She is racing with a hummingbird—holding back, I think, to give the swift little green fluff a break.
* * * *
Another note for you, Lester. I have already indicated my ring is to be yours. I don’t want to tell you what I have discovered of its properties, for fear it might not give you the same pleasure and interest that it has given me. Of course, like any spot of shifting light and color, it is an aid to self-hypnosis. It is more, much more than that, but—find out for yourself, at some time when you are a little protected from everyday distractions.
I know it can’t harm you, because I know its source.
By the way, I wish you would convey to my publishers my request that they either discontinue printing my Introductory Biology or else bring out a new edition revised in accordance with some notes you will find in the top left drawer of my library desk. I glanced through that book after my angel assured me that I wrote it, and I was amazed. However, I’m afraid my notes are messy—I call them mine by a poetic license—and they may be too advanced for the present day, though the revision is mainly a matter of leaving out certain generalities that aren’t so. Use your best judgment. It’s a very minor textbook, and the thing isn’t too important.
A last wriggle of my vanishing personal vanity.
July 27
I have seen a two-moon night. It was given to me by that remaining grown-up, at the end of a wonderful visit, when he and six of those nine other children came to see me. It was last night, I think—yes, must have been. First there was a murmur of wings above the house; my angel flew in laughing. Then they were here, all about me, full of gaiety and colored fire, showing off in every way they knew would please me. Each one had something graceful and friendly to say to me. One brought me a moving image of the St. Lawrence seen at morning from half a mile up—clouds, eagles—now how could he know that would delight me so much?
And each one thanked me for what I had done.
But it’s been so easy!
And at the end the old one—his skin is quite black, and his down is white and gray—gave the remembered image of a two-moon night. He saw it some sixty years ago.
I have not even considered making an effort to describe it. My fingers will not hold this pencil much longer tonight. Oh, soaring buildings of white and amber, untroubled countryside, silver on curling rivers, a glimpse of open sea. A moon rising in clarity, another setting in a wreath of cloud, between them a wide wandering of unfamiliar stars. Here and there the angels, worthy after fifty million years to live in such night.
No, I cannot describe anything like that. But you human kindred of mine, I can do something better. I can tell you that this two-moon night, glorious as it was, was no more beautiful than a night under a single moon on this ancient and familiar Earth might be—if you will imagine that human evil has been cleared away, and that our own people have started at last on the greatest of all explorations, themselves.
July 29
Nothing now remains to give away but the memory of the time that has passed since the angel came. I am to rest as long as I wish, write whatever I want. Then I shall get myself over to the bed and lie down as if for sleep. She tells me that I can keep my eyes open; she will close them for me when I no longer see her.
I remain convinced that our human case is hopeful. I feel sure that in only a few thousand years we may be able to perform some of the simpler preparatory tasks, such as casting out evil and loving our neighbors. And if that should prove to be so, who can doubt that in another few million years, or even less, we might be only a little lower than the angels?
LIBRARIAN’S NOTE
As is generally known, the original of the Bannerman Journal is said to have been in the possession of Dr. Lester Morse at the time of the latter’s disappearance in 1964, and that disappearance has remained an unsolved mystery to the present day. McCarran is known to have visited Capt. Garrison Blaine in October, 1951, but no record remains of that visit. Capt. Blaine appears to have been a bachelor who lived alone. He was killed in line of duty, December, 1951. McCarran is believed not to have written about nor discussed the Bannerman affair with anyone else. It is almost certain that he himself removed the extract and related papers from the files—unofficially, it would seem—when he severed his connection with the FBI in 1957. At any rate, they were found among his effects after his assassination, and were released to the public, considerably later, by Mrs. McCarran.
The following memorandum was originally attached to the extract from the Bannerman Journal. It carries the McCarran initialing.
Aug. 11, 1951
The original letter of complaint written by Stephen Clyde, M.D., and mentioned in the accompanying letter of Captain Blaine, has unfortunately been lost, owing perhaps to an error in filing.
Personnel presumed responsible have been instructed not to allow such error to be repeated except if, as and/or when necessary.
C.McC.
On the margin of this memorandum there was a penciled notation, later erased. Iodine vapor has been used to bring out the unmistakable McCarran script. The notation read in part as follows: Far be it from a McC. to lose his job except if, as and or— The rest is undecipherable, except for a terminal word which is regrettably unparliamentary.
STATEMENT BY LESTER MORSE, M.D.
DATED AUGUST 9, 1951
On the afternoon of July 30, 1951, acting on what I am obliged to describe as an unexpected impulse, I drove out to the country for the purpose of calling on my friend Dr. David Bannerman. I had not seen him nor had word from him since the evening of June 12 of this year, 1951.
After knocking, calling to him and hearing no response, I went upstairs to his bedroom and found him dead. From superficial indications I judged that death must have taken place during the previous night. He was lying on his bed on his left side, comfortably disposed as if for sleep, but fully dressed, with a fresh shirt and clean summer slacks. His eyes and mouth were closed, and there was no trace of the disorder to be expected at even the easiest death.
