“Please don’t touch the patient,” the nurse said sharply.
He released the hand, stood up and bent over to stare more closely. He looked at the slack face, comatose, dying.
“What’s the matter?” the nurse demanded.
Dake glanced at her. He knew at once how far he’d get if he tried to tell her this was not Darwin Branson. They’d have him in the next room down the hall. He sat down slowly, hoping that his emotions did not show on his face.
“Dake, I believe a fiddle-playing gentleman once commented that after you have ruled out all the impossibilities, that which remains is the solution. By the same token, if after all of the impossibilities have been ruled out, you have nothing left, then you have made a mistake in classification. You have overlooked a possibility by labeling it impossible. Like a man with a pocket lighter captured by aborigines. The wise man of the tribe says that it is impossible that there is lightning captured in that silver box. He says it is impossible that there is a tiny man in there, rubbing sticks together. He says it is impossible that fire can be made by any other than those two methods. So he falls down and worships, because he finds himself in the presence of the impossible. It was his third supposition that needed reclassification.”
“Darwin, how about wrongly classifying the impossible as possible?”
“Men have tried to trisect the angle because that is an impossibility that looks possible. Conversely, man has never tried teleportation seriously. How do we know that may not merely be a possibility which happens to seem impossible, and would yield to sustained attack?”
“Pulse thirty-eight,” the nurse said softly.
Dake looked at the yellow-gray face. “God help me to think this out as you would have, Darwin,” he said to himself.
He had classified as “possible” Branson’s sellout. But, knowing the man, it could more correctly be classified as impossible. Branson had been the man who said good-bye to him when he went to collect Smith. So the man to whom he brought Smith back was not Branson. And, if the charts were right, not even human. A doll. A toy. A clever thing wound up and set in motion at a critical juncture in history for the purpose of substituting — or more correctly, sustaining — chaos in the place of possible peace and order.
Next step: Was any world power capable of creating this man-thing?
No. Reasoning: If so, the technique would have been used for greater selfish gain, and were this the first trial attempt it would have been highly unlikely that Branson would be selected.
If the pseudo-physiology of this man-thing is beyond human abilities, then the only place of origin is extra-terrestrial.
But, to assume that means also to assume that there is some valid reason for the maintenance of world disorder. He caught the error in his own logic. He was trying to judge the validity of extra-terrestrial motivations on a human basis. He could almost imagine his skull swelling with the pressure of new concepts, new modes of thought.
Okay then. Assume that interference isn’t in the form of a mile-high spaceship that sits down in the front yard. Assume it is something that comes delicately, insidiously. Unnoticed. What about duration? New, or has it been always with us?
He had an answer to that which was more instinctive than logical. More Fortian than objective. Because it solved, with one swift answer, the great dismal riddle of how man — basically a creature capable of love — had been unable to live in peace in his world.
Dake could hear the soft, even voice. “Evil is not within man, Dake. Evil is man’s response to outward things — to hunger, disease, pain, fear, envy, hate. Maybe it is man’s answer to insecurity. Take the common denominators that are not evil. Songbirds, flowers, motherhood. All times, all nations, all men have held them in esteem. We seem to have lost our way. Yet I cannot believe that we have turned our back on God, Buddha, Mohammed, Vishnu. Rather we have been denied them in some curious way.”
The answer to the riddle of the world — lying here on this hospital bed. If it could only be proven. Prove it and then you could cry to the skies, “We have been led! We have been tortured and twisted and set against each other! We have been a culture dish into which some agency has continually dropped acid — not enough to sterilize, but just enough to make us writhe.”
How would you go about it. Autopsy? He looked at the grain of the skin, the ridged nails, the gray beard stubble. Clever, clever. They could cut the body and never find a soul. But, then, they had never found one and so could not recognize the absence.
As he became more certain, he slowly became aware of his great and dangerous knowledge. Any agency powerful enough and clever enough to effect this substitution would have a quick answer ready for any human who became suspicious, who tried to broadcast his knowledge.
Where was the real Darwin Branson?
“Pulse thirty-two,” the nurse said.
The young doctor entered the room again, checked the chart, talked softly with the nurse. He thumbed an eyelid back, focused a light on the pupil. Another nurse brought in a tray. The doctor pulled the sheet back, swabbed a place over the heart, injected a needle deeply, pushed the plunger, emptying the hypodermic. He took the limp wrist and counted the pulse.
“Can’t kick it up one beat a minute,” he said, his voice too loud for the room.
Dake barely heard him. He sat, slowly compounding his own dilemma. There was an alternative he had overlooked. The reactions in the office Kelly had loaned him had been irrational. A sign of collapse. This whole new and startling train of thought could be another sign of collapse. No hangnail. No substitution. No extra-terrestrials.
Before you could even think of proving something to the world, you had first to prove it to yourself. Either the aberrations in the office were evidences of “interference,” as was the substitution, or both factors were indicative of imminent mental collapse — a collapse due to strain, overwork, tension.
He massaged the back of his neck. Funny feeling of tension there. Had it for a week. Almost a feeling of being watched. It would come and go. A feeling of a great eye focused on you. A big lens, and you were a bug on a slide.
Either one of two things happened at five minutes past three. Either Darwin Branson died, or the man-thing ran down and stopped, its function finished. Dake left the hospital. The death watch of reporters in the main lounge converged on him. He shouldered his way through, savage and silent. They cursed him as he left. He had no heart to go back to Kelly’s place. The significance of the article he had wanted to write had dwindled. Either there was a vastly bigger article — or no article at all. He thought vaguely of trying to get back the thirty thousand and decided there would be time enough the next day. He walked for blocks and caught a bus over to the island. A girl with brown hair and curiously pale gray eyes took the seat beside him.
Five
The girl with the brown hair and the pale and luminous gray eyes had watched the tall figure of Dake Lorin as he boarded the bus. She stood on the corner as the bus lumbered down the block. She fished in her blouse pocket for a cigarette, drew it out of the pack between two fingers, and hung it in the corner of her mouth, lit it with a casual, vulgar snap of the cheap lighter. Smoke drifted up along the smooth brown cheek. She stood there in her cheap tight yellow dress. Chippy on the make. As good a cover as Miguel Larner had been able to devise for her.
And he had been thorough, in his remote, time-tested way, making her open her innermost screens for the hypno-fix of the cover story. You’re Karen Voss. You’re twenty-four.
Miguel had taped the fix from the fading brain of the actual Karen Voss. Thorough Miguel. A year back he had taken a job as a night orderly in a big hospital, smuggled the recorder in, and taken tapes off the ones on the way out of life. Better, he claimed, than inventing the cover. And it was better. It steamed the facts indelibly onto your brain patterns. No problem of learning how to stand, talk, walk or spit. And it gave Miguel a library of cover stories to apply when needed. Miguel’s efficiency kept the staff down. And it overburdened the existing personnel, she thought bitterly.