"So when you admit that one hunk of your story is mistaken--"
"That doesn't prove the rest is false!"
"The police have been tracking this affair hard," said the doctor
slowly. "They've gotten nowhere. Tell me, did anyone see you leave that
apartment with Miss Lewis?"
"No," I said slowly. "No one that knew us."
Thorndyke shook his head unhappily. "That's why we have to assume that
you are in post-accident shock."
I snorted angrily. "Then explain the license, the date with the
reverend, the hotel reservation?"
Thorndyke said quietly, "Hear me out, Steve. This is not my own idea
alone, but the combined ideas of a number of people who have studied the
human mind--"
"In other words, I'm nuts?"
"No. Shock."
"Shock?"
He nodded very slowly. "Let's put it this way. Let's assume that you
wanted this marriage with Miss Lewis. You made preparations, furnished
an apartment, got a license, made a date with a preacher, reserved a
honeymoon suite, and bought flowers for the bride. You take off from
work, arrive at her door, only to find that Miss Lewis has taken off for
parts unknown. Maybe she left you a letter--"
"Letter!"
"Hear me out, Steve. You arrive at her apartment and find her gone. You
read a letter from her saying that she cannot marry you. This is a
rather deep shock to you and you can't face it. Know what happens?"
"I blow my brains out along a country road at ninety miles per hour."
"Please, this is serious."
"It sounds incredibly stupid to me."
"You're rejecting it in the same way you rejected the fact that Miss
Lewis ran away rather than marry you."
"Do go on, Doctor."
"You drive along the same road you'd planned to take, but the
frustration and shock pile up to put you in an accident-prone frame of
mind. You then pile up, not consciously, but as soon as you come upon
something like that tree limb which can be used to make an accident
authentic."
"Oh, sure."
Thorndyke eyed me soberly. "Steve," he asked me in a brittle voice, "you
won't try to convince me that any esper will let physical danger of that
sort get close enough to--"
"I've told you how it happened. My attention was on that busted sign!"
"Fine. More evidence to the fact that Miss Lewis was with you? Now
listen to me. In accident-shock you'd not remember anything that your
mind didn't want you to recall. Failure is a hard thing to take. So now
you can blame your misfortune on that accident."
"So now you tell me how you justify the fact that Catherine told
landladies, friends, bosses, and all the rest that she was going to
marry me a good long time before I was ready to be verbal about my
plans?"
"I--"
"Suppose I've succeeded in bribing everybody to perjure themselves.
Maybe we all had it in for Catherine, and did her in?"
Thorndyke shrugged. "I don't know," he said. "I really don't know,
Steve. I wish I did."
"That makes two of us," I grunted. "Hasn't anybody thought of arresting
me for kidnapping, suspicion of murder, reckless driving and cluttering
up the highway with junk?"
"Yes," he said quietly. "The police were most thorough. They had two of
their top men look into you."
"What did they find?" I asked angrily. No man likes to have his mind
turned inside out and laid out flat so that all the little wheels,
cables and levers are open to the public gaze. On the other hand, since
I was not only innocent of any crime but as baffled as the rest of them,
I'd have gone to them willingly to let them dig, to see if they could
dig past my conscious mind into the real truth.
"They found that your story was substantially an honest one."
"Then why all this balderdash about shock, rejection, and so on?"
He shook his head. "None of us are supermen," he said simply. "Your
story was honest, you weren't lying. You believe every word of it. You
saw it, you went through it. That doesn't prove your story true."
"Now see here--"
"It does prove one thing; that you, Steve Cornell, did not have any
malicious, premeditated plans against Catherine Lewis. They've checked
everything from hell to breakfast, and so far all we can do is make
long-distance guesses as to what happened."
I snorted in my disgust. "That's a telepath for you. Everything so
neatly laid out in rows of slats like a snow fence. Me--I'm going to
consult a scholar and have him really dig me deep."
Thorndyke shook his head. "They had their top men, Steve. Scholar
Redfern and Scholar Berks. Both of them Rhine Scholars, _magna cum
laude_."
I blinked as I always do when I am flabbergasted. I've known a lot of
doctors of this and that, from medicine to languages. I've even known a
scholar or two, but none of them intimately. But when a doctor of psi is
invited to take his scholarte at Rhine, that's it, brother; I pass.
Thorndyke smiled. "You weren't too bad yourself, Steve. Ran twelfth in
your class at Illinois, didn't you?"
