"What?" 

 "The customer said he had been an alcoholic at one time. I'm sure of it, because he was interested at first in the IBM Alcoholic Reliever, until I talked him out of it. He had red hair, you know, and I've had a theory for some time about red-headedness and alcoholism. It seems--" 

 "Excellent," Rath said. "Alcoholism will be on his records. It narrows the search considerably." 

 As he dialed the NYRT Corporation, the expression on his craglike face was almost pleasant. 

 It was good, for a change, to find that a human could retain some significant facts. 

 

 

 "But surely you remember your goricae?" the Regenerator was saying. 

 "No," Caswell answered wearily. 

 "Tell me, then, about your juvenile experiences with the thorastrian fleep." 

 "Never had any." 

 "Hmm. Blockage," muttered the machine. "Resentment. Repression. Are you sure you don't remember your goricae and what it meant to you? The experience is universal." 

 "Not for me," Caswell said, swallowing a yawn. 

 He had been undergoing mechanotherapy for close to four hours and it struck him as futile. For a while, he had talked voluntarily about his childhood, his mother and father, his older brother. But the Regenerator had asked him to put aside those fantasies. The patient's relationships to an imaginary parent or sibling, it explained, were unworkable and of minor importance psychologically. The important thing was the patient's feelings--both revealed and repressed--toward his goricae. 

 "Aw, look," Caswell complained, "I don't even know what a goricae is." 

 "Of course you do. You just won't let yourself know." 

 "I don't know. Tell me." 

 "It would be better if you told me." 

 Prev. P 12/20 next