by Anthology
He ignored his parachute. With one final cry of “Catherine! Forgive me!” and an unvoiced hope that he would be found long after it proved impossible to resurrect him, he flung himself, unsupported, into space.
Down he fell and death leapt to meet him. The breath fled from his lungs, his head began to pound, his sight grew dim, but the spikes of black rock grew larger until he knew that he had struck them, for his body was a-flame, broken in a hundred places, and his sad, muddled, doom-clouded brain was chaff upon the wailing breeze. Its last coherent thought was: Let none say Werther did not pay the price in full. And thus did he end his life with a proud negative.
VI. IN WHICH WERTHER DISCOVERS CONSOLATION
“Oh, Werther, what an adventure!”
It was Catherine Gratitude looking down on him as he opened his eyes. She clapped her hands. Her blue eyes were full of joy.
Lord Jagged stood back with a smile. “Re-born, magnificent Werther, to sorrow afresh!” he said.
He lay upon a bench of marble in his own tower. Surrounding the bench were My Lady Charlotina, the Duke of Queens, Gaf the Horse in Tears, the Iron Orchid, Li Pao, O’Kala Incarnadine and many others. They all applauded.
“A splendid drama!” said the Duke of Queens.
“Amongst the best I have witnessed,” agreed the Iron Orchid (a fine compliment from her).
Werther found himself warming to them as they poured their praise upon him; but then he remembered Catherine Gratitude and what he had meant himself to be to her, what he had actually become, and although he felt much better for having paid his price, he stretched out his hand to her, saying again, “Forgive me.”
“Silly Werther! Forgive such a perfect role? No, no! If anyone needs forgiving, then it is I.” And Catherine Gratitude touched one of the many power rings now festooning her fingers and returned herself to her original appearance.
“It is you!” He could make no other response as he looked upon the Everlasting Concubine. “Mistress Christia?”
“Surely you suspected towards the end?” she said. “Was it not everything you told me you wanted? Was it not a fine ‘sin’, Werther?”
“I suffered . . .” he began.
“Oh, yes! How you suffered! It was unparallelled. It was equal, I am sure, to anything in History. And, Werther, did you not find the ‘guilt’ particularly exquisite?”
“You did it for me?” He was overwhelmed. “Because it was what I said I wanted most of all?”
“He is still a little dull,” explained Mistress Christia, turning to their friends. “I believe that is often the case after a resurrection.”
“Often,” intoned Lord Jagged, darting a sympathetic glance at Werther. “But it will pass, I hope.”
“The ending, though it could be anticipated,” said the Iron Orchid, “was absolutely right.”
Mistress Christia put her arms around him and kissed him. “They are saying that your performance rivals Jherek Carnelian’s,” she whispered. He squeezed her hand. What a wonderful woman she was, to be sure, to have added to his experience and to have increased his prestige at the same time.
He sat up. He smiled a trifle bashfully. Again they applauded.
“I can see that this was where ‘Rain’ was leading,” said Bishop Castle. “It gives the whole thing point, I think.”
“The exaggerations were just enough to bring out the essential mood without being too prolonged,” said O’Kala Incarnadine, waving an elegant hoof (he had come as a goat).
“Well, I had not . . .” began Werther, but Mistress Christia put a hand to his lips.
“You will need a little time to recover,” she said.
Tactfully, one by one, still expressing their most fulsome congratulations, they departed, until only Werther de Goethe and the Everlasting Concubine were left.
“I hope you did not mind the deception, Werther,” she said. “I had to make amends for ruining your rainbow and I had been wondering for ages how to please you. My Lady Charlotina helped a little, of course, and Lord Jagged—though neither knew too much of what was going on.”
“The real performance was yours,” he said. “I was merely your foil.”
“Nonsense. I gave you the rough material with which to work. And none could have anticipated the wonderful, consummate use to which you put it!”
