"When was the next time?" asked Humphrys.
Irritably, Sharp said: "Then it happened all the time, every time I was up high, every time I had to walk up or down a flight of steps--any situation where I was high and might fall. But to be afraid to walk up the steps of my own house--" He broke off temporarily. "I can't walk up three steps," he said wretchedly. "Three concrete steps."
"Any particular bad episodes, outside of those you've mentioned?"
"I was in love with a pretty brown-haired girl who lived on the top floor of the Atcheson Apartments. Probably she still lives there; I wouldn't know. I got five or six floors up and then--I told her good night and came back down." Ironically, he said: "She must have thought I was crazy."
"Others?" Humphrys asked, mentally noting the appearance of the sexual element.
"One time I couldn't accept a job because it involved travel by air. It had to do with inspecting agricultural projects."
Humphrys said: "In the old days, analysts looked for the origin of a phobia. Now we ask: what does it do? Usually it gets the individual out of situations he unconsciously dislikes."
A slow, disgusted flush appeared on Sharp's face. "Can't you do better than that?"
Disconcerted, Humphrys murmured: "I don't say I agree with the theory or that it's necessarily true in your case. I'll say this much though: it's not falling you're afraid of. It's something that falling reminds you of. With luck we ought to be able to dig up the prototype experience--what they used to call the original traumatic incident." Getting to his feet, he began to drag over a stemmed tower of electronic mirrors. "My lamp," he explained. "It'll melt the barriers."
Sharp regarded the lamp with apprehension. "Look," he muttered nervously, "I don't want my mind reconstructed. I may be a neurotic, but I take pride in my personality."
"This won't affect your personality." Bending down, Humphrys plugged in the lamp. "It will bring up material not accessible to your rational center. I'm going to trace your life--track back to the incident at which you were done great harm--and find out what you're really afraid of."
Black shapes drifted around him. Sharp screamed and struggled wildly, trying to pry loose the fingers closing over his arms and legs. Something smashed against his face. Coughing, he slumped forward, dribbling blood and saliva and bits of broken teeth. For an instant, blinding light flashed; he was being scrutinized.
"Is he dead?" a voice demanded.
"Not yet." A foot poked experimentally into Sharp's side. Dimly, in his half-consciousness, he could hear ribs cracking. "Almost, though."
"Can you hear me, Sharp?" a voice rasped, close to his ear.
He didn't respond. He lay trying not to die, trying not to associate himself with the cracked and broken thing that had been his body.
"You probably imagine," the voice said, familiar, intimate, "that I'm going to say you've got one last chance. But you don't, Sharp. Your chance is gone. I'm telling you what we're going to do with you."
Gasping, he tried not to hear. And, futilely, he tried not to feel what they were systematically doing to him.
"All right," the familiar voice said finally, when it had been done. "Now throw him out."
What remained of Paul Sharp was lugged to a circular hatch. The nebulous outline of darkness rose up around him and then--hideously--he was pitched into it. Down he fell, but this time he didn't scream.
No physical apparatus remained with which to scream.
Snapping the lamp off, Humphrys bent over and methodically roused the slumped figure.
"Sharp!" he ordered loudly. "Wake up! Come out of it!"
The man groaned, blinked his eyes, stirred. Over his face settled a glaze of pure, unmitigated torment.
"God," he whispered, eyes blank, body limp with suffering. "They--"
"You're back here," Humphrys said, shaken by what had been dredged up. "There's nothing to worry about; you're absolutely safe. It's over with--happened years ago."
"Over," Sharp murmured pathetically.
"You're back in the present. Understand?"
"Yes," Sharp muttered. "But--what was it? They pushed me out--through and into something. And I went on down." He trembled violently. "I fell."
"You fell through a hatch," Humphrys told him calmly. "You were beaten up and badly injured--fatally, they assumed. But you did survive. You are alive. You got out of it."
"Why did they do it?" Sharp asked brokenly. His face, sagging and gray, twitched with despair. "Help me, Humphrys ..."
