Insanity is a retreat from reality, an escape within the mind from the
reality outside the mind. But what if there is no detectable reality
outside the mind? What is there to escape from? Suicide--death in any
form--is an escape from life. But if death does not come, and can not be
self-inflicted, what then?
And when the pressure of nothingness becomes too great to bear, it
becomes necessary to escape; a man under great enough pressure will take
the easy way out. But if there is no easy way? Why, then a man must take
the hard way.
For Paul Wendell, there was no escape from his dark, senseless Gehenna
by way of death, and even insanity offered no retreat; insanity in
itself is senseless, and senselessness was what he was trying to flee.
The only insanity possible was the psychosis of regression, a fleeing
into the past, into the crystallized, unchanging world of memory.
So Paul Wendell explored his past, every year, every hour, every second
of it, searching to recall and savor every bit of sensation he had ever
experienced. He tasted and smelled and touched and heard and analyzed
each of them minutely. He searched through his own subjective thought
processes, analyzing, checking and correlating them.
_Know thyself._ Time and time again, Wendell retreated from his own
memories in confusion, or shame, or fear. But there was no retreat from
himself, and eventually he had to go back and look again.
He had plenty of time--all the time in the world. How can subjective
time be measured when there is no objective reality?
* * * * *
Eventually, there came the time when there was nothing left to look at;
nothing left to see; nothing to check and remember; nothing that he had
not gone over in every detail. Again, boredom began to creep in. It was
not the boredom of nothingness, but the boredom of the familiar.
Imagination? What could he imagine, except combinations and permutations
of his own memories? He didn't know--perhaps there might be more to it
than that.
So he exercised his imagination. With a wealth of material to draw upon,
he would build himself worlds where he could move around, walk, talk,
and make love, eat, drink and feel the caress of sunshine and wind.
It was while he was engaged in this project that he touched another
mind. He touched it, fused for a blinding second, and bounced away. He
ran gibbering up and down the corridors of his own memory, mentally
reeling from the shock of--_identification_!
* * * * *
Who was he? Paul Wendell? Yes, he knew with incontrovertible certainty
that he was Paul Wendell. But he also knew, with almost equal certainty,
that he was Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton. He was living--had
lived--in the latter half of the nineteenth century. But he knew nothing
of the Captain other than the certainty of identity; nothing else of
that blinding mind-touch remained.
Again he scoured his memory--Paul Wendell's memory--checking and
rechecking the area just before that semi-fatal bullet had crashed
through his brain.
And finally, at long last, he knew with certainty where his calculations
had gone astray. He knew positively why eight men had gone insane.
Then he went again in search of other minds, and this time he knew he
would not bounce.