“Yes, sir,” said the captain grimly. “Thank you,” said the colonel, “for your co-operation.”
Jeremy woke up starving. The light seeping through the closed Venetian blinds over the room’s one window was tinged with red, so it must be late afternoon.
He sat up and swung his legs over the side of the cot. He felt refreshed, but dizzy.
And then he remembered the questions, and his own answers, and his hands clutched the leather covering of the cot as he stared across the room.
He believed it. He couldn’t kid himself any more, he couldn’t try to convince himself any more that it was just an hallucination. He believed it, he knew it, and so did the psychiatrist.
He shouldn’t have come here. He should have hidden it, held it down, learned to live with it. Because now the psychiatrist knew, and the psychiatrist could come to only one conclusion.
That Jeremy Masters was crazy.
Maybe I am, he thought. Maybe I really am.
The door opened, and the psychiatrist looked in. “Ah,” he said, with false joviality, “you’re awake. And I imagine you’re hungry. You woke up just in time for dinner. Come along.”
The psychiatrist was angry about something, Jeremy could feel it, but he was too worried about himself to pay any attention to the feeling. “I told you, didn’t I?” he said.
“Yes, you did.”
“Am I crazy?”
The psychiatrist looked away.
“No,” he said. He started to say something, then obviously changed his mind and said instead, “There’s an ambivalence there. You believe that this hallucination was real, and yet you understand that such a belief is a symptom of mental imbalance. You haven’t been completely captured by the illusion. I don’t think it will take too long to straighten you out.”
“Will I be staying in the hospital here?”
The psychiatrist made an angry gesture. “Only till tomorrow,” he said. “Then you’ll be going to another hospital.”
“An asylum?”
“No. Another Air Force hospital. For… for observation, that’s all.”
“I see,” said Jeremy hopelessly.
The false joviality was back. “Don’t worry about it,” the psychiatrist said. “You want to be cured, and that’s half the battle.”
The next half hour was a confusing one for Jeremy. The psychiatrist turned him over to a man-with-clipboard, who turned him over to a starched smiling nurse, who traded him a set of blue-gray hospital pajamas for his uniform fatigues, and who then turned him over to another patient, a lanky buck-toothed grinner named Bob, who took him away to the hospital chow hall for dinner.
And all through that half hour, and all through dinner, and all through the long bright evening in the eight-man ward where he was to sleep that night, he kept remembering what the psychiatrist had said.
“You WANT to be cured, and that’s half the battle.” If he had traveled seven hundred miles in one split second — if he had traveled seven hundred miles in one split second — did he want to be cured?
The next day, a different starched nurse gave him back his uniform, and at ten hundred hours he followed yet another man-with-clipboard to a bus, which he boarded with nine other people. The bus was ancient, still painted the Army olive drab, and it bounced and jounced across the base to the flight line where, two hours later, the ten of them were put on a goony bird and told to fasten their safety belts. Then, after another ten minutes, the plane took off.
After seven weeks of basic training, Jeremy was used to this kind of treatment. No one told him where he was going, or how long it would take to get there, or what would happen next, or much of anything else, but that was the Air Force way. One was moved from place to place, and one simply followed and hoped for the best.
The plane ride took an hour and a half. Jeremy had time to get used to the novelty of flying in an airplane and looking out the window at the patchwork quilt below, and spent a while looking at the other passengers. Seven of them were clearly patients like himself, dressed in rumpled fatigues and looking worried but fatalistic. The last two were also in fatigues, but the fatigues were neat and pressed, and encircled at the waist by cartridge belts from which dangled holstered automatics.
Guards. Without anyone mentioning the fact, without anyone talking to him at all, he had passed progressively through the stages from basic trainee to patient to prisoner.
His depression wasn’t dispelled after the plane landed. The guards herded the seven onto another bus, and they were driven to a gray stucco building with bars on the windows of all five floors.
And the next two days were routine. The routine, that is, that Jeremy had come to expect from the Air Force. There was the checking out of pajamas and bedding, there was the assignment to a ward, there was the filling out of innumerable forms, there was the lecture by a Staff Sergeant on the degree of cleanliness to be maintained in Jeremy’s “area” — that section of space-time which included his bed and bedside table in the eight-man ward — there was the bad chow hall food, and there was the hillbilly three beds away who owned, a small radio which was at all times tuned in to Wheeling, West Virginia.
On the third day, there was another psychiatrist, a major named Grildquist. Major Grildquist was a fat bald man in a rumpled uniform. He smiled at all times, and his eyes were ice-blue and watchful.
The first interview with Major Grildquist was exactly like the interview with the psychiatrist at the other hospital. There were the questions and the answers, and then the sodium amytal and more questions and answers. And then he was sent back to the ward.
He lay miserable in the bed, listening unwillingly to Wheeling, West Virginia, and wondering what was going to become of him.
He should have kept it to himself. It was too late now, and now he knew it. He should have kept it to himself.
The four of them were sitting around the living room of Colonel Brice’s suite in the BOQ, drinking beer and talking things over. Colonel Brice paced the floor, caged and impatient. Ed Clark sat on the arm of the sofa, happily eager. Paul Swanson sat slumped on the sofa, apparently bored and half-asleep. And Major Grildquist sat on the edge of his chair, his round face open and excited.
“Teleportation!” exclaimed the major. “That was the one I was willing to bet we’d never find, and, by golly, here’s one right here!”
“I wanted a telepath,” said the colonel grumpily. Inaction always made him grouchy, even when he understood the need for inaction, for waiting-and-seeing. “I need, a telepath,” he went on. “Somebody to dig down into the bottom of that fool boy’s mind and find out what makes him tick. He doesn’t understand the thing himself; he’s devoting all his energies to denying it ever happened.”
“A natural reaction,” said the major complacently. “He’ll get over it. Once he understands that it really did happen to him, and that it’s an ability we can use—”
“That’s just it,” snapped the colonel. He stopped his pacing to glower at Major Grildquist. “Once he understands. But how are we going to get him to understand?”
“We could tell him,” suggested Paul Swanson.
“No. He wouldn’t believe it, and he wouldn’t be any closer to finding out just how he managed to do it in the first place. We’ve got to force it out of him. We’ve got to find some way to force him into such a position that he’ll have to use that talent of his again. We’ve got to force him to believe in himself, and then we’ve got to force him to understand himself.”