“Hallucinatory time is elastic and subjective.”
“It’s a defense mechanism—you know that, I suppose?”
“Defense against what?”
Morrissey moistened his lips. “Remember, I’m the psychiatrist and you’re the patient. You were psychoanalyzed when you studied psychiatry, but you didn’t get all the devils out of your subconscious. Hang it, Bob, you know very well that most psychiatrists take up the work because they’re attracted to it for pathological reasons—neuroses of their own. Why did you always insist that you were so utterly sure of everything?”
“I always made sure.”
“Compensation. To allow for a basic unsureness and insecurity in your own makeup. Consciously you were sure the empathy surrogate treatment would work, but your unconscious mind wasn’t so certain. You never let yourself know that, though. But it came out under stress—the therapy itself.”
“Go on,” Bruno said slowly.
Morrissey tapped the papers on his desk.
“I know my diagnosis is pretty accurate, but you can decide that for yourself. You can tell, perhaps, better than I can. The frontiers of the mind are terra incognita. Your simile of a uranium pile was better than you’d realized. When critical mass is approached, there’s danger. And the damper bars in your own mind—what did Parsons’ machine do to them?”