But inwardly something had changed, and would never change back. Considerable time passed. He heard steps mounting the stairs, then in the hall. They made a
_squish-squish_ sound, as if the shoes were soaking wet. They stopped outside his door. There was a soft rap. He crossed the room, turned the key in the lock--

A strand of seaweed was caught in the silver brooch. The gray suit was
dark now and heavy with water, except for one spot which had started
to dry and was faintly dusted with a white powder--salt. The odor of
the Bay was intimate and close. There was another strand of seaweed
clinging to one ankle against the wrinkled stocking. And around the stained shoes, a little pool of water was forming. His eyes traced the wet footprints down the hall. At the head of the
stairs the old clerk was standing, one foot still on the last step. He
was carrying a small pigskin suitcase. "What's all this about?" he quavered, when he saw that Norman was
looking at him. "You didn't tell me you were expecting your wife. She
looks like she'd thrown herself in the Bay. We don't want anything
queer happening in this hotel--anything wrong." "It's quite all right," said Norman, prolonging the moment before he
would have to look at her face. "I'm sorry I forgot to tell you. May I
have the bag?" "--only last year we had a suicide"--the old clerk did not seem to
realize he was speaking his thoughts aloud--"bad for the hotel--" His
voice trailed off. He looked at Norman, gathered himself together,
and came hesitatingly down the hall. When he was a few steps away, he
stopped, reached out and put down the suitcase, turned, and walked
rapidly away. Unwillingly, Norman raised his eyes until they were on a level with
hers. The face was pale, very pale, and without expression. The lips were
tinged with blue. Wet hair was plastered against the cheeks. A thick
lock crossed one eye socket, like a curtain half drawn, and curled down
toward the throat, where it merged with a strand of seaweed. The dull
eyes stared at him, without sign of recognition. And no hand moved up
to brush the lock of hair away. From the hem of the skirt, water was dripping. The lips parted. The voice had the monotonous murmur of water. "You were too late," the lips said. "You were a minute too late." XI. For a third time their exchange of conversation had come back to the
same question. He had the maddening sensation of following a robot that
was walking in a huge endless circle and always treading on precisely
the same blades of grass as it retraced its path. With the hopeless conviction that he would not get any further this
time, he asked the question again: "But how can you lack consciousness,
and at the same time _know_ that you lack consciousness? If your
mind is blank, you cannot at the same time be aware that your mind is
blank." The hands of his watch were creeping toward three in the morning. The
chill of night's lowest ebb pervaded the dingy hotel room. Tansy sat
stiffly, wearing his bathrobe and big fleece-lined slippers, with
a blanket over her knees and a bath towel wrapped around her head. They should have made her look child-like and perhaps even artlessly
attractive. They did not. If you were to unwind the towel you would
find the top of the skull sawed off and the brains removed, an empty
bowl--that was the illusion Norman experienced every time he made the
mistake of looking into her eyes. The pale lips opened. "I know nothing. I only speak. They have taken
away my soul. But my voice is a function of my body." You could not even say that the voice was patiently explanatory. It
was too utterly empty and colorless even for that. The words, clearly
enunciated and evenly spaced, all sounded alike. They came with the
regular beat of a machine. The last thing he wanted to do was hammer questions at that stiff
pitiful figure, but at all costs he must awaken some spark of feeling
in the masklike face; he must find some intelligible starting point
before his own mind could begin to work effectually. "But, Tansy, if you can talk about the present situation, you must be
aware of it. You're here in this room with me!" The toweled head shook once, like that of a mechanical doll. "Nothing is here with you but a body. 'I' is not here." His mind automatically corrected "is" to "am" before he realized that
there had been no grammatical error and shuddered at the implications
of the trifling change in a tiny verb. "You mean," he asked, "that you can see or hear nothing? That there is
just a blackness?" Again that simple mechanical headshake, which carried more absolute
conviction than the most heated protestations. "My body sees and hears perfectly. It has suffered no injury. It can
function in all particulars. But there is nothing inside. There is not
even a blackness." His tired, fumbling mind jumped to the subject of behavioristic
psychology and its fundamental assertion that human reactions can be
explained completely and satisfactorily without once referring to
consciousness--that it need not even be assumed that consciousness
exists. Here was the perfect proof. And yet not so perfect, for the
behavior of this body lacked every one of those little mannerisms whose
sum is personality. The way Tansy used to squint and twist one little
finger around another when thinking through a difficult question. The
familiar quirk at the corners of her mouth when she felt flattered or
slyly amused. All gone. Even the quick triple headshake he knew so
well, with the slight bunny-rabbit wrinkling of the little nose, had
become that robot's "No." The sensory organs still responded to stimuli. They sent nerve impulses
to the hindbrain or midbrain--or cortex--where they traveled about and
gave rise to efferent impulses which activated glands and muscles,
including the motor organs of speech. But that was all. None of those
intangible flurries we call consciousness hovered around the webwork of
nervous activity in the cortex. What had imparted _style_--Tansy's
style, like no one else's--to every movement and utterance of the body,
was gone. There was left only a physiological organism, without sign
or indication of personality. Not even a mad or an idiot soul--yes! why not use that old term now that it had an obvious specific
meaning?--peered from the gray-green eyes which winked at intervals
with machinelike regularity, but only to lubricate the cornea, nothing
more. He felt a grim sort of relief go through him, now that he had been
able to picture it in definite terms. But the picture itself--his mind
veered to the memory of a newspaper story about an old man who had kept
locked in his bedroom for years the body of a young woman whom he loved
and who had died of an incurable disease.