instead.”
“–and then I’ll teach you to love the pain, because it’s a sure sign
that you’re making progress.”
“You need a refresher course in how to inspire your patients.”
“You’ve got to inspire yourself, Mcgarvey. My main job is to challenge
you.”
“Call me Jack.”
The therapist shook his head. “No. To start, I’ll call you Mcgarvey,
you call me Bloom. This relationship is always adversarial at first.
You’ll need to hate me, to have a focus for your anger. When that time
comes, it’ll be easier to hate me if we aren’t using first names.”
“I hate you already.”
Bloom smiled. “You’ll do all right, Mcgarvey.”
CHAPTER TWELVE.
After the night of June tenth, Eduardo lived in denial. For the first
time in his life, he was unwilling to face reality, although he knew it
had never been more important to do so. It would have been healthier
for him to visit the one place on the ranch where he would find–or
fail to find–evidence to support his darkest suspicions about the
nature of the intruder who had come into the house when he had been at
Travis Potter’s office in Eagle’s Roost. Instead, it was the one place
he assiduously avoided. He didn’t even look toward that knoll.
He drank too much and didn’t care. For seventy years he had lived by
the motto
“Moderation in all things,” and that prescription for life
had led him only to this point of humbling loneliness and horror. He
wished the been-which he occasionally spiked with good bourbon–would
have a greater numbing effect on him. He seemed to have an uncanny
tolerance for alcohol. And even when he had poured down enough to turn
his legs and his spine to rubber, his mind remained far too clear to
suit him.
He escaped into books, reading exclusively in the genre for which he’d
recently developed an appreciation. Heinlein, Clarke, Bradbury,
Sturgeon, Benford, Clement, Wyndham, Christopher, Niven, Zelazny.
Whereas he had first found, to his surprise, that fiction of the
fantastic could be challenging and meaningful, he now found it could
also be narcotizing, a better drug than any volume of beer and less
taxing on the bladder. The effect it her enlightenment and wonder or
intellectual and emotional anesthesia–was strictly at the discretion
of the reader. Spaceships, time machines, teleportation cubicles,
alien worlds, colonized moons, extraterrestrials, mutants, intelligent
plants, robots, androids, clones, computers alive with artificial
intelligence, telepathy, starship war fleets engaged in battles in far
reaches of the galaxy, the collapse of the universe, time running
backward, the end of all things! He lost himself in a fog of the
fantastic, in a tomorrow that would never be, to avoid thinking about
the unthinkable.
The traveler from the doorway became quiescent, holed up in the woods,
and days passed without new developments. Eduardo didn’t understand
why it would have come across billions of miles of space or thousands
of years of time, only to proceed with the conquest of the earth at a
turtle’s pace.
Of course, the very essence of something truly and deeply alien was
that its motivations and actions would be mysterious and perhaps even
incomprehensible to a human being. The conquest of earth might be of
no interest whatsoever to the thing that had come through the doorway,
and its concept of time might be so radically different from Eduardo’s
that days were like minutes to it.
In science fiction novels, there were essentially three kinds of
aliens. The good ones generally wanted to help humanity reach its full
potential as an intelligent species and thereafter coexist in
fellowship and share adventures for eternity. The bad ones wanted to
enslave human beings, feed on them, plant eggs in them, hunt them for
sport, or eradicate them because of a tragic misunderstanding or out of
sheer viciousness. The third–and least encountered–type of
extraterrestrial was neither good nor bad but so utterly alien that its
purpose and destiny were as enigmatic to human beings as was the mind
of God, this third type usually did the human race a great good service
or a terrible evil merely by passing through on its way to the galactic
rim, like a bus running across a column of busy ants on a highway, and