Time Travel Omnibus, page 591
Yonah fought bitterly with me when I first suggested my new therapy. He had no objection—timid obscurantist that he is—to deep sleep: that was “respectable.” But using the computer to program a pattern of subliminal hypnotherapy was heresy—it did not bear the imprimatur of the blind performing seals squatting at the apex of his Freudian pyramid. I was using the girl as a “guinea pig,” he told me. (As if he and his Viennese phallic-philes hadn’t made the entire human race their collective guinea pig since 1910!)
Fortunately, the shreds of my reputation still hold some authority, and Zirin overruled Yonah’s objections. Poor old Zirin! He’s never forgiven himself for that.
Since Miriam was already in a pseudo-trance state it was necessary to hypnotize her through sleep. The hypno-therapy technique involved is relatively simple. Miriam was drugged into deep sleep and fed intravenously while an encephalograph charted her brain patterns and an electrocardiogram registered her heartbeat. Our computer was programmed with as much information about her early life as the hospital records gave me—as it was, not nearly enough—and on the basis of this data it dictated the most effective hypnotic instructions, which I then transcribed on tape. Miriam’s entire bed—pillow, mattress, everything—was wired for sound, murmuring at an almost inaudible level. Day after day, night after night, the tape decks urged her to travel back, back to the moment of the trauma with her uncle. Her bed was one huge electronic voice, exerting a constant hypnotic command, whispering her down the corridors of time, gently guiding her subconscious back to the point of confrontation.
There are two kinds of age regression. In one, the subject merely recalls a past event from his memory. In the other, known as total regression or abreaction, he actually relives the experience and suffers through the emotional trauma once again. If a subject is induced back to childhood, he will speak with the voice of a five-year-old, and even his handwriting is that of a child. He is not remembering, he is being again.
As the tapes purred their insistent message, Miriam struggled—the encephalograph registered that as clearly as the eye notes convulsions—but slowly, inexorably, the subliminal instructions took hold, and the machine hypnotized its human subject.
It was on the third night that Zvi raced into my office with the news. The encephalograph had gone suddenly dead at 3:35 A.M.—just as the brain pulses reached a crescendo. I raced into her room. The fool should have called me as soon as the count increased, since there was good reason to believe a mounting wave pattern indicates surrender to the therapy suggestion. Miriam had finally relived the moment of rape and, hopefully, faced her trauma. Anxiously, I registered her pulse, and for a moment I froze. It was gone. I checked the heartbeat, and the silence blasted me with ice. She had slipped away. Had the shock of confrontation stopped her heart?
As if in answer, a hot stabbing pain shot through my arm and shoulder, and my chest pulsed with the familiar icy ache. I fumbled in my pocket for the nitro, somehow managed to get two tablets into my mouth, and then a black screen shimmered across my eyes. Dimly, as I fell into nothingness, I could see Rachel’s face, shadowy and distorted, mirrored in Miriam’s death mask.
When I returned to consciousness, Zvi was supporting me, his eyes anxious, torn between his duties to the patient and his fears for me.
“Doctor, I’ll call Yaacov, you must rest. . . .”
I pushed him aside roughly.
“See to the girl.” The words were faint, and I braced myself against an examination table. The pain was receding, replaced by a cold tingling glow, a frozen peace. Zvi regarded me uncertainly, then returned to Miriam’s side. After a moment he turned to me.
“Doctor, I think . . . .” The words were strangled. “She’s come back. . . .”
