Chapter I: Amnesiac!

Doctor Pollard, psychologist, seemed puzzled.

"This has happened before," he remarked.

"Too often," said the director of the laboratory.

Doctor Pollard nodded in silent agreement. He faced the well-dressed man seated asprawl in the chair before him and asked, "You have never heard of James Forrest Carroll?"

"No," said the other man.

"But you are James Forrest Carroll."

"No."

The laboratory director shrugged. "This is no place for me," he said. "If I can do anything--?"

"You can do nothing, Majors. As with the others this case is almost complete amnesia. Memory completely shot. Even the trained-in mode of speech is limited to guttural monosyllables and grunts."

John Majors shook his head, partly in pity and partly in sheer withdrawal at such a calamity.

"He was a brilliant man."

"If he follows the usual pattern, he'll never be brilliant again," Doctor Pollard continued. "From I.Q. one hundred and eighty down to about seventy. That's tough to take--for his friends and associates, that is. He'll be alone in the world until we can bring his knowledge up to the low I.Q. he owns now. He'll have to make new friends for his old ones will find him dull and he'll not understand them. His family--"

"No family."

"None? A healthy specimen like Carroll at thirty-three years? No wife, chick nor child? No relations at all."

"Uncles and cousins only," sighed John Majors.

The psychologist shook his head. "Women friends?"

"Several but few close enough."

"Could that be it?" mused the psychologist. Then he answered his own question by stating that the other cases were not devoid of spouse or close relation.

"I am about to abandon the study of the Lawson Radiation," said Majors seriously. "It's taken four of my top technicians in the last five years. This--affliction seems to follow a set course. It doesn't happen to people who have other jobs that I know of. Only those who are near the top in the Lawson Laboratory."

"It might be sheer frustration," offered Dr. Pollard. "I understand that the Lawson Radiation is about as well understood now as it was when discovered some thirty years ago."

"Just about," smiled Majors wearily. "However, you know as well as I that people going to work at the Lawson Laboratory are thoroughly checked to ascertain and certify that frustration will not drive them insane.

"Research is a study in frustration anyway, and most scientists are frustrated by the ever-present inability of getting something without having to give something else up for it."

"Perhaps I should check them every six months instead of every year," suggested the psychologist.

"Good idea if it can be done without arousing their fears."

"I see what you mean."

Majors took his hat from the rack and left the doctor's office. Pollard addressed the man in the chair again.

"You are James Forrest Carroll."

"No."

"I have proof."

"No."

"Remove your shirt."

"No."

This was getting nowhere. There had to be a question that could not be answered with a grunted monosyllable.

"Will you remove your shirt or shall I have it done by force?"

"Neither!"

That was better--technically.

"Why do you deny my right to prove your identity?"

This drew no answer at all.

"You deny my right because you know that you have your name, blood type, birth-date and scientific roster number tattooed on your chest below your armpit."

"No."

"But you have--and I know it because I've seen it."

"No."

"You cannot deny your other identification. The eye-retina pattern, the Bertillion, the fingerprints, the scalp-pattern?"

"No."

"I thought not," said the doctor triumphantly. "Now understand, Carroll. I am trying to help you. You are a brilliant man--"

"No." This was not modesty cropping up, but the same repeating of the basic negative reply.

"You are and have been. You will be once again after you stop fighting me and try to help. Why do you wish to fight me?"

* * * * *

Carroll stirred uneasily in his chair. "Pain," he said with a tremble of fear in his voice.

"Where is this pain?" asked the doctor gently.

"All over."

The doctor considered that. The same pattern again--a psychotic denial of identity and a fear of pain at the dimly-grasped concept of return. Pollard turned to the sheets of notes on his desk. James Forrest Carroll had been a brilliant theorist and excellent from the practical standpoint too.

Thirty-three years old and in perfect health, his enjoyment of life was basically sound and he was about as stable as any physicist in the long list of scientific and technical men known to the Solar System's scientists.

Yesterday he had been brilliant--working on a problem that had stumped the technicians for thirty years. Today he was not quite bright, denying his brilliance with a vicious refusal to help. He remembered nothing of his work, obviously.

"You know what the Lawson Radiation is?"

"No," came the instant reply but a slight twinge of pain-syndrome crossed his face.

"You do not want to remember because you think you will have to go back to the Lawson Lab?"

"I--don't know it--" faltered James Forrest Carroll. It was obviously a lie.

"If I promise that you will never be asked about it?"

