Part 8

But on the carrick bend he was all thumbs. It was a simple knot, but no matter how he went about it, he could not get it to look like the illustration. Sweat broke out on his forehead. Very close in the room, he told himself. "I'm still overheated from rushing about." The skin on his fingertips felt an inch thick. The ends of the cord kept eluding them. He remembered how Tansy's fingers had rippled through the knots.

Eleven forty-one. The phonograph needle started to roll off the table. He dropped the cord and laid the phonograph needle against his fountain pen, so it would not roll. Then he started again on the knot.

For a moment he thought he must have picked up the gut, the cord seemed so stiff and unresponsive. Incredible what nervousness can do to you, he told himself. His mouth was dry. He swallowed with difficulty.

Finally, by keeping his eyes on the illustration and imitating it step for step, he managed to tie a carrick bend. All the while he felt as if there were more between his fingers than a cord, as if he were manipulating against a great inertia. Just as he finished, he felt a slight prickly chill, like the onset of fever, and the light overhead seemed to dim a trifle. Eye-strain.

The phonograph needle was rolling in the opposite direction, spinning faster and faster. He slapped his hand down on it, missed it, caught it at the edge of the table.

Just like a Ouija board, he told himself. You try to keep your fingers, poised on the planchette, perfectly motionless. As a result muscular tensions accumulate. They reach the breaking point. Seemingly without any volition on your part, the planchette begins to roll and skid about on its three little legs, traveling from letter to letter. Same thing here. Nervous and muscular tensions made it difficult for him to tie knots. Obeying a universal tendency, he projected the difficulty into the cord. And, by hand and knee pressure, he had been doing some unconscious table tipping.

Between his fingers, the phonograph needle seemed to vibrate, as if it were being pounded by infinitesimal hammers. There was a very faint sensation of electric shock. Unbidden, the torturesome, clangorous chords of the "Ninth Sonata" began to sound in his mind. Rot! One well-known symptom of extreme nervousness is a tingling in the fingers--often painfully intense. But his throat was dry and his snort of bitter contempt sounded choked.

He pinned the needle in the flannel for greater safety.

Eleven forty-seven. Reaching for the gut, his fingers felt as shaky and weak as if he just climbed a hundred-foot rope hand over hand. The stuff looked normal, but it was slimy to the touch. And for some moments he had been conscious of an acrid, almost metallic odor replacing the salt smell of the Bay. Tactual and olfactory hallucinations joining in with the visual and auditory, he told himself. He could still hear the "Ninth Sonata."

He knew a bowline backwards, and it should have been easier because the gut was not as stiff as it ought to be, but he felt there were other forces manipulating it or other mentalities trying to give orders to his fingers, so that the gut was trying to tie itself into a slip-knot, a reef, a half hitch--anything but a bowline. His fingers ached, his eyes were heavy with an abnormal fatigue. He was working against a mounting inertia--a dangerous, crushing inertia. He remembered Tansy telling him that first day--"There's a law of reaction in all conjuring--like the kick of a gun--" Eleven fifty-two.

With a great effort, he canalized his mental energy, focused his attention only on the knot. His numb fingers began to move in an odd rhythm, a rhythm of the "Ninth Sonata," _piu vivo_. The bowline was tied.

* * * * *

The overhead light dimmed markedly, throwing the whole room into a sooty gloom. Hysterical blindness, he told himself in a despairing effort to maintain the appearances of sanity and scientific law. It was very cold now, so cold that he fancied he could see his breath. And silent, terribly silent. Against that silence he could feel and hear the rapid drumming of his heart, accelerating unendurably to the thundering, swirling rhythm of the music.

Then, in one instant of diabolic paralyzing insight, he knew that _this_ was sorcery. No mere puttering about with ridiculous medieval implements, no effortless sleight of hand, but a straining, back-breaking struggle to keep control of _forces summoned_, of which the objects he manipulated were only the symbols. Outside the walls of the room, outside the walls of his skull, outside the impalpable energy-walls of his mind, he felt those forces gathering, swelling up, dreadfully expectant, waiting for him to make a false move so that they could crush him.

