Haskins plunged his face into his hands. He looked up and said eagerly,
"Yes! He wanted to kill someone! A friend of his!"
"Who?" Rath asked, with terrible patience.
"The friend's name was--let me think--Magneton! That was it! Magneton!
Or was it Morrison? Oh, dear...."
Mr. Rath's iron face registered a rather corrugated disgust. People
were useless as witnesses. Worse than useless, since they were
frequently misleading. For reliability, give him a robot every time.
"Didn't he mention anything significant?"
"Let me think!" Haskins said, his face twisting into a fit of
concentration.
Rath waited.
Mr. Follansby cleared his throat. "I was just thinking, Mr. Rath. About
that Martian machine. It won't treat a Terran homicidal case as
homicidal, will it?"
"Of course not. Homicide is unknown on Mars."
"Yes. But what will it do? Might it not reject the entire case as
unsuitable? Then the customer would merely return the Regenerator with
a complaint and we would--"
Mr. Rath shook his head. "The Rex Regenerator must treat if it finds
evidence of psychosis. By Martian standards, the customer is a very
sick man, a psychotic--no matter what is wrong with him."
Follansby removed his pince-nez and polished them rapidly. "What will
the machine do, then?"
"It will treat him for the Martian illness most analogous to his case.
Feem desire, I should imagine, with various complications. As for what
will happen once treatment begins, I don't know. I doubt whether anyone
knows, since it has never happened before. Offhand, I would say there
are two major alternatives: the patient may reject the therapy out of
hand, in which case he is left with his homicidal mania unabated. Or he
may accept the Martian therapy and reach a cure."
Mr. Follansby's face brightened. "Ah! A cure is possible!"
"You don't understand," Rath said. "He may effect a cure of his
nonexistent Martian psychosis. But to cure something that is not there
is, in effect, to erect a gratuitous delusional system. You might say
that the machine would work in reverse, producing psychosis instead of
removing it."
Mr. Follansby groaned and leaned against a Bell Psychosomatica.
"The result," Rath summed up, "would be to convince the customer that
he was a Martian. A sane Martian, naturally."
Haskins suddenly shouted, "I remember! I remember now! He said he
worked for the New York Rapid Transit Corporation! I remember
distinctly!"
"That's a break," Rath said, reaching for the telephone.
Haskins wiped his perspiring face in relief. "And I just remembered
something else that should make it easier still."
"What?"
"The customer said he had been an alcoholic at one time. I'm sure of
it, because he was interested at first in the IBM Alcoholic Reliever,
until I talked him out of it. He had red hair, you know, and I've had a
theory for some time about red-headedness and alcoholism. It seems--"
"Excellent," Rath said. "Alcoholism will be on his records. It narrows
the search considerably."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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