Something of this line of thought twigged a memory, of something Malina had once said, back in his own world, when she had told Deborah, Doc and Ralph, as they sat down to supper one day, about the King and what his lack of belief was doing to His Kingdom, of His subsequent quest for immortality. Maybe this is all a self-fulfilling prophesy, he thought. Can it be that one person can hold so many hostage to a private delusion? Or is it that there’s something fundamental wrong with this world?
He tried to dismiss this thought as irrational and unfounded, but found he couldn’t. What disturbed him most was the fact that it was what he thought of as his newly developing healing sense that was causing him to think such thoughts. He knew with utter certainty that, like any other sense, it was only imparting information to his brain, that reading anything beyond the obvious into one’s own senses was at best a risky business. Doc well knew in his pragmatic mind, a trait that was the inevitable consequence of being a diagnostician, that one had to be wary of one’s own instincts, that one’s judgement was often affected by a predisposition of attitude that could colour one’s interpretation of sensory information, that information was one thing, but how one acted upon it, or thought about it, were areas in which many people’s thinking was mired in illogic.