The Merchant's War by Frederik Pohl Page A

and pulled-aside ankles to the consultation room. It was like walking the Last Mile in those old prison movies, except that there were no mumbled words of encouragement from my fellow cons. There was the same expression on every face, and it said, Thank God it’s you, not me!
    I expected that past the sliding door would be the doctor who would prescribe my fate. Surprisingly there were two people there; one the doctor—you could tell by her ritual stethoscope around the neck—and the other, of all people, little Dan Dixmeister, grown all lank and gloomy. “Hey, there, Danny!” I greeted him, sticking out my hand for old time’s sake.
    And for the same sake, I guess—his version of it—he studied my hand for a moment before reluctantly putting out his own. It wasn’t a shake. It was more like his offering his hand for me to kiss—no grip, just a limp touch and withdrawal.
    Now, Danny Dixmeister had been my copy cub trainee half a dozen years earlier. I went to Venus. He stayed behind. Clearly he hadn’t wasted his time. He wore Deputy Department Head epaulettes and, on his sleeve, fifty-thousand-a-year stripes, and he looked at me as though I were the new apprentice and he the exec. “You really screwed up, Tarb,” he rasped joylessly. “Dr. Mosskristal will review your medical problem for you.” And the tone said bad news.
    Bad news it was. “What you’ve got,” said the doctor, “is a Campbellian addiction.” Her tone was neither kind nor unkind. It was the tone in which a doctor announces a white-blood-corpuscle count in a laboratory animal, and the look she turned on me was exactly the same look as Mitzi used to give a would-be returnee who might be recruited for her spy chains. “I suppose you could be reprogrammed,” she said, studying the results on the display before her. “Hardly worth the effort, I’d say. A very uninteresting chart.”
    I swallowed. It was hard for me to take in that it was my life they were talking about. “Tell me what I’m up against,” I begged. “Maybe if I understood what was wrong I could fix it.”
    “Fix it? Fix it? You mean overcome the programming by yourself? Oh-ho-ho-ho,” she laughed, glancing at Dixmeister and shaking her head humorously. “What strange notions you laymen have.”
    “But you said there was a cure—”
    “You mean reprogramming and detoxing,” she corrected. “I don’t think you want to go through that. Maybe ten years from now it might be worth a try, although there’s about a forty per cent mortality rate. But in the early stages, right after exposure—uh-uh.” She leaned back, pressing her fingertips together, and I got ready for the lecture. “What you have,” she explained, “is a Campbellian reflex. Named after Dr. H. J. Campbell. Famous pioneering psychologist in the old days, inventor of limbic-pleasure therapy.”
    “I never heard of limbic-pleasure therapy,” I said.
    “No,” she admitted, “the secret was lost for many years.” She leaned forward, depressed an intercom button and called, “Maggie, bring in the Campbell. According to Dr. Campbell,” she resumed to me, “pleasure is the name we give to the feeling we experience when the limbic areas of our brain are electrically active. He was first led to this research, I believe, when he discovered that many of his students were deriving great pleasure from what was called rock music. Saturating the senses in this way stimulated the limbic area—thus pleasure—thus, he discovered a cheap and easy way of conditioning subjects in desirable ways. Ah, here we are.” The sec 2 had brought in a transparent plastic box containing—of all things!—a book. Faded, tattered, hidden inside its plastic case, it was still about the best example I had ever seen of that quaint old art form. Instinctively I reached out for it, and Dr. Mosskristal snatched it away. “Don’t be silly,” she rapped.
    But I could read the title: The Pleasure Areas, by H. J. Campbell.