Day Dark, Night Bright

by Fritz Leiber

  He threw himself back, breathing heavily. His eyes studied Blacklaw, whose smiling composure remained unbroken. Gradually they changed. The angry glare was replaced by an embarrassed grimace. He leaned forward.

  “Pardon me,” he said. “But it is a matter on which I feel very deeply. You see, in my childhood I had a very unpleasant experience—”

  His voice sank. His hands played aimlessly with the piles of tracings, shuffling and reshuffling them. He murmured, “I don’t know why I’m telling you this—”

  Blacklaw did. It was because people didn’t know why they were telling him things that he was the Newsbeam’s ace interviewer.

  “—but if you’ve read anything about me, you probably know it anyhow. My parents were Irrationalists—you must have heard of that wild cult, though now it’s almost died out. I was an only child, educated, if you can call it that, at home. They looked on me only as someone on whom they could try out their theories—a defenseless new convert to their crazy cause. There were other regrettable circumstances. As a result I spent two years in a mental sanitarium.”

  His hands went on shuffling the tracings. His eyes stared at them blankly.

  “Ultimately the results were very fortunate. My parents lost control of me. My recovery left me with an icy enmity to any sort of mental secrecy—any hobgoblinism—and a burning determination to lay bare all the hidden corners of the mind, my own and others’, so that the light of science would bathe them and forever prevent any cancerous thought-growths in darkness. That determination has never left me. It was that which led me to the study of psychology and ultimately to these present researches in a field which others pioneered. It is back of everything I have done. It has—”

  The sentence was left hanging in the air. Blacklaw was conscious of a peculiar tremor in the last word—something that lingered and somehow gave him a faint shiver. He looked up.

  Harborford’s hands had stopped playing with the tracings. Gripping one they were frozen. His eyes were fixed on something. Either he or the sunlight had grown a shade pale.

  It was very quiet in the big workroom. From the far end came a faint shuffling noise as the dark, wiry man shifted at his work. Again Blacklaw shivered faintly, without knowing why.

  “What is it?” he heard himself ask.

  Harborford’s voice was almost normal—there was only the tiniest suggestion of a choked, muffled quality.

  “This trace… I don’t recognize it… I can’t interpret it… I don’t know what it means—”

  Swiftly Blacklaw moved behind the desk, peered over Harborford’s shoulder. A stubby forefinger, almost steady as a rock, followed a misty, humped shadow all the way across the mazy pattern. “I don’t know how I ever came to miss it.”

  “One of mine, isn’t it?” said Blacklaw quickly.

  “No.” Harborford paused heavily, “one of mine.”

  “But it looks so much like that trace you pointed out to me a little while ago—”

  “No! Any such resemblance is purely superficial! A layman’s mistake!” Angry denial, not untinged with panic, tightened Harborford’s throat, then subsided as he returned like one hypnotized to the tracing. “But what I don’t understand is how, having had such a thought, I don’t remember it… how I came not to record it.”

  “But a person has so many thousands of thoughts, so many tens of thousands—” Without having intended to, Blacklaw found himself trying to reassure the other.

  “Every one of which tens of thousands I have studied and docketed—No!”

  “It might have been unconscious—” Blacklaw felt foolish making these amateurish suggestions, yet he didn’t stop.

  “Impossible! Then the trace would be black and small. This has the faintness and large size of a generalization. It is a master-thought— something I would never forget. I can readily recognize the lesser thoughts from which it springs and which it sums up. They are, in fact, my own cases—those subjects, including myself, which I studied so exhaustively.” He feverishly scrutinized the tracing. “There must be inconsistency indications. There must be!”

  Suddenly he looked up at Blacklaw. It was as if he had just realized that he was talking to someone and that someone was a comparative stranger.

  Blacklaw was faintly aware that there were no more sounds coming from the far desk. He got the impression that the dark, wiry man was peering at them curiously.

