In the Problem Pit

When I wrote "To See Another Mountain," I had just got a new record player and some new records, including my first LP of the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto. (Actually his second, though only a few of us true-blue aficionados ever listen to his rather immature first.) My whole memory of writing the story is permeated with that lovely violin. That particular concerto happens to be my favorite, probably because one of the first real live concerts I ever attended featured it, played by Fritz Kreisler, fresh out of the hospital after being almost killed in a car accident and making his comeback. What an evening that was, with old Fritz staring out over packed Carnegie Hall and sawing away like a Vienna Woods carpenter, with a half smile on his face and the most beautiful sounds I had ever heard washing over us ... So I had the concerto, I think it was Oistrakh's version, on the record player, and every time I came to a pause in the story I would get up and start it over again. I have always thought of it as the Mendelssohn story; and what astonishes me, reading it over now, is how little the concerto has to do with the story.

Trucks were coming up the side of the mountain again. The electric motors were quiet enough, but these were heavy-duty trucks and the reduction gears could be heard a mile off. A mile by air; that was 18 miles by the blacktop road that snaked up the side of the mountain, all hairpin curves with banks that fell away to sheer cliffs.

The old man didn't mind the noise. The trucks woke him up when he was dozing, as he so often was these days.

"You didn't drink your orange juice, Doctor."

The old man wheeled himself around in his chair. He liked the nurse. There were three who took care of him, on shifts, but Maureen Wrather was his personal favorite. She always seemed to be around when he needed her. He protested: "I drank most of it." The nurse waited. "All right." He drank it, noting that the flavor had changed again. What was it this time? Stimulants, tranquilizers, sedatives, euphoriants. They played him up and down like a yo-yo. "Do I get coffee this morning, Maureen?"

"Cocoa." She put the mug and a plate with two arrowroot cookies down on the table, avoiding the central space where he laid out his endless hands of solitaire; that was one of the things the old man liked about her. "I have to get you dressed in half an hour," she announced, "because you've got company coming."

"Company? Who would be coming to see me?" But he could see from the look in her light, cheerful eyes, even before she spoke, that it was a surprise. Well, thought the old man with dutiful pleasure, that was progress; only a few weeks ago they wouldn't have permitted him any surprises at all. Weeks? He frowned. Maybe months. All the days were like all the other days. He could count one, yesterday; two, the day before; three, last week—he could count a few simple intervals with confidence, but the ancient era of a month ago was a wash of gray confusion. He sighed. That was the price you paid for being crazy, he thought with amusement. They made it that way on purpose, to help him "get well." But it had all been gray and bland enough anyhow. Back very far ago there had been a time of terror, but then it was bland for a long, long time.

"Drink your cocoa, young fellow," the nurse winked, cheerfully flirting. "Do you want any music?"

That was a good game. "I want a lot of music," he said immediately. "Stravinsky—that Sac thing, I think. And Al-ban Berg. And—I know. Do you have that old one, 'The Three Itta Fishes?'" He had been very pleased with the completeness of the tape library in the house on the Hill, until he found out that there was something in that orange juice too. Every request of his was carefully noted and analyzed. Like the tiny microphones taped to throat and heart at night, his tastes in music were data in building up a picture of his condition. Well, that took some of the joy out of it, so the old man had added some other joy of his own.

The nurse turned solemnly to the tape player. There was a pause, a faint marking beep and then the quick running opening bars of the wonderful Mendelssohn concerto, which he had always loved. He looked at the nurse. "You shouldn't tease us, Doctor," she said lightly as she left.

Dr. Noah Sidorenko had changed the world. His Hypothesis of Congruent Values, later expanded to his Theory of General Congruences, was the basis for a technology fully as complex and even more important than the nucleonics that had come from Einstein's energy-mass equation. This morning the brain that had enunciated the principle of congruence was occupied in a harder problem: What were the noises from the courtyard?

He was going to have his picture taken, he guessed, taking his evidence from the white soft shirt the nurse had laid out for him, the gray jacket and, above all, from the tie. He almost never wore a tie. (The nurse seldom gave him one. He didn't like to speculate about the reasons for this.) While he was dressing, the trucks ground into the courtyard and stopped, and men's voices came clearly.

'1 don't know who they are," he said aloud, abandoning the attempt to figure it out.

"They're the television crew," said the nurse from the next room. "Hush. Don't spoil your surprise."

