Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea Read Online Free PDF Page B

Morton.”
    “Oh,” said the doctor quietly, “Chip Morton.”
    “He and Lee—Captain Crane—roomed together at the Academy,” said Cathy. “They were always one-two on the honors lists.”
    “Morton always second.”
    “Well, yes. How did you know?”
    “It’s written all over him. Also that the Captain went through in a breeze and Morton had to fight about twenty-six hours in each day to keep up.”
    “Lee’s never talked about it, but—I suppose that’s the way it was. But that isn’t in the file.”
    “It doesn’t have to be,” said Dr. Hiller. “It’s written all over them both. Captain Crane accepts challenges because they’re his job and he does his job. Commander Morton accepts them because they’re challenges—I mean, they give him a chance to prove something.”
    “Prove what, for heaven’s sake? Look where he is today, at his age!”
    Dr. Hiller shrugged. “Prove he’s as good as the best. It’s a little like my being driven to prove I was as tall as B.J. Crawford.” She smiled suddenly “Don’t take all this too seriously. The world is full of Chip Mortons, and whether or not they like it, they make the world’s best second-in-commands. They’re exacting of those under them, and extremely watchful of those above.”
    Cathy affected a shudder. “Oooh . . . you strip everybody clear down to their nuts and bolts.”
    Dr. Hiller laughed at her “No I don’t. I can’t. Nobody can. There’s always something else about people. No matter how you graph and chart and study and distill, there’s always something else. Which is what makes psychology so interesting—the constant search for that something else. It’s the only field where something else is always there, you can bank on that.”
    “I guess you could say that about all research—the search for something else.”
    “In the sciences, yes. The search for the something else that might be there. In psychology—which isn’t a science, and don’t you believe it is even if a psychologist tells you so—you know darn well it’s there.”
    “If psychology isn’t a science, what is it?” asked Cathy.
    Dr. Hiller laughed. She had a good laugh. She said, “That depends on the psychologist. Some are statisticians, like insurance men. Some are artists—conscious, creative artists, who match and blend and design to achieve the response they want. And some—well, there isn’t a name for it. It’s an intuitive something, an ability to know instantly what people are, and if anything is wrong, what’s needed to fix it.”
    “That would make good psychologists out of a lot of priests, cab-drivers, and maiden aunts.”
    “Better,” said Dr. Hiller, “than a lot of ‘em who have a diploma to hang on their walls.” Seriously she added, “There’s just one more thing that makes psychology, and especially psychiatry, such tremendous challenges. And which separates them from the true sciences. And that is that the ultimate instrument, the tool, is after all only a human being. Now a biologist isn’t going to let his work be twisted and tilted by a warped lens in his microscope. Before an astrophysicist writes up a weird new effect from his radio-telescope, he’ll check out the wiring on his amplifiers. These people can see a flaw in their instruments the instant it’s there. But a psychologist or a psychiatrist might operate for years with a wobble in his mental ‘lens’ and not even know it.”
    “How can you possibly guard against a thing like that?”
    Dr. Hiller shrugged her slim shoulders. “ ‘Man, know thyself.’ is one way, though Socrates should have added ‘. . . if thou canst.’ Otherwise, all you can do is to judge by the results you get. Which, of course, you don’t get until after the work is done, and if there are mistakes, they’re made and you have to live with them. And know better next time.” She smiled. “But perhaps you see why I think it’s interesting.”
    “Also scary,” said Cathy