"Who is Mrs. Delacourt?"
"Eh?" Channing cried. "I didn't say anything."
"Your thoughts have such qualities too, Mr. Channing."
"You mean you can read my mind?"
"I can perceive it, as you can perceive color. To continue: we of Targoff maintain that no thing in itself is real. Things only have existence as their various qualities are perceived. When you leave this room, as far as I am concerned, you do not exist."
"A man named Hume went a step further than that," Channing told Qui Dor with a smile. "After disposing of the world in such summary fashion, he also disposed of you and me and everyone. The mind which perceived these qualities, he said, was nothing more than a collection—he used the word collocation, I think—of the qualities. So you have non-existent external things on the one hand and a non-existent mind on the other. The second nothing somehow gets images of the first nothing, and that's the sum total of the world."
"Interesting," said Qui Dor, ruffling his crest with a three-fingered hand, "but hardly practical. You see, Mr. Channing, our theories work. We can create your collocations of qualities to order. We can even give a man immortality."
"How can you do that?"
"Why, by recreating his qualities down to the last atomic detail when he dies."
"You wouldn't," said Channing.