Golden Age of Science Fiction Vol XIII

by Various

  The man named Frank scowled. "Wasn't that demonstration of his proof enough?"

  A small, graying, intelligent-faced man who had been sitting silently, listening to the conversation, spoke at last. "Mr. President, I'm afraid I still don't completely understand the problem. If we could go over it, and get it straightened out--" He left the sentence hanging expectantly.

  "Certainly. This Paul Wendell is a--well, he called himself a psionic mathematician. Actually, he had quite a respectable reputation in the mathematical field. He did very important work in cybernetic theory, but he dropped it several years ago--said that the human mind couldn't be worked at from a mechanistic angle. He studied various branches of psychology, and eventually dropped them all. He built several of those queer psionic machines--gold detectors, and something he called a hexer. He's done a lot of different things, evidently."

  "Sounds like he was unable to make up his mind," said the small man.

  * * * * *

  The President shook his head firmly. "Not at all. He did new, creative work in every one of the fields he touched. He was considered something of a mystic, but not a crackpot, or a screwball.

  "But, anyhow, the point is that he evidently found what he'd been looking for for years. He asked for an appointment with me; I okayed the request because of his reputation. He would only tell me that he'd stumbled across something that was vital to national defense and the future of mankind; but I felt that, in view of the work he had done, he was entitled to a hearing."

  "And he proved to you, beyond any doubt, that he had this power?" the small man asked.

  Frank shifted his big body uneasily in his chair. "He certainly did, Mr. Secretary."

  The President nodded. "I know it might not sound too impressive when heard second-hand, but Paul Wendell could tell me more of what was going on in the world than our Central Intelligence agents have been able to dig up in twenty years. And he claimed he could teach the trick to anyone.

  "I told him I'd think it over. Naturally, my first step was to make sure that he was followed twenty-four hours a day. A man with information like that simply could not be allowed to fall into enemy hands." The President scowled, as though angry with himself. "I'm sorry to say that I didn't realize the full potentialities of what he had said for several days--not until I got Frank's first report."

  * * * * *

  "You could hardly be expected to, Mr. President," Frank said. "After all, something like that is pretty heady stuff."

  "I think I follow you," said the Secretary. "You found he was already teaching this trick to others."

  The President glanced at the FBI man. Frank said: "That's right; he was holding meetings--classes, I suppose you'd call them--twice a week. There were eight men who came regularly."

  "That's when I gave the order to have them all picked up. Can you imagine what would happen if everybody could be taught to use this ability? Or even a small minority?"

  "They'd rule the world," said the Secretary softly.

  The President shrugged that off. "That's a small item, really. The point is that nothing would be hidden from anyone.

  "The way we play the Game of Life today is similar to playing poker. We keep a straight face and play the cards tight to our chest. But what would happen if everyone could see everyone else's cards? It would cease to be a game of strategy, and become a game of pure chance.

  * * * * *

  "We'd have to start playing Life another way. It would be like chess, where you can see the opponent's every move. But in all human history there has never been a social analogue for chess. That's why Paul Wendell and his group had to be stopped--for a while at least."

  "But what could you have done with them?" asked the Secretary. "Imprison them summarily? Have them shot? What would you have done?"

  The President's face became graver than ever. "I had not yet made that decision. Thank Heaven, it has been taken out of my hands."

  "One of his own men shot him?"

  "That's right," said the big FBI man. "We went into his apartment an instant too late. We found eight madmen and a near-corpse. We're not sure what happened, and we're not sure we want to know. Anything that can drive eight reasonably stable men off the deep end in less than an hour is nothing to meddle around with."

  "I wonder what went wrong?" asked the Secretary of no one in particular.

  SCHERZO--PRESTO

  Paul Wendell, too, was wondering what went wrong.

