The Second Randall Garrett Megapack. Randall Garrett

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      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? 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 СКАЧАТЬ