Card Sharks by George R. R. Martin
"Yes, I know," she said.
"A mathematician named Stan Ulam cracked the equations for Teller. Speaking of mathematicians, did you know that Tom Lehrer was a Manhattan Project mathematician? He wrote some great songs -"
"What happened when you got to Dr. Rudo's office?"
"Right," he responded. "Like I said, it was raining, and this trench coat I had on was dripping wet when I came into his reception area, and there was a pretty oriental rug on the floor. Looked as if it had silk in it, even. The receptionist hurried around her desk to help me, saying she'd hang it in their rest room rather than have it on a brass coat tree near the door which looked as if it held her own coat as well as the doctor's.
"I reached out and caught hold of all the water on the coat and the rug with my mind, and I removed it. I wasn't sure what to do with it then, so I held it in between places. You know what I'm talking about? You hear about Aces and Jokers who can teleport things - I've had the power a number of times myself - making things disappear in one place and reappear in another without seeming to pass through intervening space. But did you ever wonder where something is when it's in between places? I think about things like that a lot. Now, I wasn't sure of my range yet - though it seemed I could send smaller objects farther off than larger ones - and I wasn't sure how much water I'd just picked up, so I couldn't say for certain that I could send it all outside his sixth-floor window and let it fall down onto Park. I had been experimenting this time, though, with hiding things in between places - at first just to see whether it could be done - and I learned that it could. I'd learned that I could make things disappear in one place and not appear in another for a while - though I felt a kind of pressure in my mind and body while I was doing it. So I just held my water and smiled.
"'No need,' I told her. 'See? It's okay.'
"She stared at the thing as if it were alive, even running a hand over it, to make sure. Then she hung it on the tree.
"'Won't you have a seat for a moment, Mr. Crenson?' she said. 'I'll let Dr. Rudo know you're here.'
"She moved toward the intercom on her desk, and I was about to ask her where that rest room was - so I could get rid of my water - when an inner door opened and Dr. Rudo came into the reception area. He was a six-footer, blond and blue-eyed, who put on a professional smile and extended his hand as he came up to me.
"'Mr. Crenson,' he said. 'It is good to meet you. I am Pan Rudo. Won't you come into my office?' His voice was rich and resonant, his teeth very white.
"'Thanks,' I said.
"He held the door for me and I entered the next room. It was brighter than I'd thought it might be, with a few pastoral watercolors bearing his signature and architectural etchings signed by others on the walls, another oriental rug on the floor, lots of reds and blues in it. A large aquarium occupied a table to the left of the door, bright fish darting and drifting within it, a chain of bubbles along a rear corner.
"'Have a seat,' he told me, his speech slightly accented - German, and maybe something else - and he gestured toward a big, comfortable-looking leather chair facing his desk.
"I took the chair. He moved around the desk and seated himself. He smiled again, picking up a pencil and rolling it between his hands.
"'Everybody who comes here has problems,' he began, maintaining eye-contact.
"I nodded.
"'I'm no exception, I guess,' I told him. 'It's hard to know how to begin, though.'
"'There are certain broad categories most people's probblems fall into,' he said. 'Family, the people you work with....'
"'No problems there,' I said. The pressure of holding the water was bothering me, and I looked around for a suitable container into which I might deposit it. A metal wastebasket would have been fine, but I couldn't see one anywhere about.
"'Money? Sex?' he suggested.
"'No, I've got plenty of money, and I get laid pretty regular,' I said, wondering whether I could move it beyond his window and let it go. Only, it was even farther away than the one in the reception area.
"I shifted in the chair and checked out the other side of the room.
"'Mr. Crenson, is something bothering you - I mean something physical - right now?' he asked.
"'Yeah, I admitted, 'I'm having trouble holding my water.'
"'There is a rest room outside,' he said, beginning to rise. 'I'll show you -'
"'Not that way. I mean, like this water is sort of - in my head, I guess.'
"He froze. He stared at me.
"'I'm afraid I don't understand exactly what you mean,' he said then. 'Water - in your head?'
"I grinned.
"'Well, yes and no; I said. 'I was speaking sort of - figuratively. I mean, there's this water from my coat and I'm holding it with my mind and it's getting to be sort of a strain. So I should put it somewhere. Maybe I will just take it to that rest room and dump it there, if you'll show me -'
"'Mr. Crenson, do you know what a defense mechanism is?' he asked.
"'Sure, I've been doing my homework. It's something you do or say or think to keep from doing or saying or thinking something else you really want to but for some reason are afraid to. Oh, you think that's what this is. No, it's real water, and I'm carrying it and can make it be anywhere I want it to be inside of about a ten-foot radius from where I am right now - I think.'
"He smiled.
"'Then why don't you deposit it in the fish tank?' he said. 'And we can get on with our conversation.'
"'That's not a bad idea,' I said. 'It's pretty full, though.'
"'That's all right,' he said.
"So I moved the water into the tank. Immediately, the thing overflowed. Dr. Rudo's eyes widened as he watched the water run down the sides and spill onto the floor. Then he gave me a strange look and reached out and worked his intercom.
