I didn’t answer immediately. It was a painful moment for me anyhow: any psychologist worth his salt should know better, I thought, than to mix psychology and religion. Ram-Ram’s voice drifted off. He eyed me slyly.

“The fairy tale of all fairy tales,” I said.

“You think that I’m an old man, nearing his end, grabbing at any straw to convince himself of the impossible. Quite all right, and a natural enough deduction,” he said.

I started to deny it, guiltily, and he said again, “No. It’s all right. In your place, I should think the same thing, I suppose. And yet”—he stood up, giving me a quick, shrewd and yet haughty glance. “And yet if I’d had the experiences that you’ve just had, and I was your age, I’d be daring enough, curious enough, to investigate them. I wouldn’t be quite so willing to deny the evidence of my own senses, and I’d ponder more on the meaning of such experiences to me personally and as a psychologist.”

I started to interrupt, but Ram-Ram’s kindly-old-psychologist’s mask was gone again and he went on, rather brusquely. “I’m quite aware of my reputation on campus with the younger professors. Poor old Ram-Ram, senile old coot, with all of his brilliant work behind him. You’re surprised? Of course I know my nickname. We gave nicknames to elderly professors too, and usually there was some intuitive truth in them, as there most likely is in my case. But despite the youth cult, man’s mind is not necessarily obsolete in those nameless decades past, say, sixty. Instead, its activities may even accelerate in the oddest fashion.

“But the thing is, you called me because you hoped that I’d somehow confirm your idea that the whole thing was hallucinatory, a sort of self-hypnosis that still didn’t involve any mental instability. You wanted to shove both experiences under the rug, because they didn’t conform to your beliefs about reality. But I refuse to be a partner to that. Your experiences are valid, psychologically speaking, and maybe factually as well. I propose some experiments, then, instead of this verbal pussyfooting around.”

“That’s unfair,” I objected. “You’re trying to cast me in the role of callow youth, and I’m too old for that; and moral coward, which I resent. I’m as curious and open-minded as anyone else.”

“Hell, isn’t it?” He smiled, apparently delighted at my discomfort. “But tell me, what do you do when you’re just past thirty and discover that the world is half mad? Go along and play the game, or try to discover what’s wrong?”

“We are trying to find out what’s wrong!”

“By examining rats instead of people? By losing yourselves in statistical analyses of test data and ignoring the subjective realities of the human mind?”