He could not believe it. He had to believe it.

The only question was--would he be able to stay in control?

Eleven fifty-seven. He gathered the objects together on the flannel. The needle jumped to the lodestone and clung. It shouldn't; it wasn't that magnetic. He took a pinch of graveyard dirt. Between finger and thumb, each separate particle seemed to crawl, like a tiny maggot. He sensed that something was missing. He could not remember what it was. He fumbled for the formula. A current of air was blowing the scraps of paper off the table. He sensed an eager, inward surge of the forces outside, as if they knew he was failing. He clutched at the papers, managed to pin them down. Bending close, he made out the words "platinum or iridium." He jabbed his pen against the table, broke off the whole nib, and added it to the other objects.

He stood at the side of the table away from the knife that marked the east, trying to steady his shaking hands against the edge. His teeth were chattering. The room was utterly dark now except for the impossible bluish light that beat through the window shade.

Abruptly the strip of flannel started to curl like a strip of heated gelatine, to roll itself up from east to west, _with_ the sun.

He jerked forward, got his hand inside the flannel before it closed, drew it apart--in his numb hands it seemed like metal--and rolled it against the sun, widdershins.

The silence was intensified. Even the sound of his beating heart was cut off. He knew that something was listening with a terrible intensity for his command, and that something was hoping with an even more terrible avidity that he would not be able to utter that command.

Yet somewhere a clock was booming--or was it not a clock, but the secret sound of time? Nine--ten--eleven--twelve.

His tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth. He kept on choking soundlessly. He could feel the walls giving way.

Then, in a dry, croaking voice, he managed: "Stop Tansy. Bring her here."

* * * * *

The walls were shaken as if they were at the center of a whirlpool. Darkness became absolute. There was an eruption of force from the table. He felt himself flung across the room.

Then the forces were gone. In all things, tension gave way to limpness. Sound and light returned. He was sprawled across the bed. On the table was a little flannel packet, no longer of any consequence.

He felt as if he had been doped, or were waking after a debauch. There was no inclination to do anything. Emotion was absent.

Outwardly everything was the same. Even his mind, with automatic rationality, could still wearily take up the thankless task of explaining his experiences on a scientific basis--weaving an elaborate web in which psychosis, hallucination, and improbable coincidences were the strands.

But inwardly something had changed, and would never change back.

Considerable time passed.

He heard steps mounting the stairs, then in the hall. They made a _squish-squish_ sound, as if the shoes were soaking wet.

They stopped outside his door. There was a soft rap.

He crossed the room, turned the key in the lock--

A strand of seaweed was caught in the silver brooch. The gray suit was dark now and heavy with water, except for one spot which had started to dry and was faintly dusted with a white powder--salt. The odor of the Bay was intimate and close. There was another strand of seaweed clinging to one ankle against the wrinkled stocking.

And around the stained shoes, a little pool of water was forming.

His eyes traced the wet footprints down the hall. At the head of the stairs the old clerk was standing, one foot still on the last step. He was carrying a small pigskin suitcase.

"What's all this about?" he quavered, when he saw that Norman was looking at him. "You didn't tell me you were expecting your wife. She looks like she'd thrown herself in the Bay. We don't want anything queer happening in this hotel--anything wrong."

"It's quite all right," said Norman, prolonging the moment before he would have to look at her face. "I'm sorry I forgot to tell you. May I have the bag?"

"--only last year we had a suicide"--the old clerk did not seem to realize he was speaking his thoughts aloud--"bad for the hotel--" His voice trailed off. He looked at Norman, gathered himself together, and came hesitatingly down the hall. When he was a few steps away, he stopped, reached out and put down the suitcase, turned, and walked rapidly away.

Unwillingly, Norman raised his eyes until they were on a level with hers.

