One of the men in the conservative suits said: “Louis Pasteur lived through most of his life with only half a brain and he never even knew it, Frank; maybe—”
“Yeah. Maybe,” said the big man. “But I don’t know whether to hope he does or hope he doesn’t.” He used his right thumbnail to pick a bit of microscopic dust from beneath his left index finger, studying the operation without actually seeing it. “Meanwhile, we’ve got to decide what to do about the rest of those screwballs. Wendell was the only sane one, and therefore the most dangerous—but the rest of them aren’t what you’d call safe, either.”
The others nodded in a chorus of silent agreement.
Nocturne—Tempo di valse
“Now what the hell’s the matter with me?” thought Paul Wendell. He could feel nothing. Absolutely nothing: No taste, no sight, no hearing, no anything. “Am I breathing?” He couldn’t feel any breathing. Nor, for that matter, could he feel heat, nor cold, nor pain.
“Am I dead? No. At least, I don’t feel dead. Who am I? What am I?” No answer. Cogito, ergo sum. What did that mean? There was something quite definitely wrong, but he couldn’t quite tell what it was. Ideas seemed to come from nowhere; fragments of concepts that seemed to have no referents. What did that mean? What is a referent? A concept? He felt he knew intuitively what they meant, but what use they were he didn’t know.
There was something wrong, and he had to find out what it was. And he had to find out through the only method of investigation left open to him.
So he thought about it.
Sonata—Allegro con Brio
The President of the United States finished reading the sheaf of papers before him, laid them neatly to one side, and looked up at the big man seated across the desk from him.
“Is this everything, Frank?” he asked.
“That’s everything, Mr. President; everything we know. We’ve got eight men locked up in St. Elizabeth’s, all of them absolutely psychotic, and one human vegetable named Paul Wendell. We can’t get anything out of them.”
The President leaned back in his chair. “I really can’t quite understand it. Extra-sensory perception—why should it drive men insane? Wendell’s papers don’t say enough. He claims it can be mathematically worked out—that he did work it out—but we don’t have any proof of that.”
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