He replaced the phone and looked around at Phil with a despair that his baldness and big eyes turned comical. "This is most embarrassing," he said. "A former patient insists on seeing me at once, threatens to cause a disturbance downstairs if I won't. She would, too. We had some fine fracases before she broke off the analysis. I have no other course but to see her. I know how to pacify her temporarily, enough to get her home." "I'd better go," Phil said, rising. "Wouldn't hear of it," Dr. Romadka protested. "I want to go much deeper into your case this evening. That last thing you mentioned--it opened vistas! No, you just wait for five minutes in the next room, ten at the most, and I'll have her out of here." "I do think I'd better go, though," Phil said, "if you don't mind." "Quite impossible," Dr. Romadka pronounced, taking a firm hold of his arm. "She's passionately jealous of all my other patients and would be sure to attack you the instant you stepped out of the elevator. Did I tell you she carries a gold squirt gun filled with sulphuric acid? That's one of her cuter tricks. The only other way out is the service chute, and that's hardly for human use. No," he said, guiding Phil through a door beyond the arch but not entering himself, "you just stay in here for five minutes or so. There's plenty to read, to glance over and listen to--not that you'll have much time. Trust me, Phil. Everything's under control." The door shut. One fleeting glance around showed shelves of books, racks of vocal booktapes, a divan, a central table and a large mirror set in the ceiling. Then Phil remembered he had left his cigarettes on the desk. He punched the door button. Nothing happened. He punched it again. There still hadn't been time for Dr. Romadka to have taken five steps away from the other side. He started to hammer on the wall. "Dr. Romadka," he called. "Dr. Romadka!" The lights went out. V Phil stopped pounding on the wall and the black silence closed around him drowningly, stranglingly, like a preview of the mental hospital cell and electrosleep to which, he was suddenly sure, Dr. Romadka intended to consign him on a psychiatrist's writ. In the thick darkness he heard his heart pounding. His rapid breathing was for a moment that of an animal. He wondered helplessly why the analyst, after taking his satyrette hallucination so lightly, should have instantly typed him as a dangerous lunatic at his mention of a green cat. Psychologists, he supposed, knew things about the mind's secret language that were never told to ordinary people: seemingly innocent symbols that stamped men as cowards, rapists, murderers, traitors, crypto-communists, non-conformists. A fragment of conversation he'd heard somewhere came back to him: "Of course as soon as he saw _that_ in the inkblot, they hustled him off."