The face was pale, very pale, and without expression. The lips were tinged with blue. Wet hair was plastered against the cheeks. A thick lock crossed one eye socket, like a curtain half drawn, and curled down toward the throat, where it merged with a strand of seaweed. The dull eyes stared at him, without sign of recognition. And no hand moved up to brush the lock of hair away.

From the hem of the skirt, water was dripping.

The lips parted. The voice had the monotonous murmur of water.

"You were too late," the lips said. "You were a minute too late."

XI.

For a third time their exchange of conversation had come back to the same question. He had the maddening sensation of following a robot that was walking in a huge endless circle and always treading on precisely the same blades of grass as it retraced its path.

With the hopeless conviction that he would not get any further this time, he asked the question again: "But how can you lack consciousness, and at the same time _know_ that you lack consciousness? If your mind is blank, you cannot at the same time be aware that your mind is blank."

The hands of his watch were creeping toward three in the morning. The chill of night's lowest ebb pervaded the dingy hotel room. Tansy sat stiffly, wearing his bathrobe and big fleece-lined slippers, with a blanket over her knees and a bath towel wrapped around her head. They should have made her look child-like and perhaps even artlessly attractive. They did not. If you were to unwind the towel you would find the top of the skull sawed off and the brains removed, an empty bowl--that was the illusion Norman experienced every time he made the mistake of looking into her eyes.

The pale lips opened. "I know nothing. I only speak. They have taken away my soul. But my voice is a function of my body."

You could not even say that the voice was patiently explanatory. It was too utterly empty and colorless even for that. The words, clearly enunciated and evenly spaced, all sounded alike. They came with the regular beat of a machine.

The last thing he wanted to do was hammer questions at that stiff pitiful figure, but at all costs he must awaken some spark of feeling in the masklike face; he must find some intelligible starting point before his own mind could begin to work effectually.

"But, Tansy, if you can talk about the present situation, you must be aware of it. You're here in this room with me!"

The toweled head shook once, like that of a mechanical doll.

"Nothing is here with you but a body. 'I' is not here."

His mind automatically corrected "is" to "am" before he realized that there had been no grammatical error and shuddered at the implications of the trifling change in a tiny verb.

"You mean," he asked, "that you can see or hear nothing? That there is just a blackness?"

Again that simple mechanical headshake, which carried more absolute conviction than the most heated protestations.

"My body sees and hears perfectly. It has suffered no injury. It can function in all particulars. But there is nothing inside. There is not even a blackness."

His tired, fumbling mind jumped to the subject of behavioristic psychology and its fundamental assertion that human reactions can be explained completely and satisfactorily without once referring to consciousness--that it need not even be assumed that consciousness exists. Here was the perfect proof. And yet not so perfect, for the behavior of this body lacked every one of those little mannerisms whose sum is personality. The way Tansy used to squint and twist one little finger around another when thinking through a difficult question. The familiar quirk at the corners of her mouth when she felt flattered or slyly amused. All gone. Even the quick triple headshake he knew so well, with the slight bunny-rabbit wrinkling of the little nose, had become that robot's "No."

The sensory organs still responded to stimuli. They sent nerve impulses to the hindbrain or midbrain--or cortex--where they traveled about and gave rise to efferent impulses which activated glands and muscles, including the motor organs of speech. But that was all. None of those intangible flurries we call consciousness hovered around the webwork of nervous activity in the cortex. What had imparted _style_--Tansy's style, like no one else's--to every movement and utterance of the body, was gone. There was left only a physiological organism, without sign or indication of personality. Not even a mad or an idiot soul--yes! why not use that old term now that it had an obvious specific meaning?--peered from the gray-green eyes which winked at intervals with machinelike regularity, but only to lubricate the cornea, nothing more.

