con-

  trol their Ego-shiftability. The personalities in a brain would

  always be fighting each other. One personality would cut the

  body or hurt it or make it filthy, so that when the other

  personality took over the body, it would have to suffer. No,

  the schizophrenic people of the 20th Century were almost

  as 'crazy' as the ancient Moderns.

  "But then the drugs were invented one by one and the

  schizophrenic people of the 20th Century were freed of their

  troubles. With the drugs the personalities of each body were

  able to live side by side in harmony at last. It turned out that

  many schizophrenic people, called overendow6d personalities,

  simply had so many talents and viewpoints that it took two

  or more personalities to handle everything.

  "The drugs worked so well that the ancients had to let

  millions of schizophrenic people out from behind the bars of

  'crazy' houses. That was the Great Emancipation of the

  1990s. From then on, schizophrenic people had trouble only

  when they criminally didn't take their drugs. Usually, there

  are two egos in a schizophrenic personthe hyperalter, or

  prime ego, and the hypoalter, the alternate ego. There often

  were more than two, but the Medicorps makes us take our

  drugs so that won't happen to us.

  "At last someone realized that if everyone took the new

  drugs, the great wars would stop. At the World Congress of

  1997, laws were passed to make everyone take the drugs.

  There were many fights over this because some people want-

  ed to stay Modern and fight wars. The Medicorps was or-

  ganized and told to kill anyone who wouldn't take their

  drugs as prescribed. Now the laws are enforced and every-

  body takes the drugs and the hyperalter and hypoalter are

  each allowed to have the body for an ego-shift of five

  days...."

  Mary Walden faltered. She looked up at the faces of her

  classmates, started to turn to Mrs. Harris and felt the sickness

  growing in her head. Six great waves of crescendo silence

  washed through her. The silence swept away everything but

  the terror, which stood in her frail body like a shrieking rock.

  Mary heard Mrs. Harris hurry to the shining dispensary

  along one wall of the classroom and return to stand before

  her with a swab of antiseptic and a disposable syringe.

  Mrs. Harris helped her to a chair. A few minutes after the

  expert injection, Mary's mind struggled back from its core of

  silence.

  "Mary, dear, I'm sorry. I haven't been watching you closely

  enough."

  "Oh, Mrs. Harris..." Mary's chin trembled. "I hope it

  never happens again."

  "Now, child, we all have to go through these things when

  we're young. You're just a little slower than the others in

  acclimatizing to the drugs. You'll be fourteen soon and the

  medicop assures me you'll be over this sort of thing just as

  the others are."

  Mrs. Harris dismissed the class and when they had all

  filed from the room, she turned to Mary.

  "I think, dear, we should visit the clinic together, don't

  you?"

  "Yps, Mrs. Harris." Mary was not frightened now. She was

  just ashamed to be such a difficult child and so slow to ac-

  climatize to the drugs.

  As she and the teacher walked down the long corridor to

  the clinic, Mary made up her mind to tell the medicop what

  she thought was wrong. It was not herself. It was her hypoal-

  ter, that nasty little Susan Shorrs. Sometimes, when Susan had

  the body, the things Susan was doing and thinking came to

  Mary like what the ancients had called dreams, and Mary

  had never liked this secondary ego whom she could never

  really know. Whatever was wrong, it was Susan's doing. The

  filthy creature never took care of her hair, it was always so

  messy when Susan shifted the body to her.

 
; Mrs. Harris waited while Mary went into the clinic.

  Mary was glad to find Captain Thiel, the nice medicop, on

  duty. But she was silent while the X-rays were being taken,

  and, of course, while he got the blood samples, she concen-

  trated on being brave.

  Later, while Captain Thiel looked in her eyes with the bright

  little light, Mary said calmly, "Do you know my hypoalter,

  Susan Shorrs?"

  The medicop drew back and made some notes on a pad

  before answering. "Why, yes. She's in here quite often too."

  "Does she look like me?"

