After a while, they gave him a shot, and he stopped screaming and fell asleep.
“He came here!” snapped the colonel. He pointed at the middle of the room. “Right there, he stood right there, and stared at me with the most panic-stricken eyes I have ever seen in my life.”
“We shouldn’t have done it,” said the major. His voice was shaky, and he had switched to something stronger than beer. “We pushed him too hard. We shouldn’t have done it.”
“Ed!” The colonel whirled around. “What’s he doing?”
“Nothing. They gave him a sedative, I guess. He’s sound asleep.”
“What about tomorrow?” demanded the colonel. He spun back to Major Grildquist. “How’s he going to be tomorrow?”
“I don’t know. Catatonic, maybe. Or maybe he’ll snap out of it.”
“If he does, if he snaps out of it—”
“I want to tell him, Jim,” said the major. “I mean it, this is too much, we’re driving that boy too far. I mean to tell him the truth.”
“And waste the whole thing?” The colonel stood straddle-legged in front of the major, his hands on his hips. “Listen to me, Ben,” he said. “Hear me good. You didn’t have to look at that boy’s face. I did. You don’t have the final responsibility for what we’re doing to him. I do.”
“We don’t have the right—”
“We don’t have the right to lose him, Ben. We don’t have the right to throw him away. We don’t have any choice. I wish we did, but we don’t.”
“It’s gone too far, Jim. I’m going to tell him, tomorrow — if he’s capable of understanding anything.”
“And lose the whole thing? He’s gone through a lot, Ben, I’ll agree with you. And so have we. If you jump the gun on this thing, you’re wasting all that trouble and all that torment. If you jump the gun, he’s going to have gone through all this for nothing.”
The major rubbed his forehead with the back of one pudgy hand. “You’re right,” he said at last. “I know you’re right. But I look at that boy, and… never mind, you’re right.”
“It must be near the end now,” said the colonel, more softly. “It shouldn’t take too much longer.”
The major shook his head. “What should I do?” he asked. “When I talk to him tomorrow. If I talk to him tomorrow, if he’s in any condition to talk to anybody tomorrow.”
“Tell him it didn’t happen,” said the colonel immediately. “Tell him it was another delusion. You know the lingo, do your best to convince him he’s nutty as a fruit cake. And then let him stew on it a while.”
Ed Clark cleared his throat hesitantly. “Does it have to go on any more, colonel?” he asked. “Couldn’t we just go to him now and tell him the truth, and tell him we’ll help him get the ability under control?”
“How are we going to help him?” the colonel demanded. “We don’t know any more about it than he does. No, he’s got to prove himself. And in order to prove himself, he’s got to get that power of his under control.”
“I guess so,” said Clark.
“There’s one thing more,” said the colonel. “And it makes me even more sure we’ve got to push this boy to the limit.”
“What’s that?” asked Major Grildquist.
“He came here. He told you he was going to try going home again, but he came here. I would love to know how he happened to come here, why he decided to come to me.”
“You’re just a daddy to us all,” said Clark.
“Might be,” said Paul Swanson from his corner, “you’ve found that telepath you’ve been yelling for.
It took Jeremy two days to get calmed down to the point where he could walk and talk with reasonable accuracy. Then he had another interview with Major Grildquist. He tried to tell him what had happened, but it got too jumbled and confused, so they went back to the old standby, sodium amytal, and then he told the story clearly and completely, giving a full description of the room and the colonel, down to the sound of the colonel’s voice.
After the effects of the narcoanalysis had worn off, Major Grildquist discussed the situation with him. “I’ll speak frankly with you, Jeremy. You so obviously want to be cured that I really thought there was a chance we’d eventually get you squared away. I’ve been delaying the discharge papers, hoping the idea of a section eight would help you snap out of this fixation. I went along with the experiment for the same reason.”
“I saw him,” said Jeremy dully. He was afraid to let himself get even a little bit excited, because he had trouble keeping himself under control.
Major Grildquist shook his head. “I was wrong,” he said. “I want to apologize to you for that, Jeremy. The experiment had just the reverse effect from the one we were both hoping for, and I’ll admit to you that I should have expected it. You were placed in a severe stress situation, one where you were being forced to prove yourself insane, and it was just too much for you. Consciously, you want to rid yourself of this delusion. Somewhere down in the subconscious, you want to hold onto it. Crammed into that lightless closet, you cracked wide open. The subconscious took over, gave you another teleportation hallucination — the second one that can’t be proved one way or the other, significantly — and the end result is that you are now much more deeply rooted in your fixation than you were before we tried the experiment.”
The major lit a cigarette with slightly-trembling fingers. “That was my fault,” he said, “and I regret it. I wish I could go back and do it all over again, because this time I would stop and think about the implications of such an experiment, and I would never let you go through with it.”
“I saw him,” insisted Jeremy. “I can tell you just what he looked like, what the room looked like. You could find him, if you tried to.”
“All the living rooms used by Air Force colonels all over the world? You’d be an old man before we finished checking, Jeremy, and then we’d just have to come tell you we hadn’t found your man.”
“I saw him,” said Jeremy doggedly. “Jeremy, look at it this way. The first time you teleported, you went home, isn’t that right? Stress hit you, and you went home. But the second time, given at least as much stress, you didn’t go home. Think about that. Why didn’t you go home?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’d already done that. It was dangerous to try it again. Someone might be in the room where you claimed to have gone. You could give yourself just as convincing an hallucination this time, and have it all blown up by a statement from your mother, saying that she was dusting your room at the precise moment when you claimed to be there. You couldn’t take the chance. You had to find some place else to go, some place where we could never check your story, where there would never be an opportunity for you to be proved wrong.”
“No, sir,” said Jeremy. “I saw him.”
“You saw a living room very similar in appearance to the ward day-room where you’ve spent a lot of time, and you saw a man in Air Force uniform. Jeremy, think, boy! Doesn’t that sound more like dream material gathered from your real-world surroundings than like an actual teleportation?”
“You make sense, sir,” said Jeremy. “But I still saw him. And I still heard his voice.”
“All right, then,” said the major. “Why that particular officer? You said you didn’t know him. Two days ago, under narco, you admitted you’d never seen him before in your life, didn’t know his name or where he was, and simply claimed you’d gone to him because he could help you. But you didn’t know how he could help you? Don’t you see what that means? There’s only one way this hallucination could help you, and that is by fortifying your original belief.”