how did he die?’
Baumgart said, without changing his expression: ‘He committed suicide.’
I remember staring at him blankly for several seconds, then shouting:
‘What the devil are you talking about? That’s impossible.’
‘There can be no possible doubt. Please come here as soon as you can.’
He started to remove the plug; I screamed:
‘Do you want to drive me mad? Tell me what happened!’
‘He took poison. There is almost nothing else I can tell you. But his letter says we should contact you immediately. So please come. We are all very tired.’
I called a helicab, and then dressed in a state of mental numbness, telling myself that this was impossible. I had known Karel Weissman for thirty years, ever since we were students at Uppsala. He was in every way a remarkable man: brilliant, perceptive, patient, and of immense drive and energy. It was impossible. Such a man could never commit suicide. Oh, I was fully aware that the world suicide rate had multiplied by fifty since the mid-century, and that sometimes the most unexpected people kill themselves. But to tell me that Karel Weissman had committed suicide was like telling me that one and one made three. He had not an atom of self-destruction in his composition. In every way, he was one of the least neurotic, best integrated men I had ever known.
Could it, I wondered, have been murder? Had he, perhaps, been assassinated by an agent of the Central Asiatic Powers? I had heard of stranger things; political assassination had become an exact science in the second part of the eighties, and the deaths of Hammelmann and Fuller had taught us that even a scientist working under high security conditions is not safe. But Karel was a psychologist, and he had, as far as I knew, no connection of any kind with the government. His main income came from a large industrial corporation, who paid him to devise ways of combating dyno-neuroses and generally increasing productivity.
Baumgart was waiting for me when the taxi landed on the roof. The moment we were alone, I asked him: ‘Could it be murder?’ He replied: ‘It is not impossible, of course, but there is no reason to think so. He retired to his room at three this afternoon to write a paper, telling me that he was not to be disturbed. His window was locked, and I was sitting at a desk in the anteroom during the next two hours. At five, his wife brought tea, and found him dead. He left a letter in his own handwriting, and had washed down the poison with a glass of water from the toilet.’
Half an hour later, I was convinced that my friend had indeed committed suicide. The only alternative was that Baumgart had killed him; yet I could not believe this. Baumgart had the control and impassiveness of a Swiss, but I could tell that he was deeply shaken, and on the point of an emotional breakdown; no man is a good enough actor to simulate these things. Besides, there was the letter in Karel’s handwriting. Since Pomeroy produced the electro-comparison machine, forgery had become the rarest of crimes.
I left that house of gloom at two in the morning, having spoken to no one but Baumgart. I had not seen my dead friend, and neither did I want to, for I am told that the face of one who dies from cyanide is horrible. The tablets he had used had been taken from a psycho-neurotic patient only that morning.
The letter in itself was strange. It offered no word of regret for the act of self-destruction. The handwriting was shaky, but the wording was precise. It stated which of his possessions was to be left to his son, and which to his wife. It asked that I should be called as soon as possible to take charge of his scientific papers, and mentioned a sum of money that was to be paid to me, and a further sum that was to be used, if necessary, in their publication. I saw a photostat of the letter—the police had taken the original—and I knew that it was almost certainly genuine. Electronic analysis confirmed my view the following morning.
Yes, a most strange letter. Three pages long, and written with apparent calm. But why had he suggested that I should be contacted immediately? Could it be that his papers contained the clue? Baumgart had already considered the possibility, and had spent the evening examining them. He had found nothing there to justify Karel’s demand for haste. A large proportion of the papers concerned the Anglo-Indian Computers Corporation, his employer; these would naturally be made available to the firm’s other research officers. The remainder were various papers on existential psychology, Maslovian transac-tionism and the rest. An almost completed book dealt with the uses of psychedelic drugs.
Now, in the last named work, it seemed to me that I had found a clue. When Karel and I were at Uppsala, we spent a great deal of time discussing problems of the meaning of death, the limits of human consciousness, and so on. I was writing a thesis on the Egyptian Book of the Dead, whose actual title, Ru nu pert em hru, means ‘the book of coming forth by day’. I was concerned only with the symbolism of this ‘dark night of the soul’, of the perils encountered by the disembodied spirit on its nightlong journey to Amentet. But Karel had insisted that I should study the Tibetan Book of the Dead—an entirely different cup of tea—and compare the two. Now, as any student of these works knows, the Tibetan book is a Buddhist document whose religious background bears no resemblance whatever to that of the ancient Egyptians. I felt that to compare the two would be a waste of time, a mere exercise in pedantry. However, Karel succeeded in stimulating in me a certain interest in the Tibetan book for its own sake, with the consequence that we spent many a long evening discussing it. Psychedelic drugs were at the time almost unobtainable, since Aldous Huxley’s book on mescalin had made them fashionable among addicts. However, we discovered an article by René Daumal describing how he had once made similar experiments with ether. Daumal had soaked a handkerchief in ether, which he then held to his nose. When he lost consciousness, his hand dropped, and he would quickly recover. Daumal attempted to describe his visions under ether, and they impressed and excited us. His main point was the same as that made by so many mystics: that although he was ‘unconscious’ under ether, he had a sense that what he experienced was far realler than his everyday experience of the world. Now, both Karel and I agreed on one thing—no matter how dissimilar our temperaments might be in others—that our everyday lives had a quality of unreality. We could so well understand Chuang Tzu, who said that he had dreamed he was a butterfly, and felt in every respect exactly like a butterfly; and that he was not certain whether he was Chuang Tzu dreaming he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was Chuang Tzu.
For a month or so, Karel Weissman and I tried to ‘experiment with consciousness’. Over the Christmas holiday, we tried the experiment of staying awake for three days on black coffee and cigars. The result was certainly a remarkable intensity of intellectual perception. I remember saying: ‘If I could live like this all the time, poetry would become worthless, because I can see so much further than any poet’. We also tried experiments with ether and carbon tetrachloride. In my own case, these were altogether less interesting. I certainly experienced some enormous feeling of insight—of the kind that one occasionally gets on the point of sleep—but it was very brief, and I could not remember it afterwards. The ether gave me a headache for days, so after two experiments I decided to give it up. Karel claimed that his own results corresponded to those of Daumal, with certain differences; I seem to remember he found the idea of rows of black dots extremely significant. But he also found the physical aftereffects unsettling, and gave it up. Later, when he became an experimental psychologist, he was able to get mescalin and lysergic acid for the asking, and suggested several times that I should try them. But by this time I had other interests, and refused. I shall speak of these ‘other interests’ presently.
This long parenthesis has been necessary to explain why I thought I understood Karel Weissman’s last request to me. I am an archaeologist, not a psychologist. But I was his oldest friend, and I had once shared his interest in the problems of the outer limits of human consciousness. In his last moments, surely his thoughts had returned to our long nights of talk at Uppsala,
