"Carry menus in your head."
"Only a few," he said, "for awkward occasions. What was it
you wanted to seetalk to me about?"
"You're a neuroparticipant therapist," she stated, "a Shaper."
"And you are?"
"a resident in psychiatry at State Psych. I have a year
remaining."
"You knew Sam Riscomb then."
"Yes, he helped me get my appointment. He was my
adviser."
"He was a very good friend of mine. We studied together at
Menninger."
She nodded.
"I'd often heard him speak of youthat's one of the reasons
I wanted to meet you. He's responsible for encouraging me to
go ahead with my plans, despite my handicap."
Render stared at her. She was wearing a dark green dress
which appeared to be made of velvet. About three inches to the
left of the bodice was a pin which might have been gold. It
displayed a red stone which could have been a ruby, around
which the outline of a goblet was cast. Or was it really two
profiles that were outlined, staring through the stone at one
another? It seemed vaguely familiar to him, but he could not
place it at the moment. It glittered expensively in the dim light.
Render accepted his drink from the waiter.
"I want to become a neuroparticipant therapist," she told
him.
And if she had possessed vision Render would have thought
she was staring at him, hoping for some response in his expres-
sion. He could not quite calculate what she wanted him to say.
"I commend your choice," he said, "and I respect your
ambition." He tried to put his smile into his voice. "It is not an
easy thing, of course, not all of the requirements being
academic ones."
"I know," she said. "But then, I have been blind since birth
and it was not an easy thing to come this far."
"Since birth?" he repeated. "I thought you might have lost
your sight recently. You did your undergrad work then, and
went on through med school without eyes . . . That'srather
impressive."
"Thank you," she said, "but it isn't. Not really. I heard about
the first neuroparticipantsBartelmetz and the restwhen I was
a child, and I decided then that I wanted to be one. My life
ever since has been governed by that desire."
"What did you do in the labs?" he inquired. "-Not being
able to see a specimen, look through a microscope . . . ? Or all
that reading?"
"I hired people to read my assignments to me. I taped
everything. The school understood that I wanted to go into
psychiatry, and they permitted a special arrangement for labs.
I've been guided through the dissection of- cadavers by lab
assistants, and I've had everything described to me. I can tell
things by touch . . . and I have a memory like yours with the
menu," she smiled. " "The quality of psychoparticipation
phenomena can only be gauged by the therapist himself, at that
moment outside of time and space as we normally know it,
when he stands in the midst of a world erected from the stuff of
another man's
dreams, recognizes there the non-Euclidian
architecture of aberrance, and then takes his patient by the
hand and tours the landscape . . . If he can lead him back to the
common earth, then his judgments were sound, his actions
valid.' "
"From Why No Psychometrics in This Place," reflected
Render.
'-by Charles Render, M.D."
"Our dinner is already moving in this direction," he noted,
picking up his drink as the speed-cooked meal was pushed
toward them in the kitchen-buoy.
"That's one of the reasons I wanted to meet you," she
continued, raising her glass as the dishes rattled before her. "I
want you to help me become a Shaper."
Her shaded eyes, as vacant as a statue's, sought him again.
"Yours is a completely unique situation," he commented.
"There has never been a congenitally blind neuroparticipant
for obvious reasons. I'd have to consider all the aspects of the
situation before I could advise you. Let's eat now, though. I'm
starved."
"All right. But my blindness does not mean that I have never
seen."
He did not ask her what she meant by that, because prime
ribs were standing in front of him now and there was a bottle of
Chambertin at his elbow. He did pause long enough to notice
though, as she raised her left hand from beneath the table, that
she wore no rings.
"I wonder if it's still snowing," he commented as they drank
their coffee. "It was coming down pretty hard when I pulled
into the dome."
"I hope so," she said, "even though it diffuses the light and I
can't 'see' anything at all through it. I like to feel it falling about
me and blowing against my face."
"How do you get about?"
"My dog, Sigmund1 gave him the night off," she smiled,
"he can guide me anywhere. He's a mutie Shepherd."
"Oh?" Render grew curious. "Can he talk much?"
She nodded.
"That operation wasn't as successful on him as on some of
them, though. He has a vocabulary of about four hundred
words, but I think it causes him pain to speak. He's quite
intelligent. You'll have to meet him sometime."
Render began speculating immediately. He had spoken with
such animals at recent medical conferences, and had been
startled by their combination of reasoning ability and their
devotion to their handlers. Much chromosome tinkering,
followed by delicate embryo-surgery, was required" to give a
dog a brain capacity greater than a chimpanzee's. Several
followup operations were necessary to produce vocal abilities.
Most such experiments ended in failure, and the dozen or so
puppies a year on which they succeeded were valued in the
neighborhood of a hundred thousand dollars each. He realized
then, as he lit a cigarette and held the light for a moment, that
the stone in Miss Shallot's medallion was a genuine ruby. He
began to suspect that her admission to a medical school might,
in addition to her academic record, have been based upon a
sizeable endowment to the college of her choice. Perhaps he
was being unfair though, he chided himself.
"Yes," he said, "we might do a paper on canine neuroses.
Does he ever refer to his father ag 'that son of a female
Shepherd?"
"He never met his father," she said, quite soberly. "He was
raised apart from other dogs. His attitude could hardly be
typical. I don't think you'll ever learn the functional psychology
of the dog from a mutie."
"I imagine you're right," he dismissed it. "More coffee?"
"No, thanks."
Deciding it was time to continue the discussion, he said, "So
you want to be a Shaper . . ."
"Yes."
"I hate to be the one to destroy anybody's high ambitions,"
he told her. "Like poison, I hate it. Unless they have no
foundation at all in reality. Then I can be ruthless. Sohonestly,
frankly, and in all sincerity, I do not see how it could ever be
managed. Perhaps you're a fine psychiatristbut in my opinion,
it is a physical and mental impossibility for you ever to become
a neuroparticipant. As for my reasons"
"Wait," she said. "Not here, please. Humor me. I'm tired of
this stuffy placetake me somewhere else to talk. I think I might
be able to convince you there is a way."
"Why not?" he shrugged. "I have plenty of time. Sureyou
call it. Where?"
"Blindspin?"
He suppressed an unwilling chuckle at the expression, but
she laughed aloud.
"Fine," he said, "but I'm still thirsty."
A bottle of champagne was tallied and he signed the check
despite her protests. It arrived in a colorful "Drink While You
Drive" basket, and they stood then, and she was tall, but he
was taller.
Blindspin.
A single name of a multitude of practices centered about the
auto-driven auto. Flashing across the country in the sure hands
of an invisible chauffeur, windows all opaque, night dark, sky
high,
tires
assailing
the
road
below
like
four
phantom
buzzsawsand starting from scratch and ending in the same
place, and never knowing where you are going or where you
have beenit is possible, for a moment, to kindle some feeling
of individuality in
the
coldest brainpan,
to
produce
a
momentary awareness of self by virtue of an apartness from all
but a sense of motion. This is because movement through
darkness is the ultimate abstraction of life itselfat least that's
what one of the Vital Comedians said, and everybody in the
place laughed.
Actually now, the phenomenon known as blindspin first
became prevalent (as might be suspected) among certain
younger members of the community, when monitored high-
ways deprived them of the means to exercise their automobiles
in some of the more individualistic ways which had come to
be frowned upon by the National Traffic Control Authority.
Something had to be done.
It was.
The first, disastrous reaction involved the simple engineering