A Gun for Dinosaur and Other Imaginative Tales

We had to patch the bullet holes before the tent was usable. Winthrop Fish went in to lie down. When Sander came out he said:

"He'll sleep till tomorrow. I want to talk to all of you at dinner."

When I had served dinner (it being my turn) Sander looked around the tent and said: "I take it you had something to do with this, Harry?"

"No, sir, not a thing," said Constant with a grin. I don't think anybody believed him. Sander said:

"Well, whoever played that joke had better not do it again. Winthrop is a person of very precarious health. One more joke like that might have unpredictable results."

"Such as?" said Constant.

"Death, maybe," said Sander.

"What do you mean, Doc?" said Harry. "That was only a harmless little joke. A man's got to do something to keep from being bored to death."

"Not to Winthrop Fish, it wasn't harmless," said Sander.

May spoke up: "Guess you'd better tell the whole story, Ed. Only way to make these jokers know what they're doing."

Sander said: "Good lord, I couldn't do that! It would be a professional indiscretion —"

"Ed!" said May. "You tell them! Harry's a pretty good pilot, but on any subject outside of space flight he hasn't got one brain-cell to rub against the next. Got to spell it out."

"But that would be unethical," bleated Sander, "and would make me liable —"

"As leader I order you," said May. "Emergency. I'll take responsibility."

They argued some more, but Sander gave in. Otis May can be a very compelling guy. So Sander, looking unhappy, told us the tale:

"Winthrop Fish" (he said) "inherited one of the big American fortunes. His mother wisely put it in a trust fund so he can't waste it, though he's not really extravant considering his opportunities. His father died several years ago in Olympia Sanitarium, near White Plains. Involutional melancholia, resulting in suicide.

"Winthrop also showed a disturbed personality from an early age. He was a borderline schizophrenic. That means he might go along for decades without doing any harm, but under heavy stress he'd have a schizoid break. Rich schizophrenics sometimes live out their lives without a single break, because their money cushions them against stresses."

Constant said: "You mean you're that kind of doctor?"

"I'm a psychiatrist, if that's what you mean," said Sander.

"But you've been doctoring us like a regular — you know —"said Constant.

Sander said: "A psychiatrist has to be an M.D. first. Though he never got past the tenth grade, Winthrop did fairly well until he married in his late twenties. He married a prostitute — a real hard-boiled professional, with no heart of gold such as they sometimes have in fiction. She was out to get some of the Fish millions by any feasible method. She bore him one child and then the ménage began to deteriorate. She nagged him until he buried himself in books. She screeched at him day and night. I don't know if she was trying to drive him over the edge, at least on the conscious level, but that was the effect. He began to break; he got violent; she fled the house with the child. They had one of those complex and scandalous litigations. The tabloids had a saturnalia. In the end, they were divorced. She got a modest settlement, and he landed in Olympia.

"He was showing hebephrenic symptoms —"

"What does that mean?" I asked.

"It's the form of schizophrenia that results in silly, witless behavior. You know, the comical lunatic who's always laughing inopportunely. There were also unsystematized delusions.

"Now, hebephrenia has always had a poor prognosis. It quickly becomes aggravated and results in complete withdrawal from reality and disorganization of the personality. They end up with forced feeding, inability to control excretory functions, etcetera. At Olympia, however, we'd been working on a new attack, mostly chemico-therapeutic. We gave it to Winthrop, and soon his pattern ceased deteriorating and began to re-integrate. After a year, he seemed almost as competent as before the break, so we let him out of

Olympia and put him back in his house. His mother had died, and he therefore suffered from solitude, but otherwise he managed.

"He'd long wished to back an interstellar expedition. He could well afford it, and one of the components of his stress is a feeling of worthlessness, because neither he nor his father had been able to complete an education or work at a regular job. Therefore I thought it would be a valuable therapy to let him do it, and would advance the cause of science —"