(If none, write “none.”)

  (NB: If status is widowed or divorced, attach Schedule B-1.) Children (list name, age, and sex of each minor child now living. Put only one child per line and use only one line per child. If none, write “none,” If more space is needed, attach Schedule C-2.)

  _____________________________________________________________

  _____________________________________________________________

  _____________________________________________________________

  Other dependents…Religious preference (If none, write “Ecumenical.”)…Outstanding debts…

  Bailey raised his eyes.

  “But this is an application,” he said weakly. “I don’t have to fill it out, do I?”

  “I guess not,” the orderly said. “Only if you don’t, that proves you’re incapable and you get an automatic commitment.”

  Bailey wrote. Afterward he was finger-scanned and retinoscoped. “Yep, that’s him,” the orderly said. “You boys can go now.” He scribbled on a slip. “Your receipt.”

  “Thanks,” Joe said. “So long, Mac. See you in the nut bowl. Come on, Sam.” The detectives left.

  The orderly spoke on an intercom. “You’re in luck, Bailey,” he reported. “Dr. Vogelsang can see you right away. I’ve known ’em to wait for three days before a doctor is free. Gets kind of dull.”

  Bailey followed him out into the hall, as a man walks helplessly through a dream. But the office which he reached startled him back to alertness. It was like nothing he had met hitherto: fumed-oak paneling; deep rugs; a couple of tasteful Chinese scrolls; music, yes, by heaven, soft but absolutely the “Moonlight Sonata”; and the man behind the desk, small, white-haired, kindly featured, almost recklessly colorful in his garb. He rose to shake hands.

  “Welcome aboard, Mr. Bailey,” he smiled. “I’m so glad to meet you. That’ll be all, Roger.”

  “You don’t think he should be, uh, restrained?” the orderly asked.

  “Oh, no,” Dr. Vogelsang said. “Of course not.” When the door had closed and they were alone: “You must excuse him, Mr. Bailey. Frankly, he’s not too bright. But we have so big a job here, so much to do, we must manage with what personnel we can get. Please sit down. Cigarette? Or I have cigars here, if you prefer.”

  Bailey lowered himself into an extraordinarily comfortable chair. “I…I don’t smoke,” he said. “But if—a drink, maybe?…”

  Vogelsang astounded him with a laugh. “Why, sure! Excellent idea. Don’t mind if I do myself. The oldest tranquilizer, and still one of the best, eh? How about Scotch?” He used this intercom.

  Bailey couldn’t meet the twinkling eyes, but he did ask, “What got me brought here?”

  “Oh, various information. People who have your welfare at heart. They suggested we check on you. And, frankly, there were some rather disturbing things in your record. Things that should have been studied more closely a long time ago—and would have been, eventually, but as I said, we’re understaffed. We must depend to a large extent, as yet, on the patient himself, on his educated ability to recognize early symptoms, his educated willingness to come straight in for help.” Dr. Vogelsang beamed. “But please don’t imagine anyone is angry that you didn’t. We realize that you aren’t fully your own master at present. Our one desire is to cure you. You have a fine mind, intrinsically, you know, Mr. Bailey. Your IQ puts you in the upper five percent. Society needs minds like yours—minds liberated from guilts, terrors, metabolic imbalances, whatever makes them operate at less than half efficiency and makes the person so very unhappy—ah. Here we are.”

  A nurse came in with a tray. On the tray stood bottle, ice bucket, glasses, soda. She smiled on Bailey as warmly as her boss.

  “To your very good health,” Vogelsang toasted.

  “What…are you going to do?” Bailey dared say.

  “Why, nothing much. We’ll want to run a lot of diagnostic tests and so on before we decide on any course of action. Don’t worry. I’m convinced we’ll have you out of here before Christmas.”

  The Scotch was good. The talk was pleasant. Bailey wondered if rumor might not have exaggerated what went on in the Clinic.

  And, indeed, the first few days consisted of little more than interviews, multiphasic questionnaires, Rorschachs, narcosynthesis, laboratory studies—exhausting, often embarrassing, but in no way unendurable.

  However, then they decided he belonged in Ward Seven. That was for the seriously disturbed cases.

