Dacre," Fitch broke in. "It's precisely as I believed; Doctor Chalmers
is an unusually gifted precognitive percipient. You've seen,
gentlemen, how his complicated chain of precognitions about the death
of Khalid has been proven veridical; I'd stake my life that every one
of these precognitions will be similarly verified. And I'll stake my
professional reputation that the man is perfectly sane. Of course,
abnormal psychology and psychopathology aren't my subjects, but...."
"They're not my subjects, either," Whitburn retorted, "but I know a
lunatic by his ravings."
"Doctor Fitch is taking an entirely proper attitude," Pottgeiter said,
"in pointing out that abnormal psychology is a specialized branch,
outside his own field. I wouldn't dream, myself, of trying to offer a
decisive opinion on some point of Roman, or Babylonian, history. Well,
if the question of Doctor Chalmers' sanity is at issue here, let's
consult somebody who specializes in insanity. I don't believe that
anybody here is qualified even to express an opinion on that subject,
Doctor Whitburn least of all."
Whitburn turned on him angrily. "Oh, shut up, you doddering old fool!"
he shouted. "Look; there's another of them!" he told the trustees.
"Another deadhead on the faculty that this Tenure Law keeps me from
getting rid of. He's as bad as Chalmers, himself. You just heard that
string of nonsense he was spouting. Why, his courses have been noted
among the students for years as snap courses in which nobody ever has
to do any work...."
Chalmers was on his feet again, thoroughly angry. Abuse of himself he
could take; talking that way about gentle, learned, old Pottgeiter
was something else.
"I think Doctor Pottgeiter's said the most reasonable thing I've heard
since I came in here," he declared. "If my sanity is to be questioned,
I insist that it be questioned by somebody qualified to do so."
[Illustration: Had the sane restrained the insane, or was it the other
way around?]
Weill set his recorder on the floor and jumped up beside him, trying
to haul him back into his seat.
"For God's sake, man! Sit down and shut up!" he hissed.
Chalmers shook off his hand. "No, I won't shut up! This is the only
way to settle this, once and for all. And when my sanity's been
vindicated, I'm going to sue this fellow...."
Whitburn started to make some retort, then stopped short. After a
moment, he smiled nastily.
"Do I understand, Doctor Chalmers, that you would be willing to submit
to psychiatric examination?" he asked.
"Don't agree; you're putting your foot in a trap!" Weill told him
urgently.
"Of course, I agree, as long as the examination is conducted by a
properly qualified psychiatrist."
"How about Doctor Hauserman at Northern State Mental Hospital?"
Whitburn asked quickly. "Would you agree to an examination by him?"
"Excellent!" Fitch exclaimed. "One of the best men in the field. I'd
accept his opinion unreservedly."
Weill started to object again; Chalmers cut him off. "Doctor Hauserman
will be quite satisfactory to me. The only question is, would he be
available?"
"I think he would," Dacre said, glancing at his watch. "I wonder if he
could be reached now." He got to his feet. "Telephone in your outer
office, Doctor Whitburn? Fine. If you gentlemen will excuse me...."
It was a good fifteen minutes before he returned, smiling.
"Well, gentlemen, it's all arranged," he said. "Doctor Hauserman is
quite willing to examine Doctor Chalmers--with the latter's consent,
of course."
"He'll have it. In writing, if he wishes."
"Yes, I assured him on that point. He'll be here about noon
tomorrow--it's a hundred and fifty miles from the hospital, but the
doctor flies his own plane--and the examination can start at two in
the afternoon. He seems familiar with the facilities of the
psychology department, here; I assured him that they were at his
disposal. Will that be satisfactory to you, Doctor Chalmers?"
"I have a class at that time, but one of the instructors can take it
over--if holding classes will be possible around here tomorrow," he
said. "Now, if you gentlemen will pardon me, I think I'll go home and
get some sleep."
* * * * *
Weill came up to the apartment with him. He mixed a couple of drinks
and they went into the living room with them.
"Just in case you don't know what you've gotten yourself into," Weill
said, "this Hauserman isn't any ordinary couch-pilot; he's the state
psychiatrist. If he gets the idea you aren't sane, he can commit you
to a hospital, and I'll bet that's exactly what Whitburn had in mind
when he suggested him. And I don't trust this man Dacre. I thought he
was on our side, at the start, but that was before your friends got
into the act." He frowned into his drink. "And I don't like the way
that Intelligence major was acting, toward the last. If he thinks you
know something you are not supposed to, a mental hospital may be his
idea of a good place to put you away."
