Suite Mentale, Randall Garrett [web based ebook reader .txt] 📗
- Author: Randall Garrett
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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."
"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 how 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.
"The instant we call 'the present' is like that crystallization front. The past is unchangeable; the future is flexible. But they both exist."
"I see—at least, I think I do. And you can do all this?"
"Not yet," said Camberton; "not completely. My mind isn't as strong as Wendell's, nor as capable. I'm not the—shall we say—the superman he is; perhaps I never will be. But I'm learning—I'm learning. After all, it took Paul twenty years to do the trick under the most favorable circumstances imaginable."
"I see." The Senator smoked his pipe in silence for a long time. Camberton lit a cigaret and said nothing. After a time, the Senator took the briar from his mouth and began to tap the bowl gently on the heel of his palm. "Mr. Camberton, why do you tell me all this? I still have influence with the Senate; the present President is a protégé of mine. It wouldn't be too difficult to get you men—ah—put away again. I have no desire to see our society ruined, our world destroyed. Why do you tell me?"
CAMBERTON smiled apologetically. "I'm afraid you might find it a little difficult to put us away again, sir; but that's not the point. You see, we need you. We have no desire to destroy our present culture until we have designed a better one to replace it.
"You are one of the greatest living statesmen, Senator; you have a wealth of knowledge and ability that can never be replaced; knowledge and ability that will help us to design a culture and a civilization that will be as far above this one as this one is above the wolf pack. We want you to come in with us, help us; we want you to be one of us."
"I? I'm an old man, Mr. Camberton. I will be dead before this civilization falls; how can I help build a new one? And how could I, at my age, be expected to learn this technique?"
"Paul Wendell says you can. He says you have one of the strongest minds now existing."
The Senator put his pipe in his jacket pocket. "You know, Camberton, you keep referring to Wendell in the present tense. I thought you said he was dead."
Again Camberton gave him the odd smile. "I didn't say that, Senator; I said they buried his body. That's quite a different thing. You see, before the poor, useless hulk that held his blasted brain died, Paul gave the eight of us his memories; he gave us himself. The mind is not the brain, Senator; we don't know what it is yet, but we do know what it isn't. Paul's poor, damaged brain is dead, but his memories, his thought processes, the very essence of all that was Paul Wendell is still very much with us.
"Do you begin to see now why we want you to come in with us? There are nine of us now, but we need the tenth—you. Will you come?"
"I—I'll have to think it over," the old statesman said in a voice that had a faint quaver. "I'll have to think it over."
But they both knew what his answer would be.
Transcriber's Note:
This etext was produced from Future Science Fiction No. 30, 1956. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note.
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