“Most emotional illness would not exist, Diane, if it were possible in every case to separate oneself—in thought as well as circumstance—if only for a time.”
“Separate oneself?”
“Did you ever think of going away, at least for a time?”
The girl nodded, then as though she were not certain Dr. Island could see her said, “Often, I suppose, leaving the school and getting my own compartment somewhere—going to Achilles. Sometimes I wanted to so badly.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“They would have worried. And anyway, they would have found me, and made me come home.”
“Would it have done any good if I—or a human doctor—had told them not to?”
When the girl said nothing Nicholas snapped, “You could have locked them up.”
“They were functioning, Nicholas. They bought and sold; they worked, and paid their taxes—”
Diane said softly, “It wouldn’t have done any good anyway, Nicholas; they are inside me.”
“Diane was no longer functioning: she was failing every subject at the university she attended, and her presence in her classes, when she came, disturbed the instructors and the other students. You were not functioning either, and people of your own age were afraid of you.”
“That’s what counts with you, then. Functioning.”
“If I were different from the world, would that help you when you got back into the world?”
“You are different.” Nicholas kicked the sand. “Nobody ever saw a place like this.”
“You mean that reality to you is metal corridors, rooms without windows, noise.”
“Yes.”
“That is the unreality, Nicholas. Most people have never had to endure such things. Even now, this—my beach, my sea, my trees—is more in harmony with most human lives than your metal corridors; and here, I am your social environment—what individuals call they. You see, sometimes if we take people who are troubled back to something like me, to an idealized natural setting, it helps them.”
“Come on,” Nicholas told the girl. He took her arm, acutely conscious of being so much shorter than she.
“A question,” murmured the waves. “If Diane’s parents had been taken here instead of Diane, do you think it would have helped them?”
Nicholas did not reply.
“We have treatments for disturbed persons, Nicholas. But, at least for the time being, we have no treatment for disturbing persons.” Diane and the boy had turned away, and the waves’ hissing and slapping ceased to be speech. Gulls wheeled overhead, and once a red and yellow parrot fluttered from one palm to another. A monkey running on all fours like a little dog approached them, and Nicholas chased it, but it escaped.
“I’m going to take one of those things apart someday,” he said, “and pull the wires out.”
“Are we going to walk all the way round?” Diane asked. She might have been talking to herself.
“Can you do that?”
“Oh, you can’t walk all around Dr. Island; it would be too long, and you can’t get there anyway. But we could walk until we get back to where we started—we’re probably more than halfway now.”
“Are there other islands you can’t see from here?”
The girl shook her head. “I don’t think so; there’s just this one big island on this satellite, and all the rest is water.”
“Then if there’s only the one island, we’re going to have to walk all around it to get back to where we started. What are you laughing at?”
“Look down the beach, as far as you can. Never mind how it slips off to the side—pretend it’s straight.”
“I don’t see anything.”
“Don’t you? Watch.” Diane leaped into the air, six meters or more this time, and waved her arms.
“It looks like there’s somebody ahead of us, way down the beach.”
“Uh-huh. Now look behind.”
“Okay, there’s somebody there too. Come to think of it, I saw someone on the beach when I first got here. It seemed funny to see so far, but I guess I thought they were other patients. Now I see two people.”
“They’re us. That was probably yourself you saw the other time too. There are just so many of us to each strip of beach, and Dr. Island only wants certain ones to mix. So the space bends around. When we get to one end of our strip and try to step over, we’ll be at the other end.”
“How did you find out?”
“Dr. Island told me about it when I first came here.” The girl was silent for a moment, and her smile vanished. “Listen, Nicholas, do you want to see something really funny?”
Nicholas asked, “What?” As he spoke, a drop of rain struck his face.
“You’ll see. Come on, though. We have to go into the middle instead of following the beach, and it will give us a chance to get under the trees and out of the rain.”
When they had left the sand and the sound of the surf and were walking on solid ground under green-leaved
