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 possessed 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.”
He stood and stared at the doctor for a long moment, then shook his head as if trying to clear it. “It’s no use,” he said slowly, “no use at all. There is no possibility of communication. I am alone.” He replaced the instrument in its case and returned to the chess table. “My move, I believe?”
“Yes. Guard your queen.”
He studied the board. “Not necessary. I no longer need my queen. Check.”
The doctor interposed a pawn to parry the attack.
He nodded. “You use your pawns well, but I have learned to anticipate your play. Check again-and mate, I think.”
The doctor examined the new situation. “No,” he decided, “no-not quite.” He retreated from the square under attack. “Not checkmate-stalemate at the worst. Yes, another stalemate.”
He was upset by the doctor’s visit. He couldn’t be wrong, basically, yet the doctor had certainly pointed out logical holes in his position. From a logical standpoint the whole world might be a fraud perpetrated on everybody. But logic meant nothing-logic itself was a fraud, starting with unproved assumptions and capable of proving anything. The world is what it is! — and carries its own evidence of trickery.
But does it? What did he have to go on? Could he lay down a line between known facts and everything else and then make a reasonable interpretation of the world, based on facts alone-an interpretation free from complexities of logic and no hidden assumptions of points not certain. Very well —