Because of these signs I assumed, soon as I had determined the absence of breath and heartbeat and noted the chill of the body, that some neighbor must have already found him, performed these simple rites of respect for him, and probably notified a local physician or other responsible person. I therefore waited, Dr. Bannerman had no telephone, expecting that someone would soon call.
Dr. Bannerman’s journal was on a table near his bed, open to that page on which he had written a codicil to his will. I read that part. Later, while I was waiting for others to come, I read the remainder of the journal, as he apparently wished me to do. The ring he mentions was on the fifth finger of his left hand, and it is now in my possession.
When writing that codicil, Dr. Bannerman must have overlooked or forgotten the fact that in his formal will, written some months earlier, he had appointed me executor. If there are legal technicalities involved, I shall be pleased to cooperate fully with the proper authorities.
The ring, however, will remain in my keeping, since that was Dr. Bannerman’s expressed wish, and I am not prepared to offer it for examination or discussion under any circumstances.
The notes for a revision of one of his textbooks were in his desk, as indicated in the journal. They are by no means “messy,” nor are they particularly revolutionary except in so far as he wished to rephrase, as theory or hypothesis, certain statements which I would have regarded as axiomatic. This is not my field, and I am not competent to judge. I shall take up the matter with his publishers at the earliest opportunity.[5]
So far as I can determine, and bearing in mind the results of the autopsy performed by Stephen Clyde, M.D., the death of Dr. David Bannerman was not inconsistent with the presence of an embolism of some type not distinguishable on post mortem. I have so stated on the certificate of death. I am compelled to add o
ne other item of medical opinion for what it may be worth:
I am not a psychiatrist, but, owing to the demands of general practise, I have found it advisable to keep as up to date as possible with current findings and opinion in this branch of medicine. Dr. Bannerman possessed, in my opinion, emotional and intellectual stability to a higher degree than anyone else of comparable intelligence in the entire field of my acquaintance, personal and professional.
If it is suggested that he was suffering from a hallucinatory psychosis, I can only say that it must have been of a type quite outside my experience and not described, so far as I know, anywhere in the literature of psychopathology.
Dr. Bannerman’s house, on the afternoon of July 30, was in good order. Near the open, unscreened window of his bedroom there was a coverless shoebox with a folded silk scarf in the bottom. I found no pillow such as Dr. Bannerman describes in the journal, but observed that a small section had been cut from the scarf. In this box, and near it, there was a peculiar fragrance, faint, aromatic, very sweet, such as I have never encountered before and therefore cannot describe.
It may or may not have any bearing on the case that, while I remained in his house that afternoon, I felt no sense of grief or personal loss, although Dr. Bannerman had been a loved and honored friend for a number of years. I merely had, and have, a conviction that after the completion of some very great undertaking, he had found peace.
The ring he bequeathed to me has confirmed that.
[1] Dr. Bannerman’s dog, mentioned often earlier in the journal, a nine-year-old English setter. According to an entry of May 15, 1951, she was then beginning to go blind—BLAINE
[2] At this point Dr. Bannerman’s handwriting alters curiously. From here on he used a soft pencil instead of a pen, and the script shows signs of haste. In spite of this, however, it is actually much clearer, steadier and easier to read than the earlier entries in his normal hand.—BLAINE
[3] In spite of superficial changes in the handwriting, this signature has been certified genuine by an expert graphologist.—BLAINE
[4] Dr. Bannerman’s mother died in 1918 of influenza. His brother (three years older, not younger) died of pneumonia, 1906.—BLAINE
[5] LIBRARIAN’S NOTE: But it seems he never did. No new edition of “Introductory Biology” was ever brought out, and the textbook has been out of print since 1952.
THE MUSIC MASTER OF BABYLON
Originally published in Galaxy Science Fiction, November 1954.
For twenty-five years, no one came. In the seventy-sixth year of his life, Brian Van Anda was still trying not to remember a happy boyhood. To do so was irrelevant and dangerous, although every instinct of his old age tempted him to reject the present and dwell in the lost times.
He would recall stubbornly that the present year, for example, was 2096; that he had been born in 2020, seven years after the close of the Civil War, fifty years before the Final War, twenty-five years before the departure of the First Interstellar. (It had never returned, nor had the Second Interstellar. They might be still wandering, trifles of Man-made Stardust.) He would recall his place of birth, New Boston, the fine, planned city far inland from the ancient metropolis that the rising sea had reclaimed after the earthquake of 1994.
Such things, places and dates, were factual props, useful when Brian wanted to impose an external order on the vagueness of his immediate existence. He tried to make sure they became no more than that—to shut away the colors, the poignant sounds, the parks and the playgrounds of New Boston, the known faces (many of them loved), and the later years when he had briefly known a curious intoxication called fame.
