Suite Mentale Read online

Secretary. "You found he was alreadyteaching this trick to others."

  The President glanced at the FBI man. Frank said: "That's right; he washolding 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 youimagine what would happen if _everybody_ could be taught to use thisability? 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 pointis that _nothing_ would be hidden from _anyone_.

  "The way we play the Game of Life today is similar to playing poker. Wekeep a straight face and play the cards tight to our chest. But whatwould happen if everyone could see everyone else's cards? It would ceaseto 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 historythere has never been a social analogue for chess. That's why PaulWendell and his group had to be stopped--for a while at least."

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

  The President's face became graver than ever. "I had not yet made thatdecision. 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 aninstant too late. We found eight madmen and a near-corpse. We're notsure what happened, and we're not sure we want to know. Anything thatcan drive eight reasonably stable men off the deep end in less than anhour 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 belost again, sometimes to remain. Once he found himself mentally hummingan 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 aboutthe song.

  Slowly, slowly, memory returned.

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

  MARCHE FUNEBRE--LENTO

  "Open your mouth, Paul," said the pretty nurse. The hulking mass ofnot-quite-human gazed at her with vacuous eyes and opened its mouth.Dexterously, she spooned a mouthful of baby food into it. "Now swallowit, 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. Itwas 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 behindthat face." She shoveled another spoonful of mashed asparagus into thegaping mouth. "Now swallow it, Paul."

  "How long has he been here?" Benwick asked, eyeing the scars that showedthrough 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. Bulletin 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 muchof a human being, does it?"

  "It doesn't even leave much of an animal," Miss Peters said. "He'salive, 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'sforebrain and he's nothing. It's a case of the whole being _less_ thanthe sum of its parts."

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

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

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

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

  Miss Peters looked a little ill. "Why--that's _horrible_! I wish you'dnever told me." She looked at the lump of vegetablized human sittingplacidly at the table. "Do you suppose he's actually _thinking_,somewhere, deep inside?"

  "Oh, I doubt it," Benwick said hastily. "There's probably no realself-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 thereality outside the mind. But what if there is no detectable realityoutside the mind? What is there to escape from? Suicide--death in anyform--is an escape from life. But if death does not come, and can not beself-inflicted, what then?

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

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

  So Paul Wendell explored his past, every year, every hour, every secondof it, searching to recall and savor every bit of sensation he had everexperienced. He tasted and smelled and touched and heard and analyzedeach of them minutely. He searched through his own subjective thoughtprocesses, analyzing, checking and correlating them.

  _Know thyself._ Time and time again, Wendell retreated from his ownmemories in confusion, or shame, or fear. But there was no retreat fromhimself, and eventually he had to go back and look again.

  He had plenty of time--all the time in the world. How can subjectivetime 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 hadnot gone over in every detail. Again, boredom began to creep in. It wasnot the boredom of nothingness, but the boredom of the familiar.Imagination? What could he imagine, except combinations and permutationsof his own memories? He didn't know--perhaps there might be more to itthan 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 anothermind. He touched it, fused for a blinding second, and bounced away. Heran gibbering up and down the corridors of his own memory, mentallyreeling from the shock of--_identification_!

  * * * * *

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

  Again he scoured his memory--Paul Wendell's memory--checking andrechecking the area just before that semi-fatal bullet had crashedthrough his brain.

  And finally, at long last, he knew with certainty where his calculationshad 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 hewould not bounce.

  QUASI UNA FANTASIA POCO ANDANTE PIANISSIMO

  An old man sat quietly in his lawnchair, puffing contentedly on anexpensive briar pipe and making corrections with a