I was on my way to the Kasanin Clinic at Kansas City.

In a formal hearing before witnesses Doctor Nisea presented me with a summons, asking if there was any reason why I should not be taken at once to Kansas City. These legal formalities had a chilly quality that made me more anxious to be on my way than ever. Nisea offered me a twenty-four-hour period in which to conclude my business affairs, but I declined it; I wanted to leave at once. In the end, we settled on eight hours. Plane reservations were made for me by Nisea's staff and I left the Bureau in a taxi, to return to Ontario until it was time for me to take my big trip east.

I had the taxi take me to Maury's house, where I had left a good part of my possessions. Soon I was at the door knocking.

No one was home. I tried the knob; it was unlocked. So I let myself in to the silent, deserted house.

There in the bathroom was the tile mural which Pris had been working on that first night. It was done, now. For a time I stood staring up at it, marveling at the colors and the design itself, the mermaid and fish, the octopus with shoe-button bright eyes: she had finished him at last.

One blue tile had become loose. I plucked it entirely off, rubbed the sticky stuff from its back, and put it in my coat pocket.

In case I should forget you, I thought to myself. You and your bathroom mural, your mermaid with pink-tiled tits, your many lovely and monstrous creations bobbing and alive beneath the surface of the water. The placid, eternal water... she had done the line above my head, almost eight feet high. Above that, sky. Very little of it; the sky played no role in the scheme of creation, here.

As I stood there I heard from the front of the house a thumping and banging. Someone was after me, but I remained where I was. What did it matter? I waited, and presently Maury Rock came rushing in, panting; seeing me he stopped short.

"Louis Rosen," he said. "And in the bathroom."

"I'm just leaving."

"A neighbor phoned me at the office; she saw you pull up in a cab and enter and she knew I wasn't home."

"Spying on me." I was not surprised. "They all are, everywhere I go." I continued to stand, hands in my pockets, gazing up at the wall of color.

"She just thought I ought to know. I figured it was you." He saw, then, my suitcase and the articles I had collected. "You're really nuts. You barely get back here from Seattle-- when did you get in? Couldn't be before this morning. And now you're off again somewhere else."

I said, "I have to go, Maury. It's the law."

He stared at me, his jaw dropping gradually; then he flushed. "I'm sorry, Louis. I mean, saying you were a nut."

"Yes, but I am. I took the Benjamin Proverb Test and the block thing today and couldn't pass either one. The commitment's already been served on me."

Rubbing his jaw he murmured, "Who turned you in?"

"My father and Chester."

"Hell's bells. Your own blood."

"They saved me from paranoia. Listen, Maury." I turned to face him. "Do you know where she is?"

"If I did, honest to god, Louis, I'd tell you. Even if you have been certified."

"You know where they're sending me for therapy?"

"Kansas City?"

I nodded.

"Maybe you'll find her there. Maybe the mental health people caught up with her and sent her back and forgot to let me know about it."

"Yeah, maybe so," I said.

"Coming up to me he whacked me on the back. "Good luck, you son of a bitch. I know you'll pull out of it. You got 'phrenia, I presume; that's all there is, anymore."

"I've got Magna Mater 'phrenia." Reaching into my coat I got out the tile and showed it to him, saying, "To remember her. I hope you don't mind; it's your house and mural, after all."

"Take it. Take a whole fish. Take a tit." He started toward the mermaid. "No kidding, Louis; we'll pry a pink tit loose and you can carry that around with you, okay?"

"This is fine."

We both stood awkwardly facing each other for a time.

"How's it feel to be 'phrenic?" Maury said at last.

"Bad, Maury. Very, very bad."

"That's what I thought; that's what Pris always said. She was glad to get over it."

"That going to Seattle, that was it coming on. What they call catatonic excitement, a sense of urgency, that you have to do something. It always turns out to be the wrong thing; it accomplishes nothing. And you realize that and then you have panic and then you get it, the real psychosis. I heard voices and saw--" I broke off.

"Whet did you see?"

"Pris."

"Keerist," Maury said.

"Will you drive me to the airport?"

"Oh sure, buddy. Sure." He nodded vigorously.

"I don't have to go until late tonight. So maybe we could have dinner together. I don't feel like seeing my family again, after what happened; I'm sort of ashamed."

Maury said, "How come you speak so rationally if you're a 'phrenic?"

"I'm not under tension right now, so I've been able to focus my attention. That's what an attack of schizophrenia is, a weakening of attention so that unconscious processes gain mastery and take over the field. They capture awareness, very archaic processes, archetypal, such as nonschizophrenics haven't had since they were five."

"You think crazy things, like everyone's against you and you're the center of the universe?"

"No," I said. "Doctor Nisea explained to me that it's the heliocentric schizophrenics who--"

"Nisea? Ragland Nisea? Of course; by law you'd have to see him. He's the one who sent Pris up back in the beginning; he gave her the Vigotsky-Luria Block Test in his own office, personally. I always wanted to meet him."

"Brilliant man. And very humane."

"Are you dangerous?"

"Only if I'm riled."

"Should I leave you, then?"

"I guess so," I said. "But I'll see you tonight, here at the house, for dinner. About six; that'll give us time to make the flight."

"Can I do anything for you? Get you anything?"

"Naw. Thanks anyhow."

Maury hung around the house for a little while and then I heard the front door slam. The house became silent once more. I was alone, as before.

Presently I resumed my slow packing.

Maury and I had dinner together and then he drove me to the Boise airfield in his white Jaguar. I watched the streets go by, and every woman that I saw looked--for an instant, at least--like Pris; each time I thought it was but it wasn't. Maury noticed my absorption but said nothing.

The flight which the mental health people had obtained for me was first-class and on the new Australian rocket, the C-80. The Bureau, I reflected, certainly had plenty of the public's funds to disburse. It took only half an hour to reach the Kansas City airport, so before nine that night I was stepping from the rocket, looking around me for the mental health people who were supposed to receive me.

At the bottom of the ramp a young man and woman approached me, both of them wearing gay, bright Scotch plaid coats. These were my party; in Boise I had been instructed to watch for the coats.

"Mr. Rosen," the young man said expectantly.

"Right," I said, starting across the field toward the building.

One of them fell in on either side of me. "A bit chilly tonight," the girl said. They were not over twenty, I thought; two clear-eyed youngsters who undoubtedly had joined the FBMH out of idealism and were doing their heroic task right this moment. They walked with brisk, eager steps, moving me toward the baggage window, making low-keyed conversation about nothing in particular... . I would have felt relaxed by it except that in the glare of the beacons which guided the ships in I could already see that the girl looked astonishingly like Pris.

"What's your name?" I asked her.