It was not necessarily better or wiser to reject those memories, but it was safer, and nowadays Brian was often sufficiently tired, sufficiently conscious of his growing weakness and lonely unimportance, to crave safety as a meadow mouse often craves a burrow.
* * * *
He tied his canoe to the massive window that for many years had been a port and a doorway. Lounging there with a suspended sense of time, he was hardly aware that he was listening. In a way, all the twenty-five years had been a listening. He watched Earth’s patient star sink toward the rim of the forest on the Palisades. At this hour, it was sometimes possible, if the Sun-crimsoned water lay still, to cease grieving too much at the greater stillness.
There was scattered human life elsewhere, he knew—probably a great deal of it. After twenty-five years alone, that, too, often seemed almost irrelevant. At other times than mild evenings, hushed noons or mornings empty of human commotion, Brian might lapse into anger, fight the calm by yelling, resent the swift dying of his echoes. Such moods were brief. A kind of humor remained in him, not to be ruined by sorrow.
He remembered how, ten months or possibly ten years ago, he had encountered a box turtle in a forest clearing, and had shouted at it: “They went thataway!” The turtle’s rigidly comic face, fixed by nature in a caricature of startled disapproval, had seemed to point up some truth or other. Brian had hunkered down on the moss and laughed uproariously—until he observed that some of the laughter was weeping.
Today had been rather good. He had killed a deer on the Palisades, and with bow and arrow, thus saving a bullet. Not that he needed to practice such economy. He might live, he supposed, another decade or so at the most. His rifles were in good condition and his hoarded ammunition would easily outlast him. So would the stock of canned and dried food stuffed away in his living quarters. But there was satisfaction in primitive effort and no compulsion to analyze the why of it.
The stored food was more important than the ammunition. A time would come soon enough when he no longer had strength for hunting. He would lose the inclination for trips to cross the river. He would yield to such laziness or timidity for days, then weeks. Some time, when it became months or years, he might find himself too feeble to risk climbing the cliff wall into the forest. He would have the good sense then, he hoped, to destroy the canoe, thus making of his weakness a necessity.
* * * *
There were books. There was the Hall of Music on the next floor above the water, probably safe from its lessening encroachment. To secure fresh water, he need only keep track of the tides, for the Hudson had cleaned itself and now rolled down sweet from the lonely, uncorrupted hills. His decline could be comfortable. He had provided for it and planned it. Yet gazing now across the sleepy water, seeing a broad-winged hawk circle in freedom above the forest, Brian was aware of the old thought moving in him:
“If I could hear voices—just once, if I could hear human voices.…”
The Museum of Human History, with the Hall of Music on what Brian thought of as the second floor, should also outlast his requirements. In the flooded lower floor and basement, the work of slow destruction must be going on. Here and there, the unhurried waters could find their way to steel and make rust of it, for the waterproofing of the concrete was nearly a hundred years old. But it ought to be good for another century or two.
Nowadays the ocean was mild. There were moderate tides, winds no longer destructive. For the last six years, there had been no more of the heavy storms out of the south. In the same period, Brian had noted a rise in the water level of a mere nine inches. The window-sill, his port, was six inches above high-tide mark now.
Perhaps Earth was settling into a new, amiable mood. The climate had become delightful, about like what Brian remembered from a visit to southern Virginia in his childhood.
The last earthquake had come in 2082—a large one, Brian guessed, but its center could not have been close to the rock of Manhattan. The Museum had only shivered and shrugged; it had survived much worse than that, half a dozen times since 1994. After the tremor, a tall wave had thundered in from the south. Its force, like that of others, had mostly been dissipated against the barrier of tumbled rock and steel at the southern end of the subme
rged island—an undersea dam, Man-made though not Man-intended—and when it reached the Museum, it did no more than smash the southern windows in the Hall of Music, which earlier waves had not been able to reach. Then it passed on up the river, enfeebled. The windows of the lower floor had all been broken long before that.
* * * *
After the earthquake of ’82, Brian had spent a month boarding up all the openings on the south side of the Hall of Music—after all, it was home—with lumber painfully ferried from mainland ruins. That year, he had been sixty-two years old and not moving with the ease of youth: a rough job. He had deliberately left cracks and knotholes. Sunlight sifted through in narrow beams, like the bars of dusty gold Brian could remember in a hayloft at his uncle’s farm in Vermont. It was quite pleasant.
The Museum had been built in 2003. Manhattan, strangely enough, had never been bombed, although, in the Civil War, two of the type called “small fission” had fallen on the Brooklyn and Jersey sides—so Brian recalled from the jolly history books that had informed his adolescence that war was definitely a thing of the past.
By the time of the final War, in 2070, the sea, gorged on the melting ice caps, had removed Manhattan Island from history. Everything left standing above the waters south of the Museum had been knocked flat by the tornadoes of 2057 and 2064. A few blobs of rock still marked where Central Park and Mount Morris Park had been, but they were not significant. Where Long Island once rose, there was a troubled area of shoals and tiny islands, probably a useful barrier of protection for the receding shore of Connecticut.
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