All of a sudden it was too much. He slammed shut his eyes to escape any more of the messages and had to—had to—scream at the top of his lungs.
Distantly he heard Dilys Prinkett asking what was the matter, and the rest of the trouble-shooting team came rushing in to put the same question.
Forcing his eyes open again, finding that by now the display on the screens was over because Store G had printed out everything it contained, he told them. As best he could. He kept stumbling over his tongue.
When he had finished they exchanged sad glances and attempted to verify his assertions.
Bewildered, Desmond realised that they could not. The logjam could only be broken once. And still nobody knew how it had come about.
When he started to rant and howl with frustration they ran to the phone and called for help.
“By the way,” Sir Andrew inquired of Dr Molesey after conveying fulsome thanks—by phone—to him and the other members of the trouble-shooting team, “is there any improvement in the condition of poor young what’s-his-name?”
“Desmond Williams? No, I’m afraid not. I called the hospital this morning, and the psychiatrist in charge of his ward said he’d never run across such stubborn and detailed delusions of persecution. But he held out some hope; it’s possible the condition may yield to electroshock treatment.”
“What a shame, what a dreadful waste!” Sir Andrew sighed heavily. “Having had such a brilliant insight and solved our problem for us in next to no time . . . Still, they do say, don’t they, that genius is to madness next akin? I doubt if he’ll appreciate it, but if you happen to see him perhaps you’d pass on a message from my Minister. He told me yesterday that not only he himself but the entire Cabinet including the PM are very much obliged by what young Williams did.”
The Suicide of Man
This is a story with a happy ending. The beginning, on the other hand. . .
Well, after all his care, all his precautions, there was absolutely no way he could not be dead.
And yet he wasn’t. There were presence, consciousness, alarm, associated emotions. That which had been “I” for him was undestroyed.
He contrived an utterance, half a scream and half a desperate question. They answered, somehow.
What they told him was: “You are a ghost.”
It was a place, no doubt about that. In fact it was a recognisable room, with a solid floor and solid walls and a solid ceiling that shed gentle light and even a piece of furniture which supported him in a relaxed posture. Also he was not alone. There were three with him, of whom one was definitely a man and two were indisputably women. But he was more concerned about himself. He looked down and discovered his familiar naked skin with scars from, at last count, eight unsuccessful operations. He identified the hands he had once been so proud of because they were deft and subtle. He knew his own limbs, his very body- hairs . . .
And was dazed and horrified and ultimately appalled.
Someone said, and he believed it was the woman who stood nearer of the two, “In your vocabulary we find no better referent for a person who is neither alive nor dead. You were Lodovico Zaras. You were a professor of experimental psychology. You fell victim to a form of cancer which disseminated rapidly. You decided in a year which you called by the figures one-nine-seven-eight that you would rather cease than continue to endure operations which could at best postpone your death but never cure the sickness. Is this what you recall?”
He replied, not quite understanding how he was able to speak at all, let alone do so in response to statements he knew not to be in English or Spanish or French or any other tongue he was acquainted with, “Yes, but how can I remember anything? I killed myself!”
Again the flat assertion: “You are a ghost.”
At the moment of his death he had been sitting in a favourite chair, with the glass from which he had drunk his remedy for existence on a table at his side, a favourite recording of Bach’s organ music ringing in his ears.
He was sitting (again?) now, on what was not except by remote derivation a commonplace chair. He could and did stand up, feeling no twinge of pain, none of that old stubborn heaviness in the limbs which cancer had weighed down. He felt ethereally light. Yet he did not perceive himself as immaterial; when he clapped his palms together there was a noise and the contact stung, and stare how he might he could not see through his hands.
“Ghost?” he repeated in bewilderment.
From somewhere the man who was in the room produced an object he could name although its form was strange. It consisted of a reflector surrounded by a frame; it was a mirror.
“Look for yourself,” the man invited, and he did, and he failed to find what he was looking for. What he saw was the mirror.
Empty of his image.
Because of that he grew extremely frightened, but there was something worse to follow.
“Touch me,” said the woman who had spoken before, and came to stand in front of him. For a long moment he hesitated, so disturbed by not seeing his reflection that he needed to register every sense-datum he could. The ceiling was white and luminous. The walls wore the rich, profound blue of a distant horizon. The floor was green and reminded him of spring grass. This before him was, yes, was a woman: taller than himself, slender, with an avian fineness of bone, not beautiful but so unusual—indeed so improbable—that if he had hurried along a street where she was walking the other way he would have checked and looked back, astonished at her having not enough black hair beginning too high on her forehead, ceasing too high on her nape,
