"My development involves an infinitely selective feedback. We give the
subject a saturating dose of inflowing concepts. His mind is free
to choose among them and to link them. Take 'bigness, affluence and
danger' for an instance. The subject puts them together and fleshes
them out. He could experience a large, expensive fission bomb falling
onto him, or he could be sacrificed to an immense golden idol, or--Or
anything that his inner mind chose."
"I begin to understand," said Jerry. "The overlay influences all
the senses. The subject thinks he's _really_ undergoing whatever he
conjures up--and you use it for therapy, letting him work off his
aggressions and frustrations in what seems to him an actual universe."
"Correct, except for the tense," said Alan Burgess. "I _was_ doing
that until Monday of this week." He leaned forward across the desk.
"We screen the subjects carefully, because certain psychoses could be
disastrous to the subject in my device. Paranoia, for instance. The
man would be amid unutterable horrors, with danger on every side; he'd
emerge a gibbering idiot, if he didn't die of heart failure first."
"Emerge?" asked Jerry, frowning. "I'd assumed you used a helmet, such
as we do in Contact...."
Burgess sighed. "Unfortunately, I am paying the penalty of lone-wolf
experimentation. I wish I'd had the sense to route the input to the
brain through a helmet, but I didn't. Instead I installed the person in
an observation room. The influencing factor was nutrition. Intravenous
feedings wouldn't have served the purpose of the observer; sometimes
the subject's choice of foodstuffs is significant. He had to be let
move about, his mind in a make-believe world, but his body actually
moving about a room we could see into. So--I had an atomic duplicator
installed. The hospital got one last year for making radium, turning
cancerous growths into normal flesh, regrowing bone and the like.
"Should the subject then grow hungry, the duplicator would be triggered
by his conviction of eating. In his mind, he might be--hanging from
a branch by his tail, for instance. The duplicator's production of
bananas, coconuts or whatever would give us a further clue to his state
of mind. You see?"
* * * * *
"So far, sound enough, Dr. Burgess," said Jerry. "So what went wrong? I
assume something did, or I wouldn't be here."
"We made a terrible error. We tried observing a man named Anthony
Mawson in our gadget. I'd diagnosed his case as simple inferiority
complex. My fault. Wrong diagnosis. Mawson has megalomania, a gorgeous
case of it ... of course, he's not the first such case to fool
psychiatrists. You see, his outward shyness, soft-spoken voice and
general gawkishness is due to feeling superior to others, not the
reverse. He feels smarter, stronger, braver, etcetera, than everybody
else in creation--but he also feels that nobody knows it but himself.
Hence his indrawing, his brooding, taciturn gentility."
Jerry Norcriss prodded. "What happened with Mawson when you put him in
your machine?"
"I don't know," said Burgess. "No one's been able to see into the
machine since he entered it on Monday."
"He couldn't have escaped?"
"No! I wish he had. Anthony Mawson is still in that room, in his own
private universe, and we can't get him out of it. We've tried cutting
the power to the machine; the opacity inside the room remains. We sent
two men in after him. They never came out."
"How could he possibly?" asked Jerry.
Burgess shook his head. "We can only guess. Our theory is that he's
used the duplicator to make the entire room self-sustaining. Normally
we could wait till he runs out of material to feed the duplicator,
but--we can't wait on the lives of those two men. Nor can we chance his
expanding his universe."