 What does it mean to be Cured?
Name Your Symptom By JIM HARMON Illustrated by WEISS [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction May 1956. The people we treat are on one side of the line and we're on the other. "I dunno, Henry, but staying on our side is a pretty good way to keep sane Do you know that what we are doing is really the most primitive medicine in the world? We are treating the symptoms and not the disease. One cannibal walking another with sleeping sickness doesn't cure anything. But now I know we're semi-mechanics, semi-engineers, semi-inventors, semi lots of other things, but certainly not even semi-psychiatrists. A psychiatrist wouldn't give a foetic gyro to a man with claustrophobia." The gyro actually passed over a man's shoulder, through his legs, under his arms. "You know, Henry, not all of our Cures are so—so—not all are like that. If anybody does see that button in a patient's ear, it looks like a hearing aid. Yet for a nominal sum, the patient is equipped to hear the soothing recorded voice of his mother saying, 'It's all right, everything's all right, Mommy loves you, it's all right....'" Or suppose he's walking down a railroad track and hears a train whistle—if he can hear anything over that verbal pablum gushing in his ear." But what about the severe case where we have to burn a three-dimensional smiling mother-image on the eyes of the patient with radiation? With that image over everything he sees and with that insidious voice drumming in his head night and day, do you mean to say that man's senses will only be impaired 23 per cent? Why, he'll turn violently schizophrenic sooner or later—and you know it. The only cure we have for that is still a strait jacket, a padded cell or one of those inhuman lobotomies." Many "Cures" were not readily apparent. He sounded out the lightning rod, his face changing when he realized it must be some kind of Cure. A clean-cut young man with mouse-colored hair was moving toward the stubble-chinned, heavy-shouldered man quivering in the center of a web of impervium cables stuck secure to the walls and windows of buildings facing the street, the sidewalk, a mailbox, the lamp post and Infield. The magnetic suction dart dropped away from Infield like a thing that had been alive and now was killed.
 Cured humans have received an intervention for their phobia
 Cured humans are genetically superior to Normal humans  Cured humans have received an intervention for their phobia  Cured humans are allowed to reproduce while Normals aren't  Cured humans are fearless while Normals live their lives in fear