"No."
"I thought not," said the doctor triumphantly. "Now understand, Carroll. I am trying to help you. You are a brilliant man—"
"No." This was not modesty cropping up, but the same repeating of the basic negative reply.
"You are and have been. You will be once again after you stop fighting me and try to help. Why do you wish to fight me?"
Carroll stirred uneasily in his chair. "Pain," he said with a tremble of fear in his voice.
"Where is this pain?" asked the doctor gently.
"All over."
The doctor considered that. The same pattern again—a psychotic denial of identity and a fear of pain at the dimly-grasped concept of return. Pollard turned to the sheets of notes on his desk. James Forrest Carroll had been a brilliant theorist and excellent from the practical standpoint too.
Thirty-three years old and in perfect health, his enjoyment of life was basically sound and he was about as stable as any physicist in the long list of scientific and technical men known to the Solar System's scientists.