The old man stirred.
Old as he might be, and insane if they liked, but he wasn't going to linger out here and listen. A quarter after one in the morning, and the whole Institute was gathered here in Shugart's office, plotting the recovery of himself.
"All right," he gasped, rolling in, "what is this?"
They gaped at him.
"All of you!" he said strongly. "What are you doing to me? Is it a hoax?"
Shugart moved restlessly. Maria Reynolds reached up to pat her hair, avoiding his eyes.
"You, Doctor Reynolds? Want to explain? I mean—I mean," he said in a changed tone, no longer gasping, "there seems to be only one explanation. There's a conspiracy of some sort, and I'm the target."
Maureen got up and walked toward him. "Come in, Doctor," she said, in a voice of resignation tinged with pleasure. "Maybe it's better this way. We're not going to get very far continuing to He to you, are we? So I guess we'll have to tell you the truth."
The tune rocked crazily through his head. The old man spun his chair and turned pleadingly to Maureen. "Of course, Doctor," she said, understanding without words, and fetched him a fizzy drink. "Only a little stimulant," she coaxed.
The old man glanced at Dr. Shugart. Shugart laughed. "Who do you think has been prescribing for you? There isn't a human being in the Institute without a first-rate degree. Maureen's our internist—with, of course, a thorough grounding in psychology."
The old man drank reproachfully, looking at Maureen. She said, clouding: "I know. It isn't fair, but we had to get you well."
"Why?"
Maureen said somberly: "A brain like yours doesn't come along too often. I'm not a physicist, but as I understand it Congruence comes close to doing what Einstein tried with the unified field theory. You were on the point of doing something more when you—when you—"
"When I went crazy," the old man said crudely. She shook her head. "All right, I used a bad word. But that's it, isn't it?" The girl nodded. "I see."
But the stimulant wasn't doing much good. Ninety-five years, he thought confused, and perhaps I won't see that other mountain. It was hard to accept, hard to believe he had been hoaxed, hard to believe that it wasn't working, that the delusions would not be cured. "I'm flattered," he whispered hoarsely, and tried to hand the glass back to Maureen. It clattered to the floor and bounced without breaking. Maria with her schizoid detachment, Emie with his worries, Sam Krabbe and his surly anger—doctors acting parts? The room swooped around Sidorenko; he was cut off from his reference points. And they were all afraid; he could see it, it was a gamble they had taken, that he would never find out, and now they didn't know what would happen. And he—
He didn't know either.
"I'm sorry to be so much trouble," he gasped.
"You mustn't feel personal guilt," Dr. Shugart said anxiously. "These personality disorders—personality traits—go with greatness. Sir Oliver Lodge swore he believed in levitation. Think of Newton, sleepless and paranoid. Think of Einstein. Religious mania is very common," the doctor assured him, "and you were spared that, at least. Well, almost—of course, certain aspects of your—"
"Shut up!" cried Maureen, and reached for the old man's wrist. He stared up at her, touched by the worry in her face, trying to find words to tell her there was nothing to worry about, nothing to fear. He felt his heart lunging against his ribs and his breathing seemed, oddly, to have stopped. He made a convulsive effort and drew an enormous, loud breath. Why, that was almost—what did they call it?—a death rattle. He did it again.
"Doctor!" moaned the nurse, but he found the strength to shake his wrist free of her. This was interesting. He was beginning to remember something, or to imagine something—
They were all coming toward him.
"Leave me alone," he croaked. He held them off while he practiced breathing again; it wasn't hard; he could do it. He closed his eyes. He heard Maureen catch her breath and opened them to glare at her, then closed them again.
Noah Sidorenko's brain was perfectly lucid.
He saw—or remembered? But it was as though he were seeing it with an internal eye—all of his previous life, the childhood, the government office where he had received the first scholarship, the four professors quizzing him for his doctor's, even the cloudy days of therapy and breakdown.
The old man thought: It all began 90 years ago, I was all right until then . . . and he had to laugh, though laughing choked him, because 90 years ago he had been all of five years old. But up until then there had been nothing to worry about.
Was it the crash? Yes. And fire. The white man. The song about the bear. The terrible auto smash, just outside his window—for his window had looked out on an elevated automobile highway in Brooklyn, the Gowanus Parkway, where cars raced bumper to bumper, 50 miles an hour, within five yards of the bed he slept in. Whoosh. Whoosh. All day long and all night. At night the strokes were slow, a lagging wire-brush riff; in the mornings and evenings they were faster, whooshwhooshwhoosh, a quick rataplan. He listened to them and dreamed tunes around diem. And there was the night he had gone to sleep and wakened screaming, screaming.
His mother rushed in—poor woman, she was already widowed. (Though she was only 25, the old man thought with amazement. Twenty-five! Maureen was that.) She rushed in, and though the boy Noah was terrified he could see through the shadow of his own terror of hers. "Momma, Momma, the white man!" She caught him in her arms. "Please, my God, what's the matter?" But he couldn't answer, except with sobs and incoherent words about the white man; it was a code, and she was not skilled to read it. And time passed, ten minutes or so. He was not comforted — he was still crying and afraid — but his mother was warm and she soothed him. She bounced him on her knee, ka-bump, Va-hump, Ya-bump, and even though he was crying he remembered the song with that beat, He SAW anOTHer MOUNTain, he SAW anOTHer MOUNTain, and the cars whooshed by and in the next room the little TV set murmured and laughed. "You're missing your program, Momma," he said; "Go to sleep, dear," she answered; he was almost relaxed. Crash. Outside the window two cars collided violently. A taxicab was bound for New York with a boy in a satin jacket at the wheel and four others crammed in the back; the boy at the wheel was high on marijuana and he hit the divider. The cab leaped crazily across into the Long Island-bound lane. There was not much traffic that night, but there was one car too many. In it a 30-year-old advertising salesman rushed to meet his wife and baby at Idlewild. He never met them. The cars struck. The stolen taxicab was hurled back into its own lane, its gas tank split, its doors flung open. Four boys in the jackets of the Gerritsen Tigers died at once and the fifth was thrown against the retaining wall—not dead; but not with enough life left to him to matter. He stood up and tried to run, and the burning gasoline made him a white-hot phantom, auraed and terrible. He lurched clear across the roadway to just outside Noah's window and died there, flaming, hanging over the wall, 15 feet above the wreck of the space salesman's convertible.
"The white man!" screamed someone in Noah's room, but it was not the boy but his mother. She looked from the white-liamed man outside to her son, with eyes of fear and horror; and from then on it was never the same for hixu.