What would he do if I hauled off and slugged him? Luke wondered. But instead he reached out a hand and moved it back and forth in front of the man’s eyes. The man blinked, and then took off his glasses, rubbed first one eye and then the other, put the glasses back on and stared again into the tree.
Luke shivered, and walked on.
My God, he thought; he can’t see me, can’t hear me, doesn’t believe I’m here. Just as I don’t believe—
But, damn it, when I touched him he felt it, only—
Hysterical blindness, Doc Snyder explained it to me, when I asked him why, if Martians were there, I didn’t see blank spots that I couldn’t see through, even if I couldn’t see them.
And he explained that I—
Just like that man—
There was another bench and Luke sat down on it, turned to stare back at the bearded one, still sitting on his own bench twenty yards back. Still sitting there, still looking up in the tree.
At something that isn’t there? Luke wondered.
Or at something that isn’t there for me but is there for him, and which of us is right?
And he thinks that I don’t exist and I think I do, and which of us is right about that?
Well, I am, on that point if no other. I think, therefore I am.
But how do I know he’s there?
Why couldn’t he be a figment of my imagination?
Silly solipsism, the type of wondering just about everybody goes through sometime during adolescence, and then recovers from.
But it gives to wonder all over again when you and other people start seeing things differently or start seeing different things.
Not Spade-Beard; he was just another nut. No significance there. Just that maybe, just maybe, that little encounter with him had put Luke’s mind to working on what could be the right track.
The night he’d got drunk with Gresham and just before he’d passed out there’d been that Martian, like one he’d cussed back at. “I ’nvented you,” he remembered telling the Martian.
Well?
What if he really had? What if his mind, in drunkenness, had recognized something his sober mind hadn’t known?
What if solipsism wasn’t silly?
What if the universe and everything and everybody in it were simply figments of the imagination of Luke Deveraux?
What if I, Luke Devereaux, did invent the Martians that evening they came, when he was in Carter Benson’s shack on the desert near Indio?
Luke got up and stated walking again, faster, to speed up his mind. He thought back, hard, about that evening, just before the knock had come on the door he’d had the start of an idea for a science-fiction novel he’d been trying to write. He’d been thinking, “What if the Martians…”
But he couldn’t remember what the rest of that thought had been. The Martian’s knock had interrupted it.
Or had it?
What if, even though his conscious mind had not formulated the thought clearly, at had already worked itself out in his subconscious mind: What if the Martians are little green men, visible, audible, but not tangible, and what if, a second from now, one of them knocks on that door and says, “Hi’ Mack. Is this Earth?”
And went on from there.
Why not?
Well, for one reason, he’d worked oat other plots—hundreds of them if you counted shorn stories—and none of them had happened the instant he’d thought of them.
But—what if, that night, something in the conditions had been a little different? Or, and this seemed more likely, there’d beer a slip in his brain—from brain fatigue and from worry over his slump—and the part of his mind which separated “fact,” the fictional universe which his mind ordinarily projected about him, from “fiction,” the stuff he conceived and wrote as fiction and which would in that case really be fiction-within-fiction?
It made sense, however nonsensical it sounded.
But what had happened, then, a little over five weeks ago, when he’d quit believing in Martians? Why did other people—if other people were themselves products of his, Luke’s, imagination—keep on believing in and seeing something Luke himself no longer believed in, and which therefore no longer existed?
He found another bench and sat down on it. That was a tough one to figure out.
Or was it? His mind had received a shock that night. He couldn’t remember what it was except that it concerned a Martian, but from what it had done to him—knocked him temporarily into a catatonic state—it must have been a severe shock all right.
And just maybe it had knocked belief in Martians out of his conscious mind, the mind that was thinking right now, without having cleared from his subconscious the error between fact and fiction—between the projected “real” universe and the plot for a story—which had brought the fictional Martians into seemingly real existence in the first place.
He wasn’t paranoiac at all. Simply schizophrenic.
Part of his mind—the conscious, thinking part—didn’t believe in Martians, knew, in fact, that they didn’t exist.
Put the deeper part, the subconscious that was the creator and sustainer of illusions, hadn’t got the message. It still accepted the Martians as real, as real as anything else, and so, of course, did those other beings of his imagination and its, human beings.
In excitement, he got up and started to walk again, rapidly this time.
That made it easy. All he had to do was get the message to his subconscious mind.
It made him feel silly to do it, but he subvocalized: Hey, there aren’t any Martians. Other people shouldn’t be seeing them either.
Had that done it? Why not, if he had the right overall answer, and he was sure he had.
He fond himself at a far corner of the grounds and turned to head back toward the kitchen. Breakfast should be ready by now and he should be able to tell by the actions of other people whether they still saw and heard Martians.
He glanced at his watch and saw that it was ten after seven, still twenty minutes before the first call for breakfast, but there was a table and chairs in the big kitchen and from seven o’clock on early risers were welcome to have coffee there ahead of the regular breakfast.
He let himself in the back door and looked around. The cook was busy at the stove; an attendant was readying a tray for one of the confined patients. The two nurses’ aides who doubled as waitresses on the breakfast shift weren’t around; they were probably setting tables in the dining room.
Two patients were having coffee at the table, both elderly women, one in a bathrobe and the other in a housecoat.
All looked calm and peaceful, no sign of a disturbance. Not that he’d see the Martian end of one if one did happen, but he should he able to tell by the reactions of the people he could see. He’d just have to watch for indirect evidence.
He poured himself a cup of coffee and took it to the table, sat down in a chair. Said, “Good morning, Mrs. Murcheson,” to the one of the two women he knew; Margie had happened to introduce them yesterday.
“Good morning, Mr. Devereaux,” Mrs. Murcheson said. “And your beautiful wife? Still sleeping?”
“Yes. I got up early for a walk. Beautiful morning.”
“It seems to be. This is Mrs. Randall, Mr. Devereaux, if you two don’t know each other.”
Luke murmured politely.