In the morning session I find that I have a new therapist. He is much shorter and appears older than his predecessor with whom, of course, I had developed a rather close relationship. There is a brutality about his forearms, a certain glint in the glasses he wears which conveys menace. I wonder if he is administrative personnel, masquerading as a therapist, and I decide that I am not qualified to make such judgments.

“Your name is Quir,” he says, looking up from certain papers on the desk. “You are seven minutes late for this session. Is this customary?”

“I was delayed by a bad stomach,” I say. “Are you my new therapist? What happened to my old therapist?”

“All in due course,” he says. “Right now I want to know if this laxity is characteristic. Are you always late to such sessions?”

“I was ill.”

“You creatures are never ill. In almost two and a half years we have failed to detect a single disease which afflicts you. This is going to change, Quir. We are going to get to the heart of the matter and beyond. You are not going to be late for these sessions again.”

“Where is my therapist?”

“Never mind. We are not satisfied with your progress, Quir. You are holding back certain bits of information, we are convinced. Also, you seem to have lapsed into a disgusting fa­miliarity.”

“I miss my therapist. We have been together now for seven months. Is he ill?”

“I am your new therapist. Your old therapist has been replaced by me. Together we will conduct certain researches and move ahead.”

“I liked my therapist.”

“You are not supposed to like your therapist. This has nothing to do with relationships. We are no longer interested in developing relationships with you creatures, Quir; we are interested in results. Time is running out. We are here to elicit some very important facts, before it is gone.”

“I have told you everything that you asked.”

“I doubt that. We have transcripts.”

“I have answered everything. I can hold nothing back. We were made that way, so that there is nothing we cannot tell.”

“I will believe that later, Quir.” The new therapist shrugs, brings his hands together, does something with his wrists to pro­duce a perceptiblecrack ! “Sit down,” he says. “We’ll begin the session now and expect to run overtime.”

“I am not protesting,” I say. I am still trying to evaluate this new therapist who acts unlike any of the others with whom I have dealt. His manner is hostile but the hostility itself is of no importance; it is a cover for something else. I sit, uneasily. “I have told you everything you ask,” I repeat, assaulted by a vague fear. “I have held back nothing.”

“That is not so. If it is so, then we have not been asking you the right questions. My predecessors will be strongly dealt with for that. Tell me about the sedimentation process in carbon, please.”

“What kind of carbon?”

“The organic compound.”

“All carbon is an organic compound,” I say. “All organic compounds are built upon carbon, even you and me.”

“Don’t be evasive. I want to know about the sedimentation of carbon.”

“Under what conditions?” I say hopelessly. “In what locales? To what purposes? You have to be more specific than that. If you’re not familiar with your subject—”

I feel a sharp terrible jolt of pain springing upward from the chair and lancing behind my eyes, spreading like a fork through my skull. Vision wavers, it is almost impossible for me to sit upright and I find myself gasping. The pain ebbs away, slowly. The therapist leans intently over the desk.

“That is only a sample,” he says. “Just a suggestion. There is more to come.”

“Why?” I say. “There is no need for torture. You know that we have told you everything—”

I feel the pain again, just a slight gathering around the temples; and then it desists. The therapist taps a pencil on the desk and says, “Because we’re sick of this nonsense and we’re running out of time. If we’re going to be able to remake this planet we are going to have to do it now within a matter of weeks. Never mind about further questions; this is our internal affair. Are you prepared now to answer questions?”

“Yes,” I say. “Yes, I was always prepared.”

“Good. Tell me about the sedimentation of carbon.”

I tell him. I do my best. Switches within me, certain blocks, are reluctant to release because of the abstract nature of the ques­tion; but I force my way past them, demanding that they open, no matter how painfully, to disgorge information. And after a while, in replies to my insistence, they do. Leaning forward on the edge of the chair, I tell the therapist everything that I can think of about the sedimentation processes of carbon. Several times I run out of information and sit helplessly but a foregathering of his fingers on a pencil, a certain wink of his eye, force me to start again and I ransack my psyche for the most useless pieces of information, anything to keep talking, anything to placate this new and terrifying therapist.

It goes on for a very long time and at the end of it I am numbed and shocked; I did not think that within me there existed so much knowledge on carbon and its sedimentation or so much terror. I am weak with terror; I feel my body boneless with it, I can barely stagger from the room when dismissed. “That is sufficient for now,” the therapist calls after me. “I am letting you go for a few hours to get hold of yourself and then you will be back here. We are doubling the sessions. We are going to work twelve times a week and for more hours each time in order to get to the bottom of this. You had better be prepared for a very difficult month.”

There is an aspect of taunting to his advice which I see but discard. What is the difference? In the beginning they tortured us; it is no large transition from torture to taunting. In due course they may torture us again: things will come full cycle when they have squeezed out the last available bit of information. The cold portion of my mind that sent Plotar to his doom reminds me that there is nothing unusual about this and that all geological researches have indicated that the developments of planets are circular. We can return to torture again and then obliteration.

But it is hard to be objective, hard to advise oneself in such a fashion, filled as I am with fear. It is a poor position for a leader of the coming revolution to occupy; one petrified of his therapist. Still, this was to be expected. I can recognize that now. My earlier therapist and I were becoming too close, were failing to see one another any more as abstractions.

And it was to my prior therapist that I betrayed Plotar. Perhaps they have decided that I am too valuable to be left to a marginal one such as he.

It is all perplexing and terrible and I return to my rooms in complete dismay, as shocked as I have been for a long time, to see that once again they have been ransacked, this time somewhat more crudely, and that the very pictures on the wall are tilted crazily, turned, some of them, toward the ceiling, the domestic animals now become monstrosities with legs for heads, heads for tails, staring out of eyes in their buttocks, piteous and weeping eyes at the headless men who stand by them, extending their hands into hell.