He turned his eyes toward the aisle again. Not that there was anything there to see. But there was plenty there to think about. Half a dozen paper clips, his best fountain pen, and his left hand.
There was an invisible something out there. You couldn’t feel it when you touched it, and objects like paper clips didn’t click when they hit it. And you could get through it on one direction, but not in the other. He could reach his right hand out there and touch his left hand with it, no doubt, but then he wouldn’t get his right hand back again. And pretty soon class would be over and—
Nuts. There was only one thing he could do that made any sense. There wasn’t anything on the other side of that plane that hurt his left hand, was there? Well, then, why not step through it? Wherever he’d be, it would be all in one piece.
He shot a glance at the professor and waited until he turned to mark something on the blackboard again. Then, without waiting to think it over, without daring to think it over, Shorty stood up in the aisle.
The lights went out. Or he had stepped into blackness.
He couldn’t hear the professor any more, but there was a familiar buzzing noise in his ears that sounded like a bluebottle fly circling around somewhere nearby in the darkness.
He put his hands together, and they were both there; his right hand clasped his left. Well, whatever he was, he was all there. But why couldn’t he see?
Somebody sneezed.
Shorty jumped, and then said, “Is… uh… anybody there?” His voice shook a little, and he hoped now that he was really asleep and that he’d wake up in a minute.
“Of course,” said a voice. A rather sharp and querulous voice.
“Uh… who?”
“What do you mean, who? Me. Can’t you see— No, of course you can’t. I forgot. Say, listen to that guy! And they say we’re crazy!” There was a laugh in the darkness.
“What guy?” asked Shorty. “And who says who’s crazy? Listen, I don’t get—”
“That guy,” said the voice. “The teacher. Can’t you— No, I forget you can’t. You’ve got no business here anyway. But I’m listening to the teacher telling about what happened to the saurians.”
“The what?”
“The saurians, stupid. The dinosaurs. The guy’s nuts. And they say we are!”
Shorty McCabe suddenly felt the need, the stark necessity, of sitting down. He groped in darkness and felt the top of a desk and felt that there was an empty seat behind it and eased himself down into the seat. Then he said, “This is Greek to me, mister. Who says who’s crazy?”
“They say we are. Don’t you know—that’s right, you don’t. Who let that fly in here?”
“Let’s start at the beginning,” begged Shorty. “Where am I?”
“You normals,” said the voice petulantly. “Face you with anything out of the ordinary and you start asking— Oh, well, wait a minute and I’ll tell you. Swat that fly for me.”
“I can’t see it. I—”
“Shut up. I want to listen to this; it’s what I came here for. He— Yow, he’s telling them that the dinosaurs died out for lack of food because they got too big. Isn’t that silly? The bigger a thing is the better chance it has to find food, hasn’t it? And the idea of the herbivorous ones ever starving in these forests! Or the carnivorous ones while the herbivorous ones were around! And— But why am I telling you all this? You’re normal.”
“I… I don’t get it. If I’m normal, what are you?”
The voice chuckled. “I’m crazy”
Shorty McCabe gulped. There didn’t seem to be anything to say. The voice was all too obviously right, about that.
In the first place, if he could hear outside, Professor Dolohan was lecturing on the positive absolute, and this voice— with whatever, if anything, was attached to it—had come here to hear about the decline of the saurians. That didn’t make sense because Professor Dolohan didn’t know a pixilated pterodactyl from an oblate spheroid.
And— “Ouch!” said Shorty. Something had given him a hard whack on the shoulder.
“Sorry,” said the voice. “I just took a swat at that dratted fly. It lighted on you. Anyway, I missed it. Wait a minute until I turn the switch and let the darned thing out. You want out, too?”
Suddenly the buzzing stopped.
Shorty said, “Listen, I… I’m too darn curious to want out of here until I got some idea what I’m getting out from, I mean out of. I guess I must be crazy, but—”
“No, you’re normal. It’s we who are crazy. Anyway, that’s what they say. Well, listening to that guy talk about dinosaurs bores me; I’d just as soon talk to you as listen to him. But you had no business getting in here, either you or that fly, see? There was a slip-up in the apparatus. I’ll tell Napoleon—”
“Who?”
“Napoleon. He’s the boss in this province. Napoleons are bosses in some of the others, too. You see a lot of us think we’re Napoleon, but not me. It’s a common delusion. Anyway, the Napoleon I mean is the one in Donnybrook.”
“Donnybrook? Isn’t that an insane asylum?”
“Of course, where else would anyone be who thought he was Napoleon? I ask you.”
Shorty McCabe closed his eyes and found that didn’t do any good because it was dark anyway and he couldn’t see even with them open. He said himself, “I got to keep on asking questions until I get something that makes sense or I’m going crazy. Maybe I am crazy; maybe this is what it’s like to be crazy. But if I am, am I still sitting in Professor Dolohan’s class, or… or what?”
He opened his eyes and asked, “Look, let’s see if we can get at this from a different angle. Where are you?”
“Me? Oh, I’m in Donnybrook, too. Normally, I mean. All of us in this province are, except a few that are still on the outside, see? Just now”—suddenly his voice sounded embarrassed—“I’m in a padded cell.”
“And,” asked Shorty fearfully, “is… is this it? I mean, am I in a padded cell, too?”
“Of course not. You’re sane. Listen, I’ve got no business to talk these things over with you. There’s a sharp line drawn, you know. It was just because something went wrong with the apparatus.”
Shorty wanted to ask, “What apparatus?” but he had a hunch that if he did the answer would open up seven or eight new questions. Maybe if he stuck to one point until he understood that one, he could begin to understand some of the others.
He said, “Let’s get back to Napoleon. You say there is more than one Napoleon among you? How can that be? There can’t be two of the same thing.”
The voice chuckled. “That’s all you know. That’s what proves you’re normal. That’s normal reasoning; it’s right, of course. But these guys who think they are Napoleon are crazy, so it doesn’t apply. Why can’t a hundred men each be Napoleon, if they’re too crazy to know that they can’t?”
“Well,” said Shorty, “even if Napoleon wasn’t dead, at least ninety-nine of them would have to be wrong, wouldn’t they? That’s logic.”
“That’s what’s wrong with it here,” said the voice. “I keep telling you we’re crazy.”
“We? You mean that I’m—”
“No, no, no, no, no. By ‘we’ I mean us, myself and the others, not you. That’s why you got no business being here at all, see?”