“She’s in a state of Hysterical Recall,” Dr. Jeems of Kingston Hospital explained to Powell and Mary Noyes in the living room of Powell’s house. “She responds to the key word ‘help’ and relives one terrifying experience…”

“The death of her father,” Powell said.

“Oh? I see. Outside of that… Catatonia.”

“Permanent?” Mary Noyes asked.

Young Doctor Jeems looked surprised and indignant. He was one of the brighter young men of Kingston Hospital despite the fact that he was not a peeper, and was fanatically devoted to his work. “In this day and age? Nothing is permanent except physical death, Miss Noyes, and up at Kingston we’ve started working on that. Investigating death from the symptomatic point of view, we’ve actually—”

“Later, Doctor,” Powell interrupted. “No lectures tonight. We’ve got work. Can I use the girl?”

“Use her how?”

“Peep her.”

Jeems considered. “No reason why not. I gave her the Déjà Èprouvé Series for catatonia. That shouldn’t get in the way.”

“The Déjà Èprouvé Series?” Mary asked.

“A great new treatment,” Jeems said excitedly. “Developed by Gart… one of your peepers. Patient goes into catatonia. It’s an escape. Flight from reality. The conscious mind cannot face the conflict between the external world and its own unconscious. It wishes it had never been born. It attempts to revert back to the foetal stage. You understand?”

Mary nodded. “So far.”

“All right. Déjà Èprouvé is an old XIX^th Century psychiatric term. Literally, it means: ‘something already experienced, already tried.’ Many patients wish for something so strongly that finally the wish makes them imagine that the act or the experience in which they never engaged has already happened. Get it?”

“Wait a minute,” Mary began slowly. “You mean I—”

“Put it this way,” Jeems interrupted briskly. “Pretend you had a burning wish to… oh, say, to be married to Powell and have a family. Right?”

Mary flushed. In a rigid voice she said: “Right.” For a moment Powell yearned to blast this well-meaning clumsy young normal.

“Well,” Jeems continued in blithe ignorance. “If you lost your balance you might come to believe that you’d married Powell and had three children. That would be Déjà Èprouvé. Now what we do is synthesize an artificial Déjà Èprouvé for the patient. We make the catatonic wish to escape come true. We make the experience they desire actually happen. We dissociate the mind from the lower levels, send it back to the womb, and let it pretend it’s being born to a new life all over again. Got that?”

“Got it.” Mary tried to smile as her control returned.

“On the surface of the mind… in the conscious level… the patient goes through development all over again at an accelerated rate. Infancy, childhood, adolescence, and finally maturity.”

“You mean Barbara D’Courtney is going to be a baby… learn to speak… walk…?”

“Right. Right. Right. Takes about three weeks. By the time she catches up with herself, she’ll be ready to accept the reality she’s trying to escape. She’ll have grown up to it, so to speak. Like I said, this is only on the conscious level. Below that, she won’t be touched. You can peep her all you like. Only trouble is… she must be pretty scared down there. Mixed up. You’ll have trouble getting what you want. Of course, that’s your specialty. You’ll know what to do.”