“When I was eight. The war had been going on two years. I was on the surface, examining my vegetable garden.” Sharp smiled weakly. “Even when I was a kid, I grew things. The San Francisco network picked up exhaust trails of a Soviet missile and all the warning towers went off like Roman candles. I was almost on top of the shelter. I raced to it, lifted the lid and started down the stairs. At the bottom were my mother and father. They yelled for me to hurry. I started to run down the stairs.”

“And fell?” Humphrys asked expectantly.

“I didn’t fall; I suddenly got afraid. I couldn’t go any farther; I just stood there. And they were yelling up at me. They wanted to get the bottom plate screwed in place. And they couldn’t until I was down.”

With a touch of aversion, Humphrys acknowledged: “I remember those old two-stage shelters. I wonder how many people got shut between the lid and the bottom plate.” He eyed his patient. “As a child, had you heard of that happening? People being trapped on the stairs, not able to get back up, not able to get down …”

“I wasn’t scared of being trapped! I was scared of falling—afraid I’d pitch head-forward off the steps.” Sharp licked his dry lips. “Well, so I turned around—” His body shuddered. “I went back up and outside.”

“During the attack?”

“They shot down the missile. But I spent the alert tending my vegetables. Afterward, my family beat me nearly unconscious.”

Humphrys’ mind formed the words: origin of guilt.

“The next time,” Sharp continued, “was when I was fourteen. The war had been over a few months. We started back to see what was left of our town. Nothing was left, only a crater of radioactive slag several hundred feet deep. Work teams were creeping down into the crater. I stood on the edge watching them. The fear came.” He put out his cigarette and sat waiting until the analyst found him another. “I left the area after that. Every night I dreamed about that crater, that big dead mouth. I hitched a ride on a military truck and rode to San Francisco.”

“When was the next time?” asked Humphrys.

Irritably, Sharp said: “Then it happened all the time, every time I was up high, every time I had to walk up or down a flight of steps—any situation where I was high and might fall. But to be afraid to walk up the steps of my own house—” He broke off temporarily. “I can’t walk up three steps,” he said wretchedly. “Three concrete steps.”

“Any particular bad episodes, outside of those you’ve mentioned?”

“I was in love with a pretty brown-haired girl who lived on the top floor of the Atcheson Apartments. Probably she still lives there; I wouldn’t know. I got five or six floors up and then—I told her good night and came back down.” Ironically, he said: “She must have thought I was crazy.”

“Others?” Humphrys asked, mentally noting the appearance of the sexual element.

“One time I couldn’t accept a job because it involved travel by air. It had to do with inspecting agricultural projects.”

Humphrys said: “In the old days, analysts looked for the origin of a phobia. Now we ask: what does it do? Usually it gets the individual out of situations he unconsciously dislikes.”

A slow, disgusted flush appeared on Sharp’s face. “Can’t you do better than that?”

Disconcerted, Humphrys murmured: “I don’t say I agree with the theory or that it’s necessarily true in your case. I’ll say this much though: it’s not falling you’re afraid of. It’s something that falling reminds you of. With luck we ought to be able to dig up the prototype experience—what they used to call the original traumatic incident.” Getting to his feet, he began to drag over a stemmed tower of electronic mirrors. “My lamp,” he explained. “It’ll melt the barriers.”

Sharp regarded the lamp with apprehension. “Look,” he muttered nervously, “I don’t want my mind reconstructed. I may be a neurotic, but I take pride in my personality.”

“This won’t affect your personality.” Bending down, Humphrys plugged in the lamp. “It will bring up material not accessible to your rational center. I’m going to trace your life—track back to the incident at which you were done great harm—and find out what you’re really afraid of.”

Black shapes drifted around him. Sharp screamed and struggled wildly, trying to pry loose the fingers closing over his arms and legs. Something smashed against his face. Coughing, he slumped forward, dribbling blood and saliva and bits of broken teeth. For an instant, blinding light flashed; he was being scrutinized.

“Is he dead?” a voice demanded.

“Not yet.” A foot poked experimentally into Sharp’s side. Dimly, in his half-consciousness, he could hear ribs cracking. “Almost, though.”

“Can you hear me, Sharp?” a voice rasped, close to his ear.

He didn’t respond. He lay trying not to die, trying not to associate himself with the cracked and broken thing that had been his body.

“You probably imagine,” the voice said, familiar, intimate, “that I’m going to say you’ve got one last chance. But you don’t, Sharp. Your chance is gone. I’m telling you what we’re going to do with you.”

Gasping, he tried not to hear. And, futilely, he tried not to feel what they were systematically doing to him.

“All right,” the familiar voice said finally, when it had been done. “Now throw him out.”

What remained of Paul Sharp was lugged to a circular hatch. The nebulous outline of darkness rose up around him and then—hideously—he was pitched into it. Down he fell, but this time he didn’t scream.

No physical apparatus remained with which to scream.

Snapping the lamp off, Humphrys bent over and methodically roused the slumped figure.

“Sharp!” he ordered loudly. “Wake up! Come out of it!”

The man groaned, blinked his eyes, stirred. Over his face settled a glaze of pure, unmitigated torment.

“God,” he whispered, eyes blank, body limp with suffering. “They—”

“You’re back here,” Humphrys said, shaken by what had been dredged up. “There’s nothing to worry about; you’re absolutely safe. It’s over with—happened years ago.”

“Over,” Sharp murmured pathetically.

“You’re back in the present. Understand?”

“Yes,” Sharp muttered. “But—what was it? They pushed me out—through and into something. And I went on down.” He trembled violently. “I fell.”

“You fell through a hatch,” Humphrys told him calmly. “You were beaten up and badly injured—fatally, they assumed. But you did survive. You are alive. You got out of it.”

“Why did they do it?” Sharp asked brokenly. His face, sagging and gray, twitched with despair. “Help me, Humphrys …”

“Consciously, you don’t remember when it happened?”

“No.”

“Do you remember where?”

“No.” Sharp’s face jerked spasmodically. “They tried to kill me—they did kill me!” Struggling upright, he protested: “Nothing like that happened to me. I’d remember if it had. It’s a false memory—my mind’s been tampered with!”

“It’s been repressed,” Humphrys said firmly, “deeply buried because of the pain and shock. A form of amnesia—it’s been filtering indirectly up in the form of your phobia. But now that you recall it consciously—”

“Do I have to go back?” Sharp’s voice rose hysterically. “Do I have to get under that damn lamp again?”

“It’s got to come out on a conscious level,” Humphrys told him, “but not all at once. You’ve had your limit for today.”

Sagging with relief, Sharp settled back in the chair. “Thanks,” he said weakly. Touching his face, his body, he whispered: “I’ve been carrying that in my mind all these years. Corroding, eating away—”

“There should be some diminution of the phobia,” the analyst told him, “as you grapple with the incident itself. We’ve made progress; we now have some idea of the real fear. It involves bodily injury at the hands of professional criminals. Ex-soldiers in the early post-war years… gangs of bandits, I remember.”