by Fritz Leiber
“Anyone tracing him would have thought he was a dozen different people,” Jack couldn’t help interrupting, relieved to be able to grin at something.
“He told me about that too,” Joan Miles said rapidly. “Eventually he came to think of the matches mostly as people—or actors on a stage, rather with the matchbook cover their backdrop. The trick was to tear them out in such a way that you’d always have an effectively balanced stage, though that consideration only became apparent, mostly, when they’d got thinned down in numbers—”
Mr. Sarcander’s small brusque shrug gave his evaluation of such matchbook charades.
Dr. Lewison leaned forward a little. “But the strongest indication by far,” he said, “of Guy’s obsession with counting and the fascination small numbers held for him, was when he gave up chess for backgammon. In that game you’re constantly counting and you’re always juggling small numbers in your head, combining and recombining them as you hunt your move. In a way the largest number you work with is six, because there is none higher on a single die.
“One of the reasons (he told me) he made the change,” the doctor continued, “was that he’d come to think that backgammon is much more like real life than chess is. In chess you’re operating in an ideal universe where all the laws and forces are known to you and you control half of the pieces. You can make the most far-reaching and elaborate plans and nothing can upset them but your adversary. But in backgammon blind chance enters the picture on each move, at every throw of the dice. There are no certainties, only possibilities and probabilities. You can’t plan in the same way as in chess. All you can do is make your arrangements so that whatever comes, good or (more often it always seems) bad, you can best endure it or take advantage of it.” His voice was growing more animated. “It exemplifies the Pythagorean injunction: Believe that anything that can happen in the world can happen to you. You can only fight on for victory or survival, while chance rains down its blows unendingly.” He took a deep breath and settled back.
“He once told me another dream he had,” Jack Penrose broke in. “He was on this rather large flat square roof that seemed strangely familiar. It had a parapet a little less than waist high. There was also a wall the same height that went across the middle of the roof, dividing it into equal rectangles—later in the dream he figured it was the roofs of two buildings the same height and shape abutting each other, because the central wall was thicker with a crack down its middle and when he had to cross over that wall (as he did several times in the dream, moving rapidly) he was always afraid there’d be nothing on the other side or that something else drastic would happen.
“It was night with a heavy overcast pressing down and a biting wind that blew irregular splatters of rain, but enough light leaked up from the streets so that he could make out his surroundings. He was wearing some sort of dark gray uniform—it felt uncomfortable and harsh to the skin, like a uniform—but without any insignia he could discover.
“He wasn’t alone. In fact, there were quite a few other people on the roof, but they were all crouched down against the outer walls (or at least along three of those walls) just as was himself, some of them alone, some in pairs and small huddles, so that he couldn’t see them any too well. In fact, during his whole dream he never got to look one of them in the face—or address a single word to any of them, or they to him—though later on he occasionally got comfort, or at least a sense of safety, from being close to one of them and moving side by side together without their ever looking at each other. They all seemed to be wearing the same sort of nondescript gray uniform as his own, only quite a few of them—about half, in fact—were wearing uniforms of a lighter shade of gray; being near one of the latter never gave him a sense of reassurance.
“Most of the time all of these figures held very still, though watching each other closely, he supposed, as he was doing. But every so often a couple of them would scurry-crawl along the wall they were huddled against for a short (or sometimes quite long) distance and then as suddenly hold still again. If one of them had to cross the central will in the course of his crawling rush, he’d hump over it as swiftly as he could through the chill swooping wind, always keeping a low profile. It struck him that their actions were a lot like those of soldiers practicing to advance across a broken field under enemy fire.
“And every once in a while he’d get the overpowering urge to do likewise. He’d crawl as fast and inconspicuously as he could for as long as he felt the urge. When it left him he’d hold still wherever he happened to be, alone or beside others, but always as close to the wall as he could get. That part was like musical chairs, he said, except there was no music to tell you when to start and stop. It was only the urge that gave you those orders.
“He noticed that the dream soldiers in lighter gray always moved in one direction along and around the walls, while he and the ones in the same darker uniforms always advanced in the opposite direction. When opposing soldiers neared or went past each other, the sense of peril increased. Whenever the light gray soldiers moved, especially if he were alone against the wall, he’d huddle down, trying to hide his head, in horrid anticipation, of one of them landing on his back or just so much as touching him.
“Yet whenever in spite of all his efforts that did happen, there wouldn’t be any terrible pain or shock such as he anticipated, but only a break in the dream, a momentary black-out, after which he’d be back at the point where the dream had started, or near it, and all that crawling and terrified crouching in the dark windy wet to do again, and no comfort except sometimes a like-uniformed faceless gray soldier to crouch against, shoulder to shoulder.