  "Not much. She's a very nice little girl..." He hesitated,

  visibly fumbling.

  Mary blurted, "Tell me truly, what's she like?"

  Captain Thiel gave her his nice smile. "Well, I'll tell you a

  secret if you keep it to yourself."

  "Oh, I promise."

  He leaned over and whispered in her ear and she liked

  the clean odour of him. "She's not nearly as pretty as you

  are."

  Mary wanted very badly to put her arms around him and

  hug him. Instead, wondering if Mrs. Harris, waiting outside,

  had heard, she drew back self-consciously and said, "Susan

  is the cause of all this trouble, the nasty little thing."

  "Oh now!" the medicop exclaimed. "I don't think so,

  Mary. She's in trouble, too, you know."

  "She still eats sauerkraut." Mary was defiant.

  "But what's wrong with that?"

  "You told her not to last year because it makes me sick on

  my shift. But it agrees in buckets with a little pig like her."

  The medicop took this seriously. He made a note on the

  pad. "Mary, you should have complained sooner."

  "Do you think my father might not like me because Susan

  Shorrs is my hypoalter?" she asked abruptly.

  "I hardly think so, Mary. After all, he doesn't even know

  her. He's never on her ego-shift."

  "A little bit," Mary said, and was immediately frightened.

  Captain Thiel glanced at her sharply. "What do you mean

  by that, child?"

  "Oh, nothing," Mary said hastily. "I just thought maybe

  he was."

  "Let me see your pharmacase," he said rather severely.

  Mary slipped the pharmacase off the belt at her waist and

  handed it to him. Captain Thiel extracted the prescription

  card from the back and threw it away. He slipped a new

  card in the taping machine on his desk and punched out a

  new prescription, which he reinserted in the pharmacase. In

  the space on the front, he wrote directions for Mary to take

  the drugs numbered from left to right.

  Mary watched his serious face and remembered that he

  had complimented her about being prettier than Susan. "Cap-

  tain Thiel, is your hypoalter as handsome as you are?"

  The young medicop emptied the remains of the old pre-

  scription from the pharmacase and took it to the dispensary

  in the corner, where he slid it into the filling slot. He

  seemed unmoved by her question and simply muttered,

  "Much handsomer."

  The machine automatically filled the case from the punched

  card on its back and he returned it to Mary. "Are you taking

  your drugs exactly as prescribed? You know there are very

  strict laws about that, and as soon as you are fourteen,

  you will be held to them."

  Mary nodded solemnly. Great strait-jackets, who didn't

  know there were laws about taking your drugs?

  There was a long pause and Mary knew she was sup-

  posed to leave. She wanted, though, to stay with Captain Thiel

  and talk with him. She wondered how it would be if he were

  appointed her father.

  Mary was not hurt that her shy compliment to him had

  gone unnoticed. She had only wanted something to talk about.

  Finally she said desperately, "Captain Thiel, how is it pos-

  sible for a body to change as much from one ego-shift to an-

  other as it does between Susan and me?"

  "There isn't all the change you imagine," he said. "Have

  you had your first physiology?"

  "Yes. I was very good..." Mary saw from his smile that

  her inadvertent little conceit had trapped her.

  "Then, Miss Mary Walden, how do you think it is possi-

  ble?"

  Why did teachers and medicops have to be this way?

  When all you wanted was to have them talk to you, they

  turned everything around and made you think.

  She quoted unhappily from her schoolbook, "The main

  things in an ego-shift are the two vegetative nervous systems

  that translate the conditions of either personality to the blood

  and other organs right from the brain. The vegetative nervous

  systems change the rate at which the liver burns or stores

  sugar and the rate at which the kidneys excrete..."

  Through the closed door to the other room, Mrs. Harris's

  voice raised at the visiophone said distinctly, "But, Mr.

  Walden..:'

  "Reabsorb," corrected Captain Thiel.

