When the worst Sunday night in my life began, and the rains did not cease, I knew the meaning of despair for the third time in my life.
Eleanor and I were in the Trouble Center. The lights had just gone out for the eighth time. The rest of the staff was down on the third floor. We sat there in the dark without moving, without being able to do a single thing to halt the course of chaos. We couldn't even watch it until the power came back on.
So we talked.
Whether it was for five minutes or an hour, I don't really know. I remember telling her, though, about the girl buried on another world, whose death had set me to running. Two trips to two worlds and I had broken my bond with the times. But a hundred years of travel do not bring a century of forgetfulness--not when you cheat time with the _petite mort_ of the cold sleep. Time's vengeance is memory, and though for an age you plunder the eye of seeing and empty the ear of sound, when you awaken your past is still with you. The worst thing to do then is to return to visit your wife's nameless grave in a changed land, to come back as a stranger to the place you had made your home. You run again then, and after a time you _do_ forget, some, because a certain amount of actual time must pass for you also. But by then you are alone, all by yourself: completely alone. That was the _first_ time in my life that I knew the meaning of despair. I read, I worked, I drank, I whored, but came the morning after and I was always me, by myself. I jumped from world to world, hoping things would be different, but with each change I was further away from all the things I had known.
Then another feeling gradually came upon me, and a really terrible feeling it was: There _must_ be a time and a place best suited for each person who has ever lived. After the worst of my grief had left me and I had come to terms with the vanished past, I wondered about a man's place in time and space. Where, and _when_ in the cosmos would I most like to live out the balance of my days? --To live at my fullest potential? The past _was_ dead, but perhaps a better time waited on some as yet undiscovered world, waited at one yet-to-be recorded moment in its history. How could I _ever_ know? How could I ever be sure that my Golden Age did not lay but one more world away, and that I might be struggling in a Dark Era while the Renaissance of my days was but a ticket, a visa and a diary-page removed? That was my _second_ despair. I did know the answer until I came to the Land of the Swan. I do not know why I loved you Eleanor, but I did, and that was my answer. Then the rains came.
When the lights returned we sat there and smoked. She had told me of her husband, who had died a hero's death in time to save him from the delirium tremors which would have ended his days. Died as the bravest die--not knowing why--because of a reflex, which after all had been a part of him, a reflex which had made him cast himself into the path of a pack of wolf-like creatures attacking the exploring party he was with--off in that forest at the foot of Saint Stephen's--to fight them with a machete and to be torn apart by them while his companions fled to the camp, where they made a stand and saved themselves. Such is the essence of valor: an unthinking moment, a spark along the spinal nerves, predetermined by the sum total of everything you have ever done, wished to do or not to do, and wish you had done, or hadn't, and then comes the pain.
We watched the gallery on the wall. Man is the reasoning animal? Greater than beasts but less than angels? Not the murderer I shot that night. He wasn't even the one who uses tools or buries his dead. --Laughs, aspires, affirms? I didn't see any of those going on. --Watches himself watch himself doing what he knows is absurd? Too sophisticated. He just did the absurd without watching. Like running back into a burning house after his favorite pipe and a can of tobacco. --Devises religions? I saw people praying, but they weren't devising. They were making last-ditch efforts at saving themselves, after they'd exhausted everything else they knew to do. Reflex.
The creature who loves?
That's the only one I might not be able to gainsay.
I saw a mother holding her daughter up on her shoulders while the water swirled about her armpits, and the little girl was holding her doll up above _her_ shoulders, in the same way. But isn't that--the love--a part of the total? Of everything you have ever done, or wished? Positive or neg? I know that it is what made me leave my post, running, and what made me climb into Eleanor's flyer and what made me fight my way through the storm and out to that particular scene.
I didn't get there in time.
I shall never forget how glad I was that someone else did. Johnny Keams blinked his lights above me as he rose, and he radioed down:
"It's all right. They're okay. Even the doll."
"Good," I said, and headed back.
As I set the ship down on its balcony landing, one figure came toward me. As I stepped down, a gun appeared in Chuck's hand.
"I wouldn't kill you, Juss," he began, "but I'd wound you. Face the wall. I'm taking the flyer."
"Are you crazy?" I asked him.
"I know what I'm doing. I need it, Juss."
"Well, if you need it, there it is. You don't have to point a gun at me. I just got through needing it myself. Take it."
"Lottie and I both need it," he said. "Turn around!"
I turned toward the wall.
"What do you mean?" I asked.
"We're going away, together--now!"
"You _are_ crazy," I said. "This is no time..."
"C'mon, Lottie," he called, and there was a rush of feet behind me and I heard the flyer's door open.
"Chuck!" I said. "We need you now! You can settle this thing peacefully, in a week, in a month, after some order has been restored. There _are_ such things as divorces, you know."
"That won't get me off this world, Juss."
"So how is _this_ going to help?"
I turned, and I saw that he had picked up a large canvas bag from somewhere and had it slung over his left shoulder, like Santa Claus.
"Turn back around! I don't want to shoot you," he warned.
The suspicion came, grew stronger.
"Chuck, have you been looting?" I asked him.
"Turn around!"
"All right, I'll turn around. How far do you think you'll get?"
"Far enough," he said. "Far enough so that no one will find us--and when the time comes, we'll leave this world."
"No," I said. "I don't think you will, because I know you."
"We'll see." His voice was further away then.