"Consciously, you don't remember when it happened?"
"No."
"Do you remember where?"
"No." Sharp's face jerked spasmodically. "They tried to kill me--they did kill me!" Struggling upright, he protested: "Nothing like that happened to me. I'd remember if it had. It's a false memory--my mind's been tampered with!"
"It's been repressed," Humphrys said firmly, "deeply buried because of the pain and shock. A form of amnesia--it's been filtering indirectly up in the form of your phobia. But now that you recall it consciously--"
"Do I have to go back?" Sharp's voice rose hysterically. "Do I have to get under that damn lamp again?"
"It's got to come out on a conscious level," Humphrys told him, "but not all at once. You've had your limit for today."
Sagging with relief, Sharp settled back in the chair. "Thanks," he said weakly. Touching his face, his body, he whispered: "I've been carrying that in my mind all these years. Corroding, eating away--"
"There should be some diminution of the phobia," the analyst told him, "as you grapple with the incident itself. We've made progress; we now have some idea of the real fear. It involves bodily injury at the hands of professional criminals. Ex-soldiers in the early post-war years... gangs of bandits, I remember."
A measure of confidence returned to Sharp. "It isn't hard to understand a falling fear, under the circumstances. Considering what happened to me ... Shakily, he started to his feet. And screamed shrilly.
"What is it?" Humphrys demanded, hastily coming over and grabbing hold of his arm. Sharp leaped violently away, staggered, and collapsed inertly in the chair. "What happened?"
Face working, Sharp managed: "I can't get up."
"What?"
"I can't stand up." Imploringly, he gazed up at the analyst, stricken and terrified. "I'm--afraid I'll fall. Doctor, now I can't even get to my feet."
For an interval neither man spoke. Finally, his eyes on the floor, Sharp whispered: "The reason I came to you, Humphrys, is because your office is on the ground floor. That's a laugh, isn't it? I couldn't go any higher."
"We're going to have to turn the lamp back on you," Humphrys said.
"I realize it. I'm scared." Gripping the arms of the chair, he continued: "Go ahead. What else can we do? I can't leave here. Humphrys, this thing is going to kill me."
"No, it isn't." Humphrys got the lamp into position. "We'll get you out of this. Try to relax; try to think of nothing in particular." Clicking the mechanism on, he said softly: "This time I don't want the traumatic incident itself. I want the envelope of experience that surrounds it. I want the broader segment of which it's a part."
Paul Sharp walked quietly through the snow. His breath, in front of him, billowed outward and formed a sparkling cloud of white. To his left lay the jagged ruins of what had been buildings. The ruins, covered with snow, seemed almost lovely. For a moment he paused, entranced.
"Interesting," a member of his research team observed, coming up. "Could be anything--absolutely anything--under there."
"It's beautiful, in a way," Sharp commented.
"See that spire?" The young man pointed with one heavily gloved finger; he still wore his lead-shielded suit. He and his group had been poking around the still-contaminated crater. Their boring bars were lined up in an orderly row. "That was a church," he informed Sharp. "A nice one, by the looks of it. And over there--" he indicated an indiscriminate jumble of ruin--"that was the main civic center."
"The
city wasn't directly hit, was it?" Sharp asked.
"It was bracketed. Come on down and see what we've run into. The crater to our right--"
"No, thanks," Sharp said, pulling back with intense aversion. "I'll let you do the crawling around."
The youthful expert glanced curiously at Sharp, then forgot the matter. "Unless we run into something unexpected, we should be able to start reclamation within a week. The first step, of course, is to clear off the slag-layer. It's fairly well cracked--a lot of plant growth has perforated it, and natural decay has reduced a great deal of it to semi-organic ash."
"Fine," Sharp said, with satisfaction. "I'll be glad to see something here again, after all these years."
The expert asked: "What was it like before the war? I never saw that; I was born after the destruction began."
