5.
Several hours later he was again in General Banning's office.
"Look," Banning said, "I'm sorry to press this, and I know you took a hell of a beating in there. But we've got to know."
Colin nodded morosely. "I know. I'm sorry about the delay."
"You looked more dead than alive when you came out."
"I'm afraid I'm too long on empathy and too short on objectivity to fool with that kind of thing. One of the reasons I don't often trigger these big discharges in my own practice. I get—inside, I guess, somehow. No detachment, or not enough."
"What was there? Inside, if that's the way you want to put it."
Colin sighed, absently pulled his pipe from his jacket pocket. "Specifically, I don't think I can tell you. He saw—or experienced as seeing—something when he went into the Skip. It was something so damned big it stripped him of his orientation as a human being."
"The films show him assuming a foetal position. That what you mean?"
"Well—basically this kind of regression is a denial of responsibility. 'I'm not a man,' he says. 'I'm just an unborn child. Take care of me.' The individual wants no part of the problems and responsibilities of adulthood. Harkins came out of that, or he never could have got the ship back. But he couldn't face being a man. The only way he could carry out his responsibilities, and survive, was to abolish the category, man."