Suite Mentale | Page 3

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 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