"'Mr. Crenson, is something bothering you — I mean something physical — right now?' he asked.
"'Yeah, I admitted, 'I'm having trouble holding my water.'
"'There is a rest room outside,' he said, beginning to rise. 'I'll show you — '
"'Not that way. I mean, like this water is sort of — in my head, I guess.'
"He froze. He stared at me.
"'I'm afraid I don't understand exactly what you mean,' he said then. 'Water — in your head?'
"I grinned.
"'Well, yes and no; I said. 'I was speaking sort of — figuratively. I mean, there's this water from my coat and I'm holding it with my mind and it's getting to be sort of a strain. So I should put it somewhere. Maybe I will just take it to that rest room and dump it there, if you'll show me — '
"'Mr. Crenson, do you know what a defense mechanism is?' he asked.
"'Sure, I've been doing my homework. It's something you do or say or think to keep from doing or saying or thinking something else you really want to but for some reason are afraid to. Oh, you think that's what this is. No, it's real water, and I'm carrying it and can make it be anywhere I want it to be inside of about a ten-foot radius from where I am right now — I think.'
"He smiled.
"'Then why don't you deposit it in the fish tank?' he said. 'And we can get on with our conversation.'
"'That's not a bad idea,' I said. 'It's pretty full, though.'
"'That's all right,' he said.
"So I moved the water into the tank. Immediately, the thing overflowed. Dr. Rudo's eyes widened as he watched the water run down the sides and spill onto the floor. Then he gave me a strange look and reached out and worked his intercom.
"'Mrs. Weiler, would you come in here a moment?' he said. 'And bring a mop and a pail? We've had a small accident. Thank you.'
"Then he lowered himself back into his chair and studied me for several seconds.
Perhaps you should begin by telling me how you did what you just did,' he said.
"'It's kind of long and involved,' I said. 'On the other hand. It's also the cause of the problem I came to see you about.'
"Take your time,' he told me.
"'It was back in September of '46,' I began, 'the day Jetboy died….'
"Mrs. Weiler came in a couple of minutes later and was about to mop the wet area. I beat her to it and transported it all from the floor into the bucket. She stepped back and stared after the splash occurred.
"'Just take it away,' Dr. Rudo told her. 'Then phone everyone who has an appointment this afternoon. Cancel all of them.
"'Go ahead, Mr. Crenson, the whole story, please,' he said then, after she'd left.
"So I told him what it was like, and the thing that made my case different from all the others — how I fear sleeping more than anything else, and the things I do to postpone it. He questioned me at great length about the sleeping; and that was the first time I can remember hearing the word dauerschlaf. He seemed taken by my case and its parallels to an experimental European therapy technique he'd apparently once had something to do with. Also, as it turned out, he had heard of my case; and from the way he quoted medical journals, it seemed he'd read every important paper published on the wild card virus.
"I talked all afternoon. I told him about my family and old Bentley and the second-story work I used to do. I told him about my transformations, about my friends, about some of the scrapes I'd been involved in. I found myself starting to like the guy. I'd never really talked that way to anybody before. He seemed fascinated by the jokers and aces, by the different manifestations of the wild card virus I'd seen. Got me to talking about them at some length, shaking his head at my descriptions of some of the worst joker cases I've known. Even got into a long philosophical discussion with me as to what I thought it might be doing to the whole human race. I told him that not too many nats dated jokers, if it was the genetic angle he was thinking about, but he just kept shaking his head and said that wasn't the point, that their existing at all was like a cancer on human life in general, that you had to think of it sociologically as well as biologically. I allowed as he could have a point, but that it seemed one of those 'So what?' points. The situation was already in place, and the real questions involved what you were going to do about it. He agreed with me then, saying that he hoped it would be soon.