"No," said Carroll uneasily. Then with the first burst of real intelligence he had shown since his stumbling body had been picked up by the Terran Police, Carroll added, "You cannot stop me from thinking about it."

"Then you do know it?"

Carroll relapsed instantly. "No," he said sullenly.

Dr. Pollard nodded. "Tomorrow?" he pleaded.

"Why?"

Pollard knew that the wish to aid Carroll would fall on deaf ears. Carroll did not care to be helped. There were other ways.

"Because I must do my job or I shall be released," said Pollard. "You must permit me to try, at least. Will you?"

"I--yes."

"Good. No one will know that I am not trying hard. But we'll make it look good?"

"Yes."

"Do you know where your home is?" asked Pollard with his mental fingers crossed.

"No."

Pollard sighed.

"Then you stay here. Miss Farragut will show you a quiet room where you can sleep. Tomorrow we'll find your home from the files. Then you can go home."

Pollard got out of there. He knew that Carroll would not leave--could not leave. He prescribed a husky sedative to be put in Carroll's last drink of water for the night and went home himself, his mind humming with speculation.

* * * * *

The conference was composed of Pollard, Majors, and most of the other key men in the Lawson Laboratory. Pollard spoke first.

"James Carroll is a victim of a rather deep-seated amnesia," he said. "Amnesia is, of course, a mechanism of the mind set up to avoid some bitter reality. In Carroll's case, not only is the amnesia passive--some warning agency in Carroll's amnesiac mind warns him that regaining his true identity will result in great pain.

"It is something concerned with his work. We'd like to know what about the study of the Lawson Radiation could produce such a painful reality."

"We all get a bit fed up at times," remarked Tom Jackwell. "It's heartbreaking to sit daily and try things that never do anything."

"We are like an aborigine, born on an isolated island three hundred yards in diameter who has just discovered that certain blackish rocks tend to attract one another and point north. Amusing for a time, but what is it good for and what ungodly mechanism causes it?" said Majors with a shrug.

"Just what is the latest theory on the Lawson Radiation?" asked Pollard.

"You guess," said John Majors ruefully. "We've had too many theories already. The Lawson Radiation is a strange creation out of Boötes by Arcturus, and borne like Zephyr on the wind.

"Certain elemental minerals, when in contact with other minerals, produce a pulsing radiofrequency current which can be detected after more amplification than the human mind can contemplate sensibly.

"The frequency output depends upon the type of minerals used, and it is completely random so far as any consistent pattern goes. Some elemental minerals are no good, some are excellent."

"You've made determinant charts?"

"Naturally. But there's no determinant. After I said elemental minerals, I should have said that this was the original premise. Now we have a detector working with helium gas surrounding a block of lead bromide.

"Lead and helium are no good, helium and bromine equally poor. Lead and bromide are no good--as long as it lasts. Now don't ask me if the combination of the elements interferes. One good detector operates so wonderfully all the time, that a bit of yellow phosphorus is forming phosphorus pentoxid because it is suspended in an atmosphere of pure oxygen."

"No apparent determining factors, hey?"

"None. You might as well pick out the elements with six-letter names. The periodic chart looks like the scatter-pattern of an open-choke shotgun. Water works fine when it is contained in a glass vessel, but in anything else we know of--no dice."

"You seem to have covered a multitude of things," said Dr. Pollard approvingly.

"We've had a corps of brilliant, imaginative technicians working on the theory and practise for thirty years. Every one of them has come up with a number of elemental detecting combinations. We're now working on four and five element permutations.

"With and without plain and complex electrostatic and magnetic fields--and mixtures of both. We've gone logically as far as we can under a system that demands that we try everything. In each set of permutations, we cover all. You know our motto."

Majors finished with a slight laugh. He pointed to the end of the conference room, where, lettered on the wall above the blackboard was--

LEAVE NO TURN UNSTONED!

"Where does it come from?" asked Pollard innocently.

"Take a fifteen-degree angle from the middle of Boötes. Maybe Arcturus for all we know. Somewhere within fifteen degrees of an arbitrary point up there. A total conic solid angle of thirty degrees will encompass all but wisps of the stuff that filter through once in a year or so."

"And the velocity of propagation?"

"That's the simplest thing to check. The pulses from the Lawson Radiation follow random patterns. A segment printed along a time-scale can be matched to another segment of the same radiation taken from the other side of the solar system.

"It's never perfect enough to do more than approximate the answer, but we've got to get a lot more dispersion than the breadth of the orbit of the planet Pluto before we can detect any time-delay--and if we go too far the synchronization of our test equipment gets more and more difficult. You guess."

