The Paradox Men Read online

  “Stop!” cried Shey, hurrying up with his other four guards.

  Alar bit his lip indecisively. He had evidently lost the gamble. If Shey planned to have him killed on the spot, he should try to break past the swordsmen on the ramp into the solarion. A means of escape might open up in the resulting confusion. Undoubtedly Miles would not submit tamely to Shey’s forcible invasion.

  “Don’t harm that man!” called Shey. “He’s not the one.”

  He had done it.

  “Well, Dr. Talbot,” giggled Shey, “what is the Toynbeean opinion of life in a solarion on this July twentieth?”

  Alar pushed himself away from the table in Shey’s private dining room and stroked his false goatee thoughtfully. His smile held a faint curl. “My first thought, sir, is that it is most generous of you to volunteer for such risky duty.”

  Shey frowned, then giggled. “A last-minute whim really. Originally I was merely trying to contact a chap on Lunar Station…” He uttered a puzzled, gurgling bray evidently intended as a laugh. “But then I had this sudden conviction that I should try to help these poor devils on Solarion Nine. And here I am.”

  Alar shook his head. “Actually, Count, I’m afraid they’re beyond aid. I’ve been here only forty-eight hours, but I’ve come to the conclusion that a sixty-day shift in a solarion ruins a man for life. He comes in fresh and sane. He leaves insane.”

  “I agree, doctor, but doesn’t this deterioration in the individual have a larger significance to a Toynbeean?”

  “Very possibly,” admitted the Thief judicially. “But first, let us examine a society of some thirty souls, cast away from the mother culture and cooped up in a solarion. Vast dangers threaten on every side. If the Fraunhofer man should fail to catch an approaching calcium facula in time to warn the lateral jet man—bang—the station goes.

  “If the apparatus that prevents solar radiation from volatilizing the station by continuously converting the radiation into muirium should jam for a split second—whoosh—no more station. Or say the freighter fails to show up and cart the muirium away from the stock rooms, forcing us to turn muirium back into the sun—another bang.

  “Or suppose our weatherman fails to notice a slight increase in magnetic activity and our sunspot suddenly decides to enlarge itself in our direction with free sliding to the sun’s core. Or suppose the muirium anti-grav drive breaks down upstairs, and we have nothing to hold us up against the sun’s twenty-seven G’s. Or let the refrigeration system fail for ten minutes…

  “You can see, Count Shey, that it is the normal lot of people who must live this life to be—by terrestrial standards—insane. Insanity under such conditions is a useful and logical defense mechanism, an invaluable and salutary retreat from reality.

  “Until the crew makes this adjustment—‘response to challenge of environment’ as we Toynbeeans call it—they have little chance of survival. The will to insanity in a sunman is as vital as the will to irrigate in a Sumerian. But perhaps I encroach on the psychologist’s field.”

  Shey smirked. “Though I can’t agree with you entirely, doctor, still you may have something. Would you say, then, that the raison d’être of a solarion psychiatrist is to drive the men toward madness?”

  “I can answer that question by asking another,” replied Alar, eyeing his quarry covertly. “Let us suppose a norm for existence has been established in a given society. If one or two of the group deviate markedly from the norm, we say they are insane.

  “And yet the whole society may be considered insane by a foreign culture which may consider the one or two recalcitrants the only sane persons in the model society. So can’t we define sanity as conformity to—and belief in—the norm of whatever culture we represent?”

  Shey pursed his lips. “Perhaps.”

  “And then, if a few of the crew can’t lose themselves in a retreat from the peril of their daily existence—if they can’t cling to some saving certainty, even if it is only the certainty of near death—or if they can’t find some other illusion that might make existence bearable—isn’t it your duty to make these or other forms of madness easy for them? To teach them the rudiments of insanity, as it were?”

  Shey sniggered uneasily. “In a moment you’ll have me believing that in an asylum, the only lunatic is the psychologist.”