"Most of all, he seemed fascinated by my long sleeps — my dauerschlafen — and the way they pulled me apart and put me back together again. He questioned me about them at great length — how I felt going into them, coming out of them, whether I remembered anything that happened during them, whether I had any dreams while they were in progress. Then he told me about dauerschlaf as a form of therapy, of how his earlier work in Europe had involved the production of prolonged comas in non-wild card patients, by means of drugs and hypnosis, to capitalize on the remarkable recuperative abilities of the body and mind during sleep. He'd apparently gotten some very positive results with this, which was one of the reasons he found my case intriguing. The parallel struck him so forcibly, he said, that he would want to pursue the matter for that reason alone, even if he couldn't do more than adjust my feelings otherwise. But he felt that it could also be the means for doing even more for me."
Croyd finished his beer, fetched a second bottle and opened it.
"Mr. Crenson," Hannah Davis stated, and he met her eyes, "your tail seems to have developed wandering hands."
"Sorry," he said. "Sometimes it has a mind of its own."
The tiger-striped appendage emerged from beneath the table to lash behind him. Croyd took a drink.
"So the man represented himself as being able to cure your wild card condition?" she said.
"No," Croyd replied. "He never said that he could cure it. What he proposed later was something different — a rather ingenious-sounding way of stabilizing it in a fashion that I'd no longer need to fear going to sleep."
"Of course he was a fraud," she said. "He took your money and he got your hopes up and then he couldn't deliver. Right?"
"Wrong," Croyd said. "He knew what he was talking about, and he was able to deliver. That wasn't the problem."
"Wait a minute," she said. "It would have made world headlines if someone had found a way to mitigate wild card effects. Tachyon would've picked up on it and been distributing it on street corners. If it worked, how come no one ever heard about it?"
Croyd raised his hand, and his tail.
"Bear with me. If it were simpler, I'd be done talking," he said. "Excuse me."
He was gone. A man-sized form flashed past the bar at the corner of her seeing. She heard a door open and close. When she looked toward the sound, there was no one in sight. A moment later, however, a shadow flashed by and Croyd was seated before her again, sipping his beer.
"Rapid metabolism," he explained.
"Pan Rudo," he continued then, as if there had been no interruption, "seemed quite taken with my story. I talked all afternoon, and he took pages and pages of notes. Every now and then he'd ask me a question. Later, Mrs. Weiler knocked on the door and told him it was quitting time and asked whether he wanted her to lock the office door when she left. He said no, he'd do it in a few minutes. Then he offered to take me to dinner and I took him up on it.
"We went out then and had a few steaks — he was surprised at my metabolism, too — and we continued to talk through dinner. Afterwards, we went to his apartment — a very nice pad — and talked some more, until fairly late. He'd learned my story by then, and a lot of other things I don't usually talk about, too."
"What do you mean?" she asked.
"Well," Croyd said, "then, and in the days that followed, he told me about some of the more popular psychological theories. He'd even known the people who'd developed them. He'd studied with Freud for a while, and later at the Jungian Institute in Switzerland at the same time he was doing dauerschlaf research there. He told me about Freud's ideas on infantile sexuality, stages of development, sublimation, about ids and egos and superegos. And about Adler's drive to power and Rank's birth trauma. He talked about Jung's personality types and his theory of individuation. He said he felt that they all had something to them, some more for some people than others, or at different times in a person's life. He said that he was more interested in the final forms that these things took, in the emotional constructions they led to for a person's dealing with life. He felt that life is a compromise between what you want and what you get, and that there's always fear involved in the transaction — and it doesn't matter which of all the classical sources it springs from, it's just something that's always there. He said that we tell ourselves lies in order to deal with it — lies about the world, lies about ourselves. He had this idea, actually, from the playwright Ibsen, who called the big one — the big phony construct about yourself and the world — a 'life lie.' Rudo felt that everybody has one of these, and that it was just a matter of the degree of its falseness that made the difference between psychosis and neurosis. He told me that his whole approach to problems that weren't organic involved finding out a person's life lie and manipulating it so the patient can come to better terms with reality. Not to get rid of it. He said that some kind of life lie is necessary. Break it or tamper too deeply and you damage the personality, maybe drive the person completely nuts. He looked on therapy as a means of economizing the lie for better accommodation to the world."