"You looked more dead than alive when you came out."
"I'm afraid I'm too long on empathy and too short on objectivity to
fool with that kind of thing. One of the reasons I don't often trigger
these big discharges in my own practice. I get--inside, I guess,
somehow. No detachment, or not enough."
"What was there? Inside, if that's the way you want to put it."
Colin sighed, absently pulled his pipe from his jacket pocket.
"Specifically, I don't think I can tell you. He saw--or experienced
as seeing--something when he went into the Skip. It was something so
damned big it stripped him of his orientation as a human being."
"The films show him assuming a foetal position. That what you mean?"
"Well--basically this kind of regression is a denial of responsibility.
'I'm not a man,' he says. 'I'm just an unborn child. Take care of me.'
The individual wants no part of the problems and responsibilities of
adulthood. Harkins came out of that, or he never could have got the
ship back. But he couldn't face being a man. The only way he could
carry out his responsibilities, and survive, was to abolish the
category, man."
Colin leaned back and sighed. "You know," he said thoughtfully,
"Harkins must be the loneliest human being that ever lived. God!"