  Alar regarded him placidly as he held up his wine glass. “Do you realize, my dear Count, that you have repeated your last sentence not once but twice? Do you think I am hard of hearing?” He sipped at his wine casually.

  Startled disbelief showed in the psychologist’s face. “You imagined that I repeated myself. I distinctly remember—”

  “Of course, of course. No doubt I misunderstood you.” Alar lifted his shoulders in a delicate apology. “But,” he pressed, “suppose you had repeated yourself and then denied it. In a layman you’d probably analyze such fixation on trivia as incipient paranoia, to be followed in due time by delusions of persecution.

  “In you, of course, it’s hardly worth consideration. If it happened at all it was probably just an oversight. A couple of days on one of these stations is enough to disorganize almost anyone.” He put his wine glass down on the table gently. “Nothing in your room has been trifled with lately?” He had slipped into Shey’s quarters the previous day and had rotated every visible article 180 degrees.

  Shey giggled nervously. Finally he said, “Certainly not.”

  “Then there’s nothing to worry about.” Alar patted his goatee amiably. “While we’re on the subject, you might tell me something. As a Toynbeean, I have always been interested in how one person determines whether another is sane or insane. I understand you psychologists actually have cut-and-dried tests of sanity.”

  Shey looked across the table at him narrowly, then chuckled. “Ah, sanity—no, there’s no simple book test for that, but I do have some projection slides that evaluate one’s motor and mental integration. Such evaluation, of course, is not without bearing on the question of sanity, at least sanity as I understand it. Would you care to run through a few of them with me?”

  Alar nodded politely. Shey, he knew, wanted to run the slides more to reassure himself than to entertain his guest.

  The psychologist was due for the rudest shock of his life.

  Shey quickly set up the holograph and projector screen. “We’ll start with some interesting maze slides,” he chirped, switching off the light that dangled from the ceiling hook. “The ability to solve mazes quickly is strongly correlated to analyses of our daily problems. The faltering maze-solver unravels his difficulties piecemeal and lacks the cerebral integration that characterizes the executive.

  “It is interesting to note that the schizophrenic can solve only the simplest mazes, even after repeated trials. So here’s the first and simplest. White rats solve it—laid out on the floor with walls, of course—after three or four runs. A child of five, viewing it as we shall here, gets it in about thirty seconds. Adults instantaneously.”

  “Quite obvious,” agreed Alar coolly as he projected a false opening in the outer maze border and covered the real one with a section of false border.

  Shey stirred uneasily, but apparently considered his inability to solve the maze as a passing mental quirk. He switched slides.

  “What’s the average time on this next one?” asked Alar.

  “Ten seconds.”

  The Thief let the second and third ones go by without photic alteration. Shey’s relief was plain even in the darkness.

  But on the fourth slide Alar alternately opened and blocked various passages of the maze, and he knew that Shey, standing beside the projector, was rubbing his eyes. The little psychologist sighed gratefully when his guest suggested leaving the maze series and trying something else.

  The Thief smiled.

  “Our second series of slides, Dr. Talbot, shows a circle and an ellipse side by side. On each successive slide—there are twelve—the ellipse becomes more and more circular. Persons of the finest visual discrimi
nation can detect the differences on all twelve cards. Dogs can detect two, apes four, six-year-old children ten, and the average man eleven. Keep your own score. Here’s the first one.”

  A large white circle showed on a black screen, and near the circle was a narrow ellipse. That was pretty obvious. Alar decided to wait for the next one.

  On the second slide Shey frowned, removed it from the projector, held it up to the light of the screen, then inserted it once again. On the third slide he began to chew his lips. But he kept on. When the tenth was reached he was perspiring profusely and licking sweat from the edges of his mouth.

  The Thief continued to make noncommittal acknowledgments as each slide was presented. He felt no pity whatever for Shey, who had no means of knowing that from the second slide on, there were no ellipses, only pairs of identical circles. Each ellipse had been cancelled by a projection from Alar’s eyes, and a circle substituted.