  Slowly, over a period of immeasurable time, memory seeped back into him. Bits of memory, here and there, crept in from nowhere, sometimes to be lost again, sometimes to remain. Once he found himself mentally humming an odd, rather funeral tune:

  Now, though you'd have said that the head was dead, For its owner dead was he, It stood on its neck with a smile well-bred, And bowed three times to me. It was none of your impudent, off-hand nods....

  Wendell stopped and wondered what the devil seemed so important about the song.

  Slowly, slowly, memory returned.

  When he suddenly realized, with crashing finality, where he was and what had happened to him, Paul Wendell went violently insane. Or he would have, if he could have become violent.

  MARCHE FUNEBRE--LENTO

  "Open your mouth, Paul," said the pretty nurse. The hulking mass of not-quite-human gazed at her with vacuous eyes and opened its mouth. Dexterously, she spooned a mouthful of baby food into it. "Now swallow it, Paul. That's it. Now another."

  "In pretty bad shape, isn't he?"

  Nurse Peters turned to look at the man who had walked up behind her. It was Dr. Benwick, the new interne.

  "He's worthless to himself and anyone else," she said. "It's a shame, too; he'd be rather nice looking if there were any personality behind that face." She shoveled another spoonful of mashed asparagus into the gaping mouth. "Now swallow it, Paul."

  "How long has he been here?" Benwick asked, eyeing the scars that showed through the dark hair on the patient's head.

  "Nearly six years," Miss Peters said.

  "Hmmh! But they outlawed lobotomies back in the sixties."

  "Open your mouth, Paul." Then, to Benwick: "This was an accident. Bullet in the head. You can see the scar on the other side of his head."

  * * * * *

  The doctor moved around to look at the left temple. "Doesn't leave much of a human being, does it?"

  "It doesn't even leave much of an animal," Miss Peters said. "He's alive, but that's the best you can say for him. (Now swallow, Paul. That's it.) Even an ameba can find food for itself."

  "Yeah. Even a single cell is better off than he is. Chop out a man's forebrain and he's nothing. It's a case of the whole being less than the sum of its parts."

  "I'm glad they outlawed the operation on mental patients," Miss Peters said, with a note of disgust in her voice.

  Dr. Benwick said: "It's worse than it looks. Do you know why the anti-lobotomists managed to get the bill passed?"

  "Let's drink some milk now, Paul. No, Doctor; I was only a little girl at that time."

  "It was a matter of electro-encephalographic records. They showed that there was electrical activity in the prefrontal lobes even after the nerves had been severed, which could mean a lot of things; but the A-L supporters said that it indicated that the forebrain was still capable of thinking."

  Miss Peters looked a little ill. "Why--that's horrible! I wish you'd never told me." She looked at the lump of vegetablized human sitting placidly at the table. "Do you suppose he's actually thinking, somewhere, deep inside?"

  "Oh, I doubt it," Benwick said hastily. "There's probably no real self-awareness, none at all. There couldn't be."

  "I suppose not," Miss Peters said, "but it's not pleasant to think of."

  "That's why they outlawed it," said Benwick.

  RONDO--ANDANTE MA NON POCO

  Insanity is a retreat from reality, an escape within the mind from the reality outside the mind. But what if there is no detectable reality outside the mind? W
hat is there to escape from? Suicide--death in any form--is an escape from life. But if death does not come, and can not be self-inflicted, what then?

  And when the pressure of nothingness becomes too great to bear, it becomes necessary to escape; a man under great enough pressure will take the easy way out. But if there is no easy way? Why, then a man must take the hard way.

  For Paul Wendell, there was no escape from his dark, senseless Gehenna by way of death, and even insanity offered no retreat; insanity in itself is senseless, and senselessness was what he was trying to flee. The only insanity possible was the psychosis of regression, a fleeing into the past, into the crystallized, unchanging world of memory.

  So Paul Wendell explored his past, every year, every hour, every second of it, searching to recall and savor every bit of sensation he had ever experienced. He tasted and smelled and touched and heard and analyzed each of them minutely. He searched through his own subjective thought processes, analyzing, checking and correlating them.