Gently, he took her hand. “It was everything I have ever dreamed of,” he said. “It is true, Mistress Christia, that you alone know me.”
“You are kind. And now I must leave.”
“Of course.” He looked out through his window. The comforting storm raged again. Familiar lightnings flickered; friendly thunder threatened; from below there came the sound of his old consoler the furious sea flinging itself, as always, at the rock’s black fangs. His sigh was contented. He knew that their liaison was ended; neither had the bad taste to prolong it and thus produce what would be, inevitably, an anti-climax, and yet he felt regret, as evidently did she.
“If death were only permanent,” he said wistfully, “but it cannot be. I thank you again, granter of my deepest desires.”
“If death,” she said, pausing at the window, “were permanent, how would we judge our successes and our failures? Sometimes, Werther, I think you ask too much of the world.” She smiled. “But you are satisfied for the moment, my love?”
“Of course.”
It would have been boorish, he thought, to have claimed anything else.
PARADOX LOST
Fredric Brown
A blue bottle fly had got in through the screen, somehow, and it droned in monotonous circles around the ceiling of the classroom. Even as Professor Dolohan droned in monotonous circles of logic up at the front of the class. Shorty McCabe, seated in the back row, glanced from one to another of them and finally settled on the bluebottle fly as the more interesting of the two.
“The negative absolute,” said the professor, “is, in a manner of speaking, not absolutely negative. This is only seemingly contradictory. Reversed in order, the two words acquire new connotations. Therefore—”
Shorty McCabe sighed inaudibly and watched the bluebottle fly, and wished that he could fly around in circles like that, and with such a soul-satisfying buzz. In comparative sizes and decibels, a fly made more noise than an airplane.
More noise, in comparison to size, than a buzz saw. Would a buzz saw saw metal? Say, a saw. Then one could say he saw a buzz saw saw a saw. Or leave out the buzz and that would be better: I saw a saw saw a saw. Or, better yet: Sue saw a saw saw a saw.
“One may think,” said the professor, “of an absolute as a mode of being—”
“Yeah,” thought Shorty McCabe, “one may think of anything as anything else, and what does it get you but a headache?” Anyway, the bluebottle fly was becoming more interesting. It was flying down now, toward the front of the classroom, and maybe it would light on Professor Dolohan’s head. And buzz.
No, but it lighted somewhere out of sight behind the professor’s desk. Without the fly for solace, Shorty looked around the classroom for something else to look at or think about. Only the backs of heads; he was alone in the back row, and—well, he could concentrate on how the hair grew on the backs of people’s necks, but it seemed a subject of limited fascination.
He wondered how many of the students ahead of him were asleep, and decided that half of them were; and he wished he could go to sleep himself, but he couldn’t. He’d made the silly mistake of going to bed early the night before and as a result he was now wide awake and miserable.
“But,” said Professor Dolohan, “if we disregard the contravention of probability arising in the statement that the positive absolute is less than absolutely positive, we are led to—” Hooray! The bluebottle fly was back again, rising from its temporary concealment back of the desk. It droned upward to the ceiling, paused there a moment to preen its wings, and then flew down again, this time toward the back of the room.
And if it kept that spiral course, it would go past within
an inch of Shorty’s nose. It did. He went cross-eyed watching it and turned his head to keep it in sight. It flew past and—
It just wasn’t there any more. At a point about twelve inches to the left of Shorty McCabe, it had suddenly quit flying and suddenly quit buzzing, and it wasn’t there. It hadn’t died and hadn’t fallen into the aisle. It had just—
Disappeared. In midair, four feet above the aisle, it had simply ceased to be there. The sound it had made seemed to have stopped in midbuzz, and in the sudden silence the professor’s voice seemed louder, if not funnier.
“By creating, through an assumption contrary to fact, we create a pseudo-real set of axioms which are, in a measure, the reversal of existing—”
Shorty McCabe, staring at the point where the fly had vanished, said “Gaw!”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Sorry, professor. I didn’t speak,” said Shorty. “I . . . I just cleared my throat.”
