Alfred Bester - The Demolished Man

nor space nor matter. There was nothing left but dying thought. "Father?" "Son." "You are me?" "We are us." "Father and son?" "Yes." "I can't understand... What's happened?" "You lost the game, Ben." "The Sardine Game?" "The Cosmic Game." "I won, I won. I owned every bit of the world. I---" "And therefore you lose. We lose." "Lose what?" "Survival." "I don't understand. I can't understand." "My part of us understands, Ben. You would understand too if you

hadn't driven me from you." "How did I drive you from me?" "With every rotten, distorted corruption in you." "You say that? You... betrayer, who tried to kill me?" "That was without passion, Ben. That was to destroy you before you

could destroy us. That was for survival. It was to help you lose the world and win the game, Ben."

"What game? What Cosmic Game?"

"The maze... the labyrinth... all the universe, created as a puzzle for us to solve. The galaxies, the stars, the sun, the planets... the world as we knew it. We were the only reality. All the rest was make-believe... dolls, puppets, stage-settings... pretended passions. It was a make-believe reality for us to solve."

"I conquered it. I owned if."

"And you failed to solve it. We'll never know what the solution is, but it's not theft, terror, hatred, lust, murder, rapine. You failed, and it's all been abolished, disbanded..."

"But what's to become of us?"

"We are abolished too. I tried to warn you. I tried to stop you. But

we failed the test." "But why? Why? Who are we? What are we?" "Who knows? Did the seed know who or what it was when it failed to

find fertile soil? Does it matter who or what we are? We have failed. Our

test is ended. We are ended." "No!" "Perhaps if we had solved it, Ben, it might have remained real. But it

is ended. Reality has turned into might-have-been, and you have awakened at

last... to nothing." "We'll go back! We'll try it again!" "There is no going back. It is ended." "We'll find a way. There must be a way..." "There is none. It is ended." It was ended. Now... Demolition.

They found the two men next morning, far up the island in the gardens overlooking the old Haarlem Canal. Each had wandered all the night, through footway and skyway, unconscious of his surroundings, yet both were drawn inevitably together like two magnetized needles floating on a weed choked pond.

Powell was seated cross-legged on the wet turf, his face shrivelled and lifeless, his respiration almost gone, his pulse faded. He was clutching Reich with an iron grip. Reich was curled into a tight foetal ball.

They rushed Powell to his home on Hudson Ramp where the entire Guild Lab team alternately sweated over him and congratulated themselves on the first successful Mass Cathexis Measure in the history of the Esper Guild. There was no hurry for Reich. In due course and with proper procedure, his inert body was transported to Kingston Hospital for Demolition. There the matter rested for seven days.

On the eighth day, Powell arose, bathed, dressed, successfully defeated his nurses in single combat, and left the house. He made one stop at Sucre et Cie, emerged with a large mysterious parcel and then proceeded to headquarters to make his personal report to Commissioner Crabbe. On the way up, he poked his head into Beck's office.

"Hi, Jax."

"Bless (and curses) ings, Linc."

"Curses?"

"Bet fifty they'd keep you in bed till next Wed."

"You lose. Did Mose back us up on the D'Courtney motive?"

"Lock, stock & barrel. Trial took one hour. Reich's going into Demolition now."

"Good. Well, I'd better go up and s-p-e-l-l it out for Crabbe."

"What you got under your arm?"

"Present."

"For me?"

"Not today. Here's thinking at you."

Powell went up to Crabbe's ebony and silver office, knocked, heard the imperious: "Come!" and entered. Crabbe was properly solicitous, but stiff. The D'Courtney Case had not improved his relations with Powell. The denouement had come as an additional blow.

"It was a remarkably complex case, sir," Powell began tactfully. "None of us could understand it, and none of us are to blame. You see, Commissioner, even Reich himself was not consciously aware of why he had murdered D'Courtney. The only one who grasped the case was the Prosecution Computer, and we thought it was acting kittenish."

"The machine? It understood?"

"Yes, sir. When we ran our final data through the first time, the Computer told us that the `passion motive' was insufficiently documented. We'd all been assuming profit motive. So had Reich. Naturally we assumed the Computer was having kinks, and we insisted on computation based on the profit motive. We were wrong..."

"And that infernal machine was right?"

"Yes, Commissioner. It was. Reich told himself that he was killing D'Courtney for financial reasons. That was his psychological camouflage for the real passion motive. And it couldn't hold up. He offered merger to D'Courtney. D'Courtney accepted. But Reich was subconsciously compelled to misunderstand the message. He had to. He had to go on believing he murdered for money."

"Why?"

"Because he couldn't face the real motive..."

"Which was... ?"

"D'Courtney was his father."

"What!" Crabbe stared. "His father? His flesh and blood?"

"Yes, sir. It was all there before us. We just couldn't see it...

because Reich couldn't see it. That estate on Callisto, for instance. The one that Reich used to decoy Dr. Jordan off the planet. Reich inherited it from his mother who'd received it from D'Courtney. We all assumed Reich's father had chiseled it out of D'Courtney and placed it in his wife's name. We were wrong. D'Courtney had given it to Reich's mother because they were lovers. It was his love-gift to the mother of his child. Reich was born there. Jackson Beck uncovered all that, once we had the lead."

Crabbe opened his mouth, then closed it. "And there were so many other signposts. D'Courtney's suicide drive, produced by intense guilt sensations of abandonment. He had abandoned his

son. It was tearing him apart. Then, Barbara D'Courtney's deep half-twin image of herself and Ben Reich; somehow she knew they were half-brother and sister. And Reich's inability to kill Barbara at Chooka Frood's. He knew it too, deep down in the unconscious. He wanted to destroy the hateful father who had rejected him, but he could not bring himself to harm his sister."

"But when did you unearth all this?"

"After the case was closed, sir. When Reich attacked me for setting

those booby-traps." "He claimed you did. He--- But if you didn't, Powell, who did?" "Reich himself, sir." "Reich!" "Yes, sir. He murdered his father. He discharged his hatred. But his

super-ego... his conscience, could not permit him to go unpunished for such a horrible crime. Since the police apparently were unable to punish him, his conscience took over. That was the meaning of Reich's nightmare image... The Man With No Face."

"The Man With No Face?"

"Yes, Commissioner. It was the symbol of Reich's real relationship to D'Courtney. The figure had no face because Reich could not accept the truth... that he had recognized D'Courtney as his father. The figure appeared in his dreams when he made the decision to kill his father. It never left him. It was first the threat of punishment for what he contemplated. Then it became the punishment itself for the murder."

"The booby-traps?"

"Exactly. His conscience had to punish him. But Reich had never admitted to himself that he murdered because he hated D'Courtney as the father who had rejected and abandoned him. Therefore, the punishment had to take place on the unconscious level. Reich set those traps for himself without ever realizing it... in his sleep, somnambulistically... during the day, in short fugues... brief departures from conscious reality. The tricks of the mind-mechanism are fantastic."