Henry Kuttner - Ghost

The timing, the balance, were fatally right. Ford went over the rail. After a long time Crockett heard the body strike, far down.

The lift sank smoothly. The gun still lay on the platform. Crockett, groaning, began to tear his shirt into an improvised tourniquet. The wound in his thigh was bleeding badly.

The cold light of the fluorescents showed the towers of the integrators, their tops level with Crockett now, and then rising as he continued to drop. If he looked over the edge of the platform, he could see Ford’s body. But he would see it soon enough anyway.

It was utterly silent.

Tension, of course, and delayed reaction. Ford should have got drunk. Liquor would have made a buffer against the violent reaction from those long weeks of hell. Weeks of battling the downbeat, months in which Ford had kept himself keenly alert, visualising the menace as a personified antagonist, keying himself up to a completely abnormal pitch.

Then success, and the cessation of the downbeat. And silence, deadly, terrifying – time to relax and think.

And Ford – going mad.

He had said something about that weeks ago, Crockett remembered. Some psychologists have a tendency toward mental instability; that’s why they gravitate into the field, and why they understand it.

The lift stopped. Ford’s motionless body was about a yard away. Crockett could not see the man’s face.

Insanity – manic-depressives are fairly simple cases. The schizophrenic are more complex. And incurable.

Incurable.

Dr. Ford was a schizoid type. He had said that, weeks ago.

And now, Dr. Ford, a victim of schizophrenic insanity, had died by violence, as Bronson had died. Thirty white pillars stood in the Brainpan, cryptically impassive, and Crockett looked at them with the beginning of a slow, dull horror.

Thirty radioatom brains, supersensitive, ready to record a new pattern on the blank wax disks. Not manic-depressive this time, not the downbeat.

On the contrary, it would be uncharted, incurable schizophrenic insanity.

A mental explosion – yeah. Dr. Ford, lying there dead, a pattern of madness fixed in his brain at the moment of death. A pattern that might be anything.

Crockett watched the thirty integrators and wondered what was going on inside those gleaming white shells. He would find out before the blizzard ended, he thought, with a sick horror.

For the station was haunted again.