  In Ward Seven they tried shock, both insulin and electric. This reduced the notable IQ by a noticeable percentage. When that didn’t work they considered surgery, either prefrontal lobotomy or transorbital leucotomy. Since Bailey had by now met quite a few of the two-legged vegetables that resulted from such treatment, he screamed and tried to fight. He sobbed his gratitude when Dr. Vogelsang overruled the suggestion and ordered the new, somewhat experimental excitation therapy. For this, he was strapped down while a low-frequency current passed through his nerves. It was the ultimate pain. Dr. Vogelsang watched every minute.

  “Tsk, tsk,” he said after a week or two, and shook his white head. “No success, eh? Well, I’m afraid we can’t continue like this. But we must dissolve those bad thought patterns somehow, must we not? Your trouble doesn’t seem to be in your glandular chemistry, you know. Nothing that simple. We’ll use a few Pavlovian techniques and hope for the best.”

  Dream deprivation. Sleep deprivation. Cold. Heat. Hunger. Thirst. Ringing bells. Rewards when the proper thoughts were recited. Punishment when they were not. But the effects remained disappointing. At least, according to depth analysis they were; Bailey no longer knew what he believed. “Dear me, dear me,” Dr. Vogelsang said, “I’m afraid we must go one step further. The Pavlovians often get decisive results with castration.”

  Bailey leaped to attack him, but the choke-collar leash brought him up short. “You can’t do this to me!” he howled. “I’ve got my rights!”

  “Come now. Come now. Be reasonable. You know as well as I, the Supreme Court declared the Mental Health Act constitutional under the interstate commerce clause. Please don’t worry. The operation won’t hurt a bit. I’ll perform it myself. And of course, first we’ll deep-freeze some spermatozoa. You’ll want children after you’re cured. Every normal man does.”

  But that didn’t work either.

  “I don’t believe we should go further along these lines,” said gentle Dr. Vogelsang. “They do have their distressing aspects, don’t they? And in your case, for some reason they only seem to increase your basic hostility. I think we had better rebuild you.”

  “Rebuild?” Bailey’s mind groped through the haze that had lately enclosed it. “Wuh. Kill, me? You gonna kill me?”

  “Oh, no! No, no, no! Gossip is so distorted, no matter how hard we attempt to enlighten the public. True, rebuilding has replaced capital punishment. But that doesn’t mean you are a criminal. Rather, it means that the criminal is a sick man also, like you. We wouldn’t dream of going back to the barbaric waste of legalized murder.” Dr. Vogelsang grew quite indignant. “Especially in your case. You have a wonderful potential. It’s merely being held down by bad attitudes that, unfortunately, have become integral to your personality. So”—he glowed—“we start over again. Eh? A recent technique, but perfectly safe, perfectly reliable. Electrochemical treatment reverses the RNA formation which is the physical basis of memory. Every memory, every habit, every last bad, old engram goes. You start out clean, fresh, sparkling new. A tabula rasa on which experts will inscribe a different, sane, outgoing, friendly, adjusted, efficient personality! Won’t that be nice?”

  “Uh,” said Bailey. He wished they’d go away and let him sleep.

  But when at length he was boxed in the helmet, secured to a bed while drugs dripped into his veins, and the whine rose rose, rose, and he felt the departure of—

  —sundown purple on the East Bay hills; the first girl he had ever kissed, and the last; a curious old tavern, one summer when he was young and on a walking tour through England; white rush down a ski slope in the High Sierra; Shakespeare, Beethoven, Van Gogh; work, friends, father, mother, mother—

  —the animal instincts revived, and he screamed aloud in his agony of terror: “If this isn’t death, what is?”

  Then the last trace of what he had done with his genetic endowment, and what had been done to it, was scrubbed form him and he was dead.

  Death was a stormwind. It was as if he were blown, whirled cast up and down and up again, in a howl and a whistle and a noise of monstrous gallopings. He did now know whether the wind was searing him with cold or heat. Nor did he wonder about it, for the lightnings blinded his eyes and the thunders rattled his teeth.