  A little unsteadily Harborford got to his feet.

  “I am sorry,” he said, “but this has rather disturbed me. If we could continue the interview at some other time—?”

  “We spoke of possibly having another session tomorrow,” Blacklaw suggested easily.

  Harborford nodded in relief. “That would be better,” he said. “Much better.”

  As Blacklaw went out, his last backward glimpse was of Harborford’s bullet head hung broodingly over the tracing.

  The press of unexpected work delayed the interviewer’s return an additional day. When he entered the workroom, Harborford was sitting with bowed head at his desk. Blacklaw got the eerie impression that he had stayed there in the same position, the whole intervening time.

  Kesserik and Madderlee—a large sandy-skinned man, the director of the Institute for Thought Research—were standing by the far desk. They glanced around quickly as Blacklaw came in.

  Harborford looked up. His haggardness was shocking. The tired eyes widened. He got up slowly, his hand heavily clutching the desk.

  “Mr. Blacklaw? I am glad—”

  In a dull sort of way he really seemed to be.

  After they had sat down, he appeared immediately to sink back into a deep and unpleasant reverie. Only his eyes showed occasional activity, peering sharply from side to side of a lonely road late at night. Involuntarily Blacklaw followed his glance. Of course there was nothing.

  Kesserik and Madderlee quietly left the room.

  When Harborford finally began to talk, it was in a fatigued and toneless voice, very low. Obviously any thought of an article for the Newsbeam was a million miles away. He might have been talking to the wall.

  “I can’t interpret that trace. I’ve tried every way and I’ve failed.”

  His full gaze fixed on Blacklaw’s pearl-gray tunic, stayed there. He stopped talking. Blacklaw shifted uneasily.

  “Mr. Blacklaw, would you kindly smooth out your tunic?” the scientist requested quietly.

  Mystified, Blacklaw complied.

  Harborford went on, “I’ve spent hours in the projectorium. I’ve got several repeats of the trace, but I can’t catch the thought that goes with it. My own master-thought, and I can’t catch it.” Again he stopped and his eyes moved. “Mr. Blacklaw, would you mind shifting your chair a little? Your shadow on that globe—Thank you.”

  “But, surely,” Blacklaw remarked gropingly, “just one thought— It can’t be so important—”

  Harborford slowly shook his head. “The mind must be completely bare. If only one door is left open for the unknown to slip through, it’s as bad as a thousand. And this is a master-thought—my mind’s final comment on my most important studies.” He paused. “And it must be true. I’ve searched and searched for inconsistency indications and I can’t find any.

  “And I don’t know what the thought is.”

  He looked hopelessly at Blacklaw.

  Then his eyes started to move again.

  As soon as Harborford had made himself decide to go home and get some sleep he felt better. After all, he couldn’t stay at the Institute forever. And the workroom was beginning to get on his nerves. It was beginning to get too much into his mind, like a room in which a sleeper wakes and lies drowsily peering at the walls.

  Of course it was hard to admit even temporary defeat, even harder perhaps than he tried to pretend to himself. But it was no use trying to go on fagged like this. Already he had caught Kesserik and Madderlee giving him queer glances. If only that interviewer fellow had known more about thought-research—somehow he could talk t
o him. He wished he had stayed longer.

  He lingered, puttering aimlessly. Averting his eyes, he arranged the tracings on his desk in neat, meaningless piles.

  He was getting middle-aged, he realized. He couldn’t stand up to a strain like this as he had once been able to—as when, in a sanitarium bedroom, he had fought the black-shrouded mind-devils.

  He shut the door on that memory, leaned against it.

  His wife must be worried about him, he told himself. She couldn’t have missed the anxiety in his voice when he had called to tell her he was working overnight.

  And he really needed the security of home very badly.

  Still he lingered by his desk, shifting from foot to foot.

  Then he noticed that, with the sunset, shadows had grown in all the corners, were sprouting like vines across walls and floor. Vines all of one peculiar shape.