I nodded glumly. "I forgot to cover the facts. They'd called all the
bright boys out and collected them under one special-study roof. I
majored in mechanical ingenuity not psi. Hoped to get a D. Ing. out of
it, at least, but had to stop. Partly because I'm not ingenious enough
and partly because I ran out of cash."
Doctor Thorndyke nodded. "I know how it is," he said. I realized that he
was leading me away from the main subject gently, but I couldn't see how
to lead him back without starting another verbal hassle. He had me cold.
He could dig my mind and get the best way to lead me away, while I
couldn't read his. I gave up. It felt better, too, getting my mind off
this completely baffling puzzle even for a moment. He caught my thoughts
but his face didn't twitch a bit as he picked up his narrative smoothly:
"I didn't make it either," he said unhappily. "I'm psi and good. But I'm
telepath and not esper. I weasled my way through pre-med and medical by
main force and awkwardness, so to speak." He grinned at me sheepishly.
"I'm not much different than you or any other psi. The espers all think
that perception is superior to the ability to read minds, and vice
versa. I was going to show 'em that a telepath can make Scholar of
Medicine. So I 'pathed my way through med by reading the minds of my
fellows, who were all good espers. I got so good that I could read the
mind of an esper watching me do a delicate dissecting job, and move my
hands according to his perception. I could diagnose the deep ills with
the best of them--so long as there was an esper in the place."
"So what tripped you up?"
"Telepaths make out best dealing with people. Espers do better with
things."
"Isn't medicine a field that deals with people?"
He shook his head. "Not when a headache means spinal tumor, or
indigestion, or a bad cold. 'Doctor,' says the patient, 'I've a bad ache
along my left side just below the ribs,' and after you diagnose, it
turns out to be acute appendicitis. You see, Steve, the patient doesn't
know what's wrong with him. Only the symptoms. A telepath can follow the
patient's symptoms perfectly, but it takes an esper to dig in his guts
and perceive the tumor that's pressing on the spine or the striae on his
liver."
"Yeah."
"So I flopped on a couple of tests that the rest of the class sailed
through, just because I was not fast enough to read their minds and put
my own ability to work. It made 'em suspicious and so here I am, a mere
doctor instead of a scholar."
"There are fields for you, I'm sure."
He nodded. "Two. Psychiatry and psychology, neither of which I have any
love for. And medical research, where the ability to grasp another
doctor or scholar's plan, ideas and theories is slightly more important
than the ability to dig esper into the experiments."
"Don't see that," I said with a shake of my head.
"Well, Steve, let's take Mekstrom's Disease, for instance."
"Let's take something simple. What I know about Mekstrom's Disease could
be carved on the head of a pin with a blunt butter knife."
"Let's take Mekstrom's. That's my chance to make Scholar of Medicine,
Steve, if I can come up with an answer to one of the minor questions.
I'll be in the clinical laboratory where the only cases present are
those rare cases of Mekstrom's. The other doctors, espers every one of
them, and the scholars over them, will dig the man's body right down to
the last cell, looking and combing--you know some of the better espers
can actually dig into the constituency of a cell?--but I'll be the
doctor who can collect all their information, correlate it, and maybe
come up with an answer."
"You picked a dilly," I told him.
It was a real one, all right. Otto Mekstrom had been a mechanic-tech at
White Sands Space Station during the first flight to Venus, Mars and
Moon round-trip with landings. About two weeks after the ship came home,
Otto Mekstrom's left fingertips began to grow hard. The hardening
crawled up slowly until his hand was like a rock. They studied him and
worked over him and took all sorts of samples and made all sorts of
tests until Otto's forearm was as hard as his hand. Then they amputated
at the shoulder.
But by that time, Otto Mekstrom's toes on both feet were getting solid
and his other hand was beginning to show signs of the same. On one side
of the creepline the flesh was soft and normal, but on the other it was
all you could do to poke a sharp needle into the skin. Poor Otto ended
up a basket case, just in time to have the damned stuff start all over
again at the stumps of his arms and legs. He died when hardening reached
his vitals.
Since that day, some twenty-odd years ago, there had been about thirty
cases a year turn up. All fatal, despite amputations and everything else
known to modern medical science. God alone knew how many unfortunate
human beings took to suicide without contacting the big Medical Research
Center at Marion, Indiana.
Well, if Thorndyke could uncover something, no one could claim that a
telepath had no place in medicine. I wished him luck.
I did not see Thorndyke again in that hospital. They released me the
next day and then I had nothing to do but to chew my fingernails and
wonder what had happened to Catherine.