He dressed quickly then, with excitement; why, it was a big surprise. There had never been a television crew on the mountain before. When he came out of the dressing room the nurse frowned and reached for his tie. "Sloppy! Why can't you large-domes learn how to do a simple knot?" She was a very sweet girl, the old man thought, lifting his chin to help. She could have been his daughter-—even his granddaughter. She was hardly 25; yes, that would have been about right. His granddaughter would have been about that now—

The old man frowned and turned his head away. That was very wrong. He didn't have a grandchild. He had had one son, no more, and the boy had died, so they had told the old man, in the implosion of the Haaroldsen Free Trawl in the Mindanao Deep. The boy had been 19 years old, and certainly without children; and there had been something about his death, something that the old man didn't like to remember. He squinted. Worse than that, he thought, something he couldn't remember any more.

The nurse said: "Doctor, this is for you. It isn't much, but Happy Birthday."

She took a small pink-ribboned box out of the pocket of her uniform and handed it to him. He was touched. He saw his fingers trembling as he unwrapped the little package. That distracted him for a moment but then he dismissed it. It was honest emotion, that was all—well, and age too, of course. He was 95. But it wasn't the worrying intention tremor that had disfigured the few episodes he could remember clearly, in his first days here on the Hill. It was only gratitude and sentiment.

And that was what the box held for him, sentiment. "Thank you, Maureen. You're good to an old man." His eyes stung. It was only a little plastic picture-globe, with Maureen's young face captured smiling inside it, but it was for him.

She patted his shoulder and said firmly: "You're a good man. And a beautiful one, too, so come on and let's show you off to your company."

She helped him into the wheelchair. It had its motors, but he liked to have her push him and she humored him. They went out the door, down the long sunlit corridors that divided the guest rooms in the front of the building from the broad high terrace behind. Sam Krabbe, Ernest Atkinson, and a couple of the others from the Group came to the doors of their rooms to nod, and to wish the old man a happy birthday. Sidorenko nodded back, tired and pleased. He listened critically to the thumping of his heart—excitement was a risk, he knew—and then grinned. He was getting as bad as the doctors.

Maureen wheeled the old man onto the little open elevator platform. They dropped, quickly and smoothly on magnetic cushions, to the lower floor. The old man leaned far over the side of his chair, studying what he could see of the elevator, because he had a direct and personal interest in it. Somebody had told him that the application of magnetic fields to nonferrous substances was a trick that had been learned from his General Congruences. Well, there was this much to it: Congruence showed that all fields were related and interchangeable, and there was, of course, no reason why what was possible should not be made what is so. But the old man laughed silently inside himself. He was thinking of Albert Einstein confronted with a photo of Enola Gay. Or himself trying to build the communications equipment that Congruence had made possible.

The nurse wheeled him out into the garden.

And there before him was the explanation of the morning's trucks.

A whole mobile television unit had trundled up those terrible roads. And a fleet of cars and, yes, that other noise was explained, too; there was a helicopter perched on the tennis court, its vanes twisting like blown leaves in the breeze that came up the mountain. The helicopter had a definite meaning, the old man knew. Someone very important must have come up in it. The air space over the institute was closed off, by government order.

And reasoning the thing through, there was a logical conclusion; government orders can be set aside only by government executives, and—yes. There was the answer.

"Are you sure you're warm enough?" the nurse whispered. But Sidorenko hardly heard. He recognized the stocky blue-eyed man who stood chatting with one of the television crew. Sidorenko's contacts with the world around him were censored and small, but everyone would recognize that man. His name was Shawn O'Connor; he was the President of the United States.

The President was shaking his hand.

"Dear man," said President O'Connor warmly, "I can't tell you how great a pleasure this is for me. Oh, no. You wouldn't remember me. But I sat in on two of your Roose lectures. Ninety-eight, it must have been. And after the second I went up and got your autograph."

The old man shook hands and let go. 1998? Good lord, that was close to 50 years ago. True, he thought, cudgeling his memory, not very many persons had ever asked for the autograph of a mathematical physicist, but that was an endless time past. He had no recollection whatever of the event. Still, he remembered the lectures well enough. "Oh, of course," he said. "In Leeds Hall. Well, Mr. President, I'm not certain but—"

"Dear man," the President said cheerfully, "don't pretend. Whatever later honors I have attained, as an engineering sophomore I was an utterly forgettable boy. You must have met a thousand like me. But," he said, standing straighter, "you, Dr. Sidorenko, are another matter entirely. Oh, yes. You are probably the greatest man our country has produced in this century, and it is only the smallest measure of the esteem in which we hold you that I have come here today. However," he added briskly, "we don't want to spoil things for the cameramen, who will undoubtedly want to get all this on tape. So come over here, like a good fellow."

The old man blinked and allowed the cameramen to bully the President and himself into the best camera angles. One of them was whistling through his teeth, one was flirting with the nurse, but they were very efficient. The old man was trembling. All right, I'm 95, I'm entitled to a little senility, he thought; but was it that? Something was worrying him, nagging at his mind.