“—by the reversal of existing—What was I saying? Oh, yes. We create an axiomatic basis of a pseudo-logic which would yield different answers to all problem. I mean—”
Seeing that the professor’s eyes had left him, Shorty turned his head again to look at the point where the fly had ceased to fly. Had ceased, maybe, to be a fly? Nuts; it must have been an optical illusion. A fly went pretty fast. If he’s suddenly lost sight of it—
He shot a look out of the comer of his eye at Professor Dolohan, and made sure that the professor’s attention was focused elsewhere. Then Shorty reached out a tentative hand toward the point, or the approximate point where he’d seen the fly vanish.
He didn’t know what he expected to find there, but he didn’t feel anything at all. Well, that was logical enough. If the fly had flown into nothing and he, Shorty, had reached out and felt nothing, that proved nothing. But, somehow, he was vaguely disappointed. He didn’t know what he’d expected to find; hardly to touch the fly that wasn’t there, or to encounter a solid but invisible obstacle, or anything. But—what had happened to the fly?
Shorty put his hands on the desk and, for a full minute, tried to forget the fly by listening to the professor. But that was worse than wondering about the fly.
For the thousandth time he wondered why he’d ever been such a sap as to enroll in this Logic 2B class. He’d never pass the exam. And he was majoring in paleontology, anyway. He liked paleontology; a dinosaur was something you could get your teeth into, in a manner of speaking. But logic, phooey; 2B or not 2B. And he’d rather study about fossils than listen to one.
He happened to look down at his hands on the desk.
“Gaw!” he said.
“Mr. McCabe?” said the professor.
Shorty didn’t answer; he couldn’t. He was looking at his left hand. There weren’t any fingers on it. He closed his eyes.
The professor smiled a professorial smile. “I believe our young friend in the back seat has . . . uh . . . gone to sleep,” he said. “Will someone please try—”
Shorty hastily dropped his hands into his lap. He said, “I . . . I’m O. K., professor. Sorry. Did you say something?”
“Didn’t you?”
Shorty gulped. “I . . . I guess not.”
“We were discussing,” said the professor—to the class, thank Heaven, and not to Shorty individually—”the possibility of what one might refer to as the impossible. It is not a contradiction in terms for one must distinguish carefully between impossible and un-possible. The latter—”
Shorty surreptitiously put his hands back on the desk and sat there staring at them. The right hand was all right. The left—He closed his eyes and opened them again and still all the fingers of his left hand were missing. They didn’t feel missing.
Experimentally, he wriggled the muscles that ought to move them and he felt them wriggle.
But they weren’t there, as far as his eyes could see. He reached over and felt for them with his right hand—and he couldn’t feel them. His right hand went right through the space that his left-hand fingers ought to occupy, and felt nothing. But still he could move the fingers of his left hand. He did.
It was very confusing.
And then he remembered that was the hand he had used in reaching out toward the place where the bluebottle fly had disappeared. And then, as though to confirm his sudden suspicion, he felt a light touch on one of the fingers that wasn’t there. A light touch, and something light crawling along his finger. Something about the weight of a bluebottle fly. Then the touch vanished, as though it had flown again.
Shorty bit his lips to keep from saying “Gaw!” again. He was getting scared.
Was he going nuts? Or had the professor been right and was he asleep after all? How could he tell? Pinching? With the only available fingers, those of his right hand, he reached down and pinched the skin of his thigh, hard. It hurt. But then if he dreamed he pinched himself, couldn’t he also dream that it hurt?
He turned his head and looked toward his left. There wasn’t anything to see that way; the empty desk across the aisle, the empty desk beyond it, the wall, the window, and blue sky through the pane of glass.
But—
He glanced at the professor and saw that his attention was now on the blackboard where he was marking symbols. “Let N,” said the professor, “equal known infinity, and the symbol a equal the factor of probability.”
