physiologically
peculiar, and he thought I
meant it was
socially
peculiar.
Up until this t ime, although I had been unfriendly to the psychiatrist, I had nevertheless been honest in everything I said. But when he asked me
to put out my hands, I couldn't resist pulling a trick a guy in the "bloodsucking line" had told me about. I figured nobody was ever going to get a
chance to do this, and as long as I was halfway under water, I would do it. So I put out my hands with one palm up and the other one down.
The psychiatrist doesn't notice. He says, "Turn them over."
I turn them over. The one that was up goes down, and the one that was down goes up, and he
still
doesn't notice, because he's always looking
very closely at one hand to see if it is shaking. So the trick had no effect.
Finally, at the end of all these questions, he becomes friendly again. He lights up and says, "I see you have a Ph.D., Dick. Where did you study?"
"MIT and Princeton. And where did
you
study!"
"Yale and London. And what did you study, Dick?"
"Physics. And what did
you
study?"
"Medicine."
"And
this
is
medicine
?"
"Well, yes. What do you
think
it is? You go and sit down over there and wait a few minutes!"
So I sit on the bench again, and one of the other guys waiting sidles up to me and says, "Gee! You were in there twenty-five minutes! The other
guys were in there only five minutes!"
"Yeah."
"Hey," he says. "You wanna know how to fool the psychiatrist? All you have to do is pick your nails, like this."
"Then why don't
you
pick
your
nails like that?"
"Oh," he says, "I wanna get in the army!"
"You wanna fool the psychiatrist?" I say. "You just tell him that!"
After a while I was called over to a different desk to see another psychiatrist. While the first psychiatrist had been rather young and innocent-
looking, this one was gray-haired and distinguished-looking--obviously the superio r psychiatrist. I figure all of this is now going to get straightened
out, but no matter what happens, I'm not going to become friendly.
The new psychiatrist looks at my papers, puts a big smile on his face, and says, "Hello, Dick. I see you worked at Los Alamos during the war."
"Yeah."
"There used to be a boys' school there, didn't there?"
"That's right."
"Were there a lot of buildings in the school?"
"Only a few."
Three questions--same technique-and the next question is completely different. "You said you hear voices in your head. Describe that, please."
"It happens very rarely, when I've been paying attention to a person with a foreign accent. As I'm falling asleep I can hear his voice very clearly.
The first time it happened was while I was a student at MIT. I could hear old Professor Vallarta say, 'Dee-a dee-a electric field-a.' And the other time
was in Chicago during the war, when Professor Teller was explaining to me how the bomb worked. Since I'm interested in all kinds of phenomena, I
wondered how I could hear these voices with accents so precisely, when I couldn't imitate them that well . . . Doesn't everybody have something like
that happen once in a while?"
The psychiatrist put his hand over his face, and I could see through his fingers a little smile (he wouldn't answer the question).
Then the psychiatrist checked into something else. "You said that you talk to your deceased wife. What do you say to her?"
I got angry. I figure it's none of his damn business, and I say, "I tell her I love her, if it's all right with you!"
After some more bitter exchanges he says, "Do you believe in the supernormal?"
I say, "I don't know what the 'supernormal' is."
"What? You, a Ph.D. in physics, don't know what the supernormal is?"
"That's right."
"It's what Sir Oliver Lodge and his school believe in."
That's not much of a clue, but I knew it. "You mean the
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