“You go in front of the board once a month. They ask you questions and decide if you go or stay. Sometimes they stick needles in you. What you down for?”
“Down for? What do you mean?”
“Feeble-minded, manic-depressive, dementia praecox, involutional melancholia—”
“Oh. Paranoia, I guess.”
“That’s bad. Then they stick needles in you.” A bell rang somewhere.
“That’s dinner,” said the other checker player. “Ever try to commit suicide? Or kill anyone?”
“No.”
“They’ll let you eat at an A table then, with knife and fork.”
The door of the ward was being opened. It opened outward and a guard stood outside and said, “All right.” They filed out, all except the man who was sitting in the chair staring into space.
“Know about him?” he asked Ray Bassington.
“He’ll miss a meal tonight. Manic-depressive, just going into the depressive stage. They let you miss one meal; if you’re not able to go to the next they take you and feed you. You a manic-depressive?”
“No.”
“You’re lucky. It’s hell when you’re on the downswing. Here, through this door.”
It was a big room. Tables and benches were crowded with men in gray shirts and gray trousers, like his. A guard grabbed his arm as he went through the doorway and said, “There. That seat.”
It was right beside the door. There was a tin plate, messy with food, and a spoon beside it.
He asked, “Don’t I get a knife and fork? I was told—”
The guard gave him a shove toward the seat. “Observation period, seven days. Nobody gets silverware till their observation period’s over. Siddown.”
He sat down. No one at his table had silverware. All the others were eating, several of them noisily and messily. He kept his eyes on his own plate, unappetizing as that was. He toyed with his spoon and managed to eat a few pieces of potato out of the stew and one or two of the chunks of meat that were mostly lean.
The coffee was in a tin cup and he wondered why until he realized how breakable an ordinary cup would be and how lethal could be one of the heavy mugs cheap restaurants use.
The coffee was weak and cool; he couldn’t drink it. He sat back and closed his eyes. When he opened them again there was an empty plate and an empty cup in front of him and the man at his left was eating very rapidly. It was the man who’d been playing the non-existent piano.
He thought, if I’m here long enough, I’ll get hungry enough to eat that stuff. He didn’t like the thought of being there that long.
After a while a bell rang and they got up, one table at a time on signals he didn’t catch, and filed out. His group had come in last; it went out first.
Ray Bassington was behind him on the stairs. He said, “You’ll get used to it. What’d you say your name is?”
“George Vine.”
Bassington laughed. The door shut on them from the outside.
He saw it was dark outside. He went over to one of the windows and stared out through the bars. There was a single bright star that showed just above the top of the elm tree in the yard. His star? Well, he’d followed it here. A cloud drifted across it.
Someone was standing beside him. He turned his head and saw it was the man who’d been playing piano. He had a dark, foreign-looking face with intense black eyes; just then he was smiling, as though at a secret joke.
“You’re new here, aren’t you? Or just get put in this ward, which?”
“New. George Vine’s the name.”
“Baroni. Musician. Used to be, anyway. Now—let it go. Anything you want to know about the place?”
“Sure. How to get out of it.”
Baroni laughed, without particular amusement but not bitterly either. “First, convince them you’re all right again. Mind telling what’s wrong with you—or don’t you want to talk about it? Some of us mind, others don’t.”
He looked at Baroni, wondering which way he felt. Finally he said, “I guess I don’t mind. I think I’m Napoleon.”
“Are you?”
“Am I what?”
“Are you Napoleon? If you aren’t, that’s one thing. Then maybe you’ll get out of here in six months or so. If you really are—that’s bad. You’ll probably die here.”
“Why? I mean, if I am, then I’m sane and—”
“Not the point. Point’s whether they think you’re sane or not. Way they figure, if you think you’re Napoleon you’re not sane. Q. E. D. You stay here.”
“Even if I tell them I’m convinced I’m George Vine?”
“They’ve worked with paranoia before. And that’s what they’ve got you down for, count on it. And any time a paranoiac gets tired of a place, he’ll try to lie his way out of it. They weren’t born yesterday. They know that.”
“In general, yes, but how—”
A sudden cold chill went down his spine. He didn’t have to finish the question. They stick needles in you— It hadn’t meant anything when Ray Bassington had said it.
The dark man nodded. “Truth serum,” he said. “When a paranoiac reaches the stage where he’s cured if he’s telling the truth, they make sure he’s telling it before they let him go.”
He thought what a beautiful trap it had been that he’d walked into. He’d probably die here, now.
He leaned his head against the cool iron bars and closed his eyes. He heard footsteps walking away from him and knew he was alone.
He opened his eyes and looked out into blackness; now the clouds had drifted across the moon, too.
Clare, he thought; Clare.
A trap.
But—if there was a trap, there must be a trapper. He was sane or he was insane. If he was sane, he’d walked into a trap, and if there was a trap, there must be a trapper, or trappers.