  Eyes? flashed a moment’s startlement. Teeth? But I’m dead. They’ll use my body to make someone else. No, wait, that’s not right. They’ll cremate my body. I took voluntary euthanasia when I couldn’t endure my own misery any longer. No, I didn’t, either. I was wiped out of my own brain after they’d made me so miserable that it didn’t really matter.

  “Zero,” God counted, “one, ten, eleven, one hundred, one hundred ten.”

  Bailey grabbed for reality, any reality in the torrents of night. Dizziness sucked him through an infinite spiral. But the only reality was himself. He clutched that to him. I am Douglas Bailey, he thought against the devouring octopus. I am…I am…a sociologist. A madman. What else? I died twice, after two different horrible lives.

  Were there more? I can’t remember. The wind blows too hard.

  Wait. A glimpse. No, gone.

  “One thousand eleven,” counted God the Simulator, “one thousand one hundred, one thousand one hundred one, one thousand one hundred ten.”

  Why are You doing this to me? Bailey screamed. You’re as bad as they are. They killed me twice. Once with indifference. They called it freedom—freedom to choose death—but they didn’t care about us, except they hoped we would reduce our own numbers. They withdrew from us, established automatic social machinery to process us, did their best to forget us. And again they killed me with hate. It had to be hate, cruelty, death wish, no matter how much they talked of cure. What else? How can you take a human being and make an object(ive) of him, unless your real aim is to make him less than human—make him a thing that crawls at your feet—because you hate his humanity?

  “Ten thousand, ten thousand one, ten thousand ten, ten thousand eleven.” Space twisted back on itself and time split like the delta of the Styx. The wind blew and blew. My problem was real. I was suffering. I needed help and love.

  Click. The wind stopped. The darkness waited.

  Please, wept Douglas Bailey. Help me. Care about me. Give me your love.

  It was so.

  Fate the Third

  Having finished his bathroom business, he suddenly spread his legs and looked between them.

  Now why should I do that? he wondered. I’m all there. Of course.

  But not well, he reminded himself. Severe nervous breakdown, possible incipient schizophrenia. I was doing less rational things than this before they persuaded me to come here.

  Pulling his trousers up again, he stared into the mirror above the sink. The image was tall and broad-shouldered. He didn’t think Birdie Carol was lying to him when she praised his body, at least. It was deteriorating, though: too little exercise, too many drugs. He didn’t like that, but never got together the energy to do anything about it. And the face was shocking, waxy cheeks, sunken smudge-circled eyes, the dark hair unkempt.

  He had no way of measuring exactly his downhill progress. Few people did. The thing happened so gradually. But he knew that, after the brief euphoria that followed his admission to the hospital, he was getting worse fast. Mentally as well as physically—physically because mentally—he was in far poorer shape than when he entered.

  Which shouldn’t be. By every theory, it shouldn’t be.

  A tic in one eyelid. He turned from the spectacle. This made him confront the walls. They were pink, with painted teddy bears and hobby horses. He detested pink. “And I could do without kiddy pictures in the can, too.” he had grumbled.

  Birdie had patted his knee. They were side by side on the living-room couch. “I know, dear,” she said, “but Dr. Breed thinks it’s helpful in the long run. And frankly, I think he’s right.”

  “How so?”

  “Well, the idea is to re-create your childhood. That is, the love and trust and innocence you had then. I know that sounds silly, but a nursery motif ought to remind your poor subconscious of what it’s lost, and remind it that there’s a way back.”

  “What love and trust and innocence?” Bailey said. “I remember my childhood quite well, and it was perfectly typical. I was dragooned into school and loathed every minute. The neighborhood bully used to lie in wait for me on my way home and beat me up. But for some reason I never could tell my parents. Once or twice I read a ghost story, and lay awake every night for weeks, full of the horrors. My puppy was run over. I got caught at—”

  “Hush, darling.” She laid one large smooth hand across his hips and leaned close to him. The cologne she always wore smelled overpoweringly sweet. “I know. We mean an ideal childhood. You have to learn—deep, deep down inside—you have to learn how to love. And how to be loved. Then you’ll be well.”

  “Look,” he said, his exasperation growing geometrically, “supposed my trouble isn’t an autistic neurosis or whatever label you’ve hung on. Suppose it’s organic schizophrenia. What’s that got to do with this love you keep mooing about?”

