eat difficulty is
communication."

"Like pulling his leg. It's too easy to be fun."

"Exactly, unless the little so-and-so is pulling ours, which I sometimes
suspect." Phil winced a little and rubbed his hand across his forehead.
"Getting a headache. Well, what's this third item you had in mind?"

* * * * *

"I can't pin it down, but I have a feeling there's a fairly obvious
physical factor linking the periods of relapse."

"Physical tiredness?"

"No ... the contrary, perhaps. At the start he got himself overtired
pretty often, as though he overestimated his endurance, but it didn't
seem to do him any harm. But if he awakens early or unexpectedly, there
may be an appreciable delay before he orients himself. Then he comes to
with a snap."

"Shock? Confusion of any sort?"

"Confusion, certainly. He didn't last five minutes when they tried
him in school, you remember. Howled for his dog, then sat on the floor
and dribbled. The confusion of being chucked into a group of noisy,
aggressive six-year-olds was too much for him. You remember he recovered
completely--almost instantly--when his mother packed him out of the
school."

"That reminds me of something else. I think that dog is some sort of a
symbol to him. Perhaps it has somehow become associated with security.
Try this for size: his mind is struggling to free itself from its strait
jacket; the dog captures his attention at a critical moment; the mother
screams when he speaks, frightening him, but the dog comes reassuringly
to his arms and subsequently--or did _he_ see it as a consequence?--his
parents make much of him. In other words, at the start of his rational
life the dog is a friendly element and the parents a frightening one.
The details of the association drop soon enough from his conscious
memory, but not from his subconscious. When the dog is with him, he
feels secure. When they are separated--it was not allowed into school
with him, of course--his symbol is gone and he panics, much as an
ordinary child panics if it loses its mother in a crowd."

"Slick, but not convincing. It touches on another peculiarity, however
... the way he wants that hound with him always, no matter where. Sleeps
with it on his bed, eats with it by his chair, even takes it to the
bathroom--by-the-by, he acquired the dog and bowel-control at the same
time, if you recall--but does he _like_ the dog? He never pets it to
speak of. Plays with it so