"Now, Phil, let's examine how this sick society has sickened you. It may surprise you but we shan't be using any such modern techniques as electrosleep, deep brain photography or situational therapy complete with a bottle, a blanket and a blonde love-robot. We shall simply do what our great-grandfathers would have done—talk. Feel perfectly at ease. This desk is designed so we can be together, yet need not look at each other. Care to smoke? Good! Do! Now begin at the beginning. Tell me the story of your life."
Phil swallowed. "Excuse me, Dr. Romadka," he said, "but I'd rather not do that right now. I want to tell you about an experience, I mean, hallucination, I just had that convinced me I'm crazy, and then I want you to tell me about it. You know: interpret it or psych it or something."
The analyst shrugged happily. "As good a beginning as any. Go ahead."
So Phil told him what he had seen through the quarter-darkened window. He found himself ashamedly admitting under the analyst's expert rein-twitching how he had long used his own window as an observation post, and when he got to describing the hallucination itself he found himself trembling with restimulated terror, but he did finally get it all out.
Dr. Romadka seemed as delighted as if he had been presented with a rare object of art. "Beautiful!" he commented. "I have seldom heard so magnificent a symbol for the murky sexual longings of this culture. A satyress, or satyrette, prepared to inflict both love and savage stampings. Mary would be enraptured with it, I'm sure, and insist on making one of her dolls in its image." He sighed aesthetically, then recalled himself. "But, of course, Phil, I can't expect you to be interested just now in the artistic product of your unconscious creativity. You want to know about causes, sources. Tell me, have you ever seen a horse?"
"Once in a circus," Phil admitted.
"Greek mythology is one of your interests?"
"Not that I know of."
"Recall seeing that TV show A Coltish Girl or the musical sexedy The Horsy Set or the ancient film Fantasia?"
Phil shook his head. The analyst nodded thoughtfully. "You say the fur was distributed over the torso like a clinging, off-the-bosom chemise? And that the legs went straight down, like rods, to end in hoofs?"