Part 2
“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 what I needed.”
“Do you think you’re dreaming now?”
“Not at the moment—certainly.”
“Swell,” Morrissey said. “Because the conglobulation of the psych between the forever and upstriding kaleeno bystixing forinder saan—”
Bruno jumped up. “Ken!” he said, dry-throated. “Stop it!”
“Fylixar catween baleeza—”
“_Stop it!_”
“BYZINDERKONA REPSTILLING AND ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS NEVER KNOWING NEVER KNOWING NEVER KNOWING—”
The words came out in great whirling shining globes. They raced past Bruno’s head with a screaming hiss. They bombarded him. They carried him back into a thundering, windy abyss of blackness and terror.
* * * * *
Morrissey stepped back from the bed and asked:
Dr. Robert Bruno managed to nod.
“Good,” Morrissey said. “You were out for about three hours. But everything’s going nicely. You’ll be up and around pretty soon. There’s plenty to be done. Barbara wants to see you—and Parsons.”
“Ken,” Bruno said, “wait a minute. Am I awake now? I mean, really awake?”
Morrissey stared and grinned.
“Sure,” he said. “I can guarantee that.”
But Bruno did not answer. His gaze moved to the windows, to the solidity of the walls and ceiling, to the reality of his own hands and arms.
_Never knowing?_
He looked at Morrissey, waiting for Morrissey to vanish, and the black pit to open again beneath him.