Philip Dick - The Complete Stories of Philip K. Dick Vol. 4:

"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."

A measure of confidence returned to Sharp. "It isn't hard to understand a falling fear, under the circumstances. Considering what happened to me… Shakily, he started to his feet. And screamed shrilly.

"What is it?" Humphrys demanded, hastily coming over and grabbing hold of his arm. Sharp leaped violently away, staggered, and collapsed inertly in the chair. "What happened?"

Face working, Sharp managed: "I can't get up."

"What?"

"I can't stand up." Imploringly, he gazed up at the analyst, stricken and terrified. "I'm – afraid I'll fall. Doctor, now I can't even get to my feet."

For an interval neither man spoke. Finally, his eyes on the floor, Sharp whispered: "The reason I came to you, Humphrys, is because your office is on the ground floor. That's a laugh, isn't it? I couldn't go any higher."

"We're going to have to turn the lamp back on you," Humphrys said.

"I realize it. I'm scared." Gripping the arms of the chair, he continued: "Go ahead. What else can we do? I can't leave here. Humphrys, this thing is going to kill me."

"No, it isn't." Humphrys got the lamp into position. "We'll get you out of this. Try to relax; try to think of nothing in particular." Clicking the mechanism on, he said softly: "This time I don't want the traumatic incident itself. I want the envelope of experience that surrounds it. I want the broader segment of which it's a part."

Paul Sharp walked quietly through the snow. His breath, in front of him, billowed outward and formed a sparkling cloud of white. To his left lay the jagged ruins of what had been buildings. The ruins, covered with snow, seemed almost lovely. For a moment he paused, entranced.

"Interesting," a member of his research team observed, coming up. "Could be anything – absolutely anything – under there."

"It's beautiful, in a way," Sharp commented.

"See that spire?" The young man pointed with one heavily gloved finger; he still wore his lead-shielded suit. He and his group had been poking around the still-contaminated crater. Their boring bars were lined up in an orderly row. "That was a church," he informed Sharp. "A nice one, by the looks of it. And over there -" he indicated an indiscriminate jumble of ruin – "that was the main civic center."

"The city wasn't directly hit, was it?" Sharp asked.