“Essentially it is the same as fitting up a new ward for the treatment of any extra-terrestrial patient,” said Conway modestly, “the chief difference here being the scale of the work undertaken.”
“I am nevertheless impressed,” said Arretapec.
First apologies and now compliments, Conway thought wryly. As they moved closer and Arretapec once again warned him to keep quiet and still, Conway guessed that the VUXG’s change of manner was due to the work of the engineers. With the patient now in ideal surroundings the treatment, whatever form it was taking, might have an increased chance of success .
Suddenly Conway began to itch again. It started in the usual place deep inside his right ear, but this time it spread and built up in intensity until his whole brain seemed to be crawling with viciously biting insects. He felt cold sweat break on him, and remembered his fears of the previous evening when he had resolved to go to Mannon. This wasn’t imagination, this was serious, perhaps deadly serious. His hands flew to his head with a panicky, involuntary motion, knocking the container holding Arretapec to the ground.
“You are fidgeting again. . .” began the VUXG.
“I … I’m sorry,” Conway stammered. He mumbled something incoherent about having to leave, that it was important and couldn’t wait, then fled in disorder.
Three hours later he was sitting in Dr. Mannon’s DBDG examination room while Mannon’s dog alternately growled fiercely at him or rolled on its back and looked appealing in vain attempts to entice him to play with it. But Conway had no inclination for the ritual pummeling and wrestling that the dog and himself enjoyed when he had the time for it. All his attention was focused on the bent head of his former superior and on the charts lying on Mannon’s desk. Suddenly the other looked up.
“There’s nothing wrong with you,” he said in the peremptory manner reserved for students and patients suspected of malingering. A few seconds later he added, “Oh, I’ve no doubt you’ve felt these sensations- tiredness, itching, and so on-but what sort of case are you working on at the moment?”
Conway told him. A few times during the narration Mannon grinned.
“I take it this is your first long-term-er-exposure to a telepathic life-form and that I am the first you’ve mentioned this trouble to?” Mannon s tone was of one making a statement rather than of asking a question. “And, of course, although you feel this itching sensation intensely when close to the VUXG and the patient, it continues in a weaker form at other times.”
Conway nodded. “I felt it for a while just five minutes ago.
“Naturally, there is attenuation with distance,” Mannon said. “But as regards yourself, you have nothing to worry about. Arretapec is-all unknowingly, you understand-simply trying to make a telepath out of you. I’ll explain..
Apparently prolonged contact with some telepathic life-forms stimulated a certain area in the human brain which was either the beginnings of a telepathic function that would evolve in the future, or the atrophied remnant of something possessed in the primitive past and since lost.
The result was troublesome but a quite harmless irritation. On very rare occasions however, Mannon added, this proximity produced in the human a sort of artificial telepathic faculty-that was, he could sometimes receive thoughts from the telepath to whom he had been exposed, but of no other being. The faculty was in all cases strictly temporary, and disappeared when the being responsible for bringing it about left the human.
“But these cases of induced telepathy are extremely rare,” Mannon concluded, “and obviously you are getting only the irritant by-product, otherwise you might know what Arretapec is playing at simply by reading his mind..
While Dr. Mannon had been talking, and relieved of the worry that he had caught some strange new disease, Conway’s mind had been working furiously. Vaguely, as odd events with Arretapec and the brontosaurus returned to his mind and were added to scraps of the VUXG’s conversations and his own studying of the life-and extinction-of Earth’s long gone race of giant reptiles, a picture was forming in his mind. It was a crazy-or at least cockeyed-picture, and it was still incomplete, but what else could a being like Arretapec be doing to a patient like the brontosaurus, a patient who had nothing at all wrong with it?