"You don't think this man Hauserman would allow himself to be
influenced ...? No. You just don't think I'm sane. Do you?"
"I know what Hauserman'll think. He'll think this future history
business is a classical case of systematized schizoid delusion. I wish
I'd never gotten into this case. I wish I'd never even heard of you!
And another thing; in case you get past Hauserman all right, you can
forget about that damage-suit bluff of mine. You would not stand a
chance with it in court."
"In spite of what happened to Khalid?"
"After tomorrow, I won't stay in the same room with anybody who even
mentions that name to me. Well, win or lose, it'll be over tomorrow
and then I can leave here."
"Did you tell me you were going to Reno?" Chalmers asked. "Don't do
it. You remember Whitburn mentioning how I spoke about an explosion
there? It happened just a couple of days after the murder of Khalid.
There was--will be--a trainload of high explosives in the railroad
yard; it'll be the biggest non-nuclear explosion since the _Mont
Blanc_ blew up in Halifax harbor in World War One...."
Weill threw his drink into the fire; he must have avoided throwing the
glass in with it by a last-second exercise of self-control.
"Well," he said, after a brief struggle to master himself. "One thing
about the legal profession; you do hear the damnedest things!... Good
night, Professor. And try--please try, for the sake of your poor
harried lawyer--to keep your mouth shut about things like that, at
least till after you get through with Hauserman. And when you're
talking to him, don't, don't, for heaven's sake, _don't_, volunteer
anything!"
* * * * *
The room was a pleasant, warmly-colored, place. There was a desk, much
like the ones in the classrooms, and six or seven wicker armchairs. A
lot of apparatus had been pushed back along the walls; the dust-covers
were gay cretonne. There was a couch, with more apparatus, similarly
covered, beside it. Hauserman was seated at the desk when Chalmers
entered.
He rose, and they shook hands. A man of about his own age,
smooth-faced, partially bald. Chalmers tried to guess something of the
man's nature from his face, but could read nothing. A face well
trained to keep its owner's secrets.
"Something to smoke, Professor," he began, offering his cigarette
case.
"My pipe, if you don't mind." He got it out and filled it.
"Any of those chairs," Hauserman said, gesturing toward them.
They were all arranged to face the desk. He sat down, lighting his
pipe. Hauserman nodded approvingly; he was behaving calmly, and didn't
need being put at ease. They talked at random--at least, Hauserman
tried to make it seem so--for some time about his work, his book about
the French Revolution, current events. He picked his way carefully
through the conversation, alert for traps which the psychiatrist might
be laying for him. Finally, Hauserman said:
"Would you mind telling me just why you felt it advisable to request a
psychiatric examination, Professor?"
"I didn't request it. But when the suggestion was made, by one of my
friends, in reply to some aspersions of my sanity, I agreed to it."
"Good distinction. And why was your sanity questioned? I won't deny
that I had heard of this affair, here, before Mr. Dacre called me,
last evening, but I'd like to hear your version of it."
He went into that, from the original incident in Modern History IV,
choosing every word carefully, trying to concentrate on making a good
impression upon Hauserman, and at the same time finding that more
"memories" of the future were beginning to seep past the barrier of
his consciousness. He tried to dam them back; when he could not, he
spoke with greater and greater care lest they leak into his speech.
"I can't recall the exact manner in which I blundered into it. The
fact that I did make such a blunder was because I was talking
extemporaneously and had wandered ahead of my text. I was trying to
show the results of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire after the First
World War, and the partition of the Middle East into a loose
collection of Arab states, and the passing of British and other
European spheres of influence following the Second. You know, when you
consider it, the Islamic Caliphate was inevitable; the surprising
thing is that it was created by a man like Khalid...."
He was talking to gain time, and he suspected that Hauserman knew it.
The "memories" were coming into his mind more and more strongly; it
was impossible to suppress them. The period of anarchy following
Khalid's death would be much briefer, and much more violent, than he
had previously thought. Tallal ib'n Khalid would be flying from
England even now; perhaps he had already left the plane to take refuge
among the black tents of his father's Bedouins. The revolt at Damascus
would break out before the end of the month; before the end of the
year, the whole of Syria and Lebanon would be in bloody chaos, and the
Turkish army would be on the march.
"Yes. And you allowed yourself to be carried a little beyond the
present moment, into the future, without realizing it? Is that it?"
