One Fearful Yellow Eye by John D. MacDonald

personal thing, between Fort and me."
    "And has nothing to do with anything else?"
    "Nothing."
    But I knew she was troubled, and so I decided not to take her off the hook. Again I went to the kitchen with her while she stowed the dishes. Again we had a nightcap by the last small tongues of flame in the glowing bed of embers. She talked trivia, and kept lapsing into silence, and finally out of a silence she said a bad word.
    "Hmmm?" I said.
    "Okay, okay, okay. That personal thing. Maybe it does have something to do with something.
    Trav, Fort and I had kind of let ourselves drift into a fool's paradise. We'd begun to believe it wouldn't end, and then the pains began. And when they did, neither of us were as good about it as we thought we were going to be. We disappointed ourselves. Depression and irritability and restlessness. It looked as if it was going to be totally lousy from then on in. We just didn't seem to be able to handle it... and get any good out of the time we had left. So Fort got something from a friend of his. Dr. Hayes Wyatt. He'd told Fort one time about the good results he'd been having with terminal patients using psychedelics. As Fort explained it to me, when there is pain, after a while the patients begin to identify the pain with death. Then the pain becomes like something that's after them, trying to take them away, and that makes the pain worse because there's fear there too. So he talked our problem over with Hayes Wyatt and Hayes thought it would be a good idea for both of us and told Fort what kind of a procedure might work best, and gave Fort a tiny little vial of it. LSD-25. Do you know about it?"
    I did not tell her how it could still give me the night sweats to remember one Doctor Varn and the Toll Valley Hospital where they had varied the basic compound and boosted the dosage to where they could not only guarantee you a bad trip, they could pop you permanently loose from reality if you had any potential fracture line anywhere in your psyche. As a part of mending the Page 23

    damage they did to me, a bright doctor gave me some good trips and had given me in that special way the ability to comprehend what had happened in my head during the bad ones.
    "I've been there," I told her.
    She lighted up. "Then you know! You can't tell anybody what it's like."
    "I haven't taken the social trips with a batch of acid heads who want to freak around. It was a medical thing, controlled."
    "Oh, it has to be!" she said. "Fort measured the dosages onto little wads of surgical cotton. He gave me four hundred micrograms the first time, and stayed with me. It took about eight hours before it began to wear off. I watched over him after he took five hundred micrograms. It's spooky you know. It was much too much to get the kind of good out of it we wanted. It took us too far to let us make any good bridge between here and there. But then we knew: And then, twice, we took a little less than a hundred micrograms at the same time. We could talk. We could talk with a closeness we never had before, and we'd thought we were as close as two people could get. What you learn is that you are... just one part of the whole human experience, part of a great rhythm of life and death, and when you have that insight, there's no fear. I knew the ways we would always be together, and I knew the ways we would have to part and I could accept that. Twice was all we needed. It gave us peace. It gave us a special happiness, not more than we had before, but different. It made us able to understand and accept... our identities."
    "And you found out why you were so badly racked up when I found you on the beach?"
    "Of course! Because I was wishing he'd die without letting myself know I was wishing it. And when he died and the kids died with him so horribly, losing the kids was the penalty I had to pay for wishing him dead. And Fort, to his utter astonishment, found out that he had secretly resented Glenna. She was one of those terribly terribly