"'Mrs. Weiler, would you come in here a moment?' he said. 'And bring a mop and a pail? We've had a small accident. Thank you.'
"Then he lowered himself back into his chair and studied me for several seconds.
Perhaps you should begin by telling me how you did what you just did,' he said.
"'It's kind of long and involved,' I said. 'On the other hand. It's also the cause of the problem I came to see you about.'
"Take your time,' he told me.
"'It was back in September of '46,' I began, 'the day Jetboy died....'
"Mrs. Weiler came in a couple of minutes later and was about to mop the wet area. I beat her to it and transported it all from the floor into the bucket. She stepped back and stared after the splash occurred.
"'Just take it away,' Dr. Rudo told her. 'Then phone everyone who has an appointment this afternoon. Cancel all of them.
"'Go ahead, Mr. Crenson, the whole story, please,' he said then, after she'd left.
"So I told him what it was like, and the thing that made my case different from all the others - how I fear sleeping more than anything else, and the things I do to postpone it. He questioned me at great length about the sleeping; and that was the first time I can remember hearing the word dauerschlaf. He seemed taken by my case and its parallels to an experimental European therapy technique he'd apparently once had something to do with. Also, as it turned out, he had heard of my case; and from the way he quoted medical journals, it seemed he'd read every important paper published on the wild card virus.
"I talked all afternoon. I told him about my family and old Bentley and the second-story work I used to do. I told him about my transformations, about my friends, about some of the scrapes I'd been involved in. I found myself starting to like the guy. I'd never really talked that way to anybody before. He seemed fascinated by the jokers and aces, by the different manifestations of the wild card virus I'd seen. Got me to talking about them at some length, shaking his head at my descriptions of some of the worst joker cases I've known. Even got into a long philosophical discussion with me as to what I thought it might be doing to the whole human race. I told him that not too many nats dated jokers, if it was
"Most of all, he seemed fascinated by my long sleeps - my dauerschlafen - and the way they pulled me apart and put me back together again. He questioned me about them at great length - how I felt going into them, coming out of them, whether I remembered anything that happened during them, whether I had any dreams while they were in progress. Then he told me about dauerschlaf as a form of therapy, of how his earlier work in Europe had involved the production of prolonged comas in non-wild card patients, by means of drugs and hypnosis, to capitalize on the remarkable recuperative abilities of the body and mind during sleep. He'd apparently gotten some very positive results with this, which was one of the reasons he found my case intriguing. The parallel struck him so forcibly, he said, that he would want to pursue the matter for that reason alone, even if he couldn't do more than adjust my feelings otherwise. But he felt that it could also be the means for doing even more for me."
Croyd finished his beer, fetched a second bottle and opened it.
"Mr. Crenson," Hannah Davis stated, and he met her eyes, "your tail seems to have developed wandering hands."
"Sorry," he said. "Sometimes it has a mind of its own."
The tiger-striped appendage emerged from beneath the table to lash behind him. Croyd took a drink.
"So the man represented himself as being able to cure your wild card condition?" she said.
"No," Croyd replied. "He never said that he could cure it. What he proposed later was something different - a rather ingenious-sounding way of stabilizing it in a fashion that I'd no longer need to fear going to sleep."
"Of course he was a fraud," she said. "He took your money and he got your hopes up and then he couldn't deliver. Right?"
"Wrong," Croyd said. "He knew what he was talking about, and he was able to deliver. That wasn't the problem."
"Wait a minute," she said. "It would have made world headlines if someone had found a way to mitigate wild card effects. Tachyon would've picked up on it and been distributing it on street corners. If it worked, how come no one ever heard about it?"
Croyd raised his hand, and his tail.
"Bear with me. If it were simpler, I'd be done talking," he said. "Excuse me."
He was gone. A man-sized form flashed past the bar at the corner of her seeing. She heard a door open and close. When she looked toward the sound, there was no one in sight. A moment later, however, a shadow flashed by and Croyd was seated before her again, sipping his beer.
"Rapid metabolism," he explained.
"Pan Rudo," he continued then, as if there had been no interruption, "seemed quite taken with my story. I talked all afternoon, and he took pages and pages of notes. Every now and then he'd ask me a question. Later, Mrs. Weiler knocked on the door and told him it was quitting time and asked whether he wanted her to lock the office door when she left. He said no, he'd do it in a few minutes. Then he offered to take me to dinner and I took him up on it.
"We went out then and had a few steaks - he was surprised at my metabolism, too - and we continued to talk through dinner. Afterwards, we went to his apartment - a very nice pad - and talked some more, until fairly late. He'd learned my story by then, and a lot of other things I don't usually talk about, too."
"What do you mean?" she asked.