  Birdie smiled with infinite patience. “Love is a basic requirement of the mammalian life form,” she said. “We are mammalian life forms.” Her build left no doubt of that. “Little babies in orphanages used to die because they weren’t cuddled. If you get some love, but not enough, you mature starved for it. The deficiency warps and weakens you as rickets would. What we are doing is giving you the love you need to become straight and strong.”

  He jumped to his feet. “I’ve heard that over and over till I’m ready to vomit!” he shouted. “What about true psychosis?”

  “Well, yes, I suppose that is a metabolic thing,” Birdie answered. “Or so that scientists believe. Though I think every such illness must also start because there wasn’t enough love. Don’t you think so?”

  “I—I—”

  “In any event,” she said, “schizophrenia amounts to a loss of communication with the outside world. We have no hope of a cure without reestablishing communication, have we? Just think, darling, and you’ll see I’m right. But love is the bridge across all gaps.”

  Bailey longed to reply with a swear word, preferably obscene. But those he could recall were too feeble. Birdie rose, tossed back her blonde hair, and unbuttoned her dress. “I think we should make love again,” she said briskly.

  He hadn’t much wanted to, but she urged him—and what the hell else was there to do—so they ended in the bedroom. Only this time he hadn’t been able to make anything happen. She was very sympathetic, cradled him in her arms and sang him to sleep. However, first he had needed a barbiturate.

  Maybe that recollection was what had now made him worry about—Nuts! Not a thing wrong with me in that department, except I’ve gotten so bloody fed up with—

  He left the bathroom. His suite was not large, but comfortable and pleasantly furnished. He prowled to the living-room window and looked out. It was barred, but only against possible sleepwalking, he had been assured. He had the entire freedom of the grounds. As soon as he got better, he could draw weekend passes. Meanwhile, any loved ones he wished could come here to visit him.

  The view, from this twentieth floor of the largest building in the Medical Center, was magnificent in its distances. Golden Gate Park spread green toward the ocean, which blazed with sunlight. He glimpsed the bridge that soared across the bay’s mouth, water glittering away to the hills of the eastern shore, gulls, boats, ships, aircraft. A breeze wandered in, cool, smelling of the sea, and brought a remote traffic sound.

  Too remote, though; too muted; and apart from the pride that was this hilltop complex, San Francisco showed decay, here a vacant store window, there a seedy tenement. Business was spiraling downward just like Douglas Bailey. As a sociologist, he had seen the data. No doubt existed, nor any reasonable doubt about the cause. If mental illness, at every level from mild eccentricity to complete insanity, was approaching epidemic proportions, and if the United States had assumed a national obligation to care for the victims as lavishly as was the case, the bill must be paid somehow. Between them, taxes and inflation were collecting it, with their usual side effects.

  He’d argued against the policy. He still would, he supposed, in spite of having become one of its beneficiaries. But the warnings of that tiny minority to which he belonged were so much spent air. Either people refused to believe the facts of economic life, or they looked at you wide-eyed and asked, “Do you mean anything could be more important than the well-being of the people we love?”

  Perhaps, he thought with brief and discouraged humor, the futility of his efforts had helped bring on the collapse that put him in here.

  Then the sense of being caged and baited rose in him till he had no other awareness. He smashed his fist against the window sill, again and again and again. “God damn God. God damn God. God damn God.” The chant gathered speed. “Goddamngod, goddamngod, goddamngod-goddamngod-goddamngod-goddamngod-goddamngod-goddamngod, WHOOOO, WHOO-OO, ch-ch-ch, ch-ch-ch, ch-chch—”

  “Duggie! What are you doing?”

  Bailey stopped. Very slowly he turned around. Birdie Carol’s plump figure filled the hall doorway. She carried a bouquet of buttercups. As always, her dress was civilian, rather flamboyant, with merely a pin to indicate that she was a psychiatric technician.

  He swallowed some of his rage, though he nearly strangled on it, and retorted, “I might ask you the same.”

  “Why, I came to see you.” She closed the door and bustled toward him. “Look, I’ve brought you flowers. You told me once you like buttercups. I love them, myself.”