"Go ahead, Mr. President," called the director at last, and tailored men a blue and silver ribbon.

The camera purred faintly, adjusting itself to light and distance, and the President began to speak. "Dr. Sidorenko, Shawn O'Connor took from the hand of one of his alert, well-today's investiture is one of the most joyous occasions that has been my fortune—" Talk, talk, thought the old man, trying to listen, to identify the tune the cameraman had been whistling and to track down the thing that was bothering him all at once. He caught the President's merry blue eyes, now shadowed slightly as they looked at him, and realized he was trembling visibly.

Well, he couldn't help it, he thought resentfully. The body was shaking; the conscious mind had no control over it. He was ashamed and embarrassed, but even shame was a luxury he could only doubtfully afford. Something worse was very close and threatening to drown out mere shame, a touch of the crawling fear he had hoped never to feel again and had prayed not even to remember. He assumed a stiff smile.

"—of America's great men, who have received the honors due them. For this reason the Congress, by unanimous resolution of both Houses, has authorized me—"

The old man, chilled and shaking, remembered the name of the tune at last.

The hear went over the mountain,

The bear went over the mountain.

The bear went over the mountain—

And what do you think he saw?

It worried him, though he could not say why.

"—not only your scientific achievements which are honored, Dr. Sidorenko, great though these are. The truths you have discovered have brought us close to the very heart of the universe. The great inventions of our day rest in large part on the brilliant insight you have given our scientific workers. But more than that—"

Oh, stop, whispered the old man silently to himself, and he could feel his body vibrating uncontrollably. The President faltered, smiled, shrugged and began again: "More than that, your humanitarian love for all mankind is a priceless—"

Stop, whispered the old man again, and realized with horror that he was not whispering at all. He was screaming. "Stop!" he bawled, and found himself trying with withered muscles to stand erect on his useless feet. "Stop!" The cameras deserted the President and swung in to stare, with three great glassy eyes, at the old man; and for old Sidorenko tenor struck in and fastened on him. Something erupted. Something exploding and bursting, like a crash of automobiles in flame; someone shouted near him with a voice that made him cringe. He saw the nurse run in with a hypodermic, and he felt its bite.

Endless hours later (though it took less than 60 seconds for the blood to pump the drug to his brain) he felt the falling, spiralling falling that he remembered from other needles at other times, and there was the one moment of clearness before sleep. Maureen was staring down at him, the needle still in her hand. "I'm sorry I spoiled the party, dear," he whispered, his eyes closing, and then he was firmly asleep.

It really wasn't worth the trouble. Why should they want to waste so much effort on curing him?

The nurse fussed: "There's nothing to worry about, Doctor. A fine, big man like you. Sure you had a bad spell. What's that? Do you think the President himself has never had a bad spell?"

"Why don't they leave me alone, Maureen?" he whispered.

"Leave you alone, is it! And you with twenty good years inside of you."

"You're a good girl, Maureen," he said faintly, hoarding his strength. It was really more than they had a right to expect of him, he thought drowsily. He couldn't afford many blow-ups like this morning's, and it seemed they were always happening. Still, it was nice of the President. .

He was a little more alert now, the effects of the needle, and its later measured, balancing antidotes, beginning to wear off. This was Wednesday, he remembered. "Do I have to go in with the Group?" he whined.

"Doctor's orders, Doctor," she said firmly, "and doctor as you may be, you're not doctor enough to argue with doctor's orders." It was an old joke, limp to begin with, but he owed her a smile for it. He paid her, faintly.

After lunch she wheeled him into the Group meeting room. They were the last to arrive.

Sam Krabbe, said, surly as always in the Group though he was pleasant enough in social contacts, outside: "You take a lot of hostility out on us, Sidorenko. Why don't you try being on time?"

"Sam forgets," said the Reynolds woman to the air. "It isn't up to Sidorenko, as long as he and Maureen act out that master-slave thing of having her push his chair. If she doesn't want to pay us the courtesy of promptness, Sidorenko can't help it." Maria Reynolds had murdered her husband and four teenaged children; she had told the Group so at least 50 times. Sidorenko thought of her as the only legitimate lunatic the Group owned—except himself, of course; the old man kept an open mind about himself.

He struggled to hold his head up and his eyes open. You didn't get any benefit out of the Group's sessions unless you participated. The way to participate started with keeping the appearance of alertness and proceeded through talking (when you didn't really want to talk at all), to discharging emotion (when you were almost certain you had no emotion left to discharge). This he knew. Dr. Shugart had told him, in private analysis and again before the entire Group.