  Shey made no motion to insert the eleventh slide in the projector. He said, “Shall we stop here? I think you’ve got the general idea…”

  Alar nodded. “Very interesting. What else have you?”

  His host hesitated, apparently fumbling with the projector housing. Finally he giggled glassily. “I have some Rorschachs. They’re more or less conventionalized but they serve to reveal psychosis in its formative stages.”

  “If this is tiring you—” began Alar with diabolical tact.

  “Not at all.”

  The Thief smiled grimly.

  The screen lit up again, and the rotund psychologist held a slide up to its light for a lengthy inspection. Then he slid the slide into the projector. He commented, “To a normal person, the first slide resembles a symmetrical silhouette of two ballet dancers, or two skipping children, or sometimes two dogs playing. Psychotics, of course, see something they consider fearful or macabre, such as a tarantula, a demoniacal mask or a—”

  Alar had smoothly transformed the image into a grinning skull. “Rather like a couple of dancers, isn’t it?” he observed.

  Shey pulled out his handkerchief and ran it over his face. The second slide he inserted without comment, but Alar could hear it rattle as trembling fingers dropped it into the projector.

  “Looks rather like two trees,” observed the Thief meditatively, “or perhaps two feathers, or possibly two rivulets flowing together in a meadow. What would a psychotic see?”

  Shey was standing mute and motionless, apparently more dead than alive. He seemed to be aware of nothing in the room but the image within the screen, and Alar sensed that the man was staring at it in fascinated horror. He would have given a great deal to steal a look at the creature whose warped mind he was destroying, but he thought it best to continue transforming the image.

  “What would a madman see?” he repeated quietly.

  Shey’s whisper was unrecognizable. “A pair of white arms.”

  Alar reached over, flicked off the projector and screen and stole quietly from the darkened room. His host never moved.

  The Thief had not taken two steps down the corridor when a muffled gust of giggles welled out from the closed door—then another and another—finally so many that they merged into one another in a long pealing paroxysm.

  He could still hear it when he turned the corridor corner toward his own stateroom. He stroked his goatee and smiled.

  Station master Miles and Florez, who were arguing heatedly over something, passed him without acknowledging his polite bow or even his existence. He watched them thoughtfully until they turned the corner and vanished. Theirs was the ideal state of mind—to be mad and not know it. Their staunch faith in their inevitable destruction clothed them in an aura of purposeful sanity.

  Without that faith, their mental disintegration would probably be swift and complete. Undoubtedly they would prefer to die rather than to leave the station alive at the end of their shift.

  He wondered whether Shey would make an equally dramatic adjustment to his new-won madness.

  18

  Duel Ended

  THE RACING OF his heart awoke him a few hours later in his room.

  He listened tensely as he rose from his bunk. But there was no sound, other than the all-pervasive rumble of the vast and frenzied gases outside.

  He dressed quickly, stepped to the door opening into the corridor, and looked down the hall. It was empty.

  Queer—usually two or three men could be seen hurrying on some vital task or other. His heartbeat was up to one-eighty.

  All he had to do was follow his unerring scent for danger. He stepped brusquely into the corridor and strode toward Shey’s room. He arrived there in a moment and stood before the door, listening. No sound. He knocked curtly without result. He knocked again. Why didn’t Shey answer? Was there a stealthy movement within the room?

  His heartbeat touched one-eighty-five and was still climbing. His right hand flexed uneasily. Should he return for his saber?

  He shook off an impulse to run back to his room. If there was danger here, at least it would be informative danger. Somehow, he doubted that a blade would influence the issue. He looked around him. The hall was still empty.

  The preposterous thought occurred to him that he was the only being left aboard. Then he smiled humorlessly. His fertile imagination was becoming too much even for himself. He seized the panel knob, turned it swiftly, and leaped into the room.

  In the dim light, while his heartbeat soared toward two hundred, he beheld a number of things.

