The Colonel Came Back from the - Cordwainer Smith, ebook, CALIBRE SFF 1970s, Temp 2
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 The Colonel Came Back from the Nothing-at All
I. The Naked and Alone
We looked through the peephole of the hospital door.
Colonel Harkening had torn off his pajamas again and lay naked face
down on the floor.
His body was rigid.
His face was turned sharply to the left so that the neck muscles
showed. His right arm stuck out straight from the body.
The elbow formed a right angle, with the forearm and hand pointing
straight upward. The left arm also pointed straight out, but in this
case the hand and forearm pointed downward in line with the body.
The legs were in the grotesque parody of a running position.
Except that Colonel Harkening wasn't running.
He was lying flat on the floor.
Flat, as though he were trying to squeeze himself out of the third
dimension and to lie in two planes only. Grosbeck stood back and gave
Timofeyev his turn at the peephole.
"I still say he needs a naked woman," said Grosbeck.
Grosbeck always went in for the elementals.
We had atropine, surgital, a whole family of the digitalin ids assorted
narcotics, electrotherapy, hydrotherapy, subsonic therapy temperature
shock, audiovisual shock, mechanical hypnosis, and gas hypnosis.
None of these had had the least effect on Colonel Harkening.
When we picked the colonel up he tried to lie down.
When we put clothes on him he tore them off.
We had already brought his wife to see him. She had wept because the
world had acclaimed her husband a hero, dead in the vast, frightening
emptiness of space. His miraculous return had astonished seven
continents on Earth and the settlements on Venus and Mars.
Harkening had been test pilot for the new device which had been
developed by a team at the Research Office of the Instrumentality.
 of Man They called it a chronoplast, though a minority held out for
the term plano form
The theory of it was completely beyond me, though the purpose was
simple enough. Crudely stated, the theory sought to compress living,
material bodies into a two-dimensional frame while skipping the living
body and its material adjuncts through two dimensions only to some
inconceivably remote point in space.
As our technology now stood it would have taken us a century at the
least to reach Alpha Centauri, the nearest star.
Desmond, the Harkening, who held the titular rank of colonel under the
Chiefs of the Instrumentality, was one of the best space navigators we
had. His eyes were perfect, his mind cool, his body superb, his
experience first-rate: What more could we ask?
Humanity had sent him out in a minute spaceship not much larger than
the elevator in an ordinary private home. Somewhere between Earth and
the Moon with millions of televideo watchers following his course, he
had disappeared.
Presumably he had turned on the chronoplast and had been the first man
to plano form
We never saw his craft again.
But we found the colonel, all right.
He lay naked in the middle of Central Park in New York, which lay about
a hundred miles west of the Ancient Ruins.
He lay in the grotesque position in which we had just observed him in
the hospital cell, forming a sort of human starfish.
Four months had passed and we had made very little progress with the
colonel.
It was not much trouble keeping him alive since we fed him by massive
rectal and intravenous administrations of the requisites of medical
survival. He did not oppose us. He did not fight except when we put
clothes on him or tried to keep him too long out of the horizontal
plane.
When kept upright too long he would awaken just enough to go into a
mad, silent, gloating rage, fighting the attendants, the straitjacket,
and anything else that got in his way.
We had had one hellish time in which the poor man suffered for an
entire week, bound firmly in canvas and struggling every minute of the
week to get free and to resume his nightmarish position.
The wife's visit last week had done no more good than I expected
Grosbeck's suggestion to do this week.
The colonel paid no more attention to her than he paid to us doctors.
If he had come back from the stars, come back from the cold beyond the
Moon, come back from all the terrors of the Up-and Out come back by
means unknown to any man living, come back in a form not himself and
  nevertheless himself, how could we expect the crude stimuli of
previous human knowledge to awaken him?
When Timofeyev and Grosbeck turned back to me after looking at him for
the some-thousandth time, I told them I did not think we could make any
progress with the case by ordinary means.
"Let's start all over again. This man is here. He can't be here
because nobody can come back from the stars, mother-naked in his own
skin, and land from outer space in Central Park so gently that he shows
not the slightest abrasion from a fall. Therefore, he isn't in that
room, you and I aren't talking about anything, and there isn't any
problem. Is that right?"
"No," they chorused simultaneously.
I turned on Grosbeck as the more obdurate of the two.
"Have it your way then. He is there, major premise. He can't be
there, minor premise. We don't exist. Q.E.D. That suit you any
better?"
"No, sir and doctor. Chief and Leader," said Grosbeck, sticking to the
courtesies even though he was angry.
"You are trying to destroy the entire context of this case, and, by
doing so, are trying to lead us even further into unorthodox methods of
treatment. Lord and Heaven, sir! We can't go any further that way.
This man is crazy. It doesn't matter how he got into Central Park.
That's a problem for the engineers. It's not a medical problem. His
craziness is a medical problem. We can try to cure it, or we can try
not to cure it. But we won't get anywhere if we mix the medicine with
the engineering " "It's not that bad," interjected Timofeyev gently.
As the older of my associates he had the right to address me by my
short title. He turned to me.
"I agree with you, sir and doctor Anderson, that the engineering is
mixed up with this man's mental and physical state. After all, he is
the first person to go out in a chronoplast and neither we nor the
engineers nor anybody else has the faintest idea of what happened to
him. The engineers can't find the machine, and we can't find his
consciousness. Let's leave the machine to the engineers, but let's
persevere on the medical side of the case."
I said nothing, waiting for them to let off steam until they were
prepared to reason with me and not just shout at me in their
desperation.
They looked at me, keeping their silence grudgingly, and trying to make
me take the initiative in the unpleasant case.
"Open the cell door," I said.
"He's not going to run away in that position. All he wants to do is be
flat."
"Flatter than a Scotch pancake in a Chinese hell," said Grosbeck, "and
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