The old man sighed internally. Sam Krabhe could be relied on to interpret everyone's motives for them; he was doing it now. Short, squat, middle-aged . . . well, "middle-aged" by the standards of Dr. Sidorenko. Actually Sam Krabbe was close to 70. Sidorenko glanced up at the attentive, involved face of his nurse and let the conversation wash over him.

Sam: "What about that, Maureen? Do you have to focalize your aggressions on us? I'm getting damned sick and tired of it, for one."

Nelson Amster took over (35 years old, a bachelor, his life a chain of false steps and embarrassments because he saw his mother in every other female he met): "It's a stinking female attention-getting device, Sam. Ignore it."

Maria Reynolds: "That's fine talk from a pantywaist like you!"

Eddie Atkinson (glancing first at the bland face of Dr. Shugart for a cue): "Come on, you old harpies. Give the girl a break. What do you say, Dr. Shugart? Aren't they just displacing their own hostilities onto Maureen and the doctor?"

Dr. Shugart, after a moment's pause: "Mmm. Maureen, do you have a reaction to all this?"

Maureen, her eyes lively but her voice serious: "Oh, I'm sorry if I've made trouble. I didn't think we were late. Honestly. If there was any displacement it was certainly on the subconscious level. I love you all. I think you're the finest, friendliest Group I ever—-and—well, there just isn't any ambivalence at all. Honestly."

Dr. Shugart, nodding: "Mmm."

The old man tinned restlessly in his chair. Pretty soon, he thought with a familiar and tolerable ache, they would all start looking at him and prodding him to participate. All but Dr. Shugart, anyway; the psychiatrist didn't believe in prodding, except in a minor emergency as a device to pass along the burden of talk from himself to one of the Group. (Though he always said he was part of the Group, not its master: "The analyst is only the senior patient. I leam much from our sessions") But the others would prod, they had no such professional hesitations, and Sidorenko didn't like that. He was still turning over inside himself the morning's fiasco; true, he should voice it, that was what the Group was for; but the old man had learned in nearly a century to live his life his own certain way, and he wanted to think it out for himself first. The best way to keep the Group off him was to volunteer a small remark from time to time. He said at the first opportunity: "I'm sorry, ladies and gentlemen. I didn't mean to upset you."

Everyone looked at him.

Ernie Atkinson scolded: "We're not here to apologize, Sidorenko. We only want you to know your motives."

Maria Reynolds: "One wonders if all of us know just why we are here? One wonders how the rest of us are to get proper attention, if some of us get first crack at the doctor's thought because they are more important."

Sidorenko said weakly: "Oh, Mrs. Reynolds—Maria—I'm sure there's nothing like that. Is there, Dr. Shugart?"

Dr. Shugart, pausing: "Mmm. Well, why are we here? Does anyone want to say?"

The old man opened his mouth and then closed it. Some evenings he joined with these youngsters in the Group, as demanding and competitive as any of them, but this was not one of the nights. Energy simply did not flow. Sidorenko was glad when Sam Krabbe took over the answer.

"We're here," said Sam pompously, "because we have problems which we haven't been able to solve alone. By Group sessions we help each other discharge our basic emotions where it is safe to do so, thus helping each other to reduce our problems to dimensions we can handle." He waited for agreement.

"Parrot!" smirked Ernie Atkinson.

"The doctor doesn't like our using pseudo-psychiatric double-talk," Maria Reynolds accused the air.

"All right, let's see you do better!" Sam flared.

"Gladly! Easily!" cried Atkinson. He hooked a thumb in his lapel and draped a leg over the arm of the chair. "The institution is a place where very special and very concentrated help can be given to a very few." ("Snob," Nelson Amster hissed.) "I'm not a snob! It's the plain truth. We get broad-spectrum therapy here, everything from hormones to hypnosynthesis. And the reason we get it is that we deserve it. Everybody knows Dr. Sidorenko. Amster created a whole new industry with mergers and stock manipulations. Maria Reynolds is one of the greatest composers—well, the greatest woman composers—of the century." ("Damn some people!" grated Maria). "And I myself—well, I need not go on. We are worth treating, all of us. At any cost. That's why the government put us here, in this very expensive, very thorough place."

"Mmm," said Dr. Shugart, and considered for a moment. "I wonder," he said.

Ernie Atkinson suddenly shrank a good two sizes. His dark little face turned sallow. The leg slid off the aim of the chair. "What's that, Doc?" he asked dismally.

Dr. Shugart said: "I wonder if that's a personal motivation."

"Oh, I see," cried Atkinson, "it's what each of us is here for that's important, eh? Well, what about it? How about your motivations, Sidorenko?"

The old man coughed.