"Well," Sharp said, surveying the fields of snow, "this was a thriving agricultural center. They grew grapefruit here. Arizona grapefruit. The Roosevelt Dam was along this way."
"Yes," the expert said, nodding. "We located the remnants of it."
"Cotton was grown here. So was lettuce, alfalfa, grapes, olives, apricots--the thing I remember most, the time I came through Phoenix with my family, was the eucalyptus trees."
"We won't have all that back," the expert said regretfully. "What the heck--eucalyptus? I never heard of that."
"There aren't any left in the United States," Sharp said. "You'd have to go to Australia."
Listening, Humphrys jotted down a notation. "Okay," he said aloud, switching off the lamp. "Come back, Sharp."
With a grunt, Paul Sharp blinked and opened his eyes. "What--" Struggling up, he yawned, stretched, peered blankly around the office. "Something about reclamation. I was supervising a team of recon men. A young kid."
"When did you reclaim Phoenix?" Humphrys asked. "That seems to be included in the vital time-space segment."
Sharp frowned. "We never reclaimed Phoenix. That's still projected. We hope to get at it sometime in the next year."
"Are you positive?"
"Naturally. That's my job."
"I'm going to have to send you back," Humphrys said, already reaching for the lamp.
"What happened?"
The lamp came on. "Relax," Humphrys instructed briskly, a trifle too briskly for a man supposed to know exactly what he was doing. Forcing himself to slow down, he said carefully: "I want your perspective to broaden. Take in an earlier incident, one preceding the Phoenix reclamation."
In an inexpensive cafeteria in the business district, two men sat facing each other across a table.
"I'm sorry," Paul Sharp said, with impatience. "I've got to get back to my work." Picking up his cup of ersatz coffee, he gulped the contents down.
The tall, thin man carefully pushed away his empty dishes and, leaning back, lit a cigar.
"For two years," Giller said bluntly, "you've been giving us the runaround. Frankly, I'm a little tired of it."
"Runaround?" Sharp had started to rise. "I don't get your drift."
"You're going to reclaim an agricultural area--you're going to tackle Phoenix. So don't tell me you're sticking to industrial. How long do you imagine those people are going to keep on living? Unless you reclaim their farms and lands--"
"What people?"
Harshly, Giller said: "The people living at Petaluma. Camped around the craters."
With vague dismay, Sharp murmured: "I didn't realize there was anybody living there. I thought you all headed for the nearest reclaimed regions, San Francisco and Sacramento."
"You never read the petitions we presented," Giller said softly.
Sharp colored. "No, as a matter of fact. Why should I? If there're people camping in the slag, it doesn't alter the basic situation; you should leave, get out of there. That area is through." He added: "I got out."
Very quietly, Giller said: "You would have stuck around if you'd farmed there. If your family had farmed there for over a century. It's different from running a drug store. Drug stores are the same everywhere in the world."
"So are farms."
"No," Giller said dispassionately. "Your land, your family's land, has a unique feeling. We'll keep on camping there until we're dead or until you decide to reclaim." Mechanically collecting the checks, he finished: "I'm sorry for you, Paul. You never had roots like we have. And I'm sorry you can't be made to understand." As he reached into his coat for his wallet, he asked: "When can you fly out there?"
"Fly!" Sharp echoed, shuddering. "I'm not flying anywhere."
"You've got to see the town again. You can't decide without having seen those people, seen how they're living."
"No," Sharp said emphatically. "I'm not flying out there. I can decide on the basis of reports."
Giller considered. "You'll come," he declared.
"Over my dead body!"
Giller nodded. "Maybe so. But you're going to come. You can't let us die without looking at us. You've got to have the courage to see what it is you're doing." He got out a pocket calendar and scratched a mark by one of the dates. Tossing it across the table to Sharp, he informed him: "We'll come by your office and pick you up. We have the plane we flew down here. It's mine. It's a sweet ship."
Trembling, Sharp examined the calendar. And, standing over his mumbling, supine patient, so did Humphrys.