I just stood there numbly incapable of action or even coherent thought, until Zvi led me gently towards the encephalograph. Slowly, spasmodically, the pulses were beginning to register again. There was a strange, long elliptical stasis between each beat, but the brain was functioning. I returned to the bed and checked her pulse and heartbeat again. They were slow, laborious, but they were there! I almost sobbed with relief, then pulled myself together, and seized by a sudden wild surge of hope, ordered Zvi to immediately disconnect the hypno-therapy tapes. As he did so, I watched Miriam anxiously. I had never even prayed for such an instantaneous change! Color was flowing into her cheeks, and the blank, catatonic mold of her face was crumbling into folds of expression. I gave her fifty milligrams of bemegride intravenously to break the sleep trance and awaited the results tensely. Slowly, her eyelids spasmed open and her eyes looked into time. No longer empty, dead, but large, frightened—and alive! She tried to speak but her voice crackled dryly. I stroked her forehead and spoke some soothing gibberish. At that point, of course, I should have given her a sedative and returned her to sleep. But I could not. I stood there unable to move, watching this wonderful, mobile face swim into being, like a rose blooming out of the pitted face of a rock. My own momentary mortality was forgotten. I had succeeded!
For the first time Miriam spoke to me. Her voice was harsh, labored, rusty from disuse. I could not understand the Arabic words.
Zvi motioned impatiently, and I snapped out of my spell and put her out with a shot of sodium amytal. I left the room like a man in a trance and walked on jerky legs to my office where I collapsed, drained, behind my desk.
Lovingly, I held Miriam’s file in my hands. I could not know until the next day the full dimensions of my success, but the girl was no longer withdrawn, catatonic. That much had been accomplished. Long months of work lay ahead to condition Miriam to face a world she had left for eight years, but the main battle was won. In the same moment, we had both nearly died, and now the victory had resurrected me as well as Miriam. I reached for my pen and then stopped, looking at the white pages before me.
I still don’t know what it was that first caught my eye, but later I realized it must have been the length of the first page. Before, I was sure, there had been three sparse paragraphs of biographical material (how often I had lamented their brevity as I programmed the computer), but now, inexplicably, there was a fourth. I read it over slowly, the import not registering at first. The paragraph said simply that Miriam’s uncle had been found dead, his throat cut, immediately after the rape incident. An apparent suicide, the report concluded. The words tore into my mind like arrows, and I groped for the appended probation report on the man. This was some kind of weird mistake. I had investigated the uncle’s case carefully; he was sentenced to two years imprisonment for his crime and after his release in 1953 had worked as a construction hand at Eilat. I had been unable to trace him beyond that point. What possible meaning could this reference to his death have? And why had my eyes never detected it before tonight?
I calmed myself. This was ridiculous, merely some bureaucratic error I had overlooked in my previous examinations of the file. I looked for the probation report, and the results of the inquiries by the Eilat police. They were not there. I extracted every page of the file and examined it singly, but the probation report was nowhere in evidence. And yet I had reread it just the night before and carefully returned it to the folder. Unwillingly, my eyes drifted to the fourth paragraph on the first page. “Dead . . . throat cut . . . apparent suicide . . . .” This was impossible! My triumph was draining away, perhaps my sanity as well. What was happening to me? I knew this file like my own right hand; someone must have altered it since the night before. But who? And why? For no reason, my mind raced back to Miriam’s room and the blank encephalograph. I didn’t know it then, but a part of my brain had already glimpsed the truth.
The next morning, after a feverish night punctuated by two minor but-intense bouts of anginal pain, I reread Miriam’s records and ransacked my files for a copy of the missing probation report on her uncle. It had vanished without a trace. Desperately, I placed a call to Ari Bauer, the probation officer in Jaffa who had handled the case. We’d spoken at length previously, and Bauer remembered the man clearly. Incidents of incestuous rape are rare among Jews, and he had tried without success to discover the uncle’s psychological motivations. “The fellow may be a Jew by religion,” he had complained, echoing the Ashkenazi ambivalence towards their Sephardic brothers, “but he’s as much a part of our culture as a Bedouin camel driver. I got nowhere with him.” That was just a fortnight ago. Now, his voice was blank, the tone that of a stranger.
“Doctor Hirsch, you must have the wrong Bauer. You say you discussed this case with me two weeks ago? I’ve heard of you by reputation of course, Doctor, but I’ve never spoken to you before. And I’ve never handled such a case as you describe. But perhaps another of our probation workers . . . .”