It always came to this, reliably. He would put out the weak decoy remarks but it would do no good, one of the Group would pounce past the decoys to reach his flesh. Well, there was no fighting it.

"I—" he began, and stopped, and passed a hand over his face. Maureen was close beside him, her eyes warm and intent. "I know I shouldn't apologize," he apologized, "but it has been a bad day. You know about it. The thing is, I'm an old man, and even Dr. Shugart tells me that the old cells aren't in quite the shape they used to be. There was," he said mildly, as though he were reading off a dossier from a statistical sample, "a stroke a few years ago. Fortunately it limited itself; they're not operable, you know, when you get to a certain age. The blood vessels turn into a kind of rotten canvas and, although you can clamp off the hemorrhage, it only makes it pop again on the other side of the clamp, and —I'm wandering. I apologize," he finished wryly.

"Mmm," Dr. Shugart said. "There's no such thing as totally undirected speech."

"Of course. All right. But that's why I apologize, because I'm not getting around very rapidly to an answer.

"I had my—trouble—a few years ago. I don't remember much about it, except that I gather I was delusional. Thought I was God, was the way it was expressed to me once. Well, if I had been a younger man I suppose I could have been treated more easily. I don't know. I'm not. Time was, I know, when most doctors wouldn't bother with a man of ninety-five, even if he did happen to be," he said wryly, "celebrated not only for his scientific attainments but for his broad love for mankind. I mean, there's a point of obsolescence. Might as well let the old fool die."

He choked and coughed raspingly for a second. The nurse reached for him, but he waved her off.

"Mmm," said Dr. Shugart.

And the nurse whispered in a hard bright voice: "I love you, Noah Sidorenko."

He sat up straight, suddenly struck to the heart.

"I love you," she said stubbornly, "and I'll make you get well. It can't hurt you if I tell you I love you. I'm not asking for anything. It's a free gift."

The old man swallowed.

"Don't argue with me, old sport," she said tenderly, and patted his creased cheek. "Now, how about some psycho-drama? Let's do the big one! The slum you lived in, Doctor —remember? The night you were so scared. The accident. Stretch out," she ordered, wheeling him to a couch and helping him onto it. He went along, dazed. She scolded: "No, curl up more. You're four years old, remember? Maria, pull that chair over and be the mother. Ernie, Sam. Let's go out in the hall. We'll be cars speeding along the elevated highway outside the window. And let's make some noise! Honk, honk! Aooga!"

But it hadn't been like that at all, he told himself a few hours later, trying to go to sleep. It had been a big frightening experience in his childhood. Very possibly it was the thing that had caused his later troubles (though he couldn't remember the troubles well enough to be sure). But it was not what they were portraying in psychodrama. They were showing a frightened child, and the old man was stubbornly certain there was more to it than that. But very likely it was lost forever.

It was only natural that at the age of 95 a great many experiences should be lost forever. (Such as meeting a sophomore who asked for an autograph, when you could have had no idea that the sophomore would grow up to be President.)

He thought of the white man, wondered who the white man was, and shifted restlessly in the bed. He could feel his old muscles tensing up.

Curse the fool thing, the old man said to himself, referring to his own body; it has lost the knack of living. But it wasn't the body that was at fault, really. It was the brain. The body was only crepe and brittle sticks, true, but the heart still beat, blood flowed, stomach acids leached the building-blocks they needed from the food he ate. The body worked. But the brain worked against it; it was brain, not body, that tautened his muscles and shortened his breath.

That fantastic girl, the old man thought ruefully, she had said: I love tjou. Well. Let's interpret what she meant, he commanded, it could only have been an expression of the natural affection a nurse has for a patient. Still, it was ridiculous, the old man told himself, striving to catch a free and comfortable breath.

That was the worst thing about the tension. You couldn't breathe. With much effort Noah Sidorenko wedged his elbows under him and raised his chest cage a trifle, not quite off the mattress, but resting lightly on it, relieving some of the pressure his shriveled body exerted. It helped, but it didn't help enough. He thought wistfully of free-fall. Rocket jockies, he dreamed, floated endlessly with no pressure at all; how deeply they must be able to breathe! But, of course, he couldn't live to get there, not through rocket acceleration.

He was wandering, when he wanted most particularly to think clearly.

He turned on one side and pressed the tip of his nose lightly with a finger. Sometimes opening the nostrils wide helped to get a breath. He thought of what the microphones taped to rib and throat must be recording, and grinned faintly. Funny, though, he thought, that Maureen hadn't come in to check on him. The purpose of the microphones was to warn the nurse when he needed attention. Surely he needed attention now.