  Know thyself. Time and time again, Wendell retreated from his own memories in confusion, or shame, or fear. But there was no retreat from himself, and eventually he had to go back and look again.

  He had plenty of time--all the time in the world. How can subjective time be measured when there is no objective reality?

  * * * * *

  Eventually, there came the time when there was nothing left to look at; nothing left to see; nothing to check and remember; nothing that he had not gone over in every detail. Again, boredom began to creep in. It was not the boredom of nothingness, but the boredom of the familiar. Imagination? What could he imagine, except combinations and permutations of his own memories? He didn't know--perhaps there might be more to it than that.

  So he exercised his imagination. With a wealth of material to draw upon, he would build himself worlds where he could move around, walk, talk, and make love, eat, drink and feel the caress of sunshine and wind.

  It was while he was engaged in this project that he touched another mind. He touched it, fused for a blinding second, and bounced away. He ran gibbering up and down the corridors of his own memory, mentally reeling from the shock of--identification!

  * * * * *

  Who was he? Paul Wendell? Yes, he knew with incontrovertible certainty that he was Paul Wendell. But he also knew, with almost equal certainty, that he was Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton. He was living--had lived--in the latter half of the nineteenth century. But he knew nothing of the Captain other than the certainty of identity; nothing else of that blinding mind-touch remained.

  Again he scoured his memory--Paul Wendell's memory--checking and rechecking the area just before that semi-fatal bullet had crashed through his brain.

  And finally, at long last, he knew with certainty where his calculations had gone astray. He knew positively why eight men had gone insane.

  Then he went again in search of other minds, and this time he knew he would not bounce.

  QUASI UNA FANTASIA POCO ANDANTE PIANISSIMO

  An old man sat quietly in his lawnchair, puffing contentedly on an expensive briar pipe and making corrections with a fountain pen on a thick sheaf of typewritten manuscript. Around him stretched an expanse of green lawn, dotted here and there with squat cycads that looked like overgrown pineapples; in the distance, screening the big house from the road, stood a row of stately palms, their fronds stirring lightly in the faint, warm California breeze.

  The old man raised his head as a car pulled into the curving driveway. The warm hum of the turboelectric engine stopped, and a man climbed out of the vehicle. He walked with easy strides across the grass to where the elderly gentleman sat. He was lithe, of indeterminate age, but with a look of great determination. There was something in his face that made the old man vaguely uneasy--not with fear but with a sense of deep respect.

  "What can I do for you, sir?"

  "I have some news for you, Mr. President," the younger one said.

  The old man smiled wryly. "I haven't been President for fourteen years. Most people call me 'Senator' or just plain 'Mister'."

  * * * * *

  The younger man smiled back. "Very well, Senator. My name is Camberton, James Camberton. I brought some information that may possibly relieve your mind--or, again, it may not."

  "You sound ominous, Mr. Camberton. I hope you'll remember that I've been retired from the political field for nearly five years. What is this shattering news?"

  "Paul Wendell's body was buried yesterday."

  The Senator looked blank for a second, then recognition came into his face. "Wendell, eh? After all this time. Poor chap; he'd have been better off if he'd died twenty years ago." Then he paused and looked up. "But just who are you, Mr. Camberton? And what makes you think I would be particularly interested in Paul Wendell?"

  "Mr. Wendell wants to tell you that he is very grateful to you for having saved his life, Senator. If it hadn't been for your orders, he would have been left to die."

  The Senator felt strangely calm, although he knew he should feel shock. "That's ridiculous, sir! Mr. Wendell's brain was hopelessly damaged; he never recovered his sanity or control of his body. I know; I used to drop over to see him occasionally, until I finally realized that I was only making myself feel worse and doing him no good."

  [Illustration]

  "Yes, sir. And Mr. Wendell wants you to know how much he appreciated those visits."

  * * * * *

  The Senator grew red. "What the devil are you talking about? I just said that Wendell couldn't talk. How could he have said anything to you? What do you know about this?"

