Suite Mentale | Page 6

one could possibly have
gotten in or out. One of the characters suggested that the murderer
traveled through the fourth dimension in order to get at the victim. He
didn't go through the walls; he went around them." The Senator puffed
a match flame into the bowl of his pipe, his eyes on the younger man.
"Is that what you're driving at?"
"Exactly," agreed Camberton. "The fourth dimension. Time. You must

go back in time to an instant when that wall did not exist. An infant has
no shame, no modesty, no shield against the world. You must travel
back down your own four-dimensional tube of memory in order to get
outside it, and to do that, you have to know your own mind completely,
and you must be sure you know it.
"For only if you know your own mind can you communicate with
another mind. Because, at the 'instant' of contact, you become that
person; you must enter his own memory at the beginning and go up the
hyper-tube. You will have all his memories, his hopes, his fears, his
sense of identity. Unless you know--beyond any trace of doubt--who
you are, the result is insanity."
* * * * *
The Senator puffed his pipe for a moment, then shook his head. "It
sounds like Oriental mysticism to me. If you can travel in time, you'd
be able to change the past."
"Not at all," Camberton said; "that's like saying that if you read a book,
the author's words will change.
"Time isn't like that. Look, suppose you had a long trough filled with
supercooled water. At one end, you drop in a piece of ice. Immediately
the water begins to freeze; the crystallization front moves toward the
other end of the trough. Behind that front, there is ice--frozen,
immovable, unchangeable. Ahead of it there is water--fluid, mobile,
changeable.
"The instant we call 'the present' is like that crystallization front. The
past is unchangeable; the future is flexible. But they both exist."
"I see--at least, I think I do. And you can do all this?"
"Not yet," said Camberton; "not completely. My mind isn't as strong as
Wendell's, nor as capable. I'm not the--shall we say--the superman he is;
perhaps I never will be. But I'm learning--I'm learning. After all, it took
Paul twenty years to do the trick under the most favorable

circumstances imaginable."
"I see." The Senator smoked his pipe in silence for a long time.
Camberton lit a cigaret and said nothing. After a time, the Senator took
the briar from his mouth and began to tap the bowl gently on the heel
of his palm. "Mr. Camberton, why do you tell me all this? I still have
influence with the Senate; the present President is a protégé of mine. It
wouldn't be too difficult to get you men--ah--put away again. I have no
desire to see our society ruined, our world destroyed. Why do you tell
me?"
* * * * *
Camberton smiled apologetically. "I'm afraid you might find it a little
difficult to put us away again, sir; but that's not the point. You see, we
need you. We have no desire to destroy our present culture until we
have designed a better one to replace it.
"You are one of the greatest living statesmen, Senator; you have a
wealth of knowledge and ability that can never be replaced; knowledge
and ability that will help us to design a culture and a civilization that
will be as far above this one as this one is above the wolf pack. We
want you to come in with us, help us; we want you to be one of us."
"I? I'm an old man, Mr. Camberton. I will be dead before this
civilization falls; how can I help build a new one? And how could I, at
my age, be expected to learn this technique?"
"Paul Wendell says you can. He says you have one of the strongest
minds now existing."
The Senator put his pipe in his jacket pocket. "You know, Camberton,
you keep referring to Wendell in the present tense. I thought you said
he was dead."
Again Camberton gave him the odd smile. "I didn't say that, Senator; I
said they buried his body. That's quite a different thing. You see, before
the poor, useless hulk that held his blasted brain died, Paul gave the

eight of us his memories; he gave us himself. The mind is not the brain,
Senator; we don't know what it is yet, but we do know what it isn't.
Paul's poor, damaged brain is dead, but his memories, his thought
processes, the very essence of all that was Paul Wendell is still very
much with us.
"Do you begin to see now why we want you to