He listened critically to his thumping heart. Ka-hump, ka-bump, ka-bump. It made a little tune:

The bear went over the mountain

The song was very disturbing to him, though he did not even now know why. Somehow it was connected with that scene in his youth, the crashing cars and the white man. The old man sighed. He had come very close to remembering all of it once. They had put him in silence. "Silence" was an acoustically dead chamber, 20 feet cubed, hung with muffling fabric and strung with spiderwebs of the felt; there was no echo and no sound from outside could come in. It was a conventional tool of study for mental disorders; strapped in a canvas cot, hung in the center of the cube, eyes closed, hearing deadened, a subject began very quickly to seek within himself. Fantasies came, delusions came. And ultimately knowledge came, if the subject could stand it; but three out of five reached hysteria before they reached any worthwhile insight, and the old man was one of the three. He had nearly died . . .

He paused to count the times he had nearly died under therapy of one kind or another, but it was too hard. And besides, he was beginning to think that he was nearly dying again. He pushed himself back on his elbows and fought once more for breath.

This one was very bad.

He slumped back on the bed and reached out for the intercom button. "Maureen," he whispered.

She slept in the room next to him, and though he seldom woke in the night—there was something in the evening cocoa to make sure of that—when it happened that he did, if he called, she was there promptly, sometimes in a pink wrapper, once or twice in lounging pajamas. But not tonight. "Maureen," he whispered to the intercom again, but there was no answer.

The old man, with an effort, rolled onto his side. The movement dislodged one of the taped microphones. He felt it tear his skin and, simultaneously, heard the sharp alarm ping in Maureen's room. But the alarm didn't bring her.

The old man opened his eyes wide and stared at the intercom. "I have to get up," he told it reasonably, "because if I lie here I think I will die."

It was impossible, of course. But what could he lose by trying? He pushed himself to the edge of the bed. The chair was within reach, but very remote to Noah Sidorenko, who had not stood on his own feet in years . . .

And then he was in the chair. Somehow he had made it! He sat erect and gasping, for a moment. The pain was bad, but it was better sitting up. Then his hand found the buttons of the little electric motors.

He spun slowly, navigated the straits between the nurse's desk and the comer of the bed, went out the door, as it opened quietly before him.

Maureen's room was empty. The outer door opened, too.

That was good, he thought; he hadn't been sure it would open; it was never very clear to him whether he was a prisoner or not. It was, after all, a sort of madhouse he was in . . . But it opened.

The hall was empty and silent. He listened for the familiar grunch, grunch of Ernie Atkinson grinding his teeth in his sleep, but even that was stilled tonight. He rolled on. The lift rose silently to meet him.

He let it carry him gently down, and turned inward. The lower hall was blindingly bright. He made his way to Dr. Shugart's office.

He paused. There were voices.

No wonder he hadn't heard Ernie Atkinson's grinding teeth! Here was Atkinson, his voice coming plain as day: "I don't care what you say, we weren't getting through to him. No. The Group and psychodrama aren't working."

And Dr. Shugart's voice: "They have to work." Yes, the old man thought dazedly, it was Shugart's voice all right. But where was the hesitation, the carefully balanced, noncommittal air? It cracked sharp as a whip!

And Maureen's voice: "Do I have to go on building up this emotional involvement with him?"

Shugart crackled: "Is it so distasteful?"

"Oh, no!" (The old man sighed. He found he had stopped breathing until she answered.) "He's an old dear, and I do love him. But I'd like to give him little presents because I want to, not because it's part of his therapy."

Shugart rasped: "It's for his own good. This is one of the finest brains in the world, and it's falling apart. We've tried everything. Radical procedures—silence, psychosurgery, chemotherapy—are too much for him to take. Remember what happened when Dr. Reynolds tried electroshock? So we've got to work with what we've got."

The old man stirred.

Old as he might be, and insane if they liked, but he wasn't going to linger out here and listen. A quarter after one in the morning, and the whole Institute was gathered here in Shugart's office, plotting the recovery of himself.

"All right," he gasped, rolling in, "what is this?"

They gaped at him.

"All of you!" he said strongly. "What are you doing to me? Is it a hoax?"

Shugart moved restlessly. Maria Reynolds reached up to pat her hair, avoiding his eyes.

"You, Doctor Reynolds? Want to explain? I mean—I mean," he said in a changed tone, no longer gasping, "there seems to be only one explanation. There's a conspiracy of some sort, and I'm the target."

Maureen got up and walked toward him. "Come in, Doctor," she said, in a voice of resignation tinged with pleasure. "Maybe it's better this way. We're not going to get very far continuing to He to you, are we? So I guess we'll have to tell you the truth."

