An hour and a half later Baslim still squatted beside the sleeping boy. Sweat poured down wrinkles in his face and he felt badly shaken. To get the boy back to the time he wanted to explore it had been necessary to force him back through experiences disgusting even to Baslim, old and hardened as he was. Repeatedly Thorby had fought against it, nor could Baslim blame him — he felt now that he could count the scars on the boy’s back and assign a villain to each.
But he had achieved his purpose; to delve farther back than the boy’s waking memory ran, back into his very early childhood, and at last to the traumatic moment when the baby manchild had been taken from his parents.
He left the boy in deep coma while he collected his shattered thoughts. The last few moments of the quest had been so bad that the old man doubted his judgment in trying to dig out the source of the trouble.
Well, let’s see . . . what had he found out?
The boy was born free. But he had always been sure of that.
The boys native language was System English, spoken with an accent Baslim could not place; it had been blurred by baby speech. That placed him inside the Terran Hegemony; it was even possible (though not likely) that the boy had been born on Earth. That was a surprise; he had thought the boy’s native language was Interlingua, since he spoke it better than he did the other three he knew.
What else? Well, the boy’s parents were certainly dead, if the confused and terror-ridden memory he had pried out of the boy’s skull could be trusted. He had been unable to dig out their family name nor any way of identifying them — they were just “Papa” and “Mama” — so Baslim gave up a half-formed plan of trying to get word to relatives of the boy.
Well, now to make this ordeal he had put the lad through worth the cost —
“Thorby?”
The boy moaned and stirred. “Yes, Pop?”
“You are asleep. You won’t wake up until I tell you to.”
“I won’t wake up until you tell me to.”
“When I tell you, you will wake at once. You will feel fine and you won’t remember anything we’ve talked about.”
“Yes, Pop.”
“You will forget. But you will feel fine. About half an hour later you will feel sleepy again. I’ll tell you to go to bed and you will go to bed and go right to sleep. You’ll sleep all night, good sleep and pleasant dreams. You won’t have any more bad dreams. Say it.”
“I won’t have any more bad dreams.”
“You won’t ever have any more bad dreams. Not ever.”
“Not ever.”
“Papa and Mama don’t want you to have any bad dreams. They’re happy and they want you to be happy. When you dream about them, it will always be happy dreams.”
“Happy dreams.”
“Everything is all right now, Thorby. You are starting to wake. You’re waking up and you can’t remember what we’ve been talking about. But you’ll never have bad dreams again. Wake up, Thorby.”
The boy sat up, rubbed his eyes, yawned, and grinned. “Gee, I fell asleep. Guess I played out on you, Pop. Didn’t work, huh?”
“Everything’s all right, Thorby.”
It took more than one session to lay those ghosts, but the nightmares dwindled and stopped. Baslim was not technician enough to remove the bad memories; they were still there. All he did was to implant suggestions to keep them from making Thorby unhappy. Nor would Baslim have removed memories had he been skilled enough; he had a stiff-necked belief that a man’s experiences belonged to him and that even the worst should not be taken from him without his consent.
Thorby’s days were as busy as his nights had become peaceful. During their early partnership Baslim kept the boy always with him. After breakfast they would hobble to the Plaza of Liberty, Baslim would sprawl on the pavement and Thorby would stand or squat beside him, looking starved and holding the bowl. The spot was always picked to obstruct foot traffic, but not enough to cause police to do more than growl. Thorby learned that none of the regular police in the Plaza would ever do more than growl: Baslim’s arrangements with them were beneficial to underpaid police.