He had been right. Sharp's traumatic incident, the repressed material, didn't lie in the past.
Sharp was suffering from a phobia based on an event six months in the future.
"Can you get up?" Humphrys inquired.
In the chair, Paul Sharp stirred feebly. "I--" he began, and then sank into silence.
"No more for a while," Humphrys told him reassuringly. "You've had enough. But I wanted to get you away from the trauma itself."
"I feel better now."
"Try to stand." Humphrys approached and stood waiting, as the man crept unsteadily to his feet.
"Yes," Sharp breathed. "It has receded. What was that last? I was in a cafe or something. With Giller."
From his desk Humphrys got a prescription pad. "I'm going to write you out a little comfort. Some round white pills to take every four hours." He scribbled and then handed the slip to his patient. "So you will relax. It'll take away some of the tension."
"Thanks," Sharp said, in a weak, almost inaudible voice. Presently, he asked: "A lot of material came up, didn't it?"
"It certainly did," Humphrys admitted tightly.
There was nothing he could do for Paul Sharp. The man was very close to death now--in six short months, Giller would go to work on him. And it was too bad, because Sharp was a nice guy, a nice, conscientious, hard-working bureaucrat who was only trying to do his job as he saw it.
"What do you think?" Sharp asked pathetically. "Can you help me?"
"I'll try," Humphrys answered, not able to look directly at him. "But it goes very deep."
"It's been a long time growing," Sharp admitted humbly. Standing by the chair, he seemed small and forlorn; not an important official but only one isolated, unprotected individual. "I'd sure appreciate your help. If this phobia keeps up, no telling where it'll end."
Humphrys asked suddenly, "Would you consider changing your mind and granting Giller's demands?"
"I can't," Sharp said. "It's bad policy. I'm opposed to special pleading, and that's what it is."
"Even if you come from the area? Even if the people are friends and former neighbors of yours?"
"It's my job," Sharp said. "I have to do it without regard for my feelings or anybody else's."
"You're not a bad fellow," Humphrys said involuntarily. "I'm sorry--" He broke off.
"Sorry what?" Sharp moved mechanically toward the exit door. "I've taken enough of your time. I realize how busy you analysts are. When shall I come back. Can I come back?"
"Tomorrow." Humphrys guided him outside and into the corridor. "About this same time, if it's convenient."
"Thanks a lot," Sharp said, with relief. "I really appreci
ate it."
As soon as he was alone in his office, Humphrys closed the door and strode back to his desk. Reaching down, he grabbed the telephone and unsteadily dialed.
"Give me somebody on your medical staff," he ordered curtly when he had been connected with the Special Talents Agency.
"This is Kirby," a professional-sounding voice came presently. "Medical research."
Humphrys briefly identified himself. "I have a patient here," he said, "who seems to be a latent precog."
Kirby was interested. "What area does he come from?"
"Petaluma. Sonoma County, north of San Francisco Bay. It's east of--"
"We're familiar with the area. A number of precogs have showed up there. That's been a gold mine for us."
"Then I was right," Humphrys said.
"What's the date of the patient's birth?"
"He was six years old when the war began."
"Well," Kirby said, disappointed, "then he didn't really get enough of a dose. He'll never develop a full precog talent, such as we work with here."
"In other words, you won't help?"
"Latents--people with a touch of it--outnumber the real carriers. We don't have time to fool with them. You'll probably run into dozens like your patient, if you stir around. When it's imperfect, the talent isn't valuable; it's going to be a nuisance for the man, probably nothing else."
"Yes, it's a nuisance," Humphrys agreed caustically. "The man is only months away from a violent death. Since he was a child, he's been getting advanced phobic warnings. As the event gets closer, the reactions intensify."
"He's not conscious of the future material?"
"It operates strictly on a subrational level."
"Under the circumstances," Kirby said thoughtfully, "maybe it's just as well. These things appear to be fixed. If he knew about it, he still couldn't change it."