"I think we have a bear by the tail," she said. "We seem to peel off layers of Jim Britten's mind, and each time there's something different underneath. Every time he tells his story there is something new and contradictory in it. And there is no clue as to whether he is getting nearer or farther from the truth."
Wolf swivelled his chair around and stared out of the window onto the hospital lawn. "We thought that the deep therapy method was something perfect. Something that would make a patient tell the absolute truth as he saw it. But our patient is making hash out of it."
He lifted his coffee cup and tasted the black liquid tentatively.
"Follow it through. The first story he gave us was conscious. He said he couldn't remember exactly what happened to him. Okay. This could be a fabrication. The next story he gave under therapy conditions. He said that he killed Glover in a fit of rage because of an argument. Okay again. We could have accepted that at face value, and he would have gotten away with it, except that we got curious about a couple of things. We wondered how the paranoid tinge got into his thoughts, and we wondered exactly what it was that he and Glover were on the verge of discovering. So we tried again. Now we find that he deliberately plotted to kill Glover, and the paranoid symptoms are now so intense that he gives us a completely phony story about making millions of dollars out of the discovery, when everybody knows that you can't patent anything for personal profit when you invent it in a government laboratory."
Alma Heller lifted her hand, making a one with her forefinger. "So, our friend Jim Britten is doing two things—both of which we did not believe him capable of doing. First, he is lying and inventing stories under deep therapy. Second, he is withholding information. For notice that he is still avoiding specific mention of the result which his experiment was aiming at."
Her voice became flat, precise, and probing.
"Now, could our young physicist, Jim Britten, do this thing? No. Not unless he is an unsuspected superman type. Or—unless he has had special training and conditioning for resistance against deep therapy. How does a young physics student obtain such training? And where?"
She looked across the desk at Morris Wolf, who chewed savagely on his pipe bit.
"If I had any sense," he growled, "I'd call up the AEC and throw Jim Britten right back in their faces. If they give me a problem to solve they should at least tell me how hot they think it is. And my viscera are beginning to tell me that this is going to be a very, very warm baby. Maybe I should holler for help. I have a wife and two kids at home. I don't want to get hurt."
"Who you kidding?" Alma wanted to know. "You wouldn't let a juicy problem like this escape you just when you have it clutched about the middle. Besides, our two undercover friends from the FBI will be keeping their eyes on things. Let them earn their pay."