"Black—it’s your turn to attack. Why do you think we are plotting against you?"
"It’s an involved story, and goes way back into my early childhood. There was an immediate incident, however—" He opened by advancing the white king’s knight to KB3. Hayward’s eyebrows raised.
"You make a piano attack?"
"Why not? You know that it is not safe for me to risk a gambit with you."
The doctor shrugged his shoulders and answered the opening. "Suppose we start with your early childhood. It may shed more light than more recent incidents. Did you feel that you were being persecuted as a child?"
"No!" He half rose from his chair. "When I was a child I was sure of myself. I knew then, I tell you; I knew! Life was worth while, and I knew it. I was at peace with myself and my surroundings. Life was good and I assumed that the creatures around me were like myself."
"And weren’t they?"
"Not at all! Particularly the children. I didn’t know what viciousness was until I was turned loose with other children. The little devils! And I was expected to be like them and play with them."
The doctor nodded. "I know. The herd compulsion. Children can be pretty savage at times."
"You’ve missed the point. This wasn’t any healthy roughness; these creatures were different—not like myself at all. They looked like me, but they were not like me. If I tried to say anything to one of them about anything that mattered to me, all I could get was a stare and a scornful laugh. Then they would find some way to punish me for having said it."
Hayward nodded. "I see what you mean. How about grown-ups?"
"That is somewhat different. Adults don’t matter to children at first—or, rather they did not matter to me. They were too big, and they did not bother me, and they were busy with things that did not enter into my considerations. It was only when I noticed that my presence affected them that I began to wonder about them."
"How do you mean?"
"Well, they never did the things when I was around that they did when I was not around."
Hayward looked at him carefully. "Won’t that statement take quite a lot of justifying? How do you know what they did when you weren’t around?"
He acknowledged the point. "But I used to catch them just stopping. If I came into a room, the conversation would stop suddenly, and then it would pick up about the weather or something equally inane. Then I took to hiding and listening and looking. Adults did not behave the same way in my presence as out of it."
"Your move, I believe. But see here, old man—that was when you were a child. Every child passes through that phase. Now that you are a man, you must see the adult point of view. Children are strange creatures and have to be protected—at least, we do protect them—from many adult interests. There is a whole code of conventions in the matter that—"
"Yes, yes," he interrupted impatiently, "I know all that. Nevertheless, I noticed enough and remembered enough that was never clear to me later. And it put me on my guard to notice the next thing."
"Which was?" He noticed that the doctor’s eyes were averted as he adjusted a castle’s position.
"The things I saw people doing and heard them talking about were never of any importance. They must be doing something else."
"I don’t follow you."
"You don’t choose to follow me. I’m telling this to you in exchange for a game of chess."
"Why do you like to play chess so well?"
"Because it is the only thing in the world where I can see all the factors and understand all the rules. Never mind—I saw all around me this enormous plant, cities, farms, factories, churches, schools, homes, railroads, luggage, roller coasters, trees, saxophones, libraries, people and animals. People that looked like me and who should have felt very much like me, if what I was told was the ruth. But what did they appear to be doing? ‘They went to work to earn the money to buy the food to get the strength to go to work to earn the money to buy the food to get the strength to go to work to get the strength to buy the food to earn the money to go to—’ until they fell over dead. Any slight variation in the basic pattern did not matter, for they always fell over dead. And everybody tried to tell me that I should be doing the same thing. I knew better!"
The doctor gave him a look apparently intended to denote helpless surrender and laughed. "I can’t argue with you. Life does look like that, and maybe it is just that futile. But it is the only life we have. Why not make up your mind to enjoy it as much as possible?"
"Oh, no!" He looked both sulky and stubborn. "You can’t peddle nonsense to me by claiming to be fresh out of sense. How do I know? Because all this complex stage setting, all these swarms of actors, could not have been put here just to make idiot noises at each other. Some other explanation, but not that one. An insanity as enormous, as complex, as the one around me had to be planned. I’ve found the plan!"
"Which is?"
He noticed that the doctor’s eyes were again averted. "It is a play intended to divert me, to occupy my mind and confuse me, to keep me so busy with details that I will not have time to think about the meaning. You are all in it, every one of you." He shook his finger in the doctor’s face. "Most of them may be helpless automatons, but you’re not. You are one of the conspirators. You’ve been sent in as a troubleshooter to try to force me to go back to playing the role assigned to me!"
He saw that the doctor was waiting for him to quiet down.
"Take it easy," Hayward finally managed to say. "Maybe it is all a conspiracy, but why do you think that you have been singled out for special attention? Maybe it is a joke on all of us. Why couldn’t I be one of the victims as well as yourself?"
"Got you!" He pointed a long finger at Hayward. "That is the essence of the plot. All of these creatures have been set up to look like me in order to prevent me from realizing that I was the center of the arrangements. But I have noticed the key fact, the mathematically inescapable fact, that I am unique. Here am I, sitting on the inside. The world extends outward from me. I am the center—"
"Easy, man, easy! Don’t you realize that the world looks that way to me, too. We are each the center of the universe—"
"Not so! That is what you have tried to make me believe, that I am just one of millions more just like me. Wrong! If they were like me, then I could get into communication with them. I can’t. I have tried and tried and I can’t. I’ve sent out my inner thoughts, seeking some one other being who has them, too. What have I gotten back? Wrong answers, jarring incongruities, meaningless obscenity. I’ve tried. I tell you. God!—how I’ve tried! But there is nothing out there to speak to me—nothing but emptiness and otherness!"
"Wait a minute. Do you mean to say that you think there is nobody home at my end of the line? Don’t you believe that I am alive and conscious?"
He regarded the doctor soberly. "Yes, I think you are probably alive, but you are one of the others—my antagonists. But you have set thousands of others around me whose faces are blank, not lived in, and whose speech is a meaningless reflex of noise."
"Well, then, if you concede that I am an ego, why do you insist that I am so very different from yourself?"
"Why? Wait!" He pushed back from the chess table and strode over to the wardrobe, from which he took out a violin case.
While he was playing, the lines of suffering smoothed out of his face and his expression took a relaxed beatitude. For a while he recaptured the emotions, but not the knowledge, which he had ossessed in dreams. The melody proceeded easily from proposition to proposition with inescapable, unforced logic. He finished with a triumphant statement of the essential thesis and turned to the doctor. "Well?"
"Hm-m-m." He seemed to detect an even greater degree of caution in the doctor’s manner. "It’s an odd bit, but remarkable. ‘S pity you didn’t take up the violin seriously. You could have made quite a reputation. You could even now. Why don’t you do it? You could afford to, I believe."