  The first was Shey’s bloated, insensate face, framed in curls, staring down at him about a foot beneath the central ceiling lamp hook. The abnormal protrusion of the eyes was doubtless caused by the narrow leather thong that stretched taut from the folds of the neck to the hook. To one side of the little man’s dangling feet was the overturned projector table.

  Beyond the gently swaying corpse, in front of the screen, Thurmond sat quietly, studying Alar with enigmatic eyes. On either side of the police minister a Kades gun was aimed at Alar’s breast.

  Each man seemed locked in the vise of the other’s stare. Like capacitor plates, thought Alar queerly, with a corpse for a dielectric. For a long time the Thief had the strange illusion that he was part of a holo projection, that Thurmond would gaze at him with unblinking eyes forever, that he was safe because a Kades could not really be fired in holo projections.

  The room swayed faintly under their feet as an exceptionally violent and noisy swirl of gas beat at the solarion. It aroused them both from their paralytic reveries.

  Thurmond was the first to speak.

  “In the past,” came his dry, chill voice, “our traps for you were subject to the human equation. This factor no longer operates in your favor. If you move from where you now stand, the Kades will fire automatically.”

  Alar laughed shortly. “In times past, when you were positive you’d taken adequate precautions in your attempts to seize me, you were always proved wrong. I can see that your comrade’s suicide has shaken you—otherwise you would have made no attempt to explain my prospective fate. Your verbal review of your trap is mainly for your own assurance. Your expectation that I will die is a hope rather than a certainty. May I suggest that the circumstances hold as much danger for you as for me?”

  His voice held a confidence he was far from feeling. He was undoubtedly boxed in by tell-tale devices, perhaps body capacitors or photocell relays, that activated the Kades. If he leaped at the man, he would simply float to the floor—a mass of sodden cinders.

  Thurmond’s brows contracted imperceptibly. “You were bluffing, of course, when you suggested the situation contained as much danger for me as for you, since you must die in any event, while my only sources of personal concern are the general considerations of danger aboard a solarion and interference from the crew.

  “I have minimized the latter possibility by transferring to Mercury all but a skeleton crew—Miles’s shift. And they’re alerted to signal the Phobos and leave with me as soon as I return to the assembly roo
m, which will be in about ten minutes.” He arose almost casually, edged around the nearest Kades and sidled slowly along the wall toward the corridor panel, carefully avoiding the portion of the room covered by the guns.

  Thurmond had demonstrated once again why Haze-Gaunt had invited him into the wolf pack. He relied on the leverage of titanic forces when he had difficulty in disposing of an obstacle, and damned the cost.

  It was utterly simple. There would be no struggle, no personal combat. No immediate issue would be reached. And yet, within a satisfactorily short time, Alar would be dead. He couldn’t move without triggering the two Kades, and there would be no one left to free him. The solarion would be evacuated within a few minutes. The crewless station would slide over the brim of the sunspot long before he would collapse from fatigue.

  The wolf pack was willing to exchange one of its six most valuable munition factories for his life.

  And yet—it wasn’t enough. The Thief was now hardly breathing, because he believed he knew now what Miles and Florez had been discussing in the hall.

  Thurmond was now at the panel, turning the knob slowly.

  “Your program,” said Alar softly, “is sound save in one rather obscure but important particular. Your indifference to Toynbeean principles would naturally blind you to the existence of such a factor as ‘self-determination in a society.’”

  The police minister paused the barest fraction of a second before stepping through the panel.

  The Thief continued, “Can you make sense out of a Fraunhofer report? Can you operate a lateral jet motor? If not you’d better deactivate the Kades because you’re going to need me badly, and very soon. You’ll have no time to signal the Phobos.”

  The police minister hesitated just outside the door.

  “If,” said Alar, “you think the skeleton crew under Miles is in present control of the station, you’d better take a look around.”

  There was no answer. Thurmond evidently thought that one would be superfluous. His footsteps died away down the hall.