Suite Mentale | Page 4

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