The Creature Inside
BY JACK SHARKEY
ILLUSTRATED BY WOOD
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Worlds of Tomorrow December 1963
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
The room was small, but it held a whole
universe—and Norcriss had no place in it!
I
"How much did they tell you about the fix we're in?" said Dr. AlanBurgess to his visitor.
Lieutenant Jerry Norcriss shook his head. "They said you'd fill me in.They said it was urgent."
Burgess paused, lighted a cigarette, then belatedly offered one toJerry, who declined. "Well," he said, interspersing his words withshort nervous puffs of smoke, "about a year ago, I stumbled on away to reverse the process of an electro-encephalograph, to playpre-recorded thoughts and experiences to a man's mind. You zoologists,with your Contact process for penetrating newly discovered fauna'sminds, will be familiar with the process. Luckily for us."
Jerry eyed him. "Go on."
"My development involves an infinitely selective feedback. We give thesubject a saturating dose of inflowing concepts. His mind is freeto choose among them and to link them. Take 'bigness, affluence anddanger' for an instance. The subject puts them together and fleshesthem out. He could experience a large, expensive fission bomb fallingonto him, or he could be sacrificed to an immense golden idol, or—Oranything that his inner mind chose."
"I begin to understand," said Jerry. "The overlay influences allthe senses. The subject thinks he's really undergoing whatever heconjures up—and you use it for therapy, letting him work off hisaggressions and frustrations in what seems to him an actual universe."
"Correct, except for the tense," said Alan Burgess. "I was doingthat until Monday of this week." He leaned forward across the desk."We screen the subjects carefully, because certain psychoses could bedisastrous to the subject in my device. Paranoia, for instance. Theman would be amid unutterable horrors, with danger on every side; he'demerge a gibbering idiot, if he didn't die of heart failure first."
"Emerge?" asked Jerry, frowning. "I'd assumed you used a helmet, suchas we do in Contact...."
Burgess sighed. "Unfortunately, I am paying the penalty of lone-wolfexperimentation. I wish I'd had the sense to route the input to thebrain through a helmet, but I didn't. Instead I installed the person inan observation room. The influencing factor was nutrition. Intravenousfeedings wouldn't have served the purpose of the observer; sometimesthe subject's choice of foodstuffs is significant. He had to be letmove about, his mind in a make-believe world, but his body actuallymoving about a room we could see into. So—I had an atomic duplicatorinstalled. The hospital got one last year for making radium, turningcancerous growths into normal flesh, regrowing bone and the like.
"Should the subject then grow hungry, the duplicator would be triggeredby his conviction of eating. In his mind, he might be—hanging froma branch by his tail, for instance. The duplicator's production ofbananas, coconuts or whatever would give us a further clue to his stateof mind. You see?"
"So far, sound enough, Dr. Burgess," said Jerry. "So what went wrong? Iassume something did, or I wouldn't be here."
"We made a terrible error. We tried observing a man named AnthonyMawson in our gadget. I'd diagnosed his case as simple inferiori