The Man Who Came Back
The doctor to whose care Lindquist had been consigned was named Martinez. He was a little guy who looked as if he ought to be smiling all the time. He wasn’t smiling now.
“How is he?” Jenny asked. Pure ritual.
“The same,” Martinez told her, inevitably.
No better, no worse. How much worse could the poor bastard get? He just lay there, looking every inch a cadaver. No engagement whatsoever with his body. Blank features, blank eyes, absolute stillness. There was a silver helmet on his head which was connected to a computer input. Across the room was a console with a plotter and line printer. The chatter of the printer had been gagged so that it did no more than murmur, but the plotter had been able to keep its occasional click. And click it did, about three times a minute, to testify that Johnny Lindquist was still in there somewhere and could still flick a pointer with the best of them.
“Look at the plot,” said Jenny.
The paper was hanging down to the floor and rolling up. I tore off a strip and inspected it. I saw more or less what I’d expected to see. Big, slow deltas.
“So?” I said.
“Never mind the waves,” she said. “Look at the subplots.”
The subplots were the resonance currents — the traces which correlated best with the cytoanalogues in the brain — the life of the mind. It was impossible to track each neurone block, of course — even the helmet hadn’t that much ambition — and a lot of incomplete patterns and ephemeral patterns didn’t register, but the resonance finder went down deep — well below the crude frequency-sort into alpha, beta, and so on.
The real analysis would be coming out of the line printer, but you can usually gather a good idea of what’s going on and what’s not from a brisk scan of the trained eye through the subplots. My eye, of course, wasn’t trained.
“What can you see?” asked Hurst, who was suitably impressed by the clinical complexity of the operation.
I felt obliged to pretend so as not to disillusion the poor boy. I was surprised to find that I could make some sort of sense of it. I hadn’t forgotten everything.
“Normal paleocortical activity,” I said. “But with no knowledge of the mind-code it’s difficult to see . . . is he right-handed?”
“Yes.” It was Martinez who answered.
“Well, the impulses from the left neocortex are considerably different from those in the right. The fields are unbalanced — the right half is depleted. So if the left neocortex correlates with right-handedness he’s not making a lot of use of his learning. If his cytoarchitecture is stacked normally he’s a very active little lad inside his skull. The pons is cutting out all the bodily responses, though — not even a twitch.”
“You’re missing the point,” said Jenny. I wasn’t surprised.
“So okay,” I said. “Did we come here to play guessing games? You’re the one with the mind-reading license. It’s only a hobby with me.”
“Will,” she said.
“How’s that?”
“He no longer has free will.”
I looked back at the trace. “Am I supposed to be able to read that?”
She shook her head, with slight impatience. “You can’t read it,” she said. “But it can be deduced.”
“Yeah, well,” I murmured, still ardently searching the trace for clues, “I guess I failed the exam.”
Will is a modifier capable of altering the spatiotemporal activity of the neuronal network by exerting fields of analogue-predilection that become effective via the reactive properties of the vital cortex. There are two ways it can fail: if the modifying principle breaks down, or if the reactivity of the cortex is depressed. Either way you get an instant zombie.
I couldn’t find a thing. I dropped the trace.
“Let’s stop messing around,” I said. “Is the printout intelligible?”
Martinez carefully tore off the pages of the line printer output, which were stacking themselves politely on the shelf provided for just that purpose. He passed them over to me without comment.
I looked at the garbage, trying to make sense out of computer jargon for the first time in several years, finding it harder than looking at graphs. I couldn’t see a thing.
“It’s all Greek to me,” I said. “Just gibberish.”
“Perfect score,” said Jenny. “Not many people spot that. Most of them ask me what it means.”
“What does it mean?” I asked.
“Now you’ve spoiled it. You were right the first time. It is gibberish.”
“What’s the point of having the computer turn out gibberish?” I asked, reasonably enough.
“The computer is programmed to make sense,” she told me. “It has the decode process that we worked out before we sent him up operating quite normally.”
I thought for a minute. “You’re saying that his personality has been completely disintegrated?”
“No.”
I gave vent to a quick snort of exasperation. “Then he’s got himself a whole new private language. He’s acting out fantasies that bear no relation to his old reality. A sort of metamorphosis of the mind.”
“That’s right. We think his mind has suffered a kind of perspective-inversion. His viewpoint was turned inside out, if you like. If before we consider him to have been inside himself, looking out, using an inner ego to act as arbiter and interpreter, then now he’s outside himself, looking in, using an external — or at any rate totally different — ego to act as arbiter.”
“How can he be outside himself?” asked Hurst, who was lost several minutes back, but was still trying valiantly to take an interest.
“You think he formed a new ego because his old one wasn’t up to it?” I asked.
“What else can we think?” asked Jenny, rhetorically. “Johnny was a sane man. A very sane man. He was what one might call a counter-solipsist. A solipsist thinks that everything else is a figment of his imagination. Johnny, though, thought everything else was solidly, dramatically real. The solipsist can account for everything — he need never lack an explanation. But Johnny could exist only in the one reality-context. He had a strong mind — a very strong mind. But it was like a diamond — brittle. Uncrushable, but quite easily shattered.
