THE YELLOW PILL
by Rog Phillips
“The best laid schemes o’ mice and men,” that Scotsman said, “gang aft a-gley.” Which, in American, means: man or mouse, one can be just as crazy mixed-up as the other.
The late Robert Lindner, in his fascinating The Fifty-Minute Hour, wrote about a patient whose fantasy-world took the form of a space-travel story so credibly constructed that the psychiatrist himself kept drifting into near-acceptance of the reality of the alien planet. Now Mr. Phillips asks: How does the doctor know—for sure—who’s crazy?
Dr. Cedric Elton slipped into his office by the back entrance, shucked off his topcoat and hid it in the small, narrow-doored closet, then picked up the neatly piled patient cards his receptionist Helena Fitzroy had placed on the corner of his desk. There were only four, but there could have been a hundred if he accepted everyone who asked to be his patient, because his successes had more than once been spectacular and his reputation as a psychiatrist had become so great because of this that his name had become synonymous with psychiatry in the public mind.
His eyes flicked over the top card. He frowned, then went to the small square of one-way glass in the reception-room door and looked through it. There were four police officers and a man in a strait jacket.
The card said the man’s name was Gerald Bocek, and that he had shot and killed five people in a supermarket, and had killed one officer and wounded two others before being captured.
Except for the strait jacket, Gerald Bocek did not have the appearance of being dangerous. He was about twenty-five, with brown hair and blue eyes. There were faint wrinkles of habitual good nature about his eyes. Right now he was smiling, relaxed, and idly watching Helena, who was pretending to study various cards in her desk file but was obviously conscious of her audience.
Cedric returned to his desk and sat down. The card for Jerry Bocek said more about the killings. When captured, Bocek insisted that the people he had killed were not people at all, but blue-scaled Venusian lizards who had boarded his spaceship, and that he had only been defending himself.
Dr. Cedric Elton shook his head in disapproval. Fantasy fiction was all right in its place, but too many people took it seriously. Of course, it was not the fault of the fiction. The same type of person took other types of fantasy seriously in earlier days, burning women as witches, stoning men as devils—
Abruptly Cedric deflected the control on the intercom and spoke into it. “Send Gerald Bocek in, please,” he said.
A moment later the door to the reception room opened. Helena flashed Cedric a scared smile and got out of the way quickly. One police officer led the way, followed by Gerald Bocek, closely flanked by two officers with the fourth one in the rear, who carefully closed the door. It was impressive, Cedric decided. He nodded toward a chair in front of his desk and the police officers sat the strait-jacketed man in it, then hovered near by, ready for anything.
“You’re Jerry Bocek?” Cedric asked.
The strait-jacketed man nodded cheerfully.
“I’m Dr. Cedric Elton, a psychiatrist,” Cedric said. “Do you have any idea at all why you have been brought to me?”
“Brought to you?” Jerry echoed, chuckling. “Don’t kid me. You’re my old pal, Gar Castle. Brought to you? How could I get away from you in this stinking tub?”
“Stinking tub?” Cedric said.
“Spaceship,” Jerry said. “Look, Gar. Untie me, will you? This nonsense has gone far enough.”
“My name is Dr. Cedric Elton,” Cedric enunciated. “You are not on a spaceship. You were brought to my office by the four policemen standing in back of you, and—”
Jerry Bocek turned his head and studied each of the four policemen with frank curiosity. “What policemen?” he interrupted. “You mean these four gear lockers?” He turned his head back and looked pityingly at Dr. Elton. “You’d better get hold of yourself, Gar,” he said. “You’re imagining things.”
“My name is Dr. Cedric Elton,” Cedric said.
Gerald Bocek leaned forward and said with equal firmness, “Your name is Gar Castle. I refuse to call you Dr. Cedric Elton because your name is Gar Castle, and I’m going to keep on calling you Gar Castle because we have to have at least one peg of rationality in all this madness or you will be cut completely adrift in this dream world you’ve cooked up.”
Cedric’s eyebrows shot halfway up to his hairline.
“Funny,” he mused, smiling. “That’s exactly what I was just going to say to you!”
Cedric continued to smile. Jerry’s serious intenseness slowly faded. Finally an answering smile tugged at the corners of his mouth. When it became a grin, Cedric laughed, and Jerry began to laugh with him. The four police officers looked at one another uneasily.
“Well!” Cedric finally gasped. “I guess that puts us on an even footing! You’re nuts to me and I’m nuts to you!”
“An equal footing is right!” Jerry shouted in high glee. Then he sobered. “Except,” he said gently, “I’m tied up.”
“In a strait jacket,” Cedric corrected.
“Ropes,” Jerry said firmly.
“You’re dangerous,” Cedric said. “You killed six people, one of them a police officer, and wounded two other officers.”
“I blasted five Venusian lizard pirates who boarded our ship,” Jerry said, “and melted the door off of one gear locker, and seared the paint on two others. You know as well as I do, Gar, how space madness causes you to personify everything. That’s why they drill into you that the minute you think there are more people on board the ship than there were at the beginning of the trip you’d better go to the medicine locker and take a yellow pill. They can’t hurt anything but a delusion.”
“If that is so,” Cedric said, “why are you in a strait jacket?”
“I’m tied up with ropes,” Jerry said patiently. “You tied me up. Remember?”
“And those four police officers behind you are gear lockers?” Cedric said. “OK, if one of those gear lockers comes around in front of you and taps you on the jaw with his fist, would you still believe it’s a gear locker?”
Cedric nodded to one of the officers, and the man came around in front of Gerald Bocek and, quite carefully, hit him hard enough to rock his head but not hurt him. Jerry’s eyes blinked with surprise, then he looked at Cedric and smiled. “Did you feel that?” Cedric said quietly.
“Feel what?” Jerry said. “Oh!” He laughed. “You imagined that one of the gear lockers—a police officer in your dream world—came around in front of me and hit me?” He shook his head in pity. “Don’t you understand, Gar, that it didn’t really happen? Untie me and I’ll prove it. Before your very eyes I’ll open the door on your Policeman and take out the pressure suit, or magnetic grapple, or whatever is in it. Or are you afraid to? You’ve surrounded yourself with all sorts of protective delusions. I’m tied with ropes, but you imagine it to be a strait jacket. You imagine yourself to be a psychiatrist named Dr. Cedric Elton, so that you can convince yourself that you’re sane and I’m crazy. Probably you imagine yourself a very famous psychiatrist that everyone would like to come to for treatment. World famous, no doubt. Probably you even think you have a beautiful receptionist. What is her name?”
“Helena Fitzroy,” Cedric said.
Jerry nodded. “It figures,” he said resignedly. “Helena Fitzroy is the expediter at Mars Port. You try to date her every time we land there, but she won’t date you.”