"I'm afraid I'm too long on empathy and too short on objectivity to fool with that kind of thing. One of the reasons I don't often trigger these big discharges in my own practice. I get--inside, I guess, somehow. No detachment, or not enough." "What was there? Inside, if that's the way you want to put it." Colin sighed, absently pulled his pipe from his jacket pocket. "Specifically, I don't think I can tell you. He saw--or experienced as seeing--something when he went into the Skip. It was something so damned big it stripped him of his orientation as a human being." "The films show him assuming a foetal position. That what you mean?" "Well--basically this kind of regression is a denial of responsibility. 'I'm not a man,' he says. 'I'm just an unborn child. Take care of me.' The individual wants no part of the problems and responsibilities of adulthood. Harkins came out of that, or he never could have got the ship back. But he couldn't face being a man. The only way he could carry out his responsibilities, and survive, was to abolish the category, man." Colin leaned back and sighed. "You know," he said thoughtfully, "Harkins must be the loneliest human being that ever lived. God!" After a moment he looked up. "Ever read any Emerson?" "The philosopher Emerson? No, not much. Some maybe, when I was in college. Why?" "Nothing in particular. I was just thinking of an essay of his on Nature." "No, haven't read it. Well," he continued, standing, "where do we go from here?" "More of the same, I'm afraid. We have to find out what he saw. What was so--immense, that it could make a man deny the existence of other men." * * * * * Night came to Gila Base IV; the second night after the _Phoenix I_'s landing. Darkness climbed out of the eastern hills and spread itself upward into the sky and across the plane of the desert. _Phoenix I_ was still on the landing pad, but its sides were hidden by a webwork of gantries and scaffolding as base technicians clambered over it, testing, checking, examining. Colin insisted on leaving the base, making the twenty-mile drive into town and his home. Banning was too tired to argue about it. He gave the psychiatrist a security gate-pass and went to bed in his own office. Colin's car buzzed down the wide concrete toward the little cluster of lights that marked Gila City. He slowed when he reached the outskirts, watching the blue glare of the overhead sodium lamps slide along the hood and up over the windshield.