“Johnny thought he was a unit of a universe. He hardly had any concept of self that was independent of that universe framework. In a different framework, which is obviously what he found in tachyonic phase — how could he adapt? What chance had he? But you, now — your concept of self is very different from Johnny’s. It doesn’t matter whether either of you was right or wrong, sane or insane — those things are relative to context. We’re now beyond context, and it’s your mind that is definitely the more useful. Understand, I’m not saying that Johnny was sane here and insane there, while you’ll be sane there but insane here. Certainly not. You’ll be as insane relative to the tachyonic context as you are to the Earthly context. But you have the flexibility. You have the adaptability. You see what I mean?”
“In a word,” I said, “maybe.”
“In hyperspace,” she said, quite patient, because she was sure of her ground and could restate her case any number of ways, “the sane structures of Johnny’s mind became useless. They shattered, were thrown out. The same thing would have happened if a mind which was ‘sane’ relative to the tachyonic phase was suddenly precipitated into the slower-than-light phase. Sane minds are narrow minds. But a mind which allows for other reality-contexts as a matter of course is a different matter. It’s ‘insane’ relative to any particular context, because it’s badly adapted — a bad fit — but it can make some sort of adjustment to almost any context — if, that is, it can make adjustments at all. Your mind has adjusted to here; there’s no reason it can’t also adjust to there. You won’t be sane — I’m certainly not saying that your schizoid view of reality is any more true than Johnny’s normal one was. But it’s the view we need. If we’re right — and you can prove us right or wrong very soon now — space travel is for schizoids. Socially adjusted schizoids only, because it’s just as bad to be a dogmatic schizophrenic as to be a dogmatic realist, but for schizoids, nevertheless.”
“And ain’t that a laugh?” I said, still looking at the printout. “But I don’t see why it prints out anything at all. Why gibberish? Why not question marks?”
“It’s not the same sort of program that was built from your model,” said Martinez. “Your program is to assign keywords to patterns and thus gives us a picture of what you’re thinking about and the patterns of change that occur. This program assigns letters and not words, so that something comes out even when no keyword in the vocabulary is applicable. We search for patterns in the letters — new, synthesized ‘words’ and frequencies of juxtaposition.”
“You’re trying to decipher his mind from pure theory?” I said. “I’ve heard of ambition, but . . .”
“We have his old model as well,” said Martinez. “It may help. And we’ve come a long way since your initial breakthrough. There are theories about universal patterns and tendencies to make assignations in particular ways. Also, of course, we have some theories about reality-structures now that we didn’t have earlier in the Project.”
“Yeah,” I said, “but theory is theory is . . .”
“We have a pure mind there,” said Jenny. “The only one we’ve ever seen. A virgin mind, untroubled by heredity and conditioning. That’s human nature, coming out of that computer. Johnny is a valuable commodity.”
“Sure as hell,” I said, with aggressive sarcasm. “Very valuable. To whom? To him? Very valuable indeed. And I suppose your machines will keep him alive till he’s five hundred, considering he’s not about to do anything ill-advised that might jeopardize his health, like living? We’ve got men in Block C like that — you try hitching Bedbug to your machines. He’s pure human nature, too. Dead from the neck up and the waist down.”
“You could put it that way,” said Jenny flatly, forestalling Martinez. She knew me.
“I’ve heard of taking arms against a sea of troubles,” I said, “and by opposing . . . well, you know the rest. But do you honestly believe that you can send me into chaos — a mariner drowning in a sea of troubles — in order that I can make some sort of sense out of it? Order out of chaos? Who am I, God?”
“No.” The denial came from Martinez.
“Just an impure case of human nature,” I said, dryly.
“Anything God could do . . .” commented Hurst. I guess ten minutes without an inane remark must have been pushing his record fairly close.
“Thank you,” I said. “Faith is a wonderful thing.”
I looked again at the trace that was telling the story of Lindquist’s mind. If you set a monkey to producing random letters in a sequence, rumor has it that he will one day present you with a copy of the complete works of Somerset Maugham. You can see why no one’s bothered to try the experiment. What was Lindquist going to produce? the skylark of space? a la recherche du temps perdu? catch a falling star and put it in your pocket?
None of them. If he tried really hard, the net production of his thirty score and ten years might be the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog. Complete with typographical errors.
“Do me a favor,” I said. “If I come back like that, put me in a glass box and put me in the foyer of a strip club. Don’t let me fall as low as this.”
“You won’t come back like that,” said Jenny.
“Well if I don’t, put Hurst in the glass box instead. He’s the guy who gets to be me if I don’t, isn’t he?”
I don’t think Hurst liked the idea.
I left Lindquist to his private agony. Jenny stayed behind. Hurst followed me, dogging my footsteps like the avenging angel.
“You remind me of an old joke,” I told him.
“Which one?” he wanted to know.
“You’re never alone with schizophrenia.”