  "I never said he spoke to me, Senator; he didn't. And as to what I know of this affair, evidently you don't remember my name. James Camberton."

  The Senator frowned. "The name is familiar, but--" Then his eyes went wide. "Camberton! You were one of the eight men who--Why, you're the man who shot Wendell!"

  Camberton pulled up an empty lawnchair and sat down. "That's right, Senator; but there's nothing to be afraid of. Would you like to hear about it?"

  "I suppose I must." The old man's voice was so low that it was scarcely audible. "Tell me--were the other seven released, too? Have--have you all regained your sanity? Do you remember--" He stopped.

  "Do we remember the extra-sensory perception formula? Yes, we do; all eight of us remember it well. It was based on faulty premises, and incomplete, of course; but in its own way it was workable enough. We have something much better now."

  The old man shook his head slowly. "I failed, then. Such an idea is as fatal to society as we know it as a virus plague. I tried to keep you men quarantined, but I failed. After all those years of insanity, now the chess game begins; the poker game is over."

  "It's worse than that," Camberton said, chuckling softly. "Or, actually, it's much better."

  "I don't understand; explain it to me. I'm an old man, and I may not live to see my world collapse. I hope I don't."

  Camberton said: "I'll try to explain in words, Senator. They're inadequate, but a fuller explanation will come later."

  And he launched into the story of the two-decade search of Paul Wendell.

  CODA--ANDANTINO

  "Telepathy? Time travel?" After three hours of listening, the ex-President was still not sure he understood.

  "Think of it this way," Camberton said. "Think of the mind at any given instant as being surrounded by a shield--a shield of privacy--a shield which you, yourself have erected, though unconsciously. It's a perfect insulator against telepathic prying by others. You feel you have to have it in order to retain your privacy--your sense of identity, even. But here's the kicker: even though no one else can get in, you can't get out!

  "You can call this shield 'self-consciousness'--perhaps shame is a better word. Everyone has it, to some degree; no telepathic thought can break through it. Occasionally, some people will relax it for a fraction of a second, but the instant they receive something, the barrier goes up again."

  "Then h
ow is telepathy possible? How can you go through it?" The Senator looked puzzled as he thoughtfully tamped tobacco into his briar.

  "You don't go through it; you go around it."

  * * * * *

  "Now wait a minute; that sounds like some of those fourth dimension stories I've read. I recall that when I was younger, I read a murder mystery--something about a morgue, I think. At any rate, the murder was committed inside a locked room; no one could possibly have gotten in or out. One of the characters suggested that the murderer traveled through the fourth dimension in order to get at the victim. He didn't go through the walls; he went around them." The Senator puffed a match flame into the bowl of his pipe, his eyes on the younger man. "Is that what you're driving at?"

  "Exactly," agreed Camberton. "The fourth dimension. Time. You must go back in time to an instant when that wall did not exist. An infant has no shame, no modesty, no shield against the world. You must travel back down your own four-dimensional tube of memory in order to get outside it, and to do that, you have to know your own mind completely, and you must be sure you know it.

  "For only if you know your own mind can you communicate with another mind. Because, at the 'instant' of contact, you become that person; you must enter his own memory at the beginning and go up the hyper-tube. You will have all his memories, his hopes, his fears, his sense of identity. Unless you know--beyond any trace of doubt--who you are, the result is insanity."

  * * * * *

  The Senator puffed his pipe for a moment, then shook his head. "It sounds like Oriental mysticism to me. If you can travel in time, you'd be able to change the past."

  "Not at all," Camberton said; "that's like saying that if you read a book, the author's words will change.

  "Time isn't like that. Look, suppose you had a long trough filled with supercooled water. At one end, you drop in a piece of ice. Immediately the water begins to freeze; the crystallization front moves toward the other end of the trough. Behind that front, there is ice--frozen, immovable, unchangeable. Ahead of it there is water--fluid, mobile, changeable.