Pollard thought for a moment. "I can't hope to know all the angles," he said. "This is sufficient until I have to know more about it. Now tell me what might drive a man into instability?"

"You tell us," laughed Majors shortly. His laugh was not genuine for he felt the loss of Carroll deeply.

"Is there any insoluble dilemma in this at all?"

"Not that we know of."

Pollard nodded. "People are always confronted with insoluble dilemmas of one sort or another, but most of them could be avoided entirely by a slight change in personal attitude. The man who cannot get a job because of inexperience, and can get no experience for lack of job is in an insoluble dilemma.

"But it is usually resolved before the subject gets too deeply involved with his whirly. Someone always turns up needing some sort of help at any cost, and that gives the required experience which can be magnified by the applicant.

"Is it safe to assume that all of these four people who have turned up with the same affliction might have turned up with some terrific answer that drove them into a tizzy?" asked Pollard.

"Who knows?" grumbled Majors irritably. "Might be."

"What sort of answer would drive a man insane?" asked Jackwell. "If a man is seeking an answer to a specific question, and he has no penalty for not answering, what then?"

* * * * *

Majors wrinkled his forehead. "If the answer meant danger--of any sort?"

"No," said Pollard positively. "If it were social danger he would call for aid and tell the authorities. If it were personal danger, he'd run, and use his mind to avoid it."

"And if it could not be averted?"

Pollard still shook his head. "Men of Carroll's stability do not go insane when faced with personal danger or even certain death. How about his notes?"

"Nothing in them that seems out of line," said Majors. "Just the same 'no effect' or 'no improvement' conclusions."

"See here," said Pollard. "Do you have to use these improved detectors on the natural radiation?"

"Of course," said Majors. "We don't know what the Lawson Radiation is, and therefore we have no way of simulating it in our lab. What has us stumped is that the detectors go on detecting Lawson Effects while they're sitting on a fission-pile with no increase in noise-level or signal." Majors smiled unhappily.

"That is, they do until the nuclear bombardment transmutes one of the detector-elements into another one that is ineffective. So far nothing we can pour into any of them will result in an indication."

Dr. Pollard shook his head. "This has been of some help," he said. "But the big job of gaining his confidence and bringing him back is still ahead of me. I think this will be all for now. May I count on your co-operation again?"

"Any time," said Majors. "We need Carroll--which is quite aside from the fact that we all like him and it hurts to see him as he is now."

The conference broke up, and Dr. Pollard left the Lawson Laboratory and headed slowly toward the hospital where James Carroll was still sleeping.

He was praying for a miracle. A mere human, he felt ignorant, helpless, blind against the sheer disinterest that emanated from Carroll's blacked-out intelligence. Not so much for the problem of the Lawson Radiation would Pollard like to bring James Carroll back to himself as for the benefit of the man--and mankind--for Carroll had been a definite asset.

And then Pollard stopped thinking on the subject, for he found himself rolling around in a tight circle in the problem. Did he want Carroll or did he want to find out what Carroll had learned that drove him crazy?

To bring him back to full usefulness--that was admitting that his interest was as much for the benefit of science as for the man. Science in Carroll's case meant years and years of intense study of that one particular field.

He was rationalizing, he knew, and he went further by admitting that bringing Carroll back to full intelligence again meant that, unless the man regained his ability to remember and work on the Lawson Radiation, his return was incomplete. Would he bring Carroll back--only to have the man return to this rare state of amnesia at the first touch of something--and who knew what?

Pollard closed his mind and returned to the hospital.

But the days passed with no hope. Carroll was forced to admit his identity and that was all. His mind meticulously avoided any contact with the Lawson Radiation. In fact, any minor gains Pollard made were lost instantly when any phase of Carroll's former studies was mentioned.

Eventually James Carroll went home. Pollard could keep him there no longer. The former physicist returned daily, and Pollard helped the man to make plans for the future. That hurt deeply, for Pollard had to sit there, helpless to do anything about the man's lack of intellect.

Things that a normal man would take for granted in his daily life Pollard had to outline in detail as planning. Luckily Carroll had financial independence--or unluckily, perhaps, for maybe a job of some sort might have been good therapy.

The trouble was that Pollard could not make his own mental adjustment to see the former, very brilliant James Forrest Carroll working for a pittance by digging ditches or slogging away his life in a menial job.

As the days grew into weeks the pattern of Carroll's new life became fixed in the man's mind and he found it unnecessary to return daily to the hospital for advice.

And Dr. Pollard gave up, himself a fine case of frustration.