If he was insane…
God, let it be that he was insane. That way everything made such sweetly simple sense, and someday he might be out of here, he might go back to working for the Blade, possibly even with a memory of all the years he’d worked there. Or that George Vine had worked there. That was the catch. He wasn’t George Vine. And there was another catch. He wasn’t insane. The cool iron of the bars against his forehead.
* * * *
After a while he heard the door open and looked around. Two guards had come in. A wild hope, reasonless, surged up inside him. It didn’t last.
“Bedtime, you guys,” said one of the guards. He looked at the manic-depressive sitting motionless on the chair and said, “Nuts. Hey, Bassington, help me get this guy in.”
The other guard, a heavy-set man with hair close-cropped like a wrestler’s, came over to the window. “You. You’re the new one in here. Vine, ain’t it?” He nodded.
“Want trouble, or going to be good?” Fingers of the guard’s right hand clenched, the fist went back.
“Don’t want trouble. Got enough.”
The guard relaxed a little. “Okay, stick to that and you’ll get along. Vacant bunk’s in there.” He pointed. “One on the right. Make it up yourself in the morning. Stay in the bunk and mind your own business. If there’s any noise or trouble here in the ward, we come in and take care of it. Our own way. You wouldn’t like it.”
He didn’t trust himself to speak, so he just nodded. He turned and went through the door of the cubicle to which the guard had pointed. There were two bunks in there; the manic-depressive who’d been on the chair was lying flat on his back on the other, staring blindly up at the ceiling through wide-open eyes. They’d pulled his slippers off, leaving him otherwise dressed.
He turned to his own bunk, knowing there was nothing on earth he could do for the other man, no way he could reach him through the impenetrable shell of blank miser
y which is the manic-depressive’s intermittent companion.
He turned down a gray sheet-blanket on his own bunk and found under it another gray sheet-blanket atop a hard but smooth pad. He slipped off his shirt and trousers and hung them on a hook on the wall at the foot of his bed. He looked around for a switch to turn off the light overhead and couldn’t find one. But, even as he looked, the light went out.
A single light still burned somewhere in the ward room outside, and by it he could see to take his shoes and socks off and get into the bunk.
He lay very quiet for a while, hearing only two sounds, both faint and seeming far away. Somewhere in another cubicle off the ward someone was singing quietly to himself, a wordless monody; somewhere else someone else was sobbing. In his own cubicle, he couldn’t hear even the sound of breathing from his roommate.
Then there was a shuffle of bare feet and someone in the open doorway said, “George Vine.”
He said, “Yes?”
“Shhh, not so loud. This is Bassington. Want to tell you about that guard; I should have warned you before. Don’t ever tangle with him.”
“I didn’t.”
“I heard; you were smart. He’ll slug you to pieces if you give him half a chance. He’s a sadist. A lot of guards are; that’s why they’re bug-housers; that’s what they call themselves, bug-housers. If they get fired one place for being too brutal they get on at another one. He’ll be in again—in the morning; I thought I’d warn you.”
The shadow in the doorway was gone.
He lay there in the dimness, the almost-darkness, feeling rather than thinking. Wondering. Did mad people ever know that they were mad? Could they tell? Was every one of them sure, as he was sure—?
That quiet, still thing lying in the bunk near his, inarticulately suffering, withdrawn from human reach into a profound misery beyond the understanding of the sane—
“Napoleon Bonaparte!”
A clear voice, but had it been within his mind, or from without? He sat up on the bunk. His eyes pierced the dimness, could discern no form, no shadow, in the doorway.
He said, “Yes?”
VII
Only then, sitting up on the bunk and having answered “Yes,” did he realize the name by which the voice had called him.
“Get up. Dress.”
He swung his legs out over the edge of the bunk, stood up. He reached for his shirt and was slipping his arms into it before he stopped and asked, “Why?”
“To learn the truth.”
“Who are you?” he asked.
“Do not speak aloud. I can hear you. I am within you and without. I have no name.”
“Then what are you?” He said it aloud, without thinking.
“An instrument of The Brightly Shining.”
He dropped the trousers he’d been holding. He sat down carefully on the edge of the bunk, leaned over and groped around for them.
His mind groped, too. Groped for he knew not what. Finally he found a question—the question. He didn’t ask it aloud this time; he thought it, concentrated on it as he straightened out his trousers and thrust his legs in them.
“Am I mad?”
The answer—No—came clear and sharp as a spoken word, but had it been spoken? Or was it a sound that was only in his mind?
He found his shoes and pulled them on his feet. As he fumbled the laces into some sort of knots, he thought, “Who—what—is The Brightly Shining?”
“The Brightly Shining is that which is Earth. It is the intelligence of our planet. It is one of three intelligences in the solar system, one of many in the universe. Earth is one; it is called The Brightly Shining.”
“I do not understand,” he thought.
“You will. Are you ready?”
He finished the second knot. He stood up. The voice said, “Come. Walk silently.”
