“Your heart beats; I sense its pumping even as I speak—do you control the beating of your heart?”
“I can stop my breath.”
“Can you stop your heart? Honestly, Nicholas?”
“I guess not.”
“No more can I control the weather of my world, stop anyone from doing what he wishes, or feed you if you are hungry; with no need of volition on my part your emotions are monitored and averaged, and our weather responds. Calm and sunshine for tranquillity, rain for melancholy, storms for rage, and so on.
This is what mankind has always wanted.”
Diane asked, “What is?”
“That the environment should respond to human thought. That is the core of magic and the oldest dream of mankind, and here, on me, it is fact.”
“So that we’ll be well?”
Nicholas said angrily, “You’re not sick!”
Dr. Island said, “So that some of you, at least, can return to society.”
Nicholas threw a seashell into the water as though to strike the mouth that spoke. “Why are we talking to this thing?”
“Wait, tot; I think it’s interesting.”
“Lies and lies.”
Dr. Island said, “How do I lie, Nicholas?”
“You said it was magic—”
“No, I said that when humankind has dreamed of magic, the wish behind that dream has been the omnipotence of thought. Have you never wanted to be a magician, Nicholas, making palaces spring up overnight, or riding an enchanted horse of ebony to battle with the demons of the air?”
“I am a magician. I have preternatural powers, and before they cut us in two—”
Diane interrupted him. “You said you averaged emotions. When you made it rain.”
“Yes.”
“Doesn’t that mean that if one person was really, terribly sad, he’d move the average so much he could make it rain all by himself? Or whatever? That doesn’t seem fair.”
The waves might have smiled. “That has never happened. But if it did, Diane, if one person felt such deep emotion, think how great her need would be. Don’t you think we should answer it?”
Diane looked at Nicholas, but he was walking again, his head swinging, ignoring her as well as the voice of the waves. “Wait,” she called. “You said I wasn’t sick; I am, you know.”
“No, you’re not.”
She hurried after him. “Everyone says so, and sometimes I’m so confused, and other times I’m boiling inside, just boiling. Mum says if you’ve got something on the stove you don’t want to have burn, you just have to keep one finger on the handle of the pan and it won’t, but I can’t, I can’t always find the handle or remember.”
Without looking back the boy said, “Your mother is probably sick, maybe your father too; I don’t know. But you’re not. If they’d just let you alone you’d be all right. Why shouldn’t you get upset, having to live with two crazy people?”
“Nicholas!” She grabbed his thin shoulders. “That’s not true!”
“Yes, it is.”
“I am sick. Everyone says so.”
“I don’t; so ‘everyone’ just means the ones that do—isn’t that right? And if you don’t either, that will be two; it can’t be everyone then.”
The girl called, “Doctor? Dr. Island?”
Nicholas said, “You aren’t going to believe that, are you?”
“Dr. Island, is it true?”
“Is what true, Diane?”
“What he said. Am I sick?”
“Sickness—even physical illness—is relative, Diane, and complete health is an idealization, an abstraction, even if the other end of the scale is not.”
“You know what I mean.”
“You are not physically ill.” A long, blue comber curled into a line of hissing spray reaching infinitely along the sea to their left and right. “As you said yourself a moment ago, you are sometimes confused, and sometimes disturbed.”
“He said if it weren’t for other people, if it weren’t for my mother and father, I wouldn’t have to be here.”
“Diane . . .”
“Well, is that true or isn’t it?”