"Well," Croyd said, "then, and in the days that followed, he told me about some of the more popular psychological theories. He'd even known the people who'd developed them. He'd studied with Freud for a while, and later at the Jungian Institute in Switzerland at the same time he was doing dauerschlaf research there. He told me about Freud's ideas on infantile sexuality, stages of development, sublimation, about ids and egos and superegos. And about Adler's drive to power and Rank's birth trauma. He talked about Jung's personality types and his theory of individuation. He said he felt that they all had something to them, some more for some people than others, or at different times in a person's life. He said that he was more interested in the final forms that these things took, in the emotional constructions they led to for a person's dealing with life. He felt that life is a compromise between what you want and what you get, and that there's always fear involved in the transaction - and it doesn't matter which of all the classical sources it springs from, it's just something that's always there. He said that we tell ourselves lies in order to deal with it - lies about the world, lies about ourselves. He had this idea, actually, from the playwright Ibsen, who called the big one - the big phony construct about yourself and the world - a 'life lie.' Rudo felt that everybody has one of these, and that it was just a matter of the degree of its falseness that made the difference between psychosis and neurosis. He told me that his whole approach to problems that weren't organic involved finding out a person's life lie and manipulating it so the patient can come to better terms with reality. Not to get rid of it. He said that some kind of life lie is necessary. Break it or tamper too deeply and you damage the personality, maybe drive the person completely nuts. He looked on therapy as a means of economizing the lie for better accommodation to the world."
Croyd paused for a drink.
"It sounds very manipulative," Hannah said, "and it seems as if it puts the therapist in a kind of godlike position. You help this guy find the key to your personality, then he goes in, looks around, and decides what to throw away, what to keep, what to remodel."
"Yeah, I guess it does, Croyd said, "when you put it that way."
"Granting that this approach is effective, it looks as if even a well-meaning adjustment might sometimes cause some damage - not even considering the possibility of willful abuse. Is that what he did to you? Mess with your self-image and your world-view?"
"Not exactly," Croyd said. "Not intentionally or directly. He explained that he did want to explore my life lie because he had to know my fears, because they would relate directly to what he had in mind for stabilizing my condition at a level I'd find emotionally satisfying."
"You did pick up the jargon, didn't you?"
"Well, I was reading a lot in the area the whole time he was working with me. I guess everyone does that."
He took another drink of beer.
"Are you stalling now?" she said. "Because you don't want to talk about those fears? If they're not essential to the story you can leave them out, you know."
"I guess I am," he acknowledged. "But I'd probably better mention them, for the sake of completeness. I don't know how much you know about me...."
"Mark Meadows told me a few things about you. But there were a lot of gaps. You sleep a lot. You lie low lot -"
He shook his head.
"Not that kind of stuff," he said. "See, I'd thought of seeing a shrink for some time before I actually did. I guess I read a lot more in the area than I really let on - not just self-help books - some fairly heavy-duty stuff. There were two reasons for this. One is that I know what it feels like to be nuts - really out of your mind. I do it to myself regularly with amphetamines, because I'm afraid to go to sleep. And I usually wind up pushing it too far, and I can remember some of the crazy things and some of the terrible things I did when my thinking and my feelings were all screwed up. So I know what psychosis feels like, and I fear that almost as much as I do sleeping."
He laughed.
"'Almost,'" he said. "Because they're really tied up together. Rudo showed me that, and I guess I owe him for the insight, if nothing else."
"I don't understand," she said, after he'd risen and stood staring out at a sudden rainfall for at least half a minute.
"My mother went crazy," he said then, "after the wild
"Wouldn't it have been better just to sleep then?" Hannah asked. "After all, it was going to happen anyway."
Croyd turned and he was smiling.
"That's the same thing Rudo asked me," he said, and he walked slowly back to the table.
"I didn't know the answer then," he continued, "but he helped me to find it. It's a part of my life lie." He seated himself and folded his hands before him. "The way I came to see it, sleep for me represents a big unknown change. In a way, it's like death, and all of my normal death-fears are attached to it. But there's more to it than that. Rudo made me look into it deeply and I saw that my fear of insanity is also there. I always know that I'll be changed, and at some primitive level of my mind I fear that I'll wake up psychotic, like her, and it'll never go away. I saw her change too much."
He laughed then.
"Ironic," he said, "the way we make these stories we're always telling ourselves work. In a way, I drive myself crazy regularly to keep from going crazy. That's one of my places of irrationality. Everybody's got them."
"I'd think that once a therapist discovered that his first order of business would be to try to get rid of it."
Croyd nodded.
"Rudo told me that that's what most of them would try to do. But he wasn't at all certain but that it might be serving just that function - keeping me sane in the long run."
She shook her head.
"You've lost me," she said.
"Understandable. This part doesn't apply to nats. It has only to do with manifestations of the wild card virus. Rudo, as I said, had read all of the literature on the virus. He'd been impressed by certain conjectures based on anecdotal evidence, since there was no way of running controlled studies on them, due to the effect that there is a psychosomatic component to the virus's manifestation. Like, there was once a kid - we called him Kid Dinosaur - who'd loved dinosaur books. He came up with the ability to turn himself into kid-sized replicas of different dinosaurs. And there's Hits Mack, a panhandler I know who can go up to any vending machine, hit it once and have it deliver him anything he wants from its display. That's all. It's the simplest wild card ability I know. Takes care of his meals and allows him to devote a hundred percent of his panhandling income to booze. He once told me that something like that had been a daydream of his for years. Lives on Twinkies and Fritos and stale chocolate bars. Happy man.