“Prima donnas,” grumbled the colonel. He glowered at Clark and Swanson. “A bunch of prima donnas.”
Clark grinned. A cigarette drifted up out of Swanson’s shirt pocket, came to rest between his lips, and a lighter came over from the table. His cigarette going and the lighter returned to the table, Swanson said, “I could jounce his bed a little if you want.”
“No,” said the colonel. “Ben’s right. He knows what he’s doing. But at least let me complain about it.”
For two days, Jeremy was left to himself in the single room, allowed out of the room only at mealtimes, and to go to the head. On the third day, his thinking having progressed no farther than on the first day, he was introduced to group therapy.
Group therapy was ridiculous. A motley collection of fifteen or sixteen sad-looking individuals sat around a good-sized room in leather armchairs, and smoked, and told each other their problems. Then they told each other how to solve their problems. A psychiatrist in civilian clothing sat in a corner and nodded approvingly.
When Jeremy was asked what his personal twitch was, he answered shortly, “I teleported.”
They then all took turns telling him why he had this particular delusion. A couple of his fellow-inmates, there because of sexual aberrations, found a sexual cause of this fantasy, equating it with the dream in which one imagines one is flying. A little guy with a pronounced persecution complex discovered that Jeremy had an unconscious persecution complex and wanted to run away. And so on.
Jeremy went to group therapy for three days, but he could never seem to get into the swing of things. He wasn’t having fun, like the other fellows. So he was taken off group therapy, and left to stew alone in his room for two more days. Then he went back to narcoanalysis and Major Grildquist.
The sessions with Major Grildquist were, if nothing else, relaxing. The only time Jeremy could relax and ignore the doubts and the fear about his future was when he was under the influence of sodium amytal. Then it didn’t matter any more. Nothing mattered, and he spoke easily and lazily, answering the major’s questions and not bothering to worry.
The major had the same technique as the first psychiatrist. He would ask a bunch of questions about high school, and all of a sudden he would say something like, “How did you teleport?” Or, “Can you do it again?”
And his prompt baffled response would always be, “I don’t know.”
And then they would go back to questions about high school again.
After six days of this, Major Grildquist began to hint about a discharge. The facilities at this hospital were perhaps not adequate for the job ahead, he suggested. The facilities here were adequate only for those with temporary disorders, who could be cured and returned to duty in a relatively short time. It might be the best thing for Jeremy, all in all, to go to a hospital where they had more adequate facilities.
And then the major asked him, “Would you like a section eight, Jeremy?”
He was under sodium amytal, and the truth came promptly. “No, sir. No.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t want to be locked up.”
“But couldn’t you just teleport yourself out of any cell you were put in?”
“I… I don’t know. I don’t know how.”
“How would you like to spend the rest of your life in a VA hospital, Jeremy?”
“Please. Please.” Even through the mists of sodium amytal, he could feel the terror created by that suggestion. “No. Please, I want to be cured, I want to be all right. I wish it never happened, I wish, I wish, I wish it never happened.”
“All right, Jeremy. Calm down. Take a nap, now, and we’ll talk about it again later on. Just take it easy, boy.”
But he couldn’t take it easy. That night, he lay awake in his bed, staring at the ceiling. His whole life was ending here, was ending now. He was going to be just a number, a number and a body stored away in a lunatic asylum somewhere, for the rest of his life.
The next day, he announced himself cured. He told Major Grildquist that he had suddenly seen the truth. And then he proceeded to tell this truth, which turned out to be a long complicated explanation that included just about everything that anyone had said to him over the last two weeks, including one or two points brought up by his team mates on the group therapy game.
Major Grildquist listened to all this in silence, and then he fed Jeremy some more sodium amytal, and the first question he asked was, “Did you ever teleport?”
Jeremy said, “Yes.”
And that was that.
The following afternoon, Major Grildquist told him that the papers on his discharge had started their long arduous voyage through half the clerks in the Air Force. Jeremy listened to this, and thought about it all that night, and the next day he had a desperate suggestion to offer.
“Sir,” he said to the major hesitantly, “I’d like to try an experiment, if I could.”
“An experiment? What sort of experiment?”
“Well, the thing is, no matter how much I try to convince myself that I really didn’t teleport, I just can’t succeed. Now, I’ve thought it out, and I think maybe there are certain conditions that have to be met, a certain kind of situation I have to find myself in, before I can make this teleport thing work.”
The major nodded. “You want to simulate the conditions, is that it?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And what do you hope to gain from that?”
“Well, if it doesn’t work… if I can’t teleport… I don’t see why that shouldn’t convince me that the whole thing was a delusion in the first place. I won’t try to fool you or anything, I know that wouldn’t work.”
“I see,” said the major.
“And if it does work,” finished Jeremy, “then I’m sane after all.”
“I see,” said the major again. “You’ll try to go home, same as last time?”
“Yes, sir. But this time I’ll try to get some place where my mother can see me. Then I’ll have proof.”
“I’ll think about it,” said the major, deadpan. “Now, about this seventh-grade teacher of yours—”
“If he wants to try it,” said the colonel, “I say fine. That’s what we’ve been working for, after all.”
“I’m not sure,” said the major. “We might not get the conditions right — a hundred things could go wrong — and he won’t be able to do it. Then he’ll be half-convinced he didn’t do it the first time, and we’ll have lost instead of gained.”
The colonel paced the floor, glowering at the rug. “This is the turning point,” he said. “We get him, or we lose him, right here. What happens if you turn him down?”
“I’m not sure,” admitted the major. “Either he’ll revolt, and strain himself to do the trick without my co-operation, or he’ll just throw in the towel and give up completely. I wouldn’t even try to guess which way he’d go.”
“So it’s a fifty-fifty chance either way,” said the colonel. “Is that it?”
“Just about.”
“And what do you advise?”
“I frankly don’t know what to advise, Jim. This is the point, as you say. We brought him this far — now I’m lost. From now on, plans and predictions don’t mean a thing.”
The colonel nodded. He stopped his pacing to glower at Ed Clark. “What do you think?” he demanded.
“Let him try it,” said Clark promptly. “You’ve been trying to push him into action. He wants to take action now, let him do it.”
“Paul?”