Morgan said, "You can't do it, Henry. You're crossing the line. The
people we treat are on one side of the line and we're on the other. If
you cross that line, you won't be able to treat people again."
The small man looked out the large window, blinking myopically at the
brassy sunlight. "That's just it, Clyde. There is a line between us,
a wall. How can we really understand the people who come to us, if we
hide on our side of the wall?"
Morgan shook his thick head, ruffling his thinning red hair. "I dunno,
Henry, but staying on our side is a pretty good way to keep sane and
that's quite an accomplishment these days."
Infield whirled and stalked to the desk. "That's the answer! The whole
world is going mad and we are just sitting back watching it hike
along. Do you know that what we are doing is really the most primitive
medicine in the world? We are treating the symptoms and not the
disease. One cannibal walking another with sleeping sickness doesn't
cure anything. Eventually the savage dies--just as all those sick
savages out in the street will die unless we can cure the disease, not
only the indications."
* * * * *
Morgan shifted his ponderous weight uneasily. "Now, Henry, it's no good
to talk like that. We psychiatrists can't turn back the clock. There
just aren't enough of us or enough time to give that old-fashioned
_therapy_ to all the sick people."
Infield leaned on the desk and glared. "I called myself a psychiatrist
once. But now I know we're semi-mechanics, semi-engineers,
semi-inventors, semi lots of other things, but certainly not even
semi-psychiatrists. A psychiatrist wouldn't give a foetic gyro to a man
with claustrophobia."
His mind went back to the first gyro ball he had ever issued; the
remembrance of his pride in the thing sickened him. Floating before
him in memory was the vertical hoop and the horizontal hoop, both of
shining steel-impervium alloy. Transfixed in the twin circles was the
face of the patient, slack with smiles and sweat. But his memory was
exaggerating the human element. The gyro actually passed over a man's
shoulder, through his legs, under his arms. Any time he felt the
walls creeping in to crush him, he could withdraw his head and limbs
into the circle and feel safe. Steel-impervium alloy could resist even
a nuclear explosion. The foetic gyro ball was worn day and night, for
life.
The sickness overcame him. He sat down on Morgan's desk. "That's just
one thing, the gyro ball. There are so many others, so many."
Morgan smiled. "You know, Henry, not all of our Cures are so--so--not
all are like that. Those Cures for mother complexes aren't even
obvious. If anybody does see that button in a patient's ear, it looks
like a hearing aid. Yet for a nominal sum, the patient is equipped to
hear the soothing recorded voice of his mother saying, 'It's all right,
everything's all right, Mommy loves you, it's all right....'"
"But _is_ everything all right?" Infield asked intensely. "Suppose
the patient is driving over one hundred on an icy road. He thinks
about slowing down, but there's the voice in his ear. Or suppose he's
walking down a railroad track and hears a train whistle--if he can hear
anything over that verbal pablum gushing in his ear."
Morgan's face stiffened. "You know as well as I do that those voices
are nearly subsonic. They don't cut a sense efficiency more than 23
per cent."
"At first, Clyde--only at first. But what about the severe case where
we have to burn a three-dimensional smiling mother-image on the eyes of
the patient with radiation? With that image over everything he sees and
with that insidious voice drumming in his head night and day, do you
mean to say that man's senses will only be impaired 23 per cent? Why,
he'll turn violently schizophrenic sooner or later--and you know it.
The only cure we have for that is still a strait jacket, a padded cell
or one of those inhuman lobotomies."