Flatlander - Larry Niven [41]
We slowed hard in midair. The wings unfolded, and we settled over downtown Topeka.
This was going to look odd on my expense account. All this way to see a girl who hadn’t spoken sense in three years. Probably it would be disallowed … yet she was as much a part of the case as her brother. Anyone planning to recapture Holden Chambers for reransom would want Charlotte, too.
Menninger Institute was a pretty place. Besides the twelve stories of glass and mock brick which formed the main building, there were at least a dozen outbuildings of varied ages and designs that ran from boxlike rectangles to free-form organics poured in foam plastic. They were all wide apart, separated by green lawns and trees and flower beds. A place of peace, a place with elbow room. Pairs and larger groups passed me on the curving walks: an aide and a patient or an aide and several less disturbed patients. The aides were obvious at a glance.
“When a patient is well enough to go outside for a walk, then he needs the greenery and the room,” Doctor Hartman told me. “It’s part of his therapy. Going outside is a giant step.”.
“Do you get many agoraphobes?”
“No, that’s not what I was talking about. It’s the lock that counts. To anyone else that lock is a prison, but to many patients it comes to represent security. Someone else to make the decisions, to keep the world outside.”
Doctor Hartman was short and round and blond. A comfortable person, easygoing, patient, sure of himself. Just the man to trust with your destiny, assuming you were tired of running it yourself.
I asked, “Do you get many cures?”
“Certainly. As a matter of fact, we generally won’t take patients unless we feel we can cure them.”
“That must do wonders for the record.”
He was not offended. “It does even more for the patients.
Knowing that we know they can be cured makes them feel the same way. And the incurably insane … can be damned depressing.” Momentarily he seemed to sag under an enormous weight. Then he was himself again. “They can affect the other patients. Fortunately, there aren’t many incurables these days.”
“Was Charlotte Chambers one of the curables?”
“We thought so. After all, it was only shock. There was no previous history of personality disturbances. Her blood psychochemicals were near enough normal. We tried everything in the records. Stroking. Fiddling with her chemistry. Psychotherapy didn’t get very far. Either she’s deaf or she doesn’t listen, and she won’t talk. Sometimes I think she hears everything we say … but she doesn’t respond.”
We had reached a powerful-looking locked door. Doctor Hartman searched through a key ring, touched a key to the lock. “We call it the violent ward, but it’s more properly the severely disturbed ward. I wish to hell we could get some violence out of some of them. Like Charlotte. They won’t even look at reality, much less try to fight it … here we are.”
Her door opened outward into the corridor. My nasty professional mind tagged the fact: if you tried to hang yourself from the door, anyone could see you from either end of the corridor. It would be very public.
In these upper rooms the windows were frosted. I suppose there’s good reason why some patients shouldn’t be reminded that they are twelve stories up. The room was small but well lighted and brightly painted, with a bed and a padded chair and a tridee screen set flush with the wall. There wasn’t a sharp corner anywhere in the room.
Charlotte was in the chair, looking straight ahead of her, her hands folded in her lap. Her hair was short and not particularly neat. Her yellow dress was of some wrinkleproof fabric. She looked resigned, I thought, resigned to