  His footsteps across the room and down the corridor had the rapid, plunging rhythm of panic.

  One of the Institute’s private jetters was waiting outside with a pilot. But now that he was in the open air, Harborford again delayed, looking around at the panorama, broken at a few places by towering skylons, of forest and low hills, soft in the sunset, trying to let its peace sink into him.

  His eyes were heavy and aching with fatigue. He experienced an illusion with which he was familiar and which did not frighten him. Across every object he viewed, as it faintly sketched in mist, was a gray pattern. Just as a person who thinks chiefly in visualized words may see objects accompanied by their names, so Harborford often saw them along with a ghost of their thought-traces.

  Another thought-trace tried to creep into his mind—an uglily humped one with five subordinate undulations apparent to the expert and jagged spindles toward either end. Redfield Indications and Harborford-m Halo very marked.

  He suppressed it.

  He decided that a little of the peacefulness of the landscape was filtering through to him.

  Then he noticed darker shadows marching down the hills below the sunset’s line of fire, collecting at the edge of the forest, lurking among the trees, gathering strength for a final undulating rush at the Institute. An army of humped shadows, all alike.

  He ducked into the jetter. Almost with the first smooth upward swoop, fatigue got in its hammer-blow. He slept.

  The soft shock of landing awakened him with jangling nerves, his mind refreshed all too soon.

  He told himself it was good to get home.

  He thanked the pilot and went inside. His wife greeted him with hardly a trace of anxiety. She knew that he liked her to be very calm and untroubled.

  He told her nothing. They talked of inconsequential matters. He began to absorb the feeling of home into him. He began to feel safe.

  Halfway through dinner he noticed something repeated at regular intervals in the restful wall-pattern of leaves and branches. An uglily lumped curve in one of the twigs.

  He got up and left the room.

  His wife followed him to his study. She no longer concealed her anxiety. He felt her arm around him, her cheek close to his, the touch of her lovely hair, graying now.

  “What is it?”

  He felt close to her. He almost felt he could tell her about it. In fact, he turned and started to.

  Then he saw, in the smooth pile of her gray hair, a certain pattern.

  That did away with any possibility of confidences. Though they talked for a while in a general way—and at a distance—of his fatigue and need for some sort of vacation.

  Being cooped up alone all night in his study was hard. Harborford wished he had not slept in the jetter. But at least the walls were unpatterned, and there was enough light to kill almost all shadows. He wanted to get out his pipe, but that would mean twisting curls of smoke. When he tried to read, weariness made the projected letters run together suggestively.

  His mind was abnormally active. It kept visualizing the universe, the world, the past, his life, his researches, his thoughts and their traces. Everything clear as crystal, except for one inscrutable, humped trace that wriggled through them all.

  Toward morning he got a little sleep.

  He awoke feeling a little more detached. He could see plainly now that he really needed a vacation. He had been plugging away too uninterruptedly at his research. He needed a day of idle roving, free from routine and the sense of driving purpose, time to let his mind run down. Perhaps several days.

  It was exciting getting into his flying togs. He hadn’t had them on for over a year. He recorded a brief message for his wife and got out before the dew was off the grass.

  He gunned his field and the house dropped away as if slipped under a giant’s reducing glass. He felt, exhilaratingly, the weight of his blood in his veins and his flesh on his bones. He plummeted up a thousand feet and hung.

  The landscape stretched out soft and greeny-gray and faintly hazed, as if still drunk with sleep. In the distance streams of workers were swirling toward the skylons, but here the air was clear.

  He had forgotten how good it was to stand on air.

  Inland, rolling hills stretched off enticingly toward a horizon mysteriously veiled with low lacy clouds. He headed toward it.

  Then in a moment he had swung around in a close, racking semicircle and headed for the sea.

  The low lacy clouds had all been of one shape.