"Something like that," he replied, wide awake to the trap Hauserman
had set, and fearful that it might be a blind, to disguise the real
trap. "History follows certain patterns. I'm not a Toynbean, by any
manner of means, but any historian can see that certain forces
generally tend to produce similar effects. For instance, space travel
is now a fact; our government has at present a military base on Luna.
Within our lifetimes--certainly within the lifetimes of my
students--there will be explorations and attempts at colonization on
Mars and Venus. You believe that, Doctor?"
"Oh, unreservedly. I'm not supposed to talk about it, but I did some
work on the Philadelphia Project, myself. I'd say that every major
problem of interplanetary flight had been solved before the first
robot rocket was landed on Luna."
"Yes. And when Mars and Venus are colonized, there will be the same
historic situations, at least in general shape, as arose when the
European powers were colonizing the New World, or, for that matter,
when the Greek city-states were throwing out colonies across the
Aegean. That's the sort of thing we call projecting the past into the
future through the present."
Hauserman nodded. "But how about the details? Things like the
assassination of a specific personage. How can you extrapolate to a
thing like that?"
"Well...." More "memories" were coming to the surface; he tried to
crowd them back. "I do my projecting in what you might call
fictionalized form; try to fill in the details from imagination. In
the case of Khalid, I was trying to imagine what would happen if his
influence were suddenly removed from Near Eastern and Middle Eastern,
affairs. I suppose I constructed an imaginary scene of his
assassination...."
He went on at length. Mohammed and Noureed were common enough names.
The Middle East was full of old U. S. weapons. Stoning was the
traditional method of execution; it diffused responsibility so that no
individual could be singled out for blood-feud vengeance.
"You have no idea how disturbed I was when the whole thing happened,
exactly as I had described it," he continued. "And worst of all, to
me, was this Intelligence officer showing up; I thought I was really
in for it!"
"Then you've never really believed that you had real knowledge of the
future?"
"I'm beginning to, since I've been talking to these Psionics and
Parapsychology people," he laughed. It sounded, he hoped, like a
natural and unaffected laugh. "They seem to be convinced that I
have."
There would be an Eastern-inspired uprising in Azerbaijan by the
middle of the next year; before autumn, the Indian Communists would
make their fatal attempt to seize East Pakistan. The Thirty Days' War
would be the immediate result. By that time, the Lunar Base would be
completed and ready; the enemy missiles would be aimed primarily at
the rocketports from which it was supplied. Delivered without warning,
it should have succeeded--except that every rocketport had its secret
duplicate and triplicate. That was Operation Triple Cross; no wonder
Major Cutler had been so startled at the words, last evening. The
enemy would be utterly overwhelmed under the rain of missiles from
across space, but until the moon-rockets began to fall, the United
States would suffer grievously.
"Honestly, though, I feel sorry for my friend Fitch," he added. "He's
going to be frightfully let down when some more of my alleged
prophecies misfire on him. But I really haven't been deliberately
deceiving him."
And Blanley College was at the center of one of the areas which would
receive the worst of the thermonuclear hell to come. And it would be a
little under a year....
"And that's all there is to it!" Hauserman exclaimed, annoyance in his
voice. "I'm amazed that this man Whitburn allowed a thing like this to
assume the proportions it did. I must say that I seem to have gotten
the story about this business in a very garbled form indeed." He
laughed shortly. "I came here convinced that you were mentally
unbalanced. I hope you won't take that the wrong way, Professor," he
hastened to add. "In my profession, anything can be expected. A good
psychiatrist can never afford to forget how sharp and fine is the
knife-edge."
"The knife-edge!" The words startled him. He had been thinking, at
that moment, of the knife-edge, slicing moment after moment
relentlessly away from the future, into the past, at each slice coming
closer and closer to the moment when the missiles of the Eastern Axis
would fall. "I didn't know they still resorted to surgery, in mental
cases," he added, trying to cover his break.
"Oh, no; all that sort of thing is as irrevocably discarded as the
whips and shackles of Bedlam. I meant another kind of knife-edge; the
thin, almost invisible, line which separates sanity from non-sanity.
From madness, to use a deplorable lay expression." Hauserman lit
another cigarette. "Most minds are a lot closer to it than their
owners suspect, too. In fact, Professor, I was so convinced that yours
had passed over it that I brought with me a commitment form, made out
all but my signature, for you." He took it from his pocket and laid it
on the desk. "The modern equivalent of the _lettre-de-cachet_, I
suppose the author of a book on the French Revolution would call it. I
was all ready to certify you as mentally unsound, and commit you to
Northern State Mental Hospital."