“It was only when he’d at last made it all the way around and was huddled down with all the other dark gray dream soldiers and they began without warning to vanish two by two (yes, just like that) that he finally realized he was part of a backgammon game being played with living, feeling men—like chess played with living pieces who didn’t know they were that. And as he waited his unpredictable turn to be borne off (vanished), there began to build up in him a fear and a pressure—”
Jack snapped his fingers as he broke off. “Pressure!” he said, “—that’s what I was trying to remember. Once, apropos of nothing special, maybe we’d been talking about science fiction, certainly not backgammon, Mr. Manning asked me if I’d ever had the feeling of being under a kind of pressure that would suddenly squeeze me out of the world altogether, shoot me away in any direction like an apple seed or—”
“—or just melt away into space-time,” Joan murmured.
“Seriously, Joan,” Jack asked her, “how could something like awareness melt away into the material?”
“Everything has an awareness side, even the atoms, else reality wouldn’t balance out. Mr. Manning once said that. And I remember another thing he told me—that a person ought always keep a packed suitcase handy, in case he were called away at short notice. Only I don’t remember whether he said he followed his own advice.”
Mr. Breen broke in. He’d been listening to everything with the same worried, hunting look. “I seem to remember there always used to be a little suitcase at the foot of his bed,” he said. “And it’s not there now.” He continued to look worried and puzzled.
“After you found his keys,” Jack addressed him, “I went up and searched every inch of the roof. I found three items that could have been Mr. Manning’s—a backgammon doubling cube, a lens cap that fitted his binoculars, and a matchbook with five matches left in a pattern of two side by side, one alone, and two one space apart.
“There’s five of us,” Breen groped. He touched the side of his head and winced his eyes. “I knew I’d remember,” he said guiltily. “When I found the keys they were on a scrap of paper, holding it down. I started to pick the paper up too, though I never thought it might be important then, but it blew off the roof. It was ragged along one side, like it was torn out of a spiral notebook. I think it had writing on it, tiny capitals.”
They look
ed around at each other for a while. Then, as though by common consent, they went up to the roof together and watched the rising of the Loner’s Moon, which is also often called the Overlapper, linking each year with the next.
THOUGHT
“So, you see, there is no thought I cannot catch.”
Harborford’s chin jutted arrogantly as he said it. He looked rather like a Napoleon of the mental realms, with gray thought-tracings instead of maps scattered across the desk in front of him and showing ghostlike and gigantic in the sunlit projection space behind. Yet mingled with the arrogance was a sincerity that made it difficult to take—or at least to show—offense.
Blacklaw was up against this difficulty.
“That’s a large statement,” he remarked. “I should think there would always be some cases—”
“No!” Harborford’s stumpy hand thumped the pile of tracings, then seized one and pointed at an oddly humped trace which stood out plainly from the shadowy pattern. “See, even when you were thinking that I could not catch your thought, I caught that thought!”
Blacklaw grinned woefully. “I’ll admit you plucked out some of my hiddenmost secrets,” he said. “An amazing performance, considering the brief time you had for orientation. Still, I have the feeling that you’d eventually run up against certain insurmountable difficulties. It’s an elusive point I’m trying to make. I don’t know quite how to express it, because—”
“Because it’s a false point,” Harborford interrupted conclusively. “If I had you back in the projectorium, that would become obvious at once. You could see the inconsistency indications, the breakage lines signifying illogic, for yourself. No, I’m afraid humanity must face the fact that, given time and the proper facilities for research, there is not one of its thoughts which I cannot ferret out.” He sat down.
Blacklaw followed his example. He felt a twinge of regret which did not show in his lean, mobile face. It was beginning to look as if he would have to use Harborford’s dogmatic challenge for the theme of his article, even though the resultant product would resemble primitive twentieth-century journalism. He had rather hoped to do something quieter for the Newsbeam.
He brushed aside these considerations. “Let me see if I have the general outlines straight. Don’t want to pull any boners, though of course I’ll send you a transcript for corrections before we beam it.” Harborford nodded gravely. “Well, as I understand it, thought involves changes of electrical potential throughout the brain. These changes interfere with the uniform sub-photonic beam passing through the subject’s brain and are eventually projected as a pattern of grays.”
“Making use of the technique of beam-amplification which has revolutionized astronomy,” Harborford reminded him.
“Yes. Well, then doesn’t a lot depend on the angle from which you take the projection? Wouldn’t an arbitrary change in the angle at which the beam passes through the subject’s brain make the resultant tracing almost unrecognizable?”
“Only in the case of two-dimensional tracings. Kesserik, would you—” Harborford motioned to the dark, wiry man at the far end of the room. He manipulated some controls. It became black. In the empty space beyond Harborford’s desk, a mistiness became apparent, took on thickness, manifested itself as a dome-shaped dancing of lights and shadows.
Harborford stood up. To Blacklaw he was a stubby, square shouldered silhouette, from which came a didactic voice.
“There are, you see, not one, but a series of beams. Each focuses one potential plane in the brain, and one only. These planes are projected as a packet, building up a three-dimensional picture. Very much as, in primitive television, a two-dimensional picture was built from single points of light.”
He walked back from Blacklaw until he was in the shadowy dome. Then he turned around. A constantly altering flicker illumined his chinny face.
