The panic subsided and a slow, diffuse anger seeped through him. He looked up at the panels of the Mirror, as if aware for the first time that the machine had something to do with the stabbing recognition that had passed through him.
He felt the pressure of the headpiece against his skull and tore it away with a single motion that hurled it against the panel, shattering a meter face and crushing the headpiece. The anger stayed with him and he wished that he might tear the place down. But Dodge would do it better, he thought with some satisfaction. He and Dodge and Spindem — they’d really rip the place apart when the time came.
He left the room quietly. He saw no one about as he went out of the grounds and across the street to his car. He drove back to the hotel and put in an immediate call to Colonel Dodge. It took only a moment to reach him.
“Montgomery,” he said. They selected their scrambler code and he went on. “I got a look at the inside for the first time today. I think Spindem ought to be here.”
“Just a moment, I want the doctor to hear this.” There was a click and a moment of silence, then Dodge asked him to go on.
“They’ve got a machine,” said Montgomery. “Something dreamed up by one of the original designers for the Inquisition. I had to get away from it. I felt like I was going crazy. I’m willing to bet that plenty of men have graduated from here straight to the nut house.”
“But what does it do?" Dr. Spindem demanded.
Suddenly Montgomery wished he hadn’t called. He felt like he couldn’t talk about it any more. His anger was spent. He answered wearily. “I don’t know. It just gets hold of your mind and suddenly you’re convinced that everything you’ve ever done has been wrong. There’s nothing right about anything.”
“Are you going back?” said Colonel Dodge.
“Don’t do it!” Spindem exclaimed. “I’ll get away sometime tomorrow, but don’t do a thing until I get there. Your sanity may depend on it.”
“Don’t worry,” said Montgomery. “I’m not sticking my head in that noose again for anybody.”
He went down to the beach in the afternoon sunshine and there he had the chattering shakes. He threw pebbles at the sea gulls wheeling over the rocks. He stomped up and down on the sand. But he couldn’t stop the trembling of his muscles.
So he wasn’t really an engineer! So he had always made like a big shot to cover it up! What difference did it make? The work he’d done had been useful.
But it was no good. He slumped down on a rock and let the shaking possess him. He’d kidded himself. That’s where the trouble lay. He’d kidded himself — and now he couldn’t kid himself any longer. Everything that had supported him was gone. Maybe it was flimsy and phony, but it wasn’t right to strip it away like this. Now that it was gone, however, he could never again walk into a conference and hold his head up as if he were the equal of the men on the other side of the table. He never had been their equal, but he had been able to function under the illusion he was their superior. Now, he could no longer function at all.
His hand grasped a weed stalk and drew idly in the sand. A wing section formed, a curiously irregular wing section that would have provoked laughter in any engineering group. But the laws of air flow and lift were not quite the same at eighty to a hundred thousand feet as they were at sea level. His section could have shortened the span of the Ninety-one by twenty per cent. He was sure of it. Why had he never tried to get it tested?
He didn’t quite know. He’d told himself it was a wild idea that had no merit. Could the truth be that he had been unwilling to face the possibility of ridicule for his unorthodox engineering venture?
He didn’t know the answer to that, either. He only knew that something had been taken from him that enabled him to function, and now he had to have it back, or he’d never be able to function again. He had to see Wolfe and the people at the Institute. It was a sudden obsession with him. They had taken it away; they could give it back.
It was late when he reached the Institute, but Don Wolfe was still in his office. “I rather expected you’d be back today,” he said. “You gave us quite a shock when we saw the taped record of your experience with the Mirror this morning. Your fear tolerance level is higher than any we’ve seen yet. You’ve got more guts to take an honest look at yourself than anybody who’s gone through here up to now. Usually, it takes a week or two to blast out as much as you got in an hour.”
“I imagine I’m supposed to be pleased,” said Montgomery sarcastically. “I want back what I had before. I may have been a four-flusher, but at least I got along and did a job. You took away that ability. You’ve got to give it back!”
Wolfe was shaking his head very slowly and smiling faintly. “There’s a fundamental principle inherent in the Mirror,” he said. "It holds up an image, but it does not force you to look. You see nothing but what you are willing to see. There is only one answer for you now: go back and look again and ask yourself why you had to be content with the character of a phony big shot instead of being a productive individual in your own right.”
Montgomery knew that unaccountably he was going to do it. He must have known the moment he decided to come back. The Mirror was hypnotic — or narcotic — in its effect. He had to come groveling back and see if there was any answer to the question of his inability to be an engineer honestly without the false front of his uniform and R&D assignment.
Don Wolfe accompanied him back to the room. He saw that the damage of his burst of anger had been repaired. Wolfe made no mention of it.
“I’m going to wait for you in my office. Will you come over when you’re through?”
Montgomery nodded mechanically, as if in a daze. His hands were trembling faintly as he sat down and put on the headpiece. Like a hophead, he thought. You hate the stuff and can’t leave it alone. How can I ever get away from this thing now?
Wolfe observed him for a moment with a slightly worried frown. “I can turn down the fear-level control a bit, if you want me to,” he said. “Since your own acceptance point is so high, it might be easier on you —”
Montgomery waved him away. “Leave it alone. I want to know what goes on — I’ve got to find out.”
He settled back and closed his eyes as Wolfe closed the door behind him. A feeling of peace and serenity began to flow through him and he knew he should have stayed that morning without breaking off in anger as he had done. He should have seen it through then.
It was strange, though, that he could regard himself almost happily now, recognizing full well the phoniness that had adorned his entire career. After the initial panicky confusion it seemed almost a relief to feel it being stripped away. It was a relief — and now he saw why.
A thousand fears and apprehensions had gone into the support of his false front. Every time he’d gone to an engineering conference there was a constant panic that he would make some absurd break that would bring laughter around his head from the engineers. Half the muscles of his body maintained an agonizing tension in anticipation of it. And he’d prided himself on the exhaustion with which he left those meetings. He'd go home and flop on the sofa at the end of the day and tell Helen what a “rough one we had today.”
He began laughing, a slow chuckle at first that quickly rose to almost uncontrollable spasms verging on hysteria, as he caught full sight of the ludicrous spectacle he made staggering under the weight of his self-created burden that had no existence for anyone else.
Slowly, the laughter died. And the panic came back. Not as strong as it was the first time, but it was there. He felt helpless and unanchored. It was all right to laugh at himself for behaving like a fool, but that didn’t change the fact that he had done the best he could under the circumstances. He was incompetent. He could never be an engineer like Soren Gunderson if he admitted he was all the fools who ever lived. Nothing could change the real picture of his inadequacy.