“Go on,” said the doctor softly. “This is very interesting.”
“Shut up!” said the traveler voicelessly, yet with frantic urgency.
The madman was silent. His body was perfectly still, except for his calm breathing. The visitor gazed through his eyes in the only possible direction—up at the ceiling. He tried another command. “Look at the doctor.”
With that glance, the visitor told himself, he would flee the crazed mind and enter the doctor’s. There he would learn what the psychiatrist thought of his patient’s strange soliloquy—whether he believed it, or any part of it.
He prayed that the doctor was evaluating it as the intricate raving of delusion.
Slowly, Mersey turned his head. Through his eyes, the visitor saw the faded green carpet, the doctor’s dull- black shoes, his socks, the legs of his trousers. Mersey’s glance hovered there, around the doctor’s knees. The visitor forced it higher, past the belt around a tidy waist, along the buttons of the opened vest to the white collar, and finally to the kindly eyes behind gold-rimmed glasses.
Again he had commanded this human being and had been obeyed. The traveler braced himself for the leap from the tortured mind to the sane one.
But his gaze continued to be that of Mersey.
The gray eyes of the doctor were on his patient. Intelligence and kindness were in those eyes, but the visitor could read nothing else.
He was caught, a prisoner in a demented mind. He felt panic. This must be the mind-screen he’d been warned about.
“Look down,” the visitor commanded Mersey. “Shut your eyes. Don’t let him see me.”
But Mersey continued to be held by the doctor’s eyes. The visitor cowered back into the crazed mental tangle.
Gradually, then, his fear ebbed. There was more likelihood that Cloyd did not believe Mersey’s words than that he did. The doctor treated hundreds of patients and surely many of them had delusions as fanciful as this one might seem.
The traveler’s alarm simmered down until he was capable of appreciating the irony of the situation.
But at the same time, he thought with pain, “Is it our fate that of all the millions of creatures on this world, we can establish communication only through the insane? And even then to have only imperfect control of the mind and, worse, to have it become a transmitter for our most secret thoughts?”
It was heartbreaking.
Dr. Cloyd broke the long silence. Pulling at his ear, he spoke calmly and matter-of-factly:
“Let me see if I understand your problem, Mersey. You believe yourself to be from another world, from which you have traveled, although not physically. Your world is not a material one, as far as its people are concerned. Your civilization is a mental one, which has been placed in danger. You must resettle your people, but this cannot be done here, on Earth, except in the minds of the mentally ill—and that would not be a satisfactory solution. Have I stated the case correctly?”
“Yes,” Mersey’s voice said over the traveler’s mental protests. “Except that it is not a ‘case,’ as you call it. I am not Mersey. He is merely a vehicle for my thoughts. I am not here to be treated or cured, as the human being Mersey is. I’m here with a life-or-death problem affecting an entire race, and I would not be talking to you except that, at the moment, I’m trapped and confused.”
The madman was doing it again, the traveler thought helplessly—spilling out his knowledge, betraying him and his kind. Was there no way to muffle him?
“I must admit that I’m confused myself,” Dr. Cloyd said. “Humor me for a moment while I think out loud. Let me consider this in my own framework, first, and then in yours, without labeling either one absolutely true or false.
“You see,” the doctor went on, “this is a world of vitality. My world—Earth. Its people are strong. Their bodies are developed as well as their minds. There are some who are not so strong, and some whose minds have been injured. But for the most part, both the mind and the body are in balance. Each has its function, and they work together as a coordinated whole. My understanding of your world, on the other hand, is that it’s in a state of imbalance, where the physical has deteriorated almost to extinction and the mind has been nurtured in a hothouse atmosphere. Where, you might say, the mind has fed on the decay of the body.”
“No,” said Mersey, voicing the traveler’s conviction. “You paint a highly distorted picture of our world.”
“I theorize, of course,” Dr. Cloyd agreed. “But it’s a valid theory, based on intimate knowledge of my own world and what you’ve told me of yours.”
“You make a basic error, I think,” Mersey said, speaking for the unwilling visitor. “You assume that I have been able to make contact only with this deranged mind. That is wrong. I have shared the experiences of many of you—a man, a boy, a woman about to bear a child. Even a cat. And with each of these, my mind has been perfectly attuned. I was able to share and enjoy their experiences, their pleasures, to love with them and to fear, although they had no knowledge of my presence.
“Only since I came to this poor mind have I failed to achieve true empathy. I have been shocked by his madness and I’ve tried to resist it, to help him overcome it. But I’ve failed and it apparently has imprisoned me. Whereas I was able to leave the minds of the others almost at will, with poor Mersey I’m trapped. I can’t transfer to you, for instance, as I could normally from another. If there’s a way out, I haven’t found it. Have you a theory for this?”
In spite of his distress at these revelations, the traveler was intrigued, now that they had been voiced for him, and he was eager to hear Dr. Cloyd’s interpretation of them.
The psychiatrist took a pipe out of his pocket, filled it, lighted it and puffed slowly on it until it was drawing well.
“Continuing to accept your postulate that you’re not Mersey, but an alien inhabiting his mind,” the doctor said finally, “I can enlarge on my theory without changing it in any basic way.
“Your world is not superior to ours, much as it may please you to believe that it is. Nature consists of a balance, and that balance must hold true whether in Sioux City, or Mars, or in the fourth dimension, or in your world, wherever that may be. Your world is out of balance. Evidently it has been going out of balance for some time.
“Your salvation lies not in further evolution in your world—since your way of evolving proved wrong, and may prove fatal—but in a change in course, back along the evolutionary path to a society which developed naturally, with the mind and the body in balance. That society is the one you have found here, in our world. You found it pleasant and attractive, you say, but that doesn’t mean you’re suited to it.
“Nature’s harsh rules may have operated to let you observe a way of life here that you enjoy, but to exclude you otherwise—except from a mind that is not well. In nature’s balance, it could be that the refuge on this world most closely resembling your needs is in the mind of the psychotic. One conclusion could be that your race is mentally ill—by our standards, if not by yours—and that the type of person here most closely approximating your way of life is one with a disordered mind.”
Dr. Cloyd paused. Mersey had no immediate reply.
The traveler made use of the silence to consider this plausible, but frightening theory. To accept the theory would be to accept a destiny of madness here on this world, although the doctor had been kind enough to draw a distinction between madness in one dimension and a mere lack of natural balance in another.
Mersey again seized upon the traveler’s mind and spoke its thoughts. But as he spoke, he voiced a conclusion which the traveler had not yet admitted even to himself.
“Then the answer is inescapable,” Mersey said, his tone flat and unemotional. “It is theoretically possible for all of our people to migrate to this world and find refuge of a sort. But if we established ourselves in the minds of your normal people, we’d be without will. As mere observers, we’d become assimilated in time, and thus extinguished as a separate race. That, of course, we could not permit. And if we settled in the minds most suitable to receive us, we would be in the minds of those who by your standards are insane—whose destiny is controlled by the others. Here again we could permit no such fate.
“That alone would be enough to send me back to my people to report failure. But there is something more—
