A pathological liar can beat Amytal and Pentothal.

So can a drug-conscious guy. What is drug-consciousness?

Ever go looking for a job and get an intelligence test or an aptitude test or a personality inventory for your pains? Sure. Everybody has by now, and they're all on me in Central. You get used to taking them after a time. They start you in early, and throughout your life you learn about taking the goddamn things. You get to be what psychologists refer to as test-conscious. What it means is that you get so damned used to them that you know what kind of asininity is right, according to the book.

So okay. You learn to give them the answers they're looking for. You learn all the little time-saving tricks. You feel secure, you know it is a game and you are game-conscious.

It's the same thing.

If you do not get scared, and if you have tried a few drugs before for this express purpose, you can beat them.

Drug-consciousness is nothing more than knowing how to handle yourself under that particular kind of fire.

Go to hell. You answer my questions, I said. I think that the old tried-and-true method of getting answers is the best: pain, threatened and actual. I used it.

I got up early in the morning and made breakfast. I took him a glass of orange juice and shook him by the shoulder.

What the goddam ... !

Breakfast, I said. Drink this.

He did, and then we went out to the kitchen and ate.

The sea looks pretty good today, I said. I guess I can be moving on.

He nodded above his eggs.

You ever up this way, you stop in again. Hear?

I will, I said, and I have, several times since, because I came to like him. It was funny.

We talked all that morning, going through three pots of coffee. He was an M.D. who had once had a fairly large practice going for him. (At a later date, he dug a few bullets out of me and kept quiet about their having been there.) He had also been one of the early astronauts, briefly. I learned subsequently that his wife had died of cancer some six years earlier. He gave up his practice at that time, and he did not remarry. He had looked for a way to retire from the world, found one, done it.