"What I'm getting at is this: your brother managed to make a settlement with his unconscious on fairly good terms, very good terms considering that he did it without professional help. His conscious mind signed a contract and his unconscious said flatly that he must not carry it out. The conflict was so deep that it would have destroyed some people. But not your brother. His unconscious mind elected to have an accident instead, one that could cause paralysis and sure enough it did—real paralysis, mind you; no fakery. So your brother was honorably excused from an obligation he could not carry out. Then, when it was no longer possible to go on this trip; be was operated on. The surgery merely corrected minor damage to the bones. But he was encouraged to think that his paralysis would go away—and so it did." Devereaux shrugged.

I thought about it until I was confused. This conscious and unconscious stuff—I'd studied it and passed quizzes in it... but I didn't take any stock in it. Doc Devereaux could talk figures of speech until he was blue in the face but it didn't get around the fact that both Pat and I had wanted to go and the only reason Pat had to stay behind was because be had hurt himself in that accident. Maybe the paralysis was hysterical, maybe be had scared himself into thinking he was hurt worse than he was. But that didn't make any difference.

But Doc Devereaux talked as if the accident wasn't an accident. Well, what of it? Maybe Pat was scared green and had been too proud to show it—I still didn't think he had taken a tumble on a mountainside on purpose.

In any case, Doc was dead wrong on one thing: I had wanted to go. Oh, maybe I had been a little scared and I knew I had been homesick at first—but that was only natural.

("Then why are you so down in dumps, stupid?")

That wasn't Pat talking; that was me, talking to myself. Shucks, maybe it was my unconscious mind, talking out loud for once, "Doc?"

"Yes, Tom."

"You say I didn't really want to come along?"

"It looks that way."

"But you said the unconscious mind always wins. You can't have it both ways."

He sighed. "That isn't quite what I said. You were hurried into this. The unconscious is stupid and often slow; yours did not have time to work up anything as easy as a skiing accident. But it is stubborn. It's demanding that you go home... which you can't. But it won't listen to reason. It just keeps on nagging you to give it the impossible, like a baby crying for the moon."

I shrugged. "To hear you tell it, I'm in an impossible moss."

"Don't look so danged sourpuss! Mental hygiene is a process of correcting the correctable and adjusting to the inevitable. You've got three choices."

"I didn't know I had any."

"Three. You can keep on going into a spin until your mind builds up a fantasy acceptable to your unconscious • . . a psychotic adjustment, what you would call 'crazy.' Or you can muddle along as you are, unhappy and not much use to yourself or your shipmates... and always with the possibility of skidding over the line. Or you can dig into your own mind, get acquainted with it, find out what it really wants, show it what it can't have and why, and strike a healthy bargain with it on the basis of what is possible. If you've got guts and gumption, you'll try the last one. It won't be easy." He waited, looking at me.

"Uh, I guess I'd better try. But how do I do it?"

"Not by moping in your room about might-have-beens, that's sure."

"My Uncle Steve—Major Lucas, I mean"—I said slowly, "told me I shouldn't do that. He wants me to stir around and associate with other people. I guess I should."

"Surely, surely. But that's not enough. You can't chin yourself out of the hole you are in just by pretending to be the life of the party. You have to get acquainted with yourself."

"Yes, sir. But how?"

"Well, we can't do it by having you talk about yourself every afternoon while I hold your hand. Mmm... I suggest that you try writing down who you are and where you've been and how you got from there to here. You make it thorough enough and maybe you will begin to see 'why' as well as 'how.' Keep digging and you may find out who you are and what you want and how much of it you can get."

I must have looked baffled for he said, "Do you keep a diary?"

"Sometimes. I've got one along."

"Use it as an outline. 'The Life and Times of T. P. Bartlett, Gent.' Make it complete and try to tell the truth—all the truth."

I thought that over. Some things you don't want to tell anybody. "Uh, I suppose you'll want to read it, Doctor?"

"Me? Heaven forbid! I get too little rest without misguided people. This is for you, son; you'll be writing to yourself... only write it as if you didn't know anything about yourself and had to explain everything; Write it as if you expected to lose your memory and wanted to be sure you could pick up the strings again. Put it all down." He frowned and added grudgingly, "If you feel that you have found out something important and want a second opinion, I suppose I could squeeze in time to read part of it, at least. But I won't promise. Just write it to yourself—to the one with amnesia."

So I told him I would try... and I have. I can't see that it has done any special good (I pulled out of the slump anyhow) and there just isn't time to do the kind of job he told me to do. I've had to hurry over the last part of this because this is the first free evening I've had in a month.

But it's amazing how much you can remember when youreally try.

X RELATIONS

There have been a lot of changes around the Elsie. For one thing we are over the hump now and backing down the other side, decelerating as fast as we boosted; we'll be at Tau Ceti in about six months, ship's time.

But I am getting ahead of myself. It has been about a year, S-time, since I started this, and about twelve years, Earth time, since we left Earth. But forget E-time; it doesn't mean anything. We've been thirteen months in the ship by S-time and a lot has happened. Pat getting married-no, that didn't happen in the ship and it's the wrong place to start.

Maybe the place to start is with another marriage, when Chet Travers married Mei-Ling Jones. It met with wide approval, except on the part of one of the engineers who was sweet on her himself. It caused us freaks and the electron pushers to bury the hatchet to have one of us marry one of them, especially when Commander Frick came down the aisle in the mess room with the bride on his arm, looking as proud and solemn as if she had been his daughter. They were a good match; Chet was not yet thirty and I figure that Mei-Ling is at least twenty-two.

But it resulted in a change in the watch list and Rupe put me on with Prudence Mathews.

I had always liked Pru without paying much attention to her. You had to look twice to know that she was pretty. But she had a way of looking up at you that made you feel important. Up to the time I started standing watches with her I had more or less left the girls alone; I guess I was "being true to Maudie." But by then I was writing this confession story for Doe Devereaux; somehow writing things down gives them finality. I said to myself, "Why not? Tom, old boy, Maudie is as definitely out of your life as if one of you were dead. But life goes on, right here in this bucket of wind."

I didn't do anything drastic; I just enjoyed Pru's company as much as possible... which turned out to be a lot.

I've heard that when the animals came aboard the Ark two by two, Noah separated them port and starboard. The Elsie isn't run that way. Chet and Mei-Ling had found it possible to get well enough acquainted to want to make it permanent. A little less than half of the crew had come aboard as married couples; the rest of us didn't have any obstacles put in our way if we had such things on our minds.