"You better run along, Nasen," Joe said. "I think Dr. Bean wants to talk
to you."
"Well, I--uh--" Looking worried, Nasen left the shower room.
Wilhart handed Joe a towel.
"Leave me alone!" Potts yelled.
Joe wrapped the towel around Potts's neck. "Where's the key, Orville
Potts?"
"Help!" Potts cried. The towel tightened.
With rapidly dimming vision, he saw Wilhart assume a stance. A huge fist
thudded against his shrunken stomach. He tried to scream, but the towel
cut off all air and sound. Again and again, the fist struck.
Potts found himself sitting on the floor, gulping air into starved
lungs. For a moment, he hoped he had managed another transportation, but
the two white-clad human gorillas leering down at him proved he had not
left the shower room.
"Get up," Joe said.
They dragged Potts to his feet. Nasen opened the door, clamped his
teeth, and then opened his mouth to say, "Dr. Bean wants Orville Potts.
I'll--"
"I'll take him," Joe said.
Potts winced as spatulate fingers almost met through his biceps. His
feet barely touched the floor of the corridor when Joe marched him to
the office of Dr. Lawrence D. Bean.
* * * * *
Dr. Bean, a thin bald man, sat behind a maple desk and peered at Potts
over spectacles attached to a black ribbon. Joe shut the door and leaned
against it.
"I've been hearing things about you, Orville," Dr. Bean said. "We'll
have a little examination. Now, hold your right arm out straight, close
your eyes, and touch the end of your nose with your index finger."
"Can't we do without the foolishness?" Potts asked. He sank into the
chair beside the doctor's desk and gently rubbed his bruised arm.
The doctor looked slightly startled, but said, "I'm pleased to hear you
speaking again, Orville. If you continue to talk to people, take an
interest in your surroundings, write home, you'll be out of here very
shortly."
"He choked me," Potts said, pointing a thumb at Joe. "He choked me with
a towel, and the other one, that Wilhart, hit me in the stomach."
Dr. Bean's spectacles jumped from his nose and dangled by the ribbon. He
focused a pair of bleary eyes on Potts and said, "You know they didn't,
Orville. The attendants are here for your benefit. They would never
subject a patient to physical violence."
Potts laughed for the first time since he was hospitalized. He said,
"Why don't you ask me what I did with the key?"
"What did you do with the key, Orville?"
"Talk about monomaniacs!" Potts snickered. "You all have one-track
minds. You can't think of any way I could have escaped without stealing
a key. Is any key actually missing? Did anyone see me crossing the grass
or coming through the halls? I'll tell you how I did it. Exactly how.
You already think I'm nuts, so it won't matter."
Again, Potts pointed at Joe. "Laughing boy here can bear me out. He was
about to whip me with his ice water, and I vanished. I vanished from the
shower and materialized in the dayroom."
Dr. Bean replaced his glasses and grabbed a pad and pencil.
"That's right, Doc," Potts approved. "Write it down. I'm giving you a
better break than you ever gave me. I've been in this hospital four
times, and no doctor ever sat down and explained what was wrong with me,
or tried to learn why. There was something about combat fatigue,
whatever that is, over in Italy. Otherwise, I don't know anything. If I
so much as raise my voice or break a dish at home, my wife has me
shipped back here as dangerously psychotic, or psycho-neurotic, or
something. Which makes it nice for her.
"And what do you do when I come back? You give me electric shock
treatments and have your sadists whip me with P. T. baths, as if torture
could cure a sick mind! Maybe there's nothing wrong with my brain. Maybe
it's just different from yours, or this jerk's, if he has a brain."
"Never mind, Joe," Dr. Bean cautioned in a theatrical aside. "Just stand
by."
Potts smiled and said, "Take it all down. Then you can check your notes
and decide if it's schizophrenia, or catatonia, or psychasthenia, or
what not. I know a little about mental diseases from reading, and I'll
explain my theory the best I can."
* * * * *
Potts tapped his forehead with a forefinger and asked, "What is a brain?
You'll say it's an organ occupying the skull and forming the center of
the nervous system, and the seat of intellect, or some such thing. I
don't think so. It generates electricity. You know that. A nerve impulse
is a wave of electricity started and conducted by a nerve cell. You can
test it. You've made brain-wave patterns of some of the boys in the
ward.