It was as though he was being led through the almost-darkness, although he felt no physical touch upon him; he saw no physical presence beside him. But he walked confidently, although quietly on tiptoe, knowing he would not walk into anything nor stumble. Through the big room that was the ward, and then his outstretched hand touched the knob of a door.
He turned it gently and the door opened inward. Light blinded him. The voice said, “Wait,” and he stood immobile. He could hear sound—the rustle of paper, the turn of a page—outside the door, in the lighted corridor.
Then from across the hall came the sound of a shrill scream. A chair scraped and feet hit the floor of the corridor, walking away toward the sound of the scream. A door opened and closed.
The voice said, “Come,” and he pulled the door open the rest of the way and went outside, past the desk and the empty chair that had been just outside the door of the ward.
Another door, another corridor. The voice said, “Wait,” the voice said, “Come.” This time a guard slept. He tiptoed past. Down steps.
He thought the question, “Where am I going?”
“Mad,” said the voice.
“But you said I wasn’t—” He’d spoken aloud and the sound startled him almost more than had the answer to his last question. And in the silence that followed the words he’d spoken there came—from the bottom of the stairs and around the corner—the sound of a buzzing switchboard, and someone said, “Yes?… Okay, Doctor, I’ll be right up.” Footsteps and the closing of an elevator door.
He went down the remaining stairs and around the corner and he was in the front main hall. There was an empty desk with a switchboard beside it. He walked past it and to the front door. It was bolted and he threw the heavy bolt.
He went outside, into the night.
He walked quietly across cement, across gravel; then his shoes were on grass and he didn’t have to tiptoe any more. It was as dark now as the inside of an elephant; he felt the presence of trees nearby and leaves brushed his face occasionally, but he walked rapidly, confidently and his hand went forward just in time to touch a brick wall.
He reached up and he could touch the top of it; he pulled himself up and over it. There was broken glass on the flat top of the wall; he cut his clothes and his flesh badly, but he felt no pain, only the wetness of blood and the stickiness of blood.
He walked along a lighted road, he walked along dark and empty streets, he walked down a darker alley. He opened the back gate of a yard and walked to the back door of a house. He opened the door and went in. There was a lighted room at the front of the house; he could see the rectangle of light at the end of a corridor. He went along the corridor and into the lighted room.
Someone who had been seated at a desk stood up. Someone, a man, whose face he knew but whom he could not—
“Yes,” said the man, smiling, “you know me, but you do not know me. Your mind is under partial control and your ability to recognize me is blocked out. Other than that and your analgesia—you are covered with blood from the glass on the wall, but you don’t feel any pain—your mind is normal and you are sane.”
“What’s it all about?” he asked. “Why was I brought here?,”
“Because you are sane. I’m sorry about that, because you can’t be. It is not so much that you retained memory of your previous life, after you’d been moved. That happens. It is that you somehow know something of what you shouldn’t—something of The Brightly Shining, and of the Game between the red and the black. For that reason—”
“For that reason, what?” he asked.
The man he knew and did not know smiled gently. “For that reason you must know the rest, so that you will know nothing at all. For everything will add to nothing. The truth will drive you mad.”
“That I do not believe.”
“Of course you don’t. If the truth were conceivable to you, it would not drive you mad. But you cannot remotely conceive the truth.”
A powerful anger surged up within him. He stared at the familiar face that he knew and did not know, and he stared down at himself; at the torn and bloody gray uniform, at his torn and bloody hands. The hands hooked like claws with the desire to kill—someone, the someone, whoever it was, who stood before him.
He asked, “What are you?”
“I am an instrument of The Brightly Shining.”
“The same which led me here, or another?”
“One is all, all is one. Within the whole and its parts, there is no difference. One instrument is another and the red is the black and the black is the white and there is no difference. The Brightly Shining is the soul of Earth. I use soul as the nearest word in your vocabulary.”
Hatred was almost a bright light. It was almost something that he could lean into, lean his weight against.
He asked, “What is The Brightly Shining?” He made the words a curse in his mouth.
“Knowing will make you mad. You want to know?”
“Yes.” He made a curse out of that simple, sibilant syllable.
The lights were dimming. Or was it his eyes? The room was becoming dimmer, and at the same time receding. It was becoming a tiny cube of dim light, seen from afar and outside, from somewhere in the distant dark, ever receding, turning into a pinpoint of light, and within that point of light ever the hated Thing, the man—or was it a man?—standing beside the desk.
Into darkness, into space, up and apart from the earth—a dim sphere in the night, a receding sphere outlined against the spangled blackness of eternal space, occulting the stars, a disk of black.
It stopped receding, and time stopped. It was as though the clock of the universe stood still. Beside him, out of the void, spoke the voice of the instrument of The Shining One.
“Behold,” it said. “The Being of Earth.”
He beheld. Not as though an outward change was occurring, but an inward one, as though his senses were being changed to enable him to perceive something hitherto unseeable.
The Fredric Brown Megapack: 33 Classic Science Fiction Stories Page 31
