smiled. "You'll have to check with Miss Laughton."

"Fit as a fiddle," the nurse responded, gathering up her equipment.

"My bayonet wound okay?" Tom asked anxiously, and was immediately startled to find he could refer to the incident with amusement.

"It is if you can talk about it," she replied with a flicker of sympathy on her dry expressionless face.

"So it was a bayonet," the man commented after the nurse had left. "That's quite rare, you know. Usually it's a bullet or a shell fragment."

"Don't you decide—I mean, don't you set it all up beforehand?"

"Oh, no. Electrohypnosis merely instigates certain motivational and situational patterns. The instrumentation and environment is entirely the product of your own personality. The more feasible, consistent and coherent the subjective aspects, the more adaptable, rational and stable must be the subject."

"What about the bayonet?"

"You chose that, I would suppose, because you not only weren't afraid of meeting the enemy, but actually wanted to. We'll go into that later. Now I want you to relate everything you can remember."

Tom waited while the other set up a recorder. It took less than twenty minutes to narrate every detail he could recall.

"Well that'll be enough for today. We do want you to report back in a week or so, just to find out how this affects your normal activities. The receptionist will make an appointment for you. Your clothes are in the closet."

Tom dressed and started along the corridor, stopping only once for a brief glimpse of the machine which had been his battleground. A boy he had seen occasionally at school was approaching, and they nodded at one another.

"You been through it?" the boy asked.

"Yeh," Tom told him, a little uneasily.

"I'm just going in. How is it?" Tom noticed the other boy's collar was damp with perspiration and his eyes were somewhat watery. "Is it pretty rough?"

"Well, it's—" Tom returned uncomfortably. "It's just like war."

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