«Henry wrote a conclusion,» said Forester. «Well, hardly a conclusion. Let’s call it a suspicion. Now what do you want to do about it? Ignore it, run from it, test it for its proof?»
«I say, test it,» Craven said. «It was Henry’s work. Henry’s gone and can’t speak for his own beliefs. We owe at least that much to him.»
«If it can be tested,» Maitland qualified. «To me it sounds more like philosophy than science.»
«Philosophy runs hand in hand with science,» said Alice Page. «We can’t simply brush it off because it sounds involved.»
«I didn’t say involved,» Maitland objected. «What I meant was—oh, hell, let’s go ahead and check it.»
«Check it,» Sifford said.
He swung around on Lodge. «And if it checks out, if it comes anywhere near to checking, if we can’t utterly disprove it, I’m quitting. I’m serving notice now…»
«That’s your privilege, Sifford, any time you wish.»
«It might be hard to prove anything one way or the other,» said Helen Gray. «It might not be any easier to disprove than prove.»
Lodge saw Sue Lawrence looking at him and there was grim laughter and something of grudging admiration and a touch of confused cynicism in her face, as if she might be saying to him:
Well, you’ve done it again. I didn’t think you would—not this time, I didn’t. But you did. Although you won’t always do it. There’ll come a time—
«Want to bet?» he whispered at her.
She said, «Cyanide.»
And although he laughed back at her, he knew that she was right—righter than she knew. For the time had already come and this was the end of Life Team No. 3.
They would go on, of course, stung by the challenge Henry Griffith had written in his notebook, still doggedly true to their training and their charge, but the heart was out of them, the fear and the prejudice too deeply ingrained within the soul of each, the confused tangle of their thinking too much a part of them.
If Henry Griffith had sought to sabotage the project, Lodge told himself, he had done it perfectly. In death he had done it far better than he could have, living.
He seemed to hear in the room the dry, acerbic chuckling of the man and he wondered at the imagined chuckle, for Henry had had no humor in him.
Although Henry had been the Out-At-Elbows Philosopher and it was hard to think of Henry as that sort of character—an old humbug who hid behind a polished manner and a golden tongue. For there was nothing of the humbug in Henry, either, and his manner was not polished nor did he have the golden gift of words. He slouched and he rarely talked, and when he did he growled.
A joker, Lodge thought—had he been, after all, a joker?
Could he have used the Philosopher to lampoon the rest of them, a character who derided them and they not knowing it?
He shook his head, arguing with himself.
If the Philosopher had kidded them, it had been gentle kidding, so gentle that none of them had known it was going on, so subtle that it had slid off them without notice.
But that wasn’t the terrifying aspect of it—that Henry might have been quietly making fun of them. The terrifying thing was that the Philosopher had been second on the stage. He had followed the Rustic Slicker and during the whole time had been much in evidence—munching on the turkey leg and waving it to emphasize the running fire of pompous talk that had never slacked. The Philosopher had been, in fact, the most prominent player in the entire Play.
And that meant that no one could have put him on the stage, for no one, in the first place, could have known so soon which of the nine was Henry’s character, and no one, not having handled him before, could have put the Philosopher so realistically through his paces. And none of those who had sent on their characters early in the Play could have handled two characters convincingly for any length of time—especially when the Philosopher had talked all the blessed time.
And that would cancel out at least four of those sitting in the room.
Which could mean:
That there was a ghost.
Or that the machine itself retained a memory.
Or that the eight of them had suffered mass hallucination.
He considered that last alternative and it wilted in the middle.
So did the other two.
None of the three made sense.
Not any of it made sense—none of it at all.
Take a team of trained men and women, trained objectively, trained to look for facts, conditioned to skepticism and impatience of anything outside the pale of fact: What did it take to wreck a team like that? Not simply the cabin fever of a lonely asteroid. Not simply the nagging of awakened conscience against well established ethics. Not the atavistic, Transylvanian fear of ghosts.
There was some other factor.
Another factor that had not been thought of yet—like the new approach that Maitland had talked about at dinner, saying they would have to take a new direction to uncover the secret that they sought. We’re going at it wrong, Maitland had said. We’ll have to find a new approach.
And Maitland had meant, without saying so, that in their research the old methods of ferreting out the facts were no longer valid, that the scientific mind had operated for so long in the one worn groove that it knew no other, that they must seek some fresh concept to arrive at the fact of life.
Had Henry, Lodge wondered, supplied that fresh approach? And in the supplying of it and in dying, wrecked the team as well?
Or was there another factor, as Maitland had said there must be a new approach—a factor that did not fit in with conventional thinking or standard psychology?
The Play, he wondered.
Was the Play a factor?
Had the Play, designed to keep the team intact and sane, somehow turned into a two-edged sword?
They were rising from the table now, ready to leave, ready to go to their rooms and to dress for dinner. And after dinner, there would be the Play again.
Habit, Lodge thought. Even with the whole thing gone to pot, they still conformed to habit.
They would dress for dinner; they would stage the Play. They would go back tomorrow morning to their workrooms and they’d work again, but the work would be a futile work, for the dedicated purpose of their calling had been burned out of them by fear, by the conflict of their souls, by death, by ghosts.
Someone touched his elbow and he saw that Forester stood beside him.
«Well, Kent?»
«How do you feel?»
«Okay,» said Lodge. Then he said, «You know, of course, it’s over.»
«We’ll try again,» said Forester.
Lodge shook his head. «Not me. You, maybe. You’re a younger man than I. I am burned out too.»
The Play started in where it had left off the night before, with the Sweet Young Thing coming on the stage and all the others there, with the Out-At-Elbows Philosopher rubbing his hands together smugly and saying, «Now this is a cozy situation. All of us are here.»
Sweet Young Thing (tripping lightly): Why, Philosopher, I know that I am late, but what a thing to say. Of course we all are here. I was unavoidably detained…
Rustic Slicker (speaking aside, with a rural leer): By a Tom Collins and a slot machine…
Alien Monster (sticking out its head from behind the tree): Tsk hrstlgn vglater, tsk…
And there was something wrong, Lodge told himself.
There was a certain mechanical wrongness, something out of place, a horrifying alienness that sent a shiver through you even when you couldn’t spot the alienness.
There was something wrong with the Philosopher, and the wrongness was not that he should not be there, but something else entirely. There was a wrongness about the Sweet Young Thing and the Proper Young Man and the Beautiful Bitch and all the others of them.