“Cellular, you mean? Um-m. I’m not worried about that. Blood-pressure okay. Heart—” Morrissey picked up a stethoscope. After a while he nodded. “A physician hasn’t any right to be afraid of the dark,” Bruno said. “A physician isn’t charting unmapped territory,” Morrissey said abruptly. “You can dissect a cadaver, but you can’t do that to the psyche. As a psychiatrist you should be the first to admit that we don’t know all there is to know about the mind. Would you take a transfusion from a meningitis patient?” Bruno chuckled. “Witchcraft, Ken—pure witchcraft! The germ theory of psychosis! Afraid I’ll catch Gregson’s insanity? I hate to disillusion you, but episodic disorders aren’t contagious.” “Just because you can’t see a bug doesn’t mean it isn’t there,” Morrissey growled. “What about a filterable virus? A few years ago nobody could conceive of liquid life.” “Next you’ll be going back to Elizabethan times and talking about spleen and humors.” Bruno resumed his shirt and coat. He sobered. “In a way, though, this _is_ a transfusion. The only type of transfusion possible. I’ll admit no one knows all there is to know about psychoses. Nobody knows what makes a man think, either. But that’s where physics is beginning to meet medicine. Witchcraft and medicine isolated digitalin when they met. And scientists are beginning to know the nature of thought—an electronic pattern of energy.” “Empirical!” “Compare not the brain, but the mind itself, to a uranium pile,” Bruno said. “The potentialities for atomic explosion are in the mind because you can’t make a high-specialized colloid for thinking without approaching the danger level. It’s the price humans pay for being _homo sapiens_. In a uranium pile you’ve got boron-steel bars as dampers, to absorb the neutrons before they can get out of control. In the mind, those dampers are purely psychic, naturally—but they’re what keep a man sane.” “You can prove anything by symbolism,” Morrissey said sourly. “And you can’t stick bars of boron-steel in Gregson’s skull.” “Yes, I can,” Bruno said. “In effect.” “But those dampers are—_ideas_! Thoughts! You can’t—” “What is a thought?” Bruno asked. Morrissey grimaced and followed the Chief of Staff out. “You can chart a thought on the encephalograph—” he said stubbornly. “Because it’s a radiation. What causes that radiation? Energy emitted by certain electronic patterns. What causes electronic patterns? The basic physical structure of matter. What causes uranium to throw off neutrons under special conditions? Same answer. If an uranium pile starts to get out of control, you can damp it, if you move fast, with boron or cadmium.” “If you move fast. Why use Gregson? He’s been insane for years.” “If he’d been insane for only a week, we couldn’t prove it was the empathy surrogate that cured him. You’re just arguing to dodge the responsibility. If you don’t want to help me, I’ll get somebody else.”