about any easy rehabilitation.'
'I'm the original illusionless man.'
'Good. You'll fear the pain at first, dread it, cower from it, beg to
be sent home half crippled rather than finish the program--'
'Gee, I
can hardly wait to start.'
'--but I'll teach you to hate the pain instead of fear it--'
'Maybe I
should just go to some UCLA extension classes, learn Spanish
instead.'
'--and then I'll teach you to love the pain, because it's a sure sign
that you're making progress.'
'You need a refresher course in how to inspire your patients.'
'You've got to inspire yourself, Mcgarvey. My main job is to challenge
you.'
'Call me Jack.'
The therapist shook his head. 'No. To start, I'll call you Mcgarvey,
you call me Bloom. This relationship is always adversarial at first.
You'll need to hate me, to have a focus for your anger. When that time
comes, it'll be easier to hate me if we aren't using first names.'
'I hate you already.'
Bloom smiled. 'You'll do all right, Mcgarvey.'
CHAPTER TWELVE.
After the night of June tenth, Eduardo lived in denial. For the first
time in his life, he was unwilling to face reality, although he knew it
had never been more important to do so. It would have been healthier
for him to visit the one place on the ranch where he would find--or
fail to find--evidence to support his darkest suspicions about the
nature of the intruder who had come into the house when he had been at
Travis Potter's office in Eagle's Roost. Instead, it was the one place
he assiduously avoided. He didn't even look toward that knoll.
He drank too much and didn't care. For seventy years he had lived by
the motto
'Moderation in all things,' and that prescription for life
had led him only to this point of humbling loneliness and horror. He
wished the been-which he occasionally spiked with good bourbon--would
have a greater numbing effect on him. He seemed to have an uncanny
tolerance for alcohol. And even when he had poured down enough to turn
his legs and his spine to rubber, his mind remained far too clear to
suit him.
He escaped into books, reading exclusively in the genre for which he'd
recently developed an appreciation. Heinlein, Clarke, Bradbury,
Sturgeon, Benford, Clement, Wyndham, Christopher, Niven, Zelazny.
Whereas he had first found, to his surprise, that fiction of the
fantastic could be challenging and meaningful, he now found it could
also be narcotizing, a better drug than any volume of beer and less
taxing on the bladder. The effect it her enlightenment and wonder or
intellectual and emotional anesthesia--was strictly at the discretion
of the reader. Spaceships, time machines, teleportation cubicles,
