And now everything around him was melting. Under him the chair became plastic and then fluid. The floor was a bowl, and the walls were dripping down into it, into a shining whirlpool at the center.
He slipped helplessly along that slope till the pool engulfed him, in a chaos of thunder and confusion and sickening horror.
The winds bellowed.... The empty drop closed around him.... He fell in darkness....
This time, when he woke, he wasn’t sure. The panic had not left him. He learned, later, that he had been semi-delirious for eight days, and only Morrissey’s unceasing attention had kept him reasonably quiet. Then there were weeks of convalescence, and a vacation, and it seemed a long time before he came back from Florida, tanned and healthy, to resume his duties.
Even then, though, there was the fear.
When he drove toward the blocky buildings of the sanitarium he felt a touch of it brush him. He reached for Barbara’s hand, and felt some comfort in the assurance of her nearness. She had been helpful, too, though she had not understood.
Every day after that, when he left her, there was a fleeting apprehension lest he never see her again. To forget the uncertainty of his footing, the ground that was no longer absolutely solid, he plunged into the hospital’s routine. And gradually, after more weeks, the terror began to leave him.
Gregson had been cured. He was still under precautionary observation, but all traces of his psychosis seemed to have vanished. There were still minor neuroses, the natural result of the past six years of abnormal restraint, but they were disappearing under proper therapy. The empathy surrogate treatment was successful. Yet, for a while, Bruno refused to attempt more experiments.
Parsons was displeased. He was anxious to chart a graph on the process, and one trial did not provide enough evidence. Bruno kept putting the physicist off with promises. It eventually ended in a minor spat which Morrissey halted by pointing out that Dr. Robert Bruno was, technically, his own patient, and was not yet ready for further research on the dangerous subject.
Parsons, furious, went off. Bruno followed Morrissey into the latter’s office and sat down in one of the more comfortable chairs. It was mid-afternoon, and beyond the windows the drowsy hum of summer made a peaceful counterpoint to the conversation.