The voice of Parker cut across the spell in the room like the explosion of a shell in a country graveyard.
"He's just made the world's biggest understatement. By the God of the ancients, he should see some of the human wrecks that come to us, that pack our offices, and practically hang from the fluorescent. Day after day, hundreds and hundreds of them. And we can only tell them what is wrong with them—not what to do about it. A noble profession ours, gentlemen. Hah! It's hollow. Hollow and futile. Like the mobs that visit us here at Science Hall and go away uncomforted, to wait until they go completely mad and are taken away to a mechanical madhouse presided over by the same magnificently futile psychologists. A noble profession indeed."
"We can't claim immunity from it, either, you know," said Vaine. "We're all too old to join the orgies, but we try to compensate for our helplessness, our uselessness, in other ways. You, Parker," he smiled at the chubby psychologist, "are a faddist who follows every single mad-eyed craze that crops up. You have no idea how strange you look right now without any hair at all on your face; no eyebrows, no eyelashes, a bald dome. You're a remarkable sight."
Parker colored. This turned him oddly red from his smooth chin to his bald pate, so that he rather resembled a beet carved into the form of a face.
"It's not a fad. It's a hygienic movement that I highly approve of."
Vaine's laugh left little echoes repeating themselves in the corners of that acoustically perfect room.
"What term would you use to explain away the time that you brought to your office some quack's mystic device which would supposedly soothe the patient by a mysterious mixture of vibrations and music made by the movement of the operator's hands in an eddy field? Remember how the frightful noises you hauled up sent three patients into hysteria, and so accentuated another's delusion of persecution that he focused his attentions on you as the cause of his troubles? Then he chased you all around the office with a metal chair, earnestly imploring you to stand still long enough to get your head bashed in.
"And how about the time you claimed it was the duty of every citizen to learn the intricacy of a certain machine—and blew out the side of the wall with the 'harmless' little projector you rigged up? Eh?"
He chuckled and a smile flickered for an instant on the face of the sour Stanton.
"You aren't too normal yourself," retorted Parker. "Spending all your time dashing around with other people's wives."