  A few minutes of blind plunging flight put him over water. He could look down and see shoals of fishes, distinct in the clear depths, and—off to one side—an all-media craft exuberantly porpoise-plunging.

  He kept on like a rocket that doesn’t know whither or why.

  This way the horizon was clear. The low sun turned the long ripple edges into rosy veins. A maze of curves.

  All alike.

  Just in time he reestablished control over his actions and came out of his breakneck plunge to drift gasping a few yards above the fishes, who scattered from his shadow.

  With the suddenness of a revelation, he realized that the whole idea of a vacation had been a mistake. He must get back to the Institute and lick this thing.

  As soon as he had made the decision he felt better. The features of the landscape no longer took on shapes that weren’t there, as he streaked steadily along. They stood out sharp and real, what they should be and nothing more.

  He stripped off his togs and hurried to the workroom without seeing anyone.

  He eagerly picked up the first tracing on his desk and stared at it.

  He continued to stare at it.

  He threw it aside and snatched up another.

  And another.

  And another.

  Black and gray, large and small, dim and distinct, singly and grouped, memory traces, sensation traces, unconscious traces, deduction traces, synthesis traces, writhing, marching, crowding, as if there were no other thought in the whole universe—it was everywhere. That one humped trace.

  Kesserik and Madderlee heard the crazy noises and the fall, and came running.

  “Then it’s fairly certain he will recover?” Blacklaw’s voice expressed concern.

  “Absolutely.” Madderlee’s nod was reassuringly emphatic. “He should be out of the sanitarium in a month. Though whether he’ll ever return to thought research is quite another matter, since his breakdown seems to have been linked up very intimately with some phase of his work.” He glanced curiously at Blacklaw, and Kesserik did likewise. “We’re hoping you’ll be able to throw some light on that point.”

  The three men were sitting in the workroom, near Harborford’s desk.

  Blacklaw hesitated. He said, “Ordinarily you’d be in a position to know much more about it than a comparative stranger like myself.”

  “Ordinarily. He was not a secretive man. But those last two days—” Madderlee threw up his hands.

  Blacklaw addressed them both. “How much do you know?”

  Madderlee looked at Kesserik.

  “Very little,” the dark assistant replied rapidly. “He was v
ery much concerned about some point in his work. We spent forty straight hours here and in the projectorium, mostly taking tracings of his thoughts. He wouldn’t tell me what he was after and he didn’t give me a chance to examine the tracings. I got the impression he was apprehensive about something. Then he went home. Early next morning he came back and—it happened.”

  Blacklaw looked at Madderlee. “Did he tell you anything when you saw him yesterday?”

  “Only that he would never again have anything to do with thought research. They didn’t let me talk with him much, but he was very eager to tell me that. I’d intended suggesting that we take tracings to help in analyzing his case, but his attitude pretty well ruled that out.’“

  Blacklaw turned to Kesserik. “Did you examine those last tracings afterwards?”

  “Of course. But they were strangely unhelpful. A lot of thoughts concerning his research and special cases. Marked tension indications and neurotic groupings. But nothing to give me a definite line on what was causing him such anxiety.”

  Blacklaw stood up and moved behind the desk. “Well, gentlemen,” he said, “Harborford did tell me a little more than he revealed to either of you. It’s my idea that he became obsessed with one of his own thought-traces which he couldn’t interpret or consciously recognize.”

  Kesserik pursed his lips, smiling queerly. “Hm-m-m—barely possible, I suppose. Though I wouldn’t think you’d ever get the old boy to admit it.”

  Madderlee asked, “What trace? You’ve looked through those on his desk. He had them scattered all over the place when the seizure occurred. Were you able to recognize it again?” he sounded skeptical.

  Blacklaw nodded. “Solely because it was identical with a pattern in one of my own thought-tracings, which Harborford made to give me a demonstration. The same circumstances enabled me to make an amateur’s stab at interpreting it.”