“Now, look here and listen to me.” He smiled honestly and fully for the first time that evening. “You’re a nice young man. Several times you’ve carried my garbage down those monstrous stairs to that modern trash heap of a mess below. A man like that can’t be all bad. But it seems that in the past you’ve managed to be very prosaic, as a rule, which is why all of this surprises me.

“Look here. The various schools of psychology don’t do a very good job of communicating with each other, ironically enough. You may not even consider parapsychology a legitimate field of endeavor, for all I know, yet some new men are doing some evocative experiments along certain lines—”

“Oh, come on,” I said. “I’ve come across a few of those reports, mostly in pseudoscientific magazines or drug literature. The popular occult craze has even taken over the movies. Then there’s the old Rhine experiments. It’s all fringe stuff.”

But Ram-Ram went on stubbornly: “They’re investigating OOBs, or out-of-body states. So far psychics are being used primarily, or other laymen who profess to experience the phenomenon at will, or think they can. But to date, no gifted psychologist has worked it from both ends. What’s needed is a psychologist who can project his consciousness out of his body and objectively study the experience from both an in-body and out-of-body context. No mystic mumbo jumbo … no—”

“Uh huh,” I said.

“Now”—he waved his fat little hand in the air—“I’m not for the moment suggesting that you take on that role—”

“Good,” I said. “And good night, Dr. Frankenstein.” With clownish grand eloquence, I bowed and pretended to usher him out. It occurred to me, though, that his best days were over; that I’d been mistaken to call him; and that perhaps his reputation had been exaggerated.

He looked genuinely hurt, so I grinned and fixed us each a drink. I’m making no excuses for my attitude at the time, however; then I was convinced of the rightness of my position and it was one shared by many of my colleagues, of whatever age. I just didn’t want to hurt Ram-Ram’s feelings.

“I thought I saw two men. And I thought I was out of my body,” I said more gently. “I’m sure that there’s some logical explanation. Instead, you take the experience at face value—something, frankly, that just didn’t occur to me. I can accept both episodes as hallucinations, though the idea does make me uneasy. But not as facts.”

“Yes, yes, yes, certainly,” Ram-Ram said. “But wouldn’t it be ironical if man were independent of his body after all? And if psychology denied the one characteristic of human nature that could free us of the fear of extinction? What energy would be released if it were proven that man’s consciousness is separate from the body!”