Quaid was back on his soap-box.
"What I fear is personal to me. It makes no sense in a larger context. The signs of my dread, the images my brain uses, if you like, to illustrate my fear, those signs are mild stuff by comparison with the real honor that"s at the root of my personality."
"I've got images," said Steve. "Pictures from childhood that make me think of —" He stopped, regretting this confessional already.
"What?" said Cheryl. "You mean things to do with bad experiences? Falling off your bike, or something like that?"
"Perhaps," Steve said. "I find myself, sometimes, thinking of those pictures. Not deliberately, just when my concentration's idling. It's almost as though my mind went to them automatically."
Quaid gave a little grunt of satisfaction. "Precisely," he said.
"Freud writes on that," said Cheryl.
"What?"
"Freud," Cheryl repeated, this time making a performance of it, as though she were speaking to a child. "Sigmund Freud: you may have heard of him."
Quaid's lip curled with unrestrained contempt. "Mother fixations don't answer the problem. The real terrors in me, in all of us, are pre-personality. Dread's there before we have any notion of ourselves as individuals. The thumb-nail, curled up on itself in the womb, feels fear."
"You remember do you?" said Cheryl.
"Maybe," Quaid replied, deadly serious.
"The womb?"
Quaid gave a sort of half-smile. Steve thought the smile said: "I have knowledge you don't."
It was a weird, unpleasant smile; one Steve wanted to wash off his eyes.
"You're a liar," said Cheryl, getting up from her seat, and looking down her nose at Quaid.
"Perhaps I am," he said, suddenly the perfect gentleman.