Fredric Brown - The Best of Fredric Brown

Kane grinned a little crookedly. "To me my experience with the police is just as objective as my running over the girl on the bicycle. But at least you can verify the former. See if it's on the blotter and if they remember it. Dig? "

"I'm hip. Carry on. "

"So the police were satisfied that I'd had an hallucination. I damn well wasn't. I did several things. I had a garage run the Jag up on a rack and I went over the underside of it, as well as the front. No sign. Okay, it hadn 't happened, as far as the car was concerned.

"Second, I wanted to know if a girl of that description, living or dead, had been out on a bicycle that night. I spent several thousand dollars with a private detective agency, having them canvass that neighborhood—and a fair area around it—with a fine-tooth comb to find if a girl answering that description currently or ever had existed, with or without a red bicycle. They came up with a few possible red-headed teenagers, but I managed to get a gander at each of them, no dice.

"And, after asking around, I picked a head shrinker of my own and started going to him. Allegedly the best in the city, certainly the most expensive. Went to him for two months. It was a washout. I never found out what he thought had happened; he wouldn't talk. You know how psychoanalysts work, they make you do the talking, analyze yourself, and finally tell them what's wrong with you, then you yak about it awhile and tell them you're cured, and they then agree with you and tell you to go with God. All right if your subconscious knows what the score is and eventually lets it leak out. But my subconscious didn 't know which end was up, so I was wasting my time, and I quit.

"But meanwhile I'd leveled with a few friends of mine to get their ideas and one of them—a professor of philosophy at the university—started talking about ontology and that started me reading up on ontology and gave me a clue. In fact, I thought it was more than a clue, I thought it was the answer. Until last night. Since last night I know I was at least partly wrong."

"Ontology—" said Mearson. "Word 's vaguely familiar, but will you pin it down for me?"

"I quote you the Webster Unabridged, unexpurgated version: `Ontology is the science of being or reality; the branch of knowledge that investigates the nature, essential properties, and relations of being, as such."

Kane glanced at his wrist watch. "But this is taking longer to tell than I thought. I'm getting tired talking and no doubt you're even more tired of listening. Shall we finish this tomorrow?"

"An excellent idea, Larry. "Mearson stood up.

Kane tilted the silver flask for the last drop and handed it back. "You'll play St. Bernard again? "

"I went to the Forty-fourth," Mearson said. "The incident you described to me is on the blotter all right. And I talked to one of the two coppers who went back with you to the scene of the—uh—back to the car. Your reporting of the accident was real, no question of that."

"I'll start where I left off," Kane said. "Ontology, the study of the nature of reality. In reading up on it I came across solipsism, which originated with the Greeks. It is the belief that the entire universe is the product of one's imagination—in my case, my imagination. That I myself am the only concrete reality and that all things and all other people exist only in my mind."

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? "