He felt a grim sort of relief go through him, now that he had been able to picture it in definite terms. But the picture itself--his mind veered to the memory of a newspaper story about an old man who had kept locked in his bedroom for years the body of a young woman whom he loved and who had died of an incurable disease. He had maintained the body in a miraculous state of preservation by wax and other means they said, had talked to it every night and morning, had been convinced that he would some day reanimate it completely--until they found out and took him away, and buried it. Had that body--

* * * * *

"Tansy," he was asking, "when your soul went, why didn't you die?"

"Usually the soul lingers to the end, unable to escape, and vanishes or dies when the body dies," the voice answered, its words as evenly spaced as if timed to a metronome. "But He Who Walks Behind was tearing at mine. There was the weight of green water against my face. I knew it was midnight. I knew that you had failed. In that moment of despair, He Who Walks Behind was able to draw forth my soul. In the same moment Your Agent's arms were about me, lifting me toward the air. My soul was close enough to know what had happened, yet not close enough to return. Its doubled anguish was the last memory it imprinted on my brain. Your Agent and He Who Walks Behind concluded that each had obtained the thing he had been sent for, and so there was no struggle between them."

The picture created in his mind was so shockingly vivid that it seemed incredible that it could have been produced by the words of a mere physiological machine. And yet only a physiological machine could have told the story with such total restraint.

"Is there nothing that _touches_ you?" he asked abruptly in a loud voice, gripped by an intolerable spasm of anguish at the emptiness of her eyes. "Haven't you a single emotion left?"

"Yes. One." This time it was not a robot's headshake but a robot's nod. For the first time there was a stir of feeling, a hint of motivation. The tip of a pallid tongue licked hungrily around the pale lips. "I want my soul."

He caught his breath. Now that he had succeeded in awakening a feeling in her, he hated it. There was something so animal about it, so like some light-sensitive marine worm blindly yet greedily wriggling toward the sunlight.

"I want my soul," the voice repeated mechanically, tearing at his emotions more than any plaintive or whining accents could have done. "At the last moment, although it could not return, my soul implanted that one emotion in me. It knew what awaited it. It knew there are things that can be done to a soul. It was very much afraid."

He ground the words out between his teeth. "Where do you think your soul is?"

"She has it. The woman with the little black eyes."

"Evelyn Sawtelle?" He was remembering a phone call.

"Yes. But it is not wise to speak of her by name."

His hand shot out for the phone. At that moment he had to do something definite, or lose control of himself completely. For too long he had sat impotently by, watching the ghostly and harrowing drama unfold. Now he had to strike out.

After a time he roused the night clerk and got the local operator.

"Yes, sir," came the singsong voice. "Hempnell 1284. You wish to make a person-to-person call to Evelyn Sawtelle--E-V-E-L-Y-N S-A-W-T-E-L-L-E, sir?... Will you please hang up and wait? It will take considerable time to make a connection."

"I want my soul. I want to go to that woman. I want to go to Hempnell." Now that he had touched off the blind hunger in her, it persisted. He was reminded of a phonograph needle caught in the same groove, or a mechanical toy turned on to a new track by a little push.

"We'll go there all right." It was still hard for him to control his breathing. "We'll get it back."

"But I must start for Hempnell soon. My clothes were ruined by the water. I must have the maid clean and press them."

With a slow, even movement she got to her feet and started toward the phone.

"But, Tansy," he objected involuntarily. "It's three in the morning. You can't get a maid now."

"But my clothes must be cleaned and pressed. I must start for Hempnell soon."

The words might have been those of an obstinate woman, sulky and selfish. But they had less tone that a sleepwalker's.

She kept on toward the phone. Although he did not anticipate that he would do it, he shrank out of her way, pressing close against the side of the bed.

"But even if there is a maid," he said, "she won't come at this hour."

The pallid face turned toward him incuriously. "The maid will be a woman." It was a little while before he got the implication of the words. "She will come when she hears me."

Then she was talking to the night clerk. "Is there a maid in the hotel?... Send her to my room.... Then ring her.... I cannot wait until morning.... I need her at once.... I cannot tell you the reason.... Thank you."