The tune rocked crazily through his head. The old man spun his chair and turned pleadingly to Maureen. "Of course, Doctor," she said, understanding without words, and fetched him a fizzy drink. "Only a little stimulant," she coaxed.

The old man glanced at Dr. Shugart. Shugart laughed. "Who do you think has been prescribing for you? There isn't a human being in the Institute without a first-rate degree. Maureen's our internist—with, of course, a thorough grounding in psychology."

The old man drank reproachfully, looking at Maureen. She said, clouding: "I know. It isn't fair, but we had to get you well."

"Why?"

Maureen said somberly: "A brain like yours doesn't come along too often. I'm not a physicist, but as I understand it Congruence comes close to doing what Einstein tried with the unified field theory. You were on the point of doing something more when you—when you—"

"When I went crazy," the old man said crudely. She shook her head. "All right, I used a bad word. But that's it, isn't it?" The girl nodded. "I see."

But the stimulant wasn't doing much good. Ninety-five years, he thought confused, and perhaps I won't see that other mountain. It was hard to accept, hard to believe he had been hoaxed, hard to believe that it wasn't working, that the delusions would not be cured. "I'm flattered," he whispered hoarsely, and tried to hand the glass back to Maureen. It clattered to the floor and bounced without breaking. Maria with her schizoid detachment, Emie with his worries, Sam Krabbe and his surly anger—doctors acting parts? The room swooped around Sidorenko; he was cut off from his reference points. And they were all afraid; he could see it, it was a gamble they had taken, that he would never find out, and now they didn't know what would happen. And he—

He didn't know either.

"I'm sorry to be so much trouble," he gasped.

"You mustn't feel personal guilt," Dr. Shugart said anxiously. "These personality disorders—personality traits—go with greatness. Sir Oliver Lodge swore he believed in levitation. Think of Newton, sleepless and paranoid. Think of Einstein. Religious mania is very common," the doctor assured him, "and you were spared that, at least. Well, almost—of course, certain aspects of your—"

"Shut up!" cried Maureen, and reached for the old man's wrist. He stared up at her, touched by the worry in her face, trying to find words to tell her there was nothing to worry about, nothing to fear. He felt his heart lunging against his ribs and his breathing seemed, oddly, to have stopped. He made a convulsive effort and drew an enormous, loud breath. Why, that was almost—what did they call it?—a death rattle. He did it again.

"Doctor!" moaned the nurse, but he found the strength to shake his wrist free of her. This was interesting. He was beginning to remember something, or to imagine something—

They were all coming toward him.

"Leave me alone," he croaked. He held them off while he practiced breathing again; it wasn't hard; he could do it. He closed his eyes. He heard Maureen catch her breath and opened them to glare at her, then closed them again.

Noah Sidorenko's brain was perfectly lucid.

He saw—or remembered? But it was as though he were seeing it with an internal eye—all of his previous life, the childhood, the government office where he had received the first scholarship, the four professors quizzing him for his doctor's, even the cloudy days of therapy and breakdown.

The old man thought: It all began 90 years ago, I was all right until then . . . and he had to laugh, though laughing choked him, because 90 years ago he had been all of five years old. But up until then there had been nothing to worry about.

Was it the crash? Yes. And fire. The white man. The song about the bear. The terrible auto smash, just outside his window—for his window had looked out on an elevated automobile highway in Brooklyn, the Gowanus Parkway, where cars raced bumper to bumper, 50 miles an hour, within five yards of the bed he slept in. Whoosh. Whoosh. All day long and all night. At night the strokes were slow, a lagging wire-brush riff; in the mornings and evenings they were faster, whooshwhooshwhoosh, a quick rataplan. He listened to them and dreamed tunes around diem. And there was the night he had gone to sleep and wakened screaming, screaming.

His mother rushed in—poor woman, she was already widowed. (Though she was only 25, the old man thought with amazement. Twenty-five! Maureen was that.) She rushed in, and though the boy Noah was terrified he could see through the shadow of his own terror of hers. "Momma, Momma, the white man!" She caught him in her arms. "Please, my God, what's the matter?" But he couldn't answer, except with sobs and incoherent words about the white man; it was a code, and she was not skilled to read it. And time passed, ten minutes or so. He was not comforted — he was still crying and afraid — but his mother was warm and she soothed him. She bounced him on her knee, ka-bump, Va-hump, Ya-bump, and even though he was crying he remembered the song with that beat, He SAW anOTHer MOUNTain, he SAW anOTHer MOUNTain, and the cars whooshed by and in the next room the little TV set murmured and laughed. "You're missing your program, Momma," he said; "Go to sleep, dear," she answered; he was almost relaxed. Crash. Outside the window two cars collided violently. A taxicab was bound for New York with a boy in a satin jacket at the wheel and four others crammed in the back; the boy at the wheel was high on marijuana and he hit the divider. The cab leaped crazily across into the Long Island-bound lane. There was not much traffic that night, but there was one car too many. In it a 30-year-old advertising salesman rushed to meet his wife and baby at Idlewild. He never met them. The cars struck. The stolen taxicab was hurled back into its own lane, its gas tank split, its doors flung open. Four boys in the jackets of the Gerritsen Tigers died at once and the fifth was thrown against the retaining wall—not dead; but not with enough life left to him to matter. He stood up and tried to run, and the burning gasoline made him a white-hot phantom, auraed and terrible. He lurched clear across the roadway to just outside Noah's window and died there, flaming, hanging over the wall, 15 feet above the wreck of the space salesman's convertible.

