The Collection (9 page)

Mearson frowned. "So, then the girl on the bicycle,
having only an imaginary existence to begin with, ceased to exist—uh,
retroactively,
as of the moment you killed her? Leaving no trace behind her, except a
memory in your mind, of ever having existed?"

^"
That possibility occurred to me, and I
decided to do something which I thought would verify or disprove it.
Specifically, to commit a murder, deliberately, to see what would happen."

"But—but Larry, murders happen every day, people are
killed every day, and don't vanish retroactively and leave no trace behind
them.
^"

"But they were not killed by
me,
^"
Kane said earnestly.
^"
And if the universe is a product of
my imagination, that should make a difference. The girl on the bicycle is the
first person I ever killed."

Mearson sighed.
^"
So you decided to check by
committing a murder. And shot Queenie Quinn. But why didn
^'
t she—?
^"

^"
No, no, no," Kane interrupted. "I
committed another first, a month or so ago. A man. A man—and there
^'
s
no use my telling you his name or anything about him because, as of now, he
never existed, like the girl on the bicycle.

"But of course I didn't
know
it would happen
that way, so I didn
^'
t simply kill him openly, as I did the stripper.
I took careful precautions, so if his body
had
been found, the police
would never have apprehended
me
as the killer.

"But after I killed him, well—he just never had
existed, and I thought that my theory was confirmed. After that I carried a
gun, thinking that I could kill with impunity any time I wanted to—and that it
wouldn
^'
t matter, wouldn
^'
t be immoral even, because anyone
I killed didn't really exist anyway except in my mind.
^"

"Ummm," said Mearson.

^"
Ordinarily, Morty,
^"
Kane
said,
^"
I
^'
m a pretty even tempered guy. Night before
last was the first time I used the gun. When that damn stripper hit me she hit
hard,
a roundhouse swing. It blinded me for the moment and I just reacted
automatically in pulling out the gun and shooting her."

^"
Ummm,
^"
the attorney said.
^"
And
Queenie Quinn turned out to be for real and you
^'
re in jail for
murder and doesn
^'
t that blow your solipsism theory sky-high?"

Kane frowned.
^"
It certainly modifies it. I
^'
ve
been thinking a lot since I was arrested, and here's what I
^'
ve come
up with. If Queenie was real—and obviously she was—then I was not, and probably
am not, the
only
real person. There are real people and unreal ones,
ones that exist only in the imagination of the real ones.

^"
How many, I don
^'
t know. Maybe
only a few, maybe thousands, .even millions. My sampling—three people, of whom
one turned out to have been real—is too small to be significant."

^"
But why? Why should there be a duality like
that?
^"

^"
I
haven
^'
t the
faintest idea.
^"
Kane frowned.
^"
I
^'
ve
had some pretty wild thoughts, but any one of them would be just a guess. Like
a conspiracy—but a conspiracy against
whom?
Or
what?
And
all
of
the real ones couldn't be in on the conspiracy, because I'm not.
^"

He chuckled without humor.
^"
I
had
a really far-out dream about it last night, one of those confused, mixed-up
dreams that you can
^'
t really tell anybody, because they have no
continuity, just a series of impressions. Something about a conspiracy and a
reality file
that lists the names of all the real
people and
keeps them real. And—here's a dream pun for you—reality is really run by a
chain, only they're not known to be a chain, of reality
companies, one
in each city. Of course they deal in real estate too, as a front. And—oh hell,
it's all too confused even to try to tell.

^"
Well, Morty, that
^'
s it. And my
guess is that you
^'
ll tell me my only defense is an insanity plea—and
you
^'
ll be right because, damn it, if
I am
sane I
am
a
murderer. First degree and without extenuating circumstances. So?
^"

^"
So,
^"
said Mearson. He
doodled a moment with a gold pencil and then looked up.
^"
The
head shrinker you went to for a while —his name wasn
^'
t Galbraith,
was it?
^"

Kane shook his head.

^"
Good. Doc Galbraith is a friend of mine and
the best forensic psychiatrist in the city, maybe in the country. Has worked
with me on a dozen cases and we've won all of them. I'd like his opinion before
I even start to map out a defense. Will you talk to him, be completely frank
with him, if I send him around to see you?
^"

^"
Of course. Uh—will you ask him to do me a
favor?
^"

"Probably. What is it?"

^"
Lend him your flask and ask him to bring it
filled. You
^'
ve no idea how much more nearly pleasant it makes these
interviews.
^"

***

The intercom on Mortimer Mearson
^'
s desk buzzed
and he pressed the button on it that would bring his secretary
^'
s
voice in. "Dr. Galbraith to see you, sir." Mearson told her to send
him in at once.

^"
Hi, Doc,
^"
Mearson said.
^"
Take
a load off your feet and tell all."

Galbraith took the load off his feet and lighted a cigarette
before he spoke.
^"
Puzzling for a while," he said.
^"
I
didn
^'
t get the answer till I went into medical history with
him. While playing polo at age twenty-two he had a fall and got a whop on the
head with a mallet that caused a bad concussion and subsequent amnesia.
Complete at first, but gradually his memory came back completely up to early
adolescence. Pretty spotty between then and the time of the injury.
^"

^"
Good God, the indoctrination period.
^"

^"
Exactly. Oh, he has flashes—like the dream
he told you about. He could be rehabilitated—but I
^'
m afraid it
^'
s
too late, now. If only we
^'
d caught him before he committed an overt
murder—But we can
^'
t possibly risk putting his story on record now,
even as an insanity defense. So.
^"

^"
So," Mearson said.
^"
I
^'
ll
make the call now. And then go see him again. Hate to, but it
^'
s got
to be done.
^"

