column. The huge body gave no sign of life. I looked again at the soles of her naked feet; they had not been flattened or deformed in any way by the weight which they had had to carry. Walking had not calloused the skin, which was as unblemished as that of her shoulders.
With a far greater effort than it had taken to touch Gibarian's corpse, I forced myself to touch one of the bare feet. Then I made a second bewildering discovery: this body, abandoned in a deep freeze, this apparent corpse, lived and moved. The woman had withdrawn her foot, like a sleeping dog when you try to take its paw.
"She'll freeze," I thought confusedly, but her flesh had been warm to the touch, and I even imagined I had felt the regular beating of her pulse. I backed out and fled.
As I emerged from the white cave, the heat seemed suffocating. I climbed the spiral stairway back to the hangar-deck.
I sat on the hoops of a rolled-up parachute and put my head in my hands. I was stunned. My thoughts ran wild. What was happening to me? If my reason was giving way, the sooner I lost consciousness the better. The idea of sudden extinction aroused an inexpressible, unrealistic hope.
Useless to go and find Snow or Sartorius: no one could fully understand what I had just experienced, what I had seen, what I had touched with my own hands. There was only one possible explanation, one possible conclusion: madness. Yes, that was it, I had gone mad as soon as I arrived here. Emanations from the ocean had attacked my brain, and hallucination had followed hallucination. Rather than exhaust myself trying to solve these illusory riddles, I would do better to ask for medical assistance, to radio the Prometheus or some other vessel, to send out an SOS.
Then a curious change came over me: at the thought that I had gone mad, I calmed down.
And yet … I had heard Snow's words quite clearly. If, that is, Snow existed and I had ever spoken to him. The hallucinations might have begun much earlier. Perhaps I was still on board the Prometheus , perhaps I had been stricken with a sudden mental illness and was now confronting the creations of my own inflamed brain. Assuming that I was ill, there was reason to believe that I would get better, which gave me some hope of deliverance—a hope irreconcilable with a belief in the reality of the tangled nightmares through which I had just lived.
If only I could think up some experiment in logic—a key experiment—which would reveal whether I had really gone mad and was a helpless prey to the figments of my imagination, or whether, in spite of their ludicrous improbability, I had been experiencing real events.
As I turned all this over in my mind, I was looking at the monorail which led to the launching pad. It was a steel girder, painted pale green, a yard above the ground. Here and there, the paint was chipped, worn by the friction of the rocket trolleys. I touched the steel, feeling it grow warm beneath my fingers, and rapped the metal plating with my knuckles. Could madness attain such a degree of reality? Yes, I answered myself. After all, it was my own subject, I knew what I was talking about.
But was it possible to work out a controlled experiment? At first I told myself that it was not, since my sick brain (if it really was sick) would create the illusions I demanded of it. Even while dreaming, when we are in perfectly good health, we talk to strangers, put questions to them and hear their replies. Moreover, although our interlocutors are in fact the creations of our own psychic activity, evolved by a pseudo-independent process, until they have spoken to us we do not know what words will emerge from their lips. And yet these words have been formulated by a separate part of our own minds; we should therefore be aware of them at the very moment that we think them up in order to put them into the mouths of imaginary beings. Consequently, whatever form my proposed test were to take, and whatever method I used to put it into
With a far greater effort than it had taken to touch Gibarian's corpse, I forced myself to touch one of the bare feet. Then I made a second bewildering discovery: this body, abandoned in a deep freeze, this apparent corpse, lived and moved. The woman had withdrawn her foot, like a sleeping dog when you try to take its paw.
"She'll freeze," I thought confusedly, but her flesh had been warm to the touch, and I even imagined I had felt the regular beating of her pulse. I backed out and fled.
As I emerged from the white cave, the heat seemed suffocating. I climbed the spiral stairway back to the hangar-deck.
I sat on the hoops of a rolled-up parachute and put my head in my hands. I was stunned. My thoughts ran wild. What was happening to me? If my reason was giving way, the sooner I lost consciousness the better. The idea of sudden extinction aroused an inexpressible, unrealistic hope.
Useless to go and find Snow or Sartorius: no one could fully understand what I had just experienced, what I had seen, what I had touched with my own hands. There was only one possible explanation, one possible conclusion: madness. Yes, that was it, I had gone mad as soon as I arrived here. Emanations from the ocean had attacked my brain, and hallucination had followed hallucination. Rather than exhaust myself trying to solve these illusory riddles, I would do better to ask for medical assistance, to radio the Prometheus or some other vessel, to send out an SOS.
Then a curious change came over me: at the thought that I had gone mad, I calmed down.
And yet … I had heard Snow's words quite clearly. If, that is, Snow existed and I had ever spoken to him. The hallucinations might have begun much earlier. Perhaps I was still on board the Prometheus , perhaps I had been stricken with a sudden mental illness and was now confronting the creations of my own inflamed brain. Assuming that I was ill, there was reason to believe that I would get better, which gave me some hope of deliverance—a hope irreconcilable with a belief in the reality of the tangled nightmares through which I had just lived.
If only I could think up some experiment in logic—a key experiment—which would reveal whether I had really gone mad and was a helpless prey to the figments of my imagination, or whether, in spite of their ludicrous improbability, I had been experiencing real events.
As I turned all this over in my mind, I was looking at the monorail which led to the launching pad. It was a steel girder, painted pale green, a yard above the ground. Here and there, the paint was chipped, worn by the friction of the rocket trolleys. I touched the steel, feeling it grow warm beneath my fingers, and rapped the metal plating with my knuckles. Could madness attain such a degree of reality? Yes, I answered myself. After all, it was my own subject, I knew what I was talking about.
But was it possible to work out a controlled experiment? At first I told myself that it was not, since my sick brain (if it really was sick) would create the illusions I demanded of it. Even while dreaming, when we are in perfectly good health, we talk to strangers, put questions to them and hear their replies. Moreover, although our interlocutors are in fact the creations of our own psychic activity, evolved by a pseudo-independent process, until they have spoken to us we do not know what words will emerge from their lips. And yet these words have been formulated by a separate part of our own minds; we should therefore be aware of them at the very moment that we think them up in order to put them into the mouths of imaginary beings. Consequently, whatever form my proposed test were to take, and whatever method I used to put it into
Similar Books