"The brain transforms energy into thought, or thought into energy. I'm
sitting here thinking and not moving my body at all. My brain is
transforming electric energy into thought. You're writing, and your
thoughts guide the movement of your hand. Thought into energy."
Dr. Bean turned a page and continued to scribble rapidly. Potts heard
Joe move and felt the big attendant's presence behind his chair.
Potts said, "The ability to think improves with use, like a muscle
growing stronger with use. The first time you memorize a poem, it's a
hard job. If you keep on memorizing, it becomes easier, until you read a
poem a couple of times and you have it. The same goes for remembering.
I'll bet you can't even remember how your breakfast tasted and smelled
this morning. Probably not even what you ate.
"I practice remembering with all the senses. How things look and taste
and smell. Exact colors, shadows, size, impressions. Think of an
airplane, and you probably think of a little silver thing in the sky.
Actually, an airplane is much bigger than that, so your mental picture
of an airplane is all wrong. An airplane gives me a certain impression.
I have it only when looking at one. Maybe it's an unrecognized sense. I
have an entirely different impression when I'm looking at a horse."
Dr. Bean threw down his pencil, caught his falling glasses, drew a
handkerchief from his breast pocket, and polished them.
"Too deep for you, Doc?" Potts inquired. "Well, just assume that my
brain is a more powerful generator and transformer than any you ever
saw. I've developed it by memorizing, remembering, visualizing, working
problems in my head, and so on. I've been trying to make my brain take
complete control of my body. The body is composed of atoms, and the
atoms are electrical charges, protons and electrons. Therefore, you're
nothing but electricity in the shape of a man.
"By changing myself to pure thought, or pure electricity, I believed
that I could escape to the past. Get away from this age where a man is
suspected of insanity if he so much as mislays his checkbook or kicks
his dog. People didn't used to be crazy unless they went around hacking
their relatives with an ax.
"I tried to meet Columbus when he rowed ashore from the _Santa Maria_. I
tried to watch the Battle of Bunker Hill. I tried to lead the Charge of
the Light Brigade. I tried to invent an airplane during the Civil War. I
always failed, because I didn't have enough sensory knowledge of the
period, and I couldn't change the past.
"I succeeded in P. T. because I transported myself through space instead
of time. I knew every detail of the day room, so it worked. My brain
reduced my body to its elemental charges in the P. T. bath and
reassembled it in the dayroom. Something like radio, with the brain
acting as sending set and receiver. Maybe we should call it philosophy,
Doc. What is reality? If I sit here in your office but imagine I'm
sitting in the dayroom, until the chair in the dayroom becomes more real
than this, where am I actually sitting?"
Dr. Bean stood up, adjusted his glasses, and said, "Orville, I am going
to do as you asked. I am going to tell you exactly what is wrong with
you. You are suffering from distorted perception--illusions and
hallucinations, disorientation. You are also becoming an exhibitionist
and are developing a persecution complex. I thought, when you first came
in, that you had improved. But if you don't pull yourself together and
try to get well, you'll be in here a long time."
Potts's chair overturned as he thrust himself up. He placed his thin
hands on the desk and said, "You psychiatrists can't see an inch in
front of your nose! All you can do is quote a textbook. If anybody
mentions mental telepathy, or predicting the future, or a sense of
perception, you classify them as insane. You think you've reduced the
mind to a set of rules, but you're still in kindergarten! I'll prove
every word I said! I'll vanish into the future! I can't change the past,
but the future hasn't happened yet! I can imagine my own!"
Joe grabbed the fist that Potts shook under the doctor's nose and pinned
the patient's arms behind his back.
"Take him upstairs to Ward K, Joe," Dr. Bean said. "To the pack room.
That should calm him."
"So long, moron!" Potts called.
"Let's go, Orville Potts," Joe said. "We're going to fix you up just
like an ice cream soda."
"You won't pack me in ice," Potts promised. His thin body twisted in
pain.
He closed his eyes tight and concentrated.
Joe's great hands clamped into fists when Potts disappeared.
* * * * *
Potts opened his eyes. He lay face down on a padded acceleration couch
with broad straps across his brawny back and legs. Before his face, a
second hand swept around a clock toward a red zero. Potts twisted his
head slightly in the harness and looked at the beautiful young woman
strapped to the couch on his right. A shrieking warning siren blared
through the spaceship.
The woman smiled.
"Hia, ked," she said in strange new accents. "Secure your dentures. Next
stop, Alpha Centaurus!"