Shorty tentatively reached out his left hand again into the aisle and watched it closely. He thought he might as well make sure; he reached out a little farther. The hand was gone. He jerked back his wrist, and sat there sweating.
He was nuts. He had to be nuts.
Again he tried to move his fingers and felt them wriggle very satisfactorily, just as they should have wriggled. They still had feeling, kinetic and otherwise. But—He reached his wrist toward the desk and didn’t feel the desk. He put it in such a position that his hand, if it had been on the end of his wrist, would have had to touch or pass through the desk, but he felt nothing.
Wherever his hand was, it wasn’t on the end of his wrist. It was still out there in the aisle, no matter where he moved his arm. If he got up and walked out of the classroom, would his hand still be out there in the aisle, invisible? And suppose he went a thousand miles away? But that was silly.
But was it any sillier than that his arm should rest here on the desk and his hand be two feet away? The difference in silliness between two feet and a thousand miles was only one of degree.
Was his hand out there?
He took his fountain pen out of his pocket and reached out with his right hand to approximately the point where he thought it was, and—sure enough—he was holding only a part of a fountain pen, half of one. He carefully refrained from reaching any farther, but raised it and brought it down sharply.
It rapped—he felt it—across the missing knuckles of his left hand! That tied it! It so startled him that he let go of the pen and it was gone. It wasn’t on the floor of the aisle. It wasn’t anywhere. It was just gone, and it had been a good five-dollar pen, too.
Gaw! Here he was worrying about a pen when his left hand was missing. What was he going to do about that?
He closed his eyes. “Shorty McCabe,” he said to himself, “you’ve got to think this out logically and figure out how to get your hand back out of whatever that is. You daren’t get scared. Probably you’re asleep and dreaming this, but maybe you aren’t, and, if you aren’t, you’re in a jam. Now let’s be logical. There is a place out there, a plane or something, and you can reach across it or put things across it, but you can’t get them back again.
“Whatever else is on the other side, your left hand is. And your right hand doesn’t know what your left hand is doing because one is here and the other is there, and never the twain shall—Hey, cut it out, Shorty. This isn’t funny”
But there was one thing he could do, and that was find out roughly the size and shape of the—whatever it was. There was a box of paper clips on his desk. He picked up a few in his right han
d and tossed one of them out into the aisle. The paper clip got six or eight inches out into the aisle, and vanished. He didn’t hear it land anywhere.
So far, so good. He tossed one a bit lower; same result. He bent down at his desk, being careful not to lean his head out into the aisle, and skittered a paper clip across the floor out into the aisle, saw it vanish eight inches out. He tossed one a little forward, one a bit backward. The plane extended at least a yard to the front and back, roughly parallel with the aisle itself.
And up? He tossed one upward that arced six feet above the aisle and vanished there. Another one, higher yet and in a forward direction. It described an arc in the air and landed on the head of a girl three seats forward in the next aisle. She started a little and put up a hand to her head.
“Mr. McCabe,” said Professor Dolohan severely, “may I ask if this lecture bores you?”
Shorty jumped. He said, “Y—No, professor. I was just—”
“You were, I noticed, experimenting in ballistics and the nature of a parabola. A parabola, Mr. McCabe, is the curve described by a missile projected into space with no continuing force other than its initial impetus and the force of gravity. Now shall I continue with my original lecture, or would you rather we called you up before the class to demonstrate the nature of paraboloid mechanics for the edification of your fellow students?”
“I’m sorry, professor,” said Shorty. “I was . . . uh . . . I mean I . . . I mean I’m sorry.”
“Thank you, Mr. McCabe. And now”—The professor turned again to the blackboard. “If we let the symbol b represent the degree of unpossiblity, in contradistinction to c—” Shorty stared morosely down at his hands—his hand, rather—in his lap. He glanced up at the clock on the wall over the door and saw that in another five minutes the class period would be over. He had to do something, and do it quickly.