Her nose lengthened.
Her eyes slowly crawled out of their sockets and lengthened on dreadful stalks down her cheeks.
She melted down and out of sight beneath the table.
The table began to sink.
And now everything around him was melting. Under him the chair became plastic and then fluid. The floor was a bowl, and the walls were dripping down into it, into a shining whirlpool at the center.
He slipped helplessly along that slope till the pool engulfed him, in a chaos of thunder and confusion and sickening horror.
The winds bellowed. … The empty drop closed around him. … He fell in darkness. …
This time, when he woke, he wasn’t sure. The panic had not left him. He learned, later, that he had been semi-delirious for eight days, and only Morrissey’s unceasing attention had kept him reasonably quiet. Then there were weeks of convalescence, and a vacation, and it seemed a long time before he came back from Florida, tanned and healthy, to resume his duties.
Even then, though, there was the fear.
When he drove toward the blocky buildings of the sanitarium he felt a touch of it brush him. He reached for Barbara’s hand, and felt some comfort in the assurance of her nearness. She had been helpful, too, though she had not understood.
Every day after that, when he left her, there was a fleeting apprehension lest he never see her again. To forget the uncertainty of his footing, the ground that was no longer absolutely solid, he plunged into the hospital’s routine. And gradually, after more weeks, the terror began to leave him.
Gregson had been cured. He was still under precautionary observation, but all traces of his psychosis seemed to have vanished. There were still minor neuroses, the natural result of the past six years of abnormal restraint, but they were disappearing under proper therapy. The empathy surrogate treatment was successful. Yet, for a while, Bruno refused to attempt more experiments.
Parsons was displeased. He was anxious to chart a graph on the process, and one trial did not provide enough evidence. Bruno kept putting the physicist off with promises. It eventually ended in a minor spat which Morrissey halted by pointing out that Dr. Robert Bruno was, technically, his own patient, and was not yet ready for further research on the dangerous subject.
Parsons, furious, went off. Bruno followed Morrissey into the latter’s office and sat down in one of the more comfortable chairs. It was mid-afternoon, and beyond the windows the drowsy hum of summer made a peaceful counterpoint to the conversation.
“Cigarette, Ken?”
“Thanks. … Look, Bob.” The two men had drawn closer together in the last weeks. Morrissey no longer addressed his Chief of Staff with the former “Doctor.” “I’ve been collating the facts of your case, and I think I’ve got at the root of the trouble. Do you want to hear my diagnosis?”
“Candidly, I don’t,” Bruno said, closing his eyes and inhaling smoke. “I’d prefer to forget it. But I know I can’t. That would be psychically ruinous.”
“You had a cyclic self-containing dream—I suppose you could call it that. You dreamed you were dreaming you were dreaming. You know what your trouble is?”
“Well?”
“You’re not sure you’re awake now.”
“Oh, I’m sure enough,” Bruno said. “Most of the time.”
“You’ve got to be sure all the time. Or else make yourself believe that it doesn’t matter whether you’re dreaming or waking.”
“Doesn’t matter! Ken! To know that everything may melt away under my feet at any time, and to think that doesn’t matter! That’s impossible!”
“Then you’ve got to be sure you’re awake. Those hallucinations you had are over. Weeks have passed.”
“Hallucinatory time is elastic and subjective.”
“It’s a defense mechanism—you know that, I suppose?”
“Defense against what?”
Morrissey moistened his lips. “Remember, I’m the psychiatrist and you’re the patient. You were psychoanalyzed when you studied psychiatry, but you didn’t get all the devils out of your subconscious. Hang it, Bob, you know very well that most psychiatrists take up the work because they’re attracted to it for pathological reasons—neuroses of their own. Why did you always insist that you were so utterly sure of everything?”
“I always made sure.”
“Compensation. To allow for a basic unsureness and insecurity in your own makeup. Consciously you were sure the empathy surrogate treatment would work, but your unconscious mind wasn’t so certain. You never let yourself know that, though. But it came out under stress—the therapy itself.”
“Go on,” Bruno said slowly.
Morrissey tapped the papers on his desk.
“I know my diagnosis is pretty accurate, but you can decide that for yourself. You can tell, perhaps, better than I can. The frontiers of the mind are terra incognita. Your simile of a uranium pile was better than you’d realized. When critical mass is approached, there’s danger. And the damper bars in your own mind—what did Parsons’ machine do to them?”
“I am quite sane,” Bruno said. “I think.”
“Sure you are, now. You’re getting over that explosion. You’d been building up an anxiety neurosis, and the therapy made it blow off. Just how, I don’t understand. The electronic patterns of the mind aren’t in my field. All I know is that the experiment with Gregson removed the safety blocks from your mind, and you lost control for a while. Thus the hallucinations, which simply followed the path of least resistance. Point One: You’re afraid of insecurity and unsureness, and you always have been. Thus your dream follows a familiarly symbolic pattern. At any time the sureness of waking may vanish. Point Two: As long as you think you’re dreaming, you’re dodging responsibility!”
“Good Lord, Ken!” Bruno said. “I just want to be sure I’m awake!”
“And there’s absolutely no way you can be sure of that,” Morrissey said. “The conviction must come from your own mind and be subjective. No objective proof is possible. Otherwise, if you fail to convince yourself, the anxiety neurosis will grow back into a psychosis, and—” He shrugged.
“It sounds logical,” Bruno said. “I’m beginning to see it pretty clearly. I think, perhaps, this clarification is