I hung up and with trembling fingers dialed the Eilat police officer who had traced the uncle’s movements after he left prison. We had been on the phone for almost an hour a little more than a week before, but today he could remember neither me nor Miriam’s uncle. Unless—was I by any chance the Dr. Karl Hirsch? Why, he had heard so much about me from his eldest son, who had attended my lectures at the university some years before. It was a great honor, how could he help me? I hung up. The same obsequies had bubbled from his lips when I had first called about the case, a call that, in his mind at least, had never taken place. Slowly, like ice melting, my numbness began giving way to excitement.
When I got to Miriam’s room, Zvi and the Arabic translator I had requested were already standing by her bed. I looked down wonderingly at the childlike face, serene in sleep, and held back my thoughts with an effort. I was a scientist, not a witch doctor.
Zvi spoke softly and Miriam stirred and opened her eyes. There was bewilderment in them, but no fear. I leaned over the bed and touched her forehead lightly. She did not shrink from me.
“Miriam,” I said in Hebrew, “you have been ill, but you are well now. We are your friends, here to help you.”
The interpreter translated swiftly into liquid Arabic, and Miriam smiled uncertainly, first at him and then at me.
At that point I should have run through a whole series of questions designed to put her at ease and determine how adequately she was adjusting to reality. In a normal case it would have been days, perhaps weeks, before I even approached the question of her original trauma, depending upon the stability she evidenced in our talks. But I could not wait—the question was gnawing at my brain like an angry ferret. “Miriam,” I asked her tautly, “do you remember your uncle Avraham, and what happened in Lidda?” As the interpreter translated the question, Zvi’s eyes swung quizzically in my direction.
The girl was silent for a moment. Zvi was almost audibly holding his breath. And then, incredibly, she smiled and spoke in soft, fluid Arabic.
“My uncle was a bad man,” the interpreter translated. “He was very bad to me and my sisters. I think he made me sick for a while.” The smile grew wider, revealing small, bad teeth. “But now he will never hurt us again. I punished him for his wickedness.”
The voice was high, that of a child. Her mind was still, of course, arrested at the age of nine.
“How did you . . . punish him?” I asked. My voice sounded strange even to me.
“I made him dead,” she said. As the interpreter spoke the words, he looked at me strangely. Miriam paused and then spoke in a little voice. “May I have some sherbet?”
Zvi moved quickly to my side and grabbed my arm.
“For Heaven’s sake, Doctor,” he whispered harshly, “stop this now. You’ll undo everything you’ve accomplished.”
I looked at him blankly and then spoke, with an effort.
“Get her some sherbet. I’ll be in my office.” I turned, and almost ran from the room.
I sat at my desk for more than an hour, running the thing over in my mind. Zvi came in once, remonstrating with me for introducing the trauma so rapidly.
“You’ve brought her out of withdrawal, Doctor, but she’s still ill. Now she has the delusion that she killed her uncle. Why didn’t you wait?”
I knew it was not easy for Zvi to challenge me so openly, and I was not annoyed with him.
“She has no delusion,” I told him quietly. “She is well. Still mentally a child, but well.”
He started to argue with me, but I ordered him from the office.
I no longer questioned the incredible theory that had first sprung into my mind the night before. I have never been a conventional man, constrained by the shackles of the “plausible.” What is irrational today is often the germ of tomorrow’s truth; all great scientific discoveries have necessitated a leap into the impossible. I had no proof, but I knew surely, instinctually, what had happened.
