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? What 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