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The Cartels Jungle
by
In an attempt at self-assurance, he recalled to mind just how exacting a commission-job could be. Perhaps Ann had been working so hard she had simply not had the time to send him a message.
Not even five minutes to send a micropic?
It didn’t occur to him that she might be ill, for preventive medicine had long ago made physical disease a trivial factor in human affairs. A maladjustment then, with commitment to a city clinic? But Ann Saymer held a First in Psychiatry.
Hunter fingered the Saving Fund record in his pocket–the goal he and Ann had worked for so long. Nothing could go wrong now, nothing! He said the words over in his mind as he might have repeated the litany of a prayer, although Max Hunter did not consider himself a religious man.
At sixteen he and Ann Saymer had fallen in love, while they had both been in the last semester of the general school. They could have married then, or they might have registered for the less permanent companionship-union.
In either case, both of them would have had to go to work. Hunter could not have entered the space service, which enrolled only single men and Ann could not have afforded the university.
It hadn’t mattered to Hunter. But Ann had possessed enough ambition for them both. She knew she had the ability to earn a First in Psychiatry, and would settle for nothing less. The drive that kept their goal alive was hers. She was determined to establish a clinic of her own. The plan she worked out was very practical–for Ann was in all respects the opposite of an idle dreamer.
Hunter was to join a commercial spacefleet. His bonus credits would accumulate to supply their capital, while he paid her university tuition from his current earnings. After they married, Hunter was to manage the finances of the clinic while Ann became the resident psychiatrist.
Even at sixteen Ann Saymer had very positive ideas about curing mental illness, which was the epidemic sickness of their world. Eight years later, while she was still serving her internship in a city clinic, Ann had invented the tiny machine which, with wry humor, she called an Exorciser.
She had never used the device in the public clinic. If she had, she would have lost the patent, since she had built the Exorciser while she was still serving out her educational apprenticeship in the city clinic.
“I’m no fool, Max,” she told Hunter. “Why should I give it away? We’ll coin credits in our own clinic with that little gadget.”
Hunter had no objection to her aggressive selfishness. In fact, the term “selfishness” did not even occur to him. Ann was simply expressing the ethic of their society. He admired her brilliance, her cleverness; and he knew that her Exorciser, properly exploited, would be the touchstone to a fortune.
During one of his furloughs Ann demonstrated what the machine could do. After a minor surgical operation, a fragile filigree of microscopic platinum wires was planted in the cerebral cortex of a patient’s skull. From a multi-dialed console Ann verbally transmitted a new personality directly into the maladjusted mind. After twenty minutes she removed the wire grid, and the disorganized personality was whole again, with an adjustment index testing at zero-zero.
“A cure that leaves out the long probe for psychic causes,” she said enthusiastically. “In minutes, Max, we’ll be able to do what now takes weeks or months. They’ll swarm into our clinic.”
Hunter reasoned that Ann had taken the commission-job in order to experiment with her machine in a privately-operated clinic. Her internship had ended a month before, and it had been an altogether legal thing for her to do. The fact that she had taken a commission meant she would work for only a specific contract period. And because a commission-job carried a professional classification, Ann had not been compelled to join the union.
Nevertheless the haze of anxiety still lay oppressively over Captain Hunter’s mind. No matter what the requirements of Ann’s commission may have been, she could have met him at the spaceport. She knew when his ship was due, and had never failed to show up before.