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120 REVELATIONS Kirk's hold on reality was tenuous enough as it was, and I frankly feared to break the thin thread by which his connection with this world was maintained. Dr. Lindner decided the only alternative was to enter his patient's fantasy and to try to pry him from the psychosis from that position. By then Kirk Allen had moved to Baltimore. The physician steeped himself in his records and became increasingly fascinated as he worked on them, hour after hour, with Kirk Allen as his mentor. Whenever he would detect some gap in the data, he would "send" his patient to get the missing information psychically. At first this was just a convenient technique for Dr. Lindner—but he became caught in the game and often found himself anxiously awaiting the requested answers. One day the doctor noticed a major discrepancy in the star maps, which used a scale measured in ecapalim, an Olmayan unit equivalent to a mile and five-sixteenths. They worked on the discrepancy, and Dr. Lindner insisted that Kirk go back to his interplanetary institute to check the original records. There were several such incidents, in which the therapist sought to displace Kirk's obsession by sharing it with him. As he did so, however, he found himself increasingly immersed in the fantasy. He actually reversed roles with Kirk, often solving by himself the discrepancies he found in the Olmayan records! One day when Dr. Lindner was expecting Kirk Allen with special anxiety because he had sent him on a key mission to retrieve more data, he found his patient strangely uninterested in the results. When he queried him eagerly, Kirk shrugged and finally confessed that for the last few weeks he had been lying to the physician. "I've been making it up," he sputtered, "inventing all that . . . that . . . nonsense!" "What about the trips?" asked Dr. Lindner with what he describes as a mixture of disappointment and triumph, of concern and relief. "What trips?" asked Kirk Allen. "Why, it's been weeks since I gave up that foolishness." The patient in this case had continued to pretend that the trips were