2
George Webber leaned back in the soft chair, turning a quizzical glance toward the younger man across the room. He lit a long black cigar.
“Well?” His heavy voice boomed out in the small room. “Now that we’ve got him here, what do you think?”
The younger man glanced uncomfortably through the glass wall panel into the small dark room beyond. In the dimness, he could barely make out the still form on the bed, grotesque with the electrode-vernier apparatus already in place at its temples. Dr. Manelli looked away sharply, and leafed through the thick sheaf of chart papers in his hand.
“I don’t know,” he said dully. “I just don’t know what to think.”
The other man’s laugh seemed to rise from the depths of his huge chest. His heavy face creased into a thousand wrinkles. Dr. Webber was a large man, his broad shoulders carrying a suggestion of immense power that matched the intensity of his dark, wide-set eyes. He watched Dr. Manelli’s discomfort grow, saw the younger doctor’s ears grow red, and the almost cruel lines in his face were masked as he laughed still louder.
“Trouble with you, Frank, you just don’t have the courage of your convictions.”
“Well, I don’t see anything so funny about it!” Manelli’s eyes were angry. “The man has a suspicious syndrome—so you’ve followed him, and spied on him for weeks on end, which isn’t exactly highest ethical practice in collecting a history. I still can’t see how you’re justified.”
Dr. Webber snorted, tossing his cigar down on the desk with disgust. “The man is insane. That’s my justification. He’s out of touch with reality. He’s wandered into a wild, impossible, fantastic dream world. And we’ve got to get him out of it, because what he knows, what he’s trying to hide from us, is so incredibly dangerous that we don’t dare let him go.”
The big man stared at Manelli, his dark eyes flashing. “Can’t you see that? Or would you rather sit back and let Harry Scott go the way that Paulus and Wineberg and the others went?”
“But to use the Parkinson Field on him—” Dr. Manelli shook his head hopelessly. “He’d offered to come over, George. We didn’t need to use it.”
“Sure, he offered to come—fine, fine. But supposing he changed his mind on the way? For all we know, he had us figured into his paranoia, too, and never would have come near the Hoffman Center.”
Dr. Webber shook his head. “We’re not playing a game any more, Frank. Get that straight. I thought it was a game a couple of years ago, when we first started. But it ceased to be a game when men like Paulus and Wineberg walked in sane, healthy men, and came out blubbering idiots. That’s no game any more. We’re onto something big. And, if Harry Scott can lead us to the core of it, then I can’t care too much what happens to Harry Scott.”
Dr. Manelli stood up sharply, walked to the window, and looked down over the bright, clean buildings of the Hoffman Medical Center. Out across the terraced park that surrounded the glassed towers and shining metal of the Center rose the New City, tier upon tier of smooth, functional architecture, a city of dreams built up painfully out of the rubble of the older, ruined city.
“You could kill him,” the young man said finally. “The psycho-integrator isn’t any standard interrogative technique; it’s dangerous and treacherous. You never know for sure just what you’re doing when you dig down into a man’s brain tissue with those little electrode probes.”
“But we can learn the truth about Harry Scott,” Dr. Webber broke in. “Six months ago, Harry Scott was working with us, a quiet, affable, pleasant young fellow, extremely intelligent, intensely co-operative. He was just the man we needed to work with us, an engineer who could take our data and case histories, study them, and subject them to a completely nonmedical analysis. Oh, we had to have it done—the problem’s been with us for a hundred years now, growing ever since the 1950s and 60s—insanity in the population, growing, spreading without rhyme or reason, insinuating itself into every nook and cranny of our civilized life.”
The big man blinked at Manelli. “Harry Scott was the new approach. We were too close to the problem. We needed a nonmedical outsider to take a look, to tell us what we were missing. So Harry Scott walked into the problem, and then abruptly lost contact with us. We finally track him down and find him gone, out of touch with reality, on the same wretched road that all the others went. With Harry, it’s paranoia. He’s being persecuted; he has the whole world against him, but most important—the factor we don’t dare overlook—he’s no longer working on the problem.”
Manelli shifted uneasily. “I suppose that’s right.”
“Of course it’s right!” Dr. Webber’s eyes flashed. “Harry found something in those statistics. Something about the data, or the case histories; or something Harry Scott himself dug up opened a door for him to go through, a door that none of us ever dreamed existed. We don’t know what he found on the other side of that door. Oh, we know what he thinks he found, all this garbage about people that look normal but walk through walls when nobody’s looking, who think around corners instead of in straight-line logic. But what he really found there, we don’t have any way of telling. We just know that whatever he really found is something new, something unsuspected; something so dangerous it can drive an intelligent man into the wildest delusions of paranoid persecution.”
A new light appeared in Dr. Manelli’s eyes as he faced the other doctor. “Wait a minute,” he said softly. “The integrator is an experimental instrument, too.”
Dr. Webber smiled slyly. “Now you’re beginning to think,” he said.
“But you’ll see only what Scott himself believes. And he thinks his story is true.”
“Then we’ll have to break his story.”
“Break it?”
“Certainly. For some reason, this delusion of persecution is far safer for Harry Scott than facing what he really found out. What we’ve got to do is to make this delusion less safe than the truth.”
The room was silent for a long moment. Manelli looked up, his fingers trembling. “Let’s hear it.”
“It’s very simple. Up to now, Harry Scott has had delusions of persecution. But now we’re really going to persecute Harry Scott, as he’s never been persecuted before.”
3
At first he thought he was at the bottom of a deep well and he lay quite still, his eyes clamped shut, wondering where he was and how he could possibly have gotten there. He could feel the dampness and chill of the stone floor under him, and nearby he heard the damp, insistent drip of water splashing against stone. He felt his muscles tighten as the dripping sound forced itself against his senses. Then he opened his eyes.
His first impulse was to scream out wildly in unreasoning, suffocating fear. He fought it down, struggling to sit up in the blackness, his whole mind turned in bitter, hopeless hatred at the ones who had hunted him for so long, and now had trapped him.
Why?
Why did they torture him? Why not kill him outright, have done with it? He shuddered, and struggled to his feet, staring about him in horror.
It was not a well, but a small room, circular, with little rivulets of stale water running down the granite walls. The ceiling closed low over his head, and the only source of light came from the single doorway opening into a long, low stone passageway.
Wave after wave of panic rose in Harry’s throat. Each time he fought down the urge to scream, to lie down on the ground and cover his face with his hands and scream in helpless fear. How could they have known the horror that lay in his own mind, the horror of darkness, of damp slimy walls and scurrying rodents, of the clinging, stale humidity of dungeon passageways? He himself had seldom recalled it, except in his most hideous dreams, yet he had known such fear as a boy, so many years ago, and now it was all around him. They had known somehow and used it against him.
Why?
He sank down on the floor, his head in his hands, trying to think straight, to find some clue in the turmoil bubbling through his mind that would tell him what had happened.