"The white man!" screamed someone in Noah's room, but it was not the boy but his mother. She looked from the white-liamed man outside to her son, with eyes of fear and horror; and from then on it was never the same for hixu.

"From the time I was five," the old man said aloud, wondering, "it was never the same. She thought I was — I don't know. A devil. She thought I had the power of second sight, because I'd been scared by the accident before it happened."

He looked around the room. "And my son!" he cried. "I knew when he died—telepathy, at a distance of a good eight thousand miles. And—" he stopped, thinking. "There were other things," he mumbled ...

Dr. Shugart fussed kindly: "Impossible, don't you see? It's all part of your delusion. Surely a scientist should know that this—witchcraft can't be true! If only you hadn't come down here tonight, when you were so close to a cure ..."

Noah Sidorenko said terribly: "Do you want to cure me again?"

"Doctor!"

The old man shouted: "You've done it a hundred times, and a hundred times, with pain and fear, I've had to undo the cure—not because I want to! My God, no. But because I can't help myself. And now you want me to go through it again. 1 won t let you cure me!" He pushed the electric buttons; the chair began to spin but too slowly, too slowly. The old man fought his way to his feet, shouting at them. "Don't you see? I don't want to do this, but it does itself ; it's like a baby that's getting born, I can't stop it now. It's difficult to have a baby. A woman in labor," he cried, seeing the worry in their eyes, knowing he must seem insane, "a woman in labor is having a fit, she struggles and screams—and what can a doctor do for her? Kill the pain? Yes, and perhaps kill the baby with it. That happened, over and over, until the doctors learned how, and—and you don't know how ...

"You mustn't kill it this time! Let me suffer. Don't cure me!"

And they stood there looking at him. No one spoke at all.

The room was utterly silent; the old man asked himself, Can I have convinced them? But that was so improbable. His words were such poor substitutes for the thoughts that raced about his thumping head. But—the thoughts, yes, they were clear now; maybe for the first time. He understood. Psionic power, telepathy, precognition, all the other hard-to-handle gifts that filled the gap between metaphysics and muscle . . . they lay next door to madness. Worse! By definition, they were "madness", as a diamond can be "dirt" if it clogs the jet of a rocket. They were mad, since they didn't fit self-defining "sane" science.

But how many times he had come so close, all the same! And how often, how helpfully, he had been "cured." The delusional pattern had been so clear to "sane" science; and with insulin shock and hypnosynthesis, with electrodes in his shaved scalp and psychodrama, with Group therapy and the silence—with every pill and incantation of the sciences of the mind they had, time after time, rooted out the devils. Precognition had been frightened out of him by his mother's panic. Telepathy had been electroshocked out of him in the Winford Retreat. But they returned and returned.

Handle them? No, the old man admitted, he couldn't handle them, not yet. But if God was good and gave him more time, an hour or two perhaps ... or maybe some years; if the doctor was improperly kind and allowed him his "delusion"—why, he might learn to handle them after all. He might, for example, be able to peer into minds at will and not only when some randomly chosen mind, half-shattered itself, created such a clamorous beacon of noise that then the (tele-pathically) nearly deaf might hear it. He might be able to stare into the future at will, instead of having his attention chance-caught by the flicker of some catastrophic terror projecting its shadow ahead. And this ancient and useless hulk that was his body, for example. He might yet force it to live, to move, to walk about, to stand-

To stand?

The old man stood perfectly motionless beside his chair. To stand? And then, rather late, he followed the direction of the staring eyes of Maureen and Shugart and the others.

He was standing.

But not as he had visioned it, in wretched bedridden hours. He was standing tall and straight; but between the felt soles of his slippers and the rubber tiles of the office floor there were eight inches of untroubled air.

No. They wouldn't cure him again, not ever. And with luck, he realized slowly, he might now proceed to infect the world.