allow them that emotional freedom is to allow the Pa’ak virus which infests them to remain active, since they tend to be attracted to one another for neurotic reasons. At leastwe don’t have
that
much trouble. There was so little neurosis or anything else left in these minds when we took them over that they were poor feeding grounds for Pa’ak. And that’s the—”
“Verna, can you spare me that everlasting—”
”—the way it is,” finished Verna inexorably. “I’m sorry, Pallas, truly. There’s a horrid little pushbutton in this mind that plays that phrase off every once in a while no matter what I do. I’m rebuilding the mind as fast as I can; I’ll get to it soon. I hope.”
“Verna …” said Pallas with an air of revelation. “We can speed this thing up. I’m sure we can. Look. These fools won’t group in threes. And Ril and Kad can’t complete themselves unless their three hosts are emotionally ready for it. Now then.” She leaned forward over her teacup. “There’s no important difference between
two
groups of
three
and
three
groups of
two.”
“You really think … why, Pallas, that’s a
marvelous
idea. You’re so clever, dear! Now the first thing we’ll have to—”
They both froze in an attitude of listening.
“My word,” said Verna. “That’s a bad one.”
“I’ll go,” said Pallas. “That’s one of the creatures I’m guarding. Ril is in it.”
“Shall I come too?”
“You stay here. I’ll take a taxi and keep in touch with you. When I’m far enough away I’ll triangulate. Keep watch for that signal again. Goodness! What an urgent one!”
She trotted out. Verna looked across at Pallas’s untouched teacup. “She left me with the check.” A sigh. “Well, that’s the way it is.”
The news is the artificial satellite program and flying discs … three-stage rockets and guilt by association
.
Dr. Jonathan Prince was saying, “The world’s never been in such a state. Industrialization is something you can graph, and you find a geometric increase. You can graph the incidence of psychoneuroses the same way and find almost the same curve, but it’s a much larger one. I tell you, Edie, it’s as if something were cultivating our little traumas and anxieties like plowed fields to increase their yield, and then feeding off them.”
“But so much is being done, Jon!” his ex-wife protested.
Jon waved his empty glass. “There are 39,000 psychotherapists to how many millions of people who need their help? There’s a crying need for some kind of simple, standardized therapy, and people refuse to behave either simply or according to standards. Somewhere, somehow, there’s a new direction in therapy. So-called orthodox procedures as they now exist don’t show enough promise. They take too long. If by some miracle of state support and streamlined education you could create therapists for everyone who needed them, you’d have what amounted to a nation or a world of full-time therapists. Someone’s got to bake bread and drive buses, you know.”
“What about these new therapies I’ve been reading about?” Edie wanted to know.
“Oh, they’re a healthy sign to a certain extent; they indicate we know how sick we are. The most encouraging thing about them is their diversity. There are tools and schools and phoneys and fads. There’s psychoanalysis, where the patient talks about his troubles to the therapist, and narcosynthesis, where the patient’s troubles talk to the therapist, and hypnotherapy, where the therapist talks to the patient’s troubles.
“There’s insulin to jolt a man out of his traumas and electric shock to subconsciously frighten him out of them, and CO2 to choke the traumas to death. And there’s the pre-frontal lobotomy, the transorbital leukotomy, and the topectomy to cut the cables between a patient’s expression of his aberrations and its power supply, with the bland idea that the generator will go away if you can’t see
that
much trouble. There was so little neurosis or anything else left in these minds when we took them over that they were poor feeding grounds for Pa’ak. And that’s the—”
“Verna, can you spare me that everlasting—”
”—the way it is,” finished Verna inexorably. “I’m sorry, Pallas, truly. There’s a horrid little pushbutton in this mind that plays that phrase off every once in a while no matter what I do. I’m rebuilding the mind as fast as I can; I’ll get to it soon. I hope.”
“Verna …” said Pallas with an air of revelation. “We can speed this thing up. I’m sure we can. Look. These fools won’t group in threes. And Ril and Kad can’t complete themselves unless their three hosts are emotionally ready for it. Now then.” She leaned forward over her teacup. “There’s no important difference between
two
groups of
three
and
three
groups of
two.”
“You really think … why, Pallas, that’s a
marvelous
idea. You’re so clever, dear! Now the first thing we’ll have to—”
They both froze in an attitude of listening.
“My word,” said Verna. “That’s a bad one.”
“I’ll go,” said Pallas. “That’s one of the creatures I’m guarding. Ril is in it.”
“Shall I come too?”
“You stay here. I’ll take a taxi and keep in touch with you. When I’m far enough away I’ll triangulate. Keep watch for that signal again. Goodness! What an urgent one!”
She trotted out. Verna looked across at Pallas’s untouched teacup. “She left me with the check.” A sigh. “Well, that’s the way it is.”
The news is the artificial satellite program and flying discs … three-stage rockets and guilt by association
.
Dr. Jonathan Prince was saying, “The world’s never been in such a state. Industrialization is something you can graph, and you find a geometric increase. You can graph the incidence of psychoneuroses the same way and find almost the same curve, but it’s a much larger one. I tell you, Edie, it’s as if something were cultivating our little traumas and anxieties like plowed fields to increase their yield, and then feeding off them.”
“But so much is being done, Jon!” his ex-wife protested.
Jon waved his empty glass. “There are 39,000 psychotherapists to how many millions of people who need their help? There’s a crying need for some kind of simple, standardized therapy, and people refuse to behave either simply or according to standards. Somewhere, somehow, there’s a new direction in therapy. So-called orthodox procedures as they now exist don’t show enough promise. They take too long. If by some miracle of state support and streamlined education you could create therapists for everyone who needed them, you’d have what amounted to a nation or a world of full-time therapists. Someone’s got to bake bread and drive buses, you know.”
“What about these new therapies I’ve been reading about?” Edie wanted to know.
“Oh, they’re a healthy sign to a certain extent; they indicate we know how sick we are. The most encouraging thing about them is their diversity. There are tools and schools and phoneys and fads. There’s psychoanalysis, where the patient talks about his troubles to the therapist, and narcosynthesis, where the patient’s troubles talk to the therapist, and hypnotherapy, where the therapist talks to the patient’s troubles.
“There’s insulin to jolt a man out of his traumas and electric shock to subconsciously frighten him out of them, and CO2 to choke the traumas to death. And there’s the pre-frontal lobotomy, the transorbital leukotomy, and the topectomy to cut the cables between a patient’s expression of his aberrations and its power supply, with the bland idea that the generator will go away if you can’t see
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