“I am now standing in such a three-dimensional picture. Dark light, timed to explode into visibility at an exact distance from the projector, does away with the need for a series of screens. The picture is not directly projected, of course, from a human brain present with us now, but from one of the multi-level films made in the projectorium. It comes, however, to the same thing.” He spread his arms wide. “I am standing, as it were, in the midst of a thinking human brain. Each flicker is a nerve discharge, or a thought-pattern, or a conscious thought. And I can interpret every one of them. Nothing is hidden—not the faintest twinge of feeling or the subtlest hint of an idea.”
His voice was triumphant and raw with emotion, as if all this were very important to him in an intensely personal way. Blacklaw wondered why. As before, he was both impressed and repelled. Bathed in that swirling flicker, Harborford seemed like some evil gnome that had crept into the human brain to strut and mock. Blacklaw knew this was a foolish feeling, yet it was so.
The flicker dwindled. Sunlight returned. The dark, wiry man, who seemed faintly bored, went back to a desk at the far end of the room.
Harborford said, “So, you see, the three-dimensional picture is basic. Two-dimensionals, however, are convenient for reference and comparison. In them the packet of planes is compressed into one plane, with the resultant blending effect. They are generally taken from a frontal position, to insure uniformity.”
Blacklaw frowned. He said, “I think I understand that part of it now. But that only leaves you with a very complex and shadowy pattern of grays. I don’t quite see—”
Harborford bridled. “A pattern which we can analyze down to the last detail. We can pick out and follow an individual thought-trace as readily as a trained musician, listening to a symphony, can recognize the note of a single instrument—or its pattern in a sound track.”
“I didn’t make myself clear. Analysis still only leaves you with a pattern of tracings, meaningless by themselves. It’s in the interpretation of the tracings that I’d think there’d be room for error.”
“Not at all.” Harborford was dogmatic. “While the tracings are being made, the subject is presented with various stimuli—pictures, words, and so forth—and he gives us a verbal account of his thought, which is recorded. Stimuli and account are afterwards correlated with the tracings. In a single instance, error or deception would be possible. But when the instances are multiplied, when the same ground is covered again and again, any such possibility cancels out. We know the thought back of each individual trace and can identify it whenever it reappears—whether in the median size and dark gray of a sensation, the light gray of a memory, the isolated black pattern of a so-called unconscious thought, or the large and comprehensive pattern of an abstraction or generalization.”
He warmed to his subject. “The whole logical process is open to our view, just as if it were diagramed on a blackboard. For example, you have in mind the knowledge of individual houses and also the general idea ‘house’. The former would show as a set of similar small traces, the latter as a large trace covering them all and growing from them—a kind of magnified composite photograph. Similarly, we can identify the traces representing the subject’s knowledge of a scientific law and the instances of that law. Most important, if one of the instances does not agree with the law and therefore tends to be suppressed, we can spot it at once—the inconsistency indications are very marked. Ultimately, all scientists and thinkers of any consequence will have their thought processes checked at frequent intervals. In this way they will become truly infallible thinking machines. All cloudiness and freakishness will be eliminated from human thought.”
Harborford leaned back and smiled at Blacklaw. His voice was easier now and friendly, marked by that sincerity which tempered his arrogance. “Of course, each person requires detailed study. The brain is very plastic with regard to which set of neurons does which job. Fairly similar thought patterns may mean quite different things in two individuals. Although, after spending years in interpreting tracings, one acquires an amazing knack of catching on to the patterns of a new mind. You saw what I was able to do in your case.”
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br /> Blacklaw rehearsed his woeful grin.
“However,” Harborford continued, leaning forward, stubby finger tapping the pile of tracings strewn across his desk, “there is in the long run no substitute for detailed study of a single individual—sessions running over months and years, until you can interpret every twist and turn of his mind. I have literally hundreds of miles of taped files on single cases.” His expression grew suddenly angry and bitter. “Unfortunately I have been rather unlucky in my choice of subjects for detailed study. Each one of them found some excuse to break off the sessions, just as I was getting to know their minds completely.” His voice became heavily sarcastic. “They professed to be afraid of losing individuality, of becoming mere mental guinea pigs. They developed or claimed to develop, a wholly unreasoning terror—as if I were some primitive medicine-man trying to trap their souls.” He laughed harshly. “Fortunately, I have at least one subject on whom my files are complete—myself. For years now there has not been a single thought-trace taken from my mind that I could not immediately interpret.”
For a moment Blacklaw wrestled with the image of Harborford intently studying his thoughts both from inside and out, hour after hour. Then he said, “I believe I can understand the attitude of your subjects. I don’t imagine they were insincere. After all, privacy is something that most people prize highly—mental as well as physical. There’s something terrible in the thought of not having at least one corner of your mind wholly your own, to which you can retreat.”
“Superstition!” Harborford said harshly. “A reversion to primitive attitudes—the secrecy of the hunted or hunting beast! An outcropping of that illogic and lack of realism which has at regular intervals vitiated the progress of human thought—under the guise of mysticism, intuitionalism, inspirationalism, or some other nonsense! Fear of science’s light! But I have ended all that.”