The Villain bowed. «The Slicker has the choice,» he said.
The Extra-Terrestrial Ally piped up. «This is ridiculous,» it said. «All you humans are ridiculous.»
The Alien Monster stuck his head out from behind the tree.
«Leave ’em alone,» he bellowed in his frightful brogue. «If they want to fight, let them go ahead and fight.»
Then he curled himself into a wheel by the simple procedure of putting his tail into his mouth and started to roll. He rolled around the duck pond at a fearful pace, chanting all the while:
«Leave ’em fight. Leave ’em fight. Leave ’em fight.»
Then popped behind his tree again.
The Defenseless Orphan complained, «I thought this was a picnic.»
And so did all the rest of us, thought Lodge.
Although you could have bet, even before it started, that it wouldn’t stay a picnic.
«Your choice, please,» said the Villain to the Slicker, far too politely. «Pistols, knives, swords, battle axes…»
Ridiculous, thought Lodge.
Make it ridiculous.
He made the Slicker say, «Pitchforks at three paces.»
The Sweet Young Thing tripped lightly on the stage. She was humming a drinking song, and you could see that she’d picked up quite a glow.
But she stopped at what she saw before her—the Philosopher dripping goose grease, the Villain clutching a pistol in each hand, the Beautiful Bitch jangling a diamond necklace, and she asked: «What is going on here?»
The Out-At-Elbows Philosopher relaxed his pose and rubbed his hands together with smirking satisfaction.
«Now,» he said, oozing good fellowship and cheer, «isn’t this a cozy situation. All nine of us are here…»
In the audience Alice Page leaped to her feet, put her hands up to her face, pressed her palms tight against her temples, closed her eyes quite shut and screamed and screamed and screamed.
There had been, not eight characters, but nine.
Henry Griffith’s character had walked on with the rest of them.
«You’re crazy, Bayard,» Forester said. «When a man is dead, he’s dead. Whether he still exists or not, I don’t profess to know, but if he does exist it is not on the level of his previous existence; it is on another plane, in another state of being, in another dimension, call it what you will, religionist or spiritualist, the answer is the same.»
Lodge nodded his agreement. «I was grasping at straws. Trying to dredge up every possibility. I know that Henry’s dead. I know the dead stay dead. And yet, you’ll have to admit, it is a natural thought. Why did Alice scream? Not because the nine characters were there. But because of why there might be nine of them. The ghost in us dies hard.»
«It’s not only Alice,» Forester told him. «It’s all the others, too. If we don’t get this business under control, there’ll be a flare-up. The emotional index was already stretched pretty thin when this happened—doubt over the purpose of the research, the inevitable wear and tear of nine people living together for months on end, a sort of cabin fever. It all built up. I’ve watched it building up and I’ve held my breath.»
«Some joker out there subbed for Henry,» Lodge said. «How does that sound to you? Someone handled his own character and Henry’s, too.»
«No one could handle more than one character,» said Forester.
«Someone put a whale into that duck pond.»
«Sure, but it didn’t last long. The whale jumped a time or two and then was gone. Whoever put it there couldn’t keep it there.»
«We all cooperate on the setting and the props. Why couldn’t someone pull quietly out of that cooperation and concentrate all his mind on two characters?»
Forester looked doubtful. «I suppose it could be done. But the second character probably would be out of whack. Did you notice any of them that seemed a little strange?»
«I don’t know about strange,» said Lodge, «but the Alien Monster hid—»
«Henry’s character wasn’t the Alien Monster.»
«How can you be sure?»
«Henry wasn’t the kind of mind to cook up an alien monster.»
«All right, then. Which one is Henry’s character?»
Forester slapped the arm of his chair impatiently. «I’ve told you, Bayard, that I don’t know who any of them are. I’ve tried to match them up and it can’t be done.»
«It would help if we knew. Especially…»
«Especially Henry’s character,» said Forester.
He left the chair and paced up and down the office.
«Your theory of some joker putting on Henry’s character is all wrong,» he said. «How would he know which one…»
Lodge raised his hand and smote the desk.
«The Sweet Young Thing!» he shouted.
«What’s that?»
«The Sweet Young Thing. She was the last to walk on. Don’t you remember? The Mustached Villain asked where she was and the Rustic Slicker said he saw her in a saloon and…»
«Good Lord!» breathed Forester. «And the Out-At-Elbows Philosopher was at great pains to announce that all of them were there. Needling us! Jeering at us!»
«You think the Philosopher is the one, then? He’s the joker. The one who produced the Sweet Young Thing—the ninth member of the cast. The ninth one to appear would have to be Henry’s character, don’t you see. You said yourself it couldn’t be done because you wouldn’t know which one it was. But you could know—you’d know when eight were on the stage that the missing one was Henry’s character.»
«Either there was a joker,» Forester said, «or the cast itself is somehow sentient—has come halfway alive.»
Lodge scowled. «I can’t buy that one, Kent. They’re images of our minds. We call them up, we put them through their paces, we dismiss them. They depend utterly on us. They couldn’t have a separate identity. They’re creatures of our mind and that is all.»
«It wasn’t exactly along that line that I was thinking,» said Forester. «I was thinking of the machine itself. It takes the impressions from our minds and shapes them. It translates what we think into the images on the screen. It transforms our thoughts into seeming actualities…»
«A memory…»
«I think the machine may have a memory,» Forester declared. «God knows it has enough sensitive equipment packed into it to have almost anything. The machine does more of it than we do, it contributes more than we do. After all, we’re the same drab old mortals that we always were. We’ve just got clever, that is all. We’ve built extensions of ourselves. The machine is an extension of our imagery.»
«I don’t know,» protested Lodge. «I simply do not know. This going around in circles. This incessant speculation.»
But he did know, he told himself. He did know that the machine could act independently, for it had made the Slicker throw the goose. But that was different from handling a character from scratch, different from putting on a character that should not appear. It had simply been a matter of an induced, automatic action—and it didn’t mean a thing.
Or did it?
«The machine could walk on Henry’s character,» Forester persisted. «It could have the Philosopher mock us.»
«But why?» asked Lodge, and even as he asked it, he knew why the machine might do just that, and the thought of it made icy worms go crawling up his back.
«To show us,» Forester said, «that it was sentient, too.»
«But it wouldn’t do that,» Lodge argued. «If it were sentient it would keep quiet about it. That would be its sole defense. We could smash it. We probably would smash it if we thought it had come alive. We could dismantle it; we could put an end to it.»
He sat in the silence that fell between them and felt the dread that had settled on this place—a strange dread compounded of an intellectual and a moral doubt, of a man who had fallen dead, of one character too many, of the guarded loneliness that hemmed in their lives.