  "What?" She didn't know what to listen tothe medicop

  or the distant voice of Mrs. Harris.

  "It's better to think of the kidneys as reabsorbing salts

  and nutrients from the filtrated blood."

  "Oh."

  "But, Mr. Walden, we can overdo a good thing. The proper

  amount of neglect is definitely required for full development

  Of some personality types and Mary certainly is one of

  those...."

  "What about the pituitary gland that's attached to the brain

  and controls all the other glands during the shift of egos?"

  pressed Captain Thiel distractingly.

  "But, Mr. Walden, too much neglect at this critical point

  may cause another personality to split off and we can't have

  that. Adequate personalities are congenital. A new one now

  would only rob the present personalities. You are the ap-

  pointed parent of this child and the Board of Education will

  enforce your compliance with our diagnosis. . . ."

  Mary's mind leaped to a page in one of her childhood

  storybooks. It was an illustration of a little girl resting be-

  neath a great tree that overhung a brook. There were friend-

  ly little wild animals about. Mary could see the page clearly

  and she thought about it very hard instead of crying.

  "Aren't you interested any more, Mary?" Captain Thiel

  was looking at her strangely.

  The agitation in her voice was a surprise. "I have to get

  home. I have a lot of things to do."

  Outside, when Mrs. Harris seemed suddenly to realize that

  something was wrong, and delicately probed to find out

  whether her angry voice had been overheard, Mary said calm-

  ly and as if it didn't matter, "Was my father home when

  you called him before?"

  "Whyyes, Mary. But you mustn't pay any attention to

  conversations like that, darling."

  You can't force him to like me, she thought to herself, and

  she was angry with Mrs. Harris because now her father would

  only dislike her more.

  Neither her father nor her mother was home when Mary

  walked into the evening-darkened apartment. It was the first

  day of the family shift, and on that day,
for many periods

  now, they had not been home until late.

  Mary walked through the empty rooms, turning on lights.

  She passed up the electrically heated dinner her father had

  set out for her. Presently she found herself at the storage-

  room door. She opened it slowly.

  After hesitating a while she went in and began an ex-

  hausting search for the old storybook with the picture in it.

  Finally she knew she could not find it. She stood in the

  middle of the junk-filled room and begqn to cry.

  The day which ended for Mary Walden in lonely weeping

  should have been, for Conrad Manz, a pleasant rest day with

  an hour of rocket racing in the middle of it. Instead, he awak-

  ened with a shock to hear his wife actually talking while she

  was asleep.

  He stood over her bed and made certain that she was

  asleep. It was as though her mind thought it was somewhere

  else, doing something else. Vaguely he remembered that the

  ancients did something called dreaming while they slept and

  the thought made him shiver.

  Clara Manz was saying, "Oh, Bill, they'll catch us. We

  can't pretend any more unless we have drugs. Haven't we

  any drugs. Bill?"

  Then she was silent and lay still. Her breathing was shal-

  low and even in the dawn light her cheeks were deeply

  flushed against the blonde hair.

  Having just awakened, Conrad was on a very low drug

  level and the incident was unpleasantly disturbing. He picked

  up his pharmacase from beside his bed and made his way

  to the bathroom. He took his hypothalamic block and the

  integration enzymes and returned to the bedroom. Clara was

  still sleeping.

  She had been behaving oddly for some time, but there had

  never been anything as disturbing as this. He felt that he

  should call a medicop, but, of course, he didn't want to do

  anything that extreme. It was probably something with a sim-

  ple explanation. Clara was a little scatterbrained at times.

  Maybe she had forgotten to take her sleeping compound and

  that was what caused dreaming. The very word made his

  powerful body chill. But if she was neglecting to take any of

  her drugs and he called in a medicop, it would be serious.

  Conrad went into the library and found the Family Phar-

  macy. He switched on a light in the dawn-shrunken room

  and let his heavy frame into a chair. A Guide to Better Un-

  derstanding of Your Family Prescriptions. Official Edition,