He pushed a button on the intercom. "Dorothy, get me
Mr. Hodge at the Midland Realty Company. When you get him, put the call on my
private line.
^"

Galbraith left while he was waiting and a moment later one
of his phones rang and he picked it up.
^"
Hodge?
^"
he said,
^"
Mearson here. Your phone secure? . . . Good. Code
eighty-four. Remove the card of Lorenz Kane—L-o-r-e-n-z K-a-n-e from the
reality file at once . . . Yes, it
^'
s necessary and an emergency. I
^'
ll
submit a report tomorrow.
^"

He took a pistol from a desk drawer and a taxi to the
courthouse. He arranged an audience with his client and as soon as Kane came
through the door—there was no use waiting—he shot him dead. He waited the
minute it always took for the body to vanish, and then went upstairs to the
chambers of Judge Amanda Hayes to make a final check.

^"
Hi, Your Honoress,
^"
he
said. "Somebody recently was telling me about a man named Lorenz Kane, and
I don
^'
t remember who it was. Was it you?
^"

^"
Never heard the name, Morty. If wasn
^'
t
me.
^"

^"
You mean `It wasn
^'
t I.
^'
Must
^'
ve been someone else. Thanks, Your Judgeship. Be seeing you.
^"

The king, my liege lord, is a discouraged man. We understand
and do not blame him, for the war has been long and bitter and there are so
pathetically few of us left, yet we wish that it were not so. We sympathize
with him for having lost his Queen, and we too all loved her—but since the
Queen of the Blacks died with her, her loss does not mean the loss of the war.
Yet our King, he who should be a tower of strength, smiles weakly and his words
of attempted encouragement to us ring false in our ears because we hear in his
voice the undertones of fear and defeat. Yet we love him and we die for him,
one by one.

One by one we die in his defense, here upon this blooded
bitter field, churned muddy by the horses of the Knights—while they lived; they
are dead now, both ours and the Black ones—and will there be an end, a victory?

We can only have faith, and never become cynics and
heretics, like my poor fellow Bishop Tibault.
^"
We fight and
die; we know not why,
^"
he once whispered to me, earlier in the
war at a time when we stood side by side defending our King while the battle
raged in a far corner of the field.

But that was only the beginning of his heresy. He had
stopped believing in a God and had come to believe in gods, gods who play a
game with us and care nothing for us as persons. Worse, he believed that our
moves are not our own, that we are but puppets fighting in a useless war. Still
worse—and how absurd!—that White is not necessarily good and Black is not
necessarily evil, that on the cosmic scale it does not matter who wins the war!

Of course it was only to me, and only in whispers, that he
said these things. He knew his duties as a bishop. He fought bravely. And died
bravely, that very day, impaled upon the lance of a Black Knight. I prayed for
him:
God, rest his soul and grant him peace; he meant not what he said.

Without faith we are nothing. How could Tibault have been so
wrong? White must win. Victory is the only thing that can save us. Without
victory our companions who have died, those who here upon this embattled field
have given their lives that we may live, shall have died in vain.
Et tu,
Tibault.

And you were wrong, so wrong. There is a God, and so great a
God that He will forgive your heresy, because there was no evil in you,
Tibault, except as doubt—no, doubt is error but it is not evil.

Without faith we are noth--

But something is happening! Our Rook, he who was on the
Queen's side of the field in the Beginning, swoops toward the evil Black King,
our enemy. The villainous one is under attack—and cannot escape. We have won!
We have won!

A voice in the sky says calmly,
^"
Checkmate.
^"

We have won! The war, this bitter stricken field, was
not
in vain. Tibault, you were wrong, you were--

But what is happening now? The very Earth tilts; one side of
the battlefield rises and we are sliding—White and Black alike into--

—into a monstrous
box
and I see that it is a mass
coffin in which already lie dead--

IT IS NOT FAIR; WE WON! GOD, WAS TIBAULT RIGHT? IT IS NOT
JUST; WE WON!

The King, my liege lord, is sliding too across the
squares—

IT IS NOT JUST; IT IS NOT
RIGHT;
IT IS NOT...

His name was Dooley Hanks and he was One of Us, by which I
mean that he was partly a paranoiac, partly a schizophrenic, and mostly a nut
with a strong
idee fixe,
an obsession. His obsession was that someday
he'd find The Sound that he
^'
d been looking for all his life, or at
least all of his life since twenty years ago, in his teens, when he had
acquired a clarinet and learned how to play it. Truth to tell, he was only an
average musician, but the clarinet was his rod and staff, and it was the
broomstick that enabled him to travel over the face of Earth, on all the continents,
seeking The Sound. Playing a gig here and a gig there, and then, when he was
ahead by a few dollars or pounds or drachmas or rubles he
^'
d take a
walking tour until his money started to run out, then start for the nearest
city big enough to let him find another gig.

He didn
^'
t know what The Sound would sound like,
but he knew that he
^'
d know it when he heard it. Three times he
^'
d
thought
he'd found it. Once, in Australia, the first time he
^'
d
heard a bull-roarer. Once, in Calcutta, in the sound of a musette played by a
fakir to charm a cobra. And once, west of Nairobi, in the blending of a hyena
^'
s
laughter with the voice of a lion. But the bull-roarer, on second hearing, was
just a noise; the musette, when he
^'
d bought it from the fakir for
twenty rupees and had taken it home, had turned out to be only a crude and
raucous type of reed instrument with little range and not even a chromatic
scale; the jungle sounds had resolved themselves finally into simple lion roars
and hyena laughs, not at all The Sound.