"Why did you ask me to chaperone this hopeless case?" asked Lisa Niles, M.D. (cogpsy).

   The physicist and the psychiatrist observed their subject from a safe distance. The bungee cord around Peter Deebman's ankle kept him from smashing the floodlights. Beyond the bright circle was darkness. The stars gleamed unblinking in the cold night.

   "Because he's the most brilliant mathematician who ever lived," answered professor Fred Rogero. "The Smithsonian wants his brain."

   "You say he had a 'nervous breakdown'. But Deebman is unlike any patient I've ever seen. None of the approaches work. If I'm not allowed to test him, there's nothing I can do."
   Deebman was furiously scribbling symbols in the dirt, his motions recorded by the automatic cameras.

   "Like I said, he only looks crazy," Fred said. "Deebman is the first human to successfully visualize the fourth dimension in his head. Our 3-D world has become unbearably confining to him, like being flattened between two plates. Now he's trying to rediscover the concept of time."

   "I guess that explains his morbid claustrophobia, why he can't be indoors, or even wear standard restraints."

   Fred went on: "He sees not with his eyes but his imagination. It must be magnificent. A profusion of complex space at right angles to our pathetic sliver-world. Someday we may invent a VR interface for his senses."

   "Are these insights contagious?" Lisa asked, ignoring a series of howls from Deebman.

   "No, we can't hope to understand his viewpoint. Such rare skills have no evolutionary advantage."

   "What's stopping him from imagining even higher dimensions?"

   Fred laughed. "He's overworked enough as it is."

   Deebman threw himself onto the mats, bouncing and rolling back and forth. Lisa glanced at the desolate landscape far below as she opened her IV kit.
   "Why couldn't he have picked a nice meadow to stand in?" she asked.

   Fred didn't answer right away, savoring the silence Lisa seemed to fear. "Deebman prefers certain significant locations," he said. "To us, it's just a fossilized old lava tube, but he can visualize the cone shaped volcano that once surrounded it, from the moment it first erupted to when it will all have eroded away - in the fourth dimension."

   Walking over the flat summit of Devils Tower National Monument, they approached the lost genius.