Students of hypnosis have long speculated on how far back the mind could be drawn in trance. Some sensational studies, such as the “Bridie Murphy” case in the States, even claimed that the regression could lead into past incarnations. Such theories were, and are, just mystical gibberish to me. But there was no doubt the mind could travel down the corridors of time, particularly in sleep, when the subconscious is most liberated and incidents buried years in the past, forgotten or rejected by the conscious mind, can be relived. In Miriam’s case I had instituted a radically new kind of hypno-therapy: day after day I had urged her to recreate an incident blocked off from her consciousness. I had no idea of the strength of the hypnotic impulse the tape decks transmitted to her as she slept in trance. Her mind had traveled back—but not just in memory! At the moment the encephalograph went dead (I could admit no other explanation) Miriam had somehow sent her mental force physically back through time, back to the moment her uncle raped her. And the revenge that had simmered in her subconscious for eight years of schizoid withdrawal had exacted its price. Somehow, Miriam had broken the bonds of time and space—and killed a man.
All my scientific training forced me to reject the thought, but some inner fiber of my being resisted and thrust it inexorably forward. I knew—against logic, against all reason—that I had discovered the secret to time travel. Not, to be sure, by the corporal body—that would probably be forever impossible—but by the mind. And that mental force, stretching back through time, was more than a disembodied entity; it had the power to affect its environment. Miriam’s mind had killed. And when the act was accomplished, time itself had changed.
The logical objections to my theory were, of course, legion. The hoary paradox of the man traveling back in time to kill his own grandfather had relevance here—how could man change the past without the consequences of that change affecting his own present? The fact must be that he could. Time must have elastic quality, absorbing the changes, the ruptures in its fabric, and incorporating them into a new framework of reality. Like a rubber band, time can be stretched, but will always snap back into shape. Thus Miriam’s uncle, who in “Prime” Time had raped her, been sentenced to prison, and gone on to work as a laborer, had in “Secondary” Time been murdered immediately after the rape. He had ceased to be. And all the records of his subsequent existence in initial time had been snuffed out with him. Thus the probation report had disappeared; Bauer and the police officer didn’t remember the uncle’s case or talking about it with me, and a new paragraph reporting his death had flashed into existence on Miriam’s records. But why, then, was the memory still so clearly enshrined in my own brain? Had my very closeness to the case—yes, let’s face it, my obsession—managed to preserve my recollections, somehow resisted the cosmic eraser scrubbing away the past? Or had my momentary blackout, that brief slice of death as my diseased heart choked off the supply of oxygen to the brain, spared me the editing process, perpetuating my original memories of the case as they were snuffed out in everyone else? Could it even be, for some inscrutable reason, that I, as the author of the change, had been deliberately spared its consequences as part of some larger purpose? No, that way lies megalomania. But whatever accounted for it, one thing now was certain to me: the fabric of time itself had been altered, the future had been changed. And—the thought clawed at my brain—if it could be done once, it could be done again.
Tel Aviv, Monday, October 18, 1959.
Rereading last night’s notes in the clear light of morning, my first impulse is to burn them. If the experiment fails, and they are found, I will be branded a lunatic, or worse. But on reflection I decided to preserve them as a kind of shorthand record of the project. While I can recognize the prospect of failure intellectually, I have an emotional, almost mystical, assurance of its success. Why, I do not know, but it is of the same unassailable intensity as the initial flash of perception I experienced the night of Miriam’s “recovery.” The project will succeed. And if that conviction is just one more delusion of my crumbling mind, well, I shall at least have willed to posterity an interesting clinical case history.
My only worry is that this record might become a guidebook for future efforts along similar lines. I have none of the innovator’s passion to proselytize. I know how dangerous misuse, any use, of my process can be. But I am determined to go ahead. If I succeed, these notes will in any case blink out of existence with me and my world. They will belong to Prime Time—dusty tombstones marking what-might-have-been. And I will be—where? Sitting somewhere in Germany with my grandchildren playing at my feet, David and Rachel’s children, and Ruth in the kitchen simmering a schnitzel on the stove? Or, just as likely, dead years before, felled by disease or accident. It makes little difference. I have been dead for years, it is only the manner of death that matters. And whatever happens to Ruth or Rachel or David, they shall never have seen Auschwitz.
