"Well, at least try, Harry. Get here to the Hoffman Center. We'll help
you all we can."
"I'll try." Harry's words were hardly audible as he set the receiver
down with a trembling hand.
The room was silent. The footsteps had stopped. A wave of panic passed
up Harry's spine; he crossed the room, threw open the door, stared up
and down the hall, unbelieving.
The hall was empty. He started down toward the stairs at a dead run, and
then, too late, saw the faint golden glow of a Parkinson Field across
the dingy corridor. He gasped in fear, and screamed out once as he
struck it.
And then, for seconds stretching into hours, he heard his scream echoing
and re-echoing down long, bitter miles of hollow corridor.
2
George Webber leaned back in the soft chair, turning a quizzical glance
toward the younger man across the room. He lit a long black cigar.
"Well?" His heavy voice boomed out in the small room. "Now that we've
got him here, what do you think?"
The younger man glanced uncomfortably through the glass wall panel into
the small dark room beyond. In the dimness, he could barely make out the
still form on the bed, grotesque with the electrode-vernier apparatus
already in place at its temples. Dr. Manelli looked away sharply, and
leafed through the thick sheaf of chart papers in his hand.
"I don't know," he said dully. "I just don't know what to think."
The other man's laugh seemed to rise from the depths of his huge chest.
His heavy face creased into a thousand wrinkles. Dr. Webber was a large
man, his broad shoulders carrying a suggestion of immense power that
matched the intensity of his dark, wide-set eyes. He watched Dr.
Manelli's discomfort grow, saw the younger doctor's ears grow red, and
the almost cruel lines in his face were masked as he laughed still
louder.
"Trouble with you, Frank, you just don't have the courage of your
convictions."
"Well, I don't see anything so funny about it!" Manelli's eyes were
angry. "The man has a suspicious syndrome--so you've followed him, and
spied on him for weeks on end, which isn't exactly highest ethical
practice in collecting a history. I still can't see how you're
justified."
Dr. Webber snorted, tossing his cigar down on the desk with disgust.
"The man is insane. That's my justification. He's out of touch with
reality. He's wandered into a wild, impossible, fantastic dream world.
And we've got to get him out of it, because what he knows, what he's
trying to hide from us, is so incredibly dangerous that we don't dare
let him go."
The big man stared at Manelli, his dark eyes flashing. "Can't you see
that? Or would you rather sit back and let Harry Scott go the way that
Paulus and Wineberg and the others went?"
"But to use the Parkinson Field on him--" Dr. Manelli shook his head
hopelessly. "He'd offered to come over, George. We didn't need to use
it."
"Sure, he offered to come--fine, fine. But supposing he changed his mind
on the way? For all we know, he had us figured into his paranoia, too,
and never would have come near the Hoffman Center."
Dr. Webber shook his head. "We're not playing a game any more, Frank.
Get that straight. I thought it was a game a couple of years ago, when
we first started. But it ceased to be a game when men like Paulus and
Wineberg walked in sane, healthy men, and came out blubbering idiots.
That's no game any more. We're onto something big. And, if Harry Scott
can lead us to the core of it, then I can't care too much what happens
to Harry Scott."
Dr. Manelli stood up sharply, walked to the window, and looked down over
the bright, clean buildings of the Hoffman Medical Center. Out across
the terraced park that surrounded the glassed towers and shining metal
of the Center rose the New City, tier upon tier of smooth, functional
architecture, a city of dreams built up painfully out of the rubble of
the older, ruined city.
"You could kill him," the young man said finally. "The psycho-integrator
isn't any standard interrogative technique; it's dangerous and
treacherous. You never know for sure just what you're doing when you dig
down into a man's brain tissue with those little electrode probes."
"But we can learn the truth about Harry Scott," Dr. Webber broke in.
"Six months ago, Harry Scott was working with us, a quiet, affable,
pleasant young fellow, extremely intelligent, intensely co-operative. He
was just the man we needed to work with us, an engineer who could take
our data and case histories, study them, and subject them to a
completely nonmedical analysis. Oh, we had to have it done--the
problem's been with us for a hundred years now, growing ever since the
1950s and 60s--insanity in the population, growing, spreading without
rhyme or reason, insinuating itself into every nook and cranny of our
civilized life."
The big man blinked at Manelli. "Harry Scott was the new approach. We
were too close to the problem. We needed a nonmedical outsider to take a
look, to tell us what we were missing. So Harry Scott walked into the
problem, and then abruptly lost contact with us. We finally track him
down and find him gone, out of touch with reality, on the same wretched
road that all the others went. With Harry, it's paranoia. He's being
persecuted; he has the whole world against him, but most important--the
factor we don't dare overlook--_he's no longer working on the problem_."