"Rog Phillips - The Yelllow Pill" - читать интересную книгу автора (Phillips Rog)

get out of my mind the fact that if we had spaceships and if there were a type of space madness in which
you began to personify objects, a yellow pill would be the right thing to stop that."

"How?" Helena said.

"They almost triple the strength of nerve currents from end organs. What results is that reality practically
shouts down any fantasy insertions. It's quite startling. I took one three years ago when they first became
available. You'd be surprised how little you actually see of what you look at, especially of people. You
look at symbol inserts instead. I had to cancel my appointments for a week. I found I couldn't work
without my professionally built symbol inserts about people that enable me to see themтАФnot as they
really areтАФbut as a complex of normal and abnormal symptoms."

"I'd like to take one sometime," Helena said.

"That's a twist," Cedric said, laughing. "One of the characters in a dream world takes a yellow pill and
discovers it doesn't exist at all except as a fantasy."

"Why don't we both take one?" Helena said.

"Uh-uh," Cedric said firmly. "I couldn't do my work."

"You're afraid you might wake up on a spaceship?" Helena said, grinning.

"Maybe I am," Cedric said. "Crazy, isn't it? But there is one thing today that stands out as a serious flaw
in my reality. It's so glaring that I actually am afraid to ask you about it."

"Are you serious?" Helena said.

"I am." Cedric nodded. "How does it happen that the police brought Gerald Bocek here to my office
instead of holding him in the psychiatric ward at City Hospital and having me go there to see him? How
does it happen the D.A. didn't get in touch with me beforehand and discuss the case with me?"

"I тАж I don't know!" Helena said. "I received no call. They just showed up, and I assumed they wouldn't
have without your knowing about it and telling them to. Mrs. Fortesque was your first patient, and I
called her at once and caught her just as she was leaving the house and told her an emergency case had
come up." She looked at Cedric with round, startled eyes.

"Now we know how the patient must feel," Cedric said, crossing the reception room to his office door.
"Terrifying, isn't it, to think that if I took a yellow pill, all this might vanishтАФmy years of college, my
internship, my fame as the world's best-known psychiatrist, and you. Tell me, Helena, are you sure
you aren't an expediter at Mars Port?"

He leered at her mockingly as he slowly closed the door, cutting off his view of her.



┬╖┬╖┬╖┬╖┬╖
Cedric put his coat away and went directly to the small square of one-way glass in the reception-room
door. Gerald Bocek, still in straitjacket, was there, and so were the same four police officers.