Wolf sank down in his chair and cocked an eye at Alma Heller, who came into the room at that moment.
"Did you hear that, Alma? In more ways than one our boy isn't what he seems to be. By last night I was certain that he is not a native of Louisville, Kentucky. Now we are told that he is twice as old as we thought he was."
Alma stared for a moment.
"We do seem to get in deeper and deeper. Have any ideas?"
Wolf ran his hand worriedly through his hair. "One. But I'm afraid of it. At any rate, we're in too far to back out. This morning we're going to dig for more information, and we're not going to stop until we have Britten squeezed dry."
He reached onto his desk for his tobacco can and began filling a pipe, meanwhile organizing his thoughts.
"Somehow or other," he resumed, "Britten has received conditioning to resist giving information under deep therapy."
"And not only that," Alma interposed, "but he has the ability to retain consciousness under deep therapy and fabricate a story to replace the true facts."
"Correct. So, since the ordinary deep therapy method is useless, we have to get tough. We have to eliminate his present set of conditioned reactions and replace them by a new set. In other words, we must reset the controls so that he responds to a new set of orders."
Alma pursed her lips for a soundless whistle. "Fisher's method! Do you know how much of that a nervous system can take?"