Page:Fantastic Volume 08 Number 01.djvu/28

 ory-banks and you eliminate the source of aberration. There is no trauma, no guilt, no compulsion, when you remove the past; when you excise it surgically, completely.

"The brain has often been compared to a sponge, and so it is. Squeeze this gray sponge, squeeze it dry of all unpleasant memories of the past, and it can be filled again.

"I've learned how to drain the memories, using my own surgical techniques—call it a combination of lobotomy, topectomy and advanced shock-therapy, exercised with sufficient skill to avoid permanent damage to the tissue. There will be papers published some day, when my findings are sufficiently comprehensive, and I assure you that your own case will be much more than a mere footnote. Meanwhile, the work goes on."

I remember my reaction to Wagram's words. "So that's it," I said. "You actually induce amnesia, deliberately and artificially erase all memory-patterns."

"Not in your case," he told me, "It wasn't necessary, any more than it was necessary during the war when I first began to study and specialize in mnemonic disorders. But I have learned how to duplicate general as well as retrograde amnesia without risk of amentia or physical lesion. And that's what I've done for my screaming people.

"In effect, I reduce them to the prenatal stage, and put them back in the womb. Then, very slowly, with the help of the staff working under my direction and with my prescribed techniques—I allow them to be born again. To become infants, little children; to learn once more how to walk, and feed themselves, and control bodily functions. I teach them to talk, to think, guide them through childhood and adolescence to full maturity. All this, of course, with a careful avoidance of traumatic incident; and naturally, in a comparatively short time. The autonomous nervous system responds quickly, relearning and readapting previous patterns of behavior. In some cases a year or two is necessary for complete reeducation; in others, I've seen miracles accomplished in eight or ten months."

"But don't you get zombies, robots?"

"Not when the process is accompanied by selective memory-restoration. When these people are ready for it, 28