Fredric Brown: Come and Go Mad

“ Are you Napoleon? If you aren’t, that’s one thing. Then maybe you’ll get out of here in six months or so. If you really are—that’s bad. You’ll probably die here.”

“Why? I mean, if I am, then I’m sane and—”

“Not the point. Point’s whether they think you’re sane or not. Way they figure, if you think you’re Napoleon you’re not sane. Q. E. D. You stay here.”

“Even if I tell them I’m convinced I’m George Vine?”

“They’ve worked with paranoia before. And that’s what they’ve got you down for, count on it. And any time a paranoiac gets tired of a place, he’ll try to lie his way out of it. They weren’t born yesterday. They know that.”

“In general, yes, but how—”

A sudden cold chill went down his spine. He didn’t have to finish the question. They stick needles in you— It hadn’t meant anything when Ray Bassington had said it.

The dark man nodded. “Truth serum,” he said. “When a paranoiac reaches the stage where he’s cured if he’s telling the truth, they make sure he’s telling it before they let him go.”

He thought what a beautiful trap it had been that he’d walked into. He’d probably die here, now.

He leaned his head against the cool iron bars and closed his eyes. He heard footsteps walking away from him and knew he was alone.

He opened his eyes and looked out into blackness; now the clouds had drifted across the moon, too. Clare, he thought; Clare.

A trap.

But—if there was a trap, there must be a trapper. He was sane or he was insane. If he was sane, he’d walked into a trap, and if there was a trap, there must be a trapper, or trappers.

If he was insane—

God, let it be that he was insane. That way everything made such sweetly simple sense, and someday he might be out of here, he might go back to working for the Blade, possibly even with a memory of all the years he’d worked there. Or that George Vine had worked there. That was the catch. He wasn’t George Vine. And there was another catch. He wasn’t insane. The cool iron of the bars against his forehead.

After a while he heard the door open and looked around. Two guards had come in. A wild hope, reasonless, surged up inside him. It didn’t last.

“Bedtime, you guys,” said one of the guards. He looked at the manic-depressive sitting motionless on the chair and said, “Nuts. Hey, Bassington, help me get this guy in.”

The other guard, a heavy-set man with hair close-cropped like a wrestler’s, came over to the window. “You. You’re the new one in here. Vine, ain’t it?” He nodded.

“Want trouble, or going to be good?” Fingers of the guard’s right hand clenched, the fist went back. ” Don’t want trouble. Got enough.”

The guard relaxed a little. “Okay, stick to that and you’ll get along. Vacant bunk’s in there.” He pointed. “One on the right. Make it up yourself in the morning. Stay in the bunk and mind your own business. If there’s any noise or trouble here in the ward, we come in and take care of it. Our own way. You wouldn’t like it.”

He didn’t trust himself to speak, so he just nodded. He turned and went through the door of the cubicle to which the guard had pointed. There were two bunks in there; the manic-depressive who’d been on the chair was lying flat on his back on the other, staring blindly up at the ceiling through wide-open eyes. They’d pulled his slippers off, leaving him otherwise dressed.

He turned to his own bunk, knowing there was nothing on earth he could do for the other man, no way he could reach him through the impenetrable shell of blank misery which is the manic-depressive’s intermittent companion.

He turned down a gray sheet-blanket on his own bunk and found under it another gray sheet-blanket atop a hard but smooth pad. He slipped off his shirt and trousers and hung them on a hook on the wall at the foot of his bed. He looked around for a switch to turn off the light overhead and couldn’t find one. But, even as he looked, the light went out.

A single light still burned somewhere in the ward room outside, and by it he could see to take his shoes and socks off and get into the bunk.

He lay very quiet for a while, hearing only two sounds, both faint and seeming far away. Somewhere in another cubicle off the ward someone was singing quietly to himself, a wordless monody; somewhere else someone else was sobbing. In his own cubicle, he couldn’t hear even the sound of breathing from his room mate.

Then there was a shuffle of bare feet and someone in the open doorway said, “George Vine.”

He said, “Yes?”

“Shhh, not so loud. This is Bassington. Want to tell you about that guard; I should have warned you before. Don’t ever tangle with him.”

“I didn’t.”

“I heard; you were smart. He’ll slug you to pieces if you give him half a chance. He’s a sadist. A lot of guards are; that’s why they’re bughousers; that’s what they call themselves, bughousers. If they get fired one place for being too brutal they get on at another one. He’ll be in again—in the morning; I thought I’d warn you.”

The shadow in the doorway was gone.

He lay there in the dimness, the almost-darkness, feeling rather than thinking. Wondering. Did mad people ever know that they were mad? Could they tell? Was every one of them sure, as he was sure—?

That quiet, still thing lying in the bunk near his, inarticulately suffering, withdrawn from human reach into a profound misery beyond the understanding of the sane—

“Napoleon Bonaparte!”

A clear voice, but had it been within his mind, or from without? He sat up on the bunk. His eyes pierced the dimness, could discern no form, no shadow, in the doorway.

He said, “Yes?”

Only then, sitting up on the hunk and having answered “Yes,” did he realize the name by which the voice had called him.

“Get up. Dress.”

He swung his legs out over the edge of the bunk, stood up. He reached for his shirt and was slipping his arms into it before he stopped and asked, “Why?”

“To learn the truth.”

“Who are you?” he asked.

“Do not speak aloud. I can hear you. I am within you and without. I have no name.”

“Then what are you?” He said it aloud, without thinking.

“An instrument of The Brightly Shining.”

He dropped the trousers he’d been holding. He sat down carefully on the edge of the bunk, leaned over and groped around for them.

His mind groped, too. Groped for he knew not what. Finally he found a question—the question. He didn’t ask it aloud this time; he thought it, concentrated on it as he straightened out his trousers and thrust his legs in them.

“ Am I mad? ”

The answer—No—came clear and sharp as a spoken word, but had it been spoken? Or was it a sound that was only in his mind?

He found his shoes and pulled them on his feet. As he fumbled the laces into some sort of knots, he thought, “Who—what—is The Brightly Shining?”

“The Brightly Shining is that which is Earth. It is the intelligence of our planet. It is one of three intelligences in the solar system, one of many in the universe. Earth is one; it is called The Brightly Shining.”

“I do not understand.” he thought.

“You will. Are you ready?”

He finished the second knot. He stood up. The voice said, “Come. Walk silently.”

It was as though he was being led through the almost-darkness, although he felt no physical touch upon him; he saw no physical presence beside him. But he walked confidently, although quietly on tiptoe, knowing he would not walk into anything nor stumble. Through the big room that was the ward, and then his outstretched hand touched the knob of a door.