Norman was thinking: How can a physiological machine conceive and carry out even such a simple plan? Yet how could a conscious human being do it with such utter listlessness? Same paradox. He wondered if he ought to stop her. But an idea was growing in his mind.

There was a long wait, while he heard faintly the repeated ringing at the other end of the line. He could imagine the sleepy, surly voice that finally answered.

"Is this the maid?... Come at once to Room 37." He could almost catch the indignant answer. Then--"Can't you hear my voice? Don't you realize who is speaking?... Yes.... Come at once." And she replaced the phone in its cradle.

"Tansy--" he began. Then his eyes met hers, and once again he found himself asking a halting prefatory question, although he had not intended to. "You are able to hear and answer my questions?"

"I can answer questions. I have been answering questions for three hours." The lack of expression only made the irony more complete.

* * * * *

But--logic prompted wearily--if she can remember what has been happening these last three hours, then surely--And yet, what is memory but a track worn in the nervous system? In order to explain memory you don't need to bring in consciousness. Quit banging your head against that stone wall, you fool!--came another inward prompting. You've looked in her eyes, haven't you? Well, then, get on with it!

"Tansy, is that woman coming here because she's ... well, the same as you were?"

"Yes. But since you are present she will not speak of it."

"But if I weren't here--or if I hid myself?"

"She might respond to questioning." The hungry subanimal expression came back, and the tip of the tongue appeared between the lips. "If I make her speak ... if I make you believe--will we go back to Hempnell very quickly? Will you help me?"

"Yes." Of course he would. He wouldn't do anything else. But what good to say all that to a blank physiological machine beyond the reach of comfort? Besides, the maid should soon be here, and an unwholesome curiosity was eating at him.

"I'll leave the closet door just a little ajar," he said. "She probably won't notice. See?"

There were footsteps in the hall. The robot nod was his only answer.

"You wanted me, mum?" Contrary to his expectations, the voice was young, but very low. It sounded as if she had swallowed as she spoke.

"Yes. I want you to clean and press some things of mine. They're hanging on the edge of the bathtub. Go and get them."

The maid came into his line of vision, then. She would be very heavy in a few years, he thought, but she was handsome now, though puffed with sleep. She had hastily pulled on a dull-black dress, but her feet were in slippers and her hair was snarly.

"Be careful with the dress. It's wool," came Tansy's voice, sounding just as toneless as when it had been directed at him. "And I want them promptly at nine o'clock."

Norman half expected to hear an objection to this unreasonable request, but there was none. The girl walked rapidly out of the bathroom, the damp clothes hurriedly slung over one arm, as if her one object were to get away before she was spoken to again.

"Wait a moment, girl. I want to ask you a question." The voice was somewhat louder this time. That was the only change whatsoever, but it had a startling effect of command.

The girl hesitated, then swung around unwillingly, and Norman got a good look at her face. He could not see Tansy--the closet door just cut her off--but he could see the fear come to the surface of the girl's face as she turned, see the sleep-creased cheek pale.

"Yes, mum?" she managed.

There was a considerable pause. He could tell from the way the girl shrank, hugging the damp clothes tight to her body, that Tansy had lifted her eyes and was looking at her.

Finally: "You know The Easy Way to Do Things? The Ways to Get and Guard?"

Norman could have sworn that the girl gave a guilty start at that second phrase. But she only shook her head quickly, and mumbled, "No, mum. I ... I don't know what you're talking about."

"You mean you have never learned How to Make Wishes Work? You don't conjure, or spell, or hex? You don't know the Art?"

This time the "No" was almost inaudible. The girl was trying to look away, but failing.

"I think you are lying."

You could put any construction on those toneless words. The girl twisted, hands tightly clutching her overlapping arms. He wanted to go out and stop it, but curiosity held him rigid.

The girl's resistance broke. "Please, mum. We're not supposed to tell."

"You may tell me. What Procedures do you use?"

The girl's perplexity at the new word looked real.