Chalmers sat erect in his chair. He knew where that was; on the other
side of the mountains, in the one part of the state completely
untouched by the H-bombs of the Thirty Days' War. Why, the town
outside which the hospital stood had been a military headquarters
during the period immediately after the bombings, and the center from
which all the rescue work in the state had been directed.
"And you thought you could commit me to Northern State!" he demanded,
laughing scornfully, and this time he didn't try to make the laugh
sound natural and unaffected. "You--confine _me_, anywhere? Confine a
poor old history professor's body, yes, but that isn't me. I'm
universal; I exist in all space-time. When this old body I'm wearing
now was writing that book on the French Revolution, I was in Paris,
watching it happen, from the fall of the Bastile to the Ninth
Thermidor. I was in Basra, and saw that crazed tool of the Axis shoot
down Khalid ib'n Hussein--and the professor talked about it a month
before it happened. I have seen empires rise and stretch from star to
star across the Galaxy, and crumble and fall. I have seen...."
Doctor Hauserman had gotten his pen out of his pocket and was signing
the commitment form with one hand; with the other, he pressed a button
on the desk. A door at the rear opened, and a large young man in a
white jacket entered.
"You'll have to go away for a while, Professor," Hauserman was telling
him, much later, after he had allowed himself to become calm again.
"For how long, I don't know. Maybe a year or so."
"You mean to Northern State Mental?"
"Well.... Yes, Professor. You've had a bad crack-up. I don't suppose
you realize how bad. You've been working too hard; harder than your
nervous system could stand. It's been too much for you."
"You mean, I'm nuts?"
"Please, Professor. I deplore that sort of terminology. You've had a
severe psychological breakdown...."
"Will I be able to have books, and papers, and work a little? I
couldn't bear the prospect of complete idleness."
"That would be all right, if you didn't work too hard."
"And could I say good-bye to some of my friends?"
Hauserman nodded and asked, "Who?"
"Well, Professor Pottgeiter...."
"He's outside now. He was inquiring about you."
"And Stanly Weill, my attorney. Not business; just to say good-bye."
"Oh, I'm sorry, Professor. He's not in town, now. He left almost
immediately after.... After...."
"After he found out I was crazy for sure? Where'd he go?"
"To Reno; he took the plane at five o'clock."
Weill wouldn't have believed, anyhow; no use trying to blame himself
for that. But he was as sure that he would never see Stanly Weill
alive again as he was that the next morning the sun would rise. He
nodded impassively.
"Sorry he couldn't stay. Can I see Max Pottgeiter alone?"
"Yes, of course, Professor."
Old Pottgeiter came in, his face anguished. "Ed! It isn't true," he
stammered. "I won't believe that it's true."
"What, Max?"
"That you're crazy. Nobody can make me believe that."
He put his hand on the old man's shoulder. "Confidentially, Max,
neither do I. But don't tell anybody I'm not. It's a secret."
Pottgeiter looked troubled. For a moment, he seemed to be wondering if
he mightn't be wrong and Hauserman and Whitburn and the others right.
"Max, do you believe in me?" he asked. "Do you believe that I knew
about Khalid's assassination a month before it happened?"
"It's a horribly hard thing to believe," Pottgeiter admitted. "But,
dammit, Ed, you did! I know, medieval history is full of stories
about prophecies being fulfilled. I always thought those stories were
just legends that grew up after the event. And, of course, he's about
a century late for me, but there was Nostradamus. Maybe those old
prophecies weren't just _ex post facto_ legends, after all. Yes. After
Khalid, I'll believe that."
"All right. I'm saying, now, that in a few days there'll be a bad
explosion at Reno, Nevada. Watch the papers and the telecast for it.
If it happens, that ought to prove it. And you remember what I told
you about the Turks annexing Syria and Lebanon?" The old man nodded.
"When that happens, get away from Blanley. Come up to the town where
Northern State Mental Hospital is, and get yourself a place to live,
and stay there. And try to bring Marjorie Fenner along with you. Will
you do that, Max?"
"If you say so." His eyes widened. "Something bad's going to happen
here?"
"Yes, Max. Something very bad. You promise me you will?"
"Of course, Ed. You know, you're the only friend I have around here.
You and Marjorie. I'll come, and bring her along."
"Here's the key to my apartment." He got it from his pocket and gave
it to Pottgeiter, with instructions. "Everything in the filing cabinet
on the left of my desk. And don't let anybody else see any of it. Keep
it safe for me."
The large young man in the white coat entered.
THE END
End of Project Gutenberg's The Edge of the Knife, by Henry Beam Piper