"But we can't control. I've tried and failed. At best we can co-exist, as observers and vicarious participants, but we must surrender choice. Is that to be our destiny—to live on, but to be denied all except contemplation—to live on as guests among you, accepting your ways and sharing them, but with no power to change them?"
The traveler shouted at Mersey's mind in soundless fury: "Shut up! Shut up!"
Mersey stopped talking.
"Go on," said the doctor softly. "This is very interesting."
"Shut up!" said the traveler voicelessly, yet with frantic urgency.
The madman was silent. His body was perfectly still, except for his calm breathing. The visitor gazed through his eyes in the only possible direction—up at the ceiling. He tried another command. "Look at the doctor."
With that glance, the visitor told himself, he would flee the crazed mind and enter the doctor's. There he would learn what the psychiatrist thought of his patient's strange soliloquy—whether he believed it, or any part of it.
He prayed that the doctor was evaluating it as the intricate raving of delusion.
