/past a cube of water with schools of fish each made of two opposing tails swimming forever in stasis/mountains crumble to the right/breach-born ahead is a similar range/which disappears as they step off a sudden precipice and float through a dank forest and are surrounded by peering, glowing, unblinking yellow eyes/ /descent/
/to a desert road stretching emptily and limitlessly ahead/and suddenly a town has sprung up around them, its buildings built at impossible angles/a stick man walks up and smiles as his form fills out and then swells, bloats, and ruptures, spewing mounds of writhing maggots upon the ground/the face and body begin to dissolve but the mouth remains, growing larger and nearer/it opens to show its double rows of curved teeth /and growing still larger it moves upon them, enveloping them, closing upon them with a SNAP/
Dalt next found himself on the floor with Webst and a technician bending over him. But it was Pard who awakened him.
("Get up, Steve! Now! We've got to go back in there as soon as possible!")
Dalt rose slowly to his feet and brushed his palms. "I'm all right," he told Webst. "Just slipped out of the chair." And to Pard: You must be kidding!
("I assure you, I am not. That was a jolting experience, and if we don't go back immediately, we'll probably build up a reflex resistance that will keep us out in the future.")
That's fine with me.
("But we can do something for this girl; I'm sure of it.")
Dalt waved Webst and his technician away. I'm going to try again," he muttered, and repositioned himself before the girl. Okay, Pard. I'm trusting you.
/and then they were in a green-fogged bog as ochre hands reached up for them from the rank marsh grasses to try to pull them into the quicksand/
/the sun suddenly appeared overhead but was quickly muffled by the fog/it persisted, however, and slowly the fog began to thin and burn away/
/the land tilted then and the marsh began to drain/the rank grasses began to wither and die in the sun/slowly a green carpet of neatly trimmed grass unrolled about them, covering and smothering the ever-clutching hands/
/a giant, spheroid boulder rolled in from the horizon at dazzling speed and threatened to overrun them until a chasm yawned suddenly before it and swallowed it/
/dark things crept toward them from all sides, trailing dusk behind them, but a high, smooth, safe wall suddenly encircled them and sunlight prevailed/
Dalt was suddenly back in the room again with Sally Ragna, only this time he was seated on the chair instead of the floor.
("We'll leave her in that sanctuary by herself for a few minutes while I get the lay of the land here.")
You made all those changes, then?
("Yes, and it was easier than I thought it would be. I met a lot of resistance at first when I tried to bring the sun out, but once I accomplished that, I seemed to be in full control. There were a couple of attempts to get at her again, but they were easily repulsed.")
What now?
("Now that we've made her comfortable in her sylvan nunnery—which is as unreal as the horror show she's lived in all these years, but completely unthreatening—we'll bring her back to reality.")
Ah, but what is reality?
("Please, Steve. I haven't time for such a sophomoric question. Just go along with me, and for a working definition we'll just say that reality is what trips you up when you walk around with your eyes closed. But no more talk ... now comes the hard part. Up until now we've been seeing what she sees; the task at hand is to reverse that situation. Here goes.")
They were back in again and apparently Pard's benign reconstruction had held—and had been improved upon; the wall had been removed and a smooth grassy sward stretched to the far horizon. Pard set up a bare green panel to the left; three more panels appeared and boxed them in ... a lighted ceiling finished the job. An odd piece of metallic machinery overhung them, and there, just a short distance before them, sat a man with a golden hand and a flamestone slung at his throat, whose dark hair was interrupted by a patch of silver at the crown.
A sudden blurring and they were looking at Sally again. Only this time she was looking back—and smiling. As tears slid down her cheeks, the smile faded and she collapsed into unconsciousness.
IX
"You've done something," Webst said later at the office after Sally had been examined and returned to her bed, "something beneficial. Can't be sure just yet, but I can smell it! Did you see her smile at you? She's never smiled before. Never!"
Webst's enthusiasm whirled past Dalt without the slightest effect. He was tired, tired as he'd never been before. There was a vague feeling of dissociation, too; he'd visited the mind of another and had returned home to find himself subtly altered by the experience.
"Well, I certainly hope I didn't go through all that for nothing."
"I'm sure you didn't," said a voice behind him. He turned to see El walking across the room. "She's sleeping now," she said, sliding easily into a chair, "and without a hypnotic. You've gotten through to her, no question about it."
Webst leaned forward on his desk. "But just what is it you've done?" he asked intently. "What did you see in there?"
Dalt opened his mouth to protest, to put off all explanations and descriptions until tomorrow, but Pard cut him off.
("Tell them something. They're hungry for information.")
How can I describe all ... that? ("Try. Just skim the details.")
Dalt gave a halting summary of what they had seen and done, then:
"In conclusion, it's my contention that the girl's underlying lesion was not organic but conceptual. Her sense of reality was completely aberrant, but as to how this came to be, I do not know." He hesitated and El thought she saw him shudder ever so slightly. "For a moment I got the feeling that I was working against something ... something dark and very alien, just over the horizon. At one point I thought I actually touched it, or it reached for me, or—" He shook himself. "I don't know. Maybe it was part of her fantasy complex. Anyway, what matters is that she was a very sick girl and I think I've helped her."
"I take it, then," Webst said, "that we can assume that these acute, unremitting, chemonegative schizophrenics are actually only conceptually deranged. Okay, I'll buy that. But why are they deranged?"
Dalt remembered the dark thing he had sensed in Sally's mind and the word "imposed" rushed into his thoughts, but he pushed it away. "Can't help you there as yet. But let's get her back on her feet and worry about why it happened later on. Chemotherapy was no good because her enzyme chains are normal; and psychotherapy has been useless because, as far this patient was concerned, the psychotherapist didn't exist. Apparently, only a strong psionic thrust and subsequent reconstruction of the fantasy world is of any value. And by the way, her mind was extremely easy to enter. Perhaps in erecting an impenetrable barrier against reality, it left itself completely open to psionics."
El and Webst were virtually glowing with the exhilaration of discovery. "This is incredible!" Webst declared. "A whole new direction in psychotherapy! Mr. Dalt, I don't know how we can repay you!"
("Tell him what he can pay you.")
We can't take money for helping that poor girl!
("He's going to ask you to do it again ... and again. That was no sylvan picnic in there—it's risky business. I won't allow us to enter another mind unless we're compensated for it. Value given for value received, remember?")
That's crass.
("That's life. Something that costs nothing is usually worth the price.") That's trite.