He shrugged. “We have insight into each other’s abnormality, but are unaware of the same in ourselves.”
“That’s the whole basis for psychiatry, isn’t it?”
“In a way. But this is physical—functional—when psychiatry presents situation where—” His voice trailed off.
“I have it figured this way.” How eager she was. Somehow, it didn’t matter much now, to him. “We’re conditioned to react to reality in certain accepted ways. For instance that we’re supposed to see our shadows. So we see them. But in our case they were never really there to see. Our sanity or ‘normalcy’ is maintained that way. But the constant auto-illusion must always lead to neuroticism and pathology—the hidden fears. But these fears must express themselves. So they do so in more socially acceptable ways.”
Her voice suddenly dropped as her odd eyes flickered across the street. “But we see each other as we really are,” she whispered tensely. “Though we could never have recognized the truth in ourselves.”
She pointed stiffly. Her mouth gaped, quivered slightly.
He turned slowly. His mouth twitched with a growing terrible hatred. They were coming for him now.
Four men with rifles were coming toward him. Stealthily creeping, they were, as though it were some pristine scene with caves in the background. They were bent slightly, stalking. Hunters and hunted, and the law of the wild and two of them stopping in the middle of the street. The other two branched, circled, came at him from either side, clumping down the walk. George recognized them all. The town marshal, Bill Conway, and Mike Lash, Harry Hutchinson, and Dwight Farrigon.
Edith Bailey was backed up against the window. Her eyes were strangely dilated. But the faces of the four men exuded cold animal hate, and blood-lust.
Edith Bailey’s lips said faintly, “What—what are we going to do?”
He felt so calm. He felt his lips writhe back in a snarl. The wind tingled on his teeth. “I know now,” he said. “I know about the minutes I lost. I know why they’re after me. You’d better get away.”
“But why the—the guns?”
“I murdered my wife. She served me greasy eggs. God—she was an animal—just a dumb beast!”
Conway called, his rifle crooked in easy promising grace. “All right, Doc. Come on along without any trouble. Though I’d just as soon you made a break. I’d like to shoot you dead, Doctor.”
“And what have I done, exactly,” said Doctor Spechaug.
“He’s hog-wild,” yelled Mike Lash. “Cuttin’ her all up that way! Let’s string ’em up!” Conway yelled something about a “fair trial,” though not with much enthusiasm.
Edith screamed as they charged toward them. A wild, inhuman cry.
Doctor Spechaug’s eyes flashed up the narrow street.
“Let’s go!” he said to Edith Bailey. “They’ll see running they’ve never seen before. They can’t touch us.”
They ran. They heard the sharp crack of rifles. They saw the dust spurting up. Doctor Spechaug heard himself howling as he became aware of peculiar stings in his body. Queer, painless, deeply penetrating sensations that made themselves felt all over his body—as though he was awakening from a long paralysis.
Then the mad yelling faded rapidly behind them. They were running, streaking out of the town with inhuman speed. They struck out in long easy strides across the meadow toward the dense woods that brooded beyond the college.
Her voice gasped exultingly. “They couldn’t hurt us! They couldn’t! They tried!”
He nodded, straining eagerly toward he knew not what, nosing into the fresh wind. How swiftly and gracefully they could run. Soon they lost themselves in the thick dark forest. Shadows hid them.
Days later the moon was full. It edged over the low hill flanking Glen Oaks on the east. June bugs buzzed ponderously like armor-plated dragons toward the lights glowing faintly from the town. Frogs croaked from the swampy meadows and the creek.
They came up slowly to stand silhouetted against the glowing moon, nosing hungrily into the steady, aromatic breeze blowing from the Conway farm below.
They glided effortlessly down, then across the sharp-bladed marsh grass, leaping high with each bound. As they came disdainfully close to the silent farm house, a column of pale light from a coal oil lamp came through the living room window and haloed a neglected flower bed. Sorrow and fear clung to the house.
The shivering shadow of a gaunt woman was etched against the half drawn shade. The two standing outside the window called. The woman’s shadow trembled.
Then a long rigid finger of steel projected itself beneath the partially raised window. The rifle cracked almost against the faces of the two. He screamed hideously as his companion dropped without a sound, twitching, twitching—he screamed again and began dragging himself away toward the sheltering forest. Intently and desperately the rifle cracked again.
He gave up then.
He sprawled out flatly on the cool, damp, moon-bathed path. His hot tongue lapped feverishly at the wet grass. He felt the persistent impact of the rifle’s breath against him, and now there was a wave of pain. The full moon was fading into black mental clouds as he feebly attempted to lift his bleeding head.
He thought with agonized irony:
“Provincial fools. Stupid, superstitious idiots… and that damned Mrs. Conway—the most stupid of all. Only she would have thought to load her dead husband’s rifle with silver bullets! Damned peasants—”
Total darkness blotted out futile revery.
THE IDEAL
by Stanley G. Weinbaum
“This,” said the Franciscan, “is my Automaton, who at the proper time will speak, answer whatsoever question I may ask, and reveal all secret knowledge to me.” He smiled as he laid his hand affectionately on the iron skull that topped the pedestal.
The youth gazed open-mouthed, first at the head and then at the Friar. “But it’s iron!” he whispered. “The head is iron, good father.”
“Iron without, skill within, my son,” said Roger Bacon. “It will speak, at the proper time and in its own manner, for so have I made it. A clever man can twist the devil’s arts to God’s ends, thereby cheating the fiend— Sst! There sounds vespers! Plena gratia, ave Virgo—”
But it did not speak. Long hours, long weeks, the doctor mirabilis watched his creation, but iron lips were silent and the iron eyes dull, and no voice but the great man’s own sounded in his monkish cell, nor was there ever an answer to all the questions that he asked—until one day when he sat surveying his work, composing a letter to Duns Scotus in distant Cologne—one day—
“Time is!” said the image, and smiled benignly.
The Friar looked up. “Time is, indeed,” he echoed. “Time it is that you give utterance, and to some assertion less obvious than that time is. For of course time is, else there were nothing at all. Without time—”
“Time was!” rumbled the image, still smiling, but sternly at the statue of Draco.
“Indeed time was,” said the Monk. “Time was, is, and will be, for time is that medium in which events occur. Matter exists in space, but events—”
The image smiled no longer. “Time is past!” it roared in tones deep as the cathedral bell outside, and burst into ten thousand pieces.
“There,” said old Haskel van Manderpootz, shutting the book, “is my classical authority in this experiment. This story, overlaid as it is with medi?val myth and legend, proves that Roger Bacon himself attempted the experiment—and failed.” He shook a long finger at me. “Yet do not get the impression, Dixon, that Friar Bacon was not a great man. He was—extremely great, in fact; he lighted the torch that his namesake Francis Bacon took up four centuries later, and that now van Manderpootz rekindles.”