I heard three rapid footsteps and the slamming of a door. I turned then, in time to see the flyer rising from the balcony.
I watched it go. I never saw either of them again.
Inside, two men were unconscious on the floor. It turned out that they were not seriously hurt. After I saw them cared for, I rejoined Eleanor in the Tower.
All that night did we wait, emptied, for morning.
Somehow, it came.
We sat and watched the light flow through the rain. So much had happened so quickly. So many things had occurred during the past week that we were unprepared for morning.
It brought an end to the rains.
A good wind came from out of the north and fought with the clouds, like En-ki with the serpent Tiamat. Suddenly, there was a canyon of cobalt.
A cloudquake shook the heavens and chasms of light opened across its dark landscape.
It was coming apart as we watched.
I heard a cheer, and I croaked in unison with it as the sun appeared.
The good, warm, drying, beneficial sun drew the highest peak of Saint Stephen's to its face and kissed both its cheeks.
There was a crowd before each window. I joined one and stared, perhaps for ten minutes.
When you awaken from a nightmare you do not normally find its ruins lying about your bedroom. This is one way of telling whether or not something was only a bad dream, or whether or not you are really awake.
We walked the streets in great boots. Mud was everywhere. It was in basements and in machinery and in sewers and in living room clothes closets. It was on buildings and on cars and on peopl
e and on the branches of trees. It was broken brown blisters drying and waiting to be peeled off from clean tissue. Swarms of skytoads rose into the air when we approached, hovered like dragon-flies, returned to spoiling food stores after we had passed. Insects were having a heyday, too. Betty would have to be deloused. So many things were overturned or fallen down, and half-buried in the brown Sargassos of the streets. The dead had not yet been numbered. The water still ran by, but sluggish and foul. A stench was beginning to rise across the city. There were smashed-in store fronts and there was glass everywhere, and bridges fallen down and holes in the streets...But why go on? If you don't get the picture by now, you never will. It was the big morning after, following a drunken party by the gods. It is the lot of mortal man always to clean up their leavings or be buried beneath them.
So clean we did, but by noon Eleanor could no longer stand. So I took her home with me, because we were working down near the harbor section and my place was nearer.
That's almost the whole story--light to darkness to light--except for the end, which I don't really know. I'll tell you of its beginning, though...
I dropped her off at the head of the alleyway, and she went on toward my apartment while I parked the car. Why didn't I keep her with me? I don't know. Unless it was because the morning sun made the world seem at peace, despite its filth. Unless it was because I was in love and the darkness was over, and the spirit of the night had surely departed.
I parked the car and started up the alley. I was halfway before the corner where I had met the org when I heard her cry out.
I ran. Fear gave me speed and strength and I ran to the corner and turned it.
The man had a bag, not unlike the one Chuck had carried away with him, lying beside the puddle in which he stood. He was going through Eleanor's purse, and she lay on the ground--so still!--with blood on the side of her head.
I cursed and ran toward him, switching on my cane as I went. He turned, dropped her purse, and reached for the gun in his belt.
We were about thirty feet apart, so I threw my cane.
He drew his gun, pointed it at me, and my cane fell into the puddle in which he stood.
Flights of angels sang him to his rest, perhaps.
She was breathing, so I got her inside and got hold of a doctor--I don't remember how, not too clearly, anyway--and I waited and waited.
She lived for another twelve hours and then she died. She recovered consciousness twice before they operated on her, and not again after. She didn't say anything. She smiled at me once, and went to sleep again.
I don't know.
Anything, really.
It happened that I became Betty's mayor, to fill in until November, to oversee the rebuilding. I worked, I worked my head off, and I left her bright and shiny, as I had found her. I think I could have won if I had run for the job that fall, but I did not want it.
The Town Council overrode my objections and voted to erect a statue of Godfrey Justin Holmes beside the statue of Eleanor Schirrer which was to stand in the Square across from cleaned-up Wyeth. I guess it's out there now.
I said that I would never return, but who knows? In a couple of years, after some more history has passed, I may revisit a Betty full of strangers, if only to place a wreath at the foot of the one statue. Who knows but that the entire continent may be steaming and clanking and whirring with automation by then, and filled with people from shore to shining shore?
There was a Stopover at the end of the year and I waved goodbye and climbed aboard and went away, anywhere.
I went aboard and went away, to sleep again the cold sleep.
Delirium of ship among stars--
Years have passed, I suppose. I'm not really counting them anymore. But I think of this thing often: Perhaps there _is_ a Golden Age someplace, a Renaissance for me sometime, a special time somewhere, somewhere but a ticket, a visa, a diary-page away. I don't know where or when. Who does? Where are all the rains of yesterday?
In the invisible city?
Inside me?
It is cold and quiet outside and the horizon is infinity. There is no sense of movement.
There is no moon, and the stars are very bright, like broken diamonds, all.
The Great Slow Kings
Drax and Dran sat in the great Throne Hall of Glan, discussing life. Monarchs by virtue of superior intellect and physique--and the fact that they were the last two survivors of the race of Glan--theirs was a divided rule over the planet and their one subject, Zindrome, the palace robot.
Drax had been musing for the past four centuries (theirs was a sluggish sort) over the possibility of life on other planets in the galaxy.
Accordingly, "Dran," said he, addressing the other (who was becoming mildly curious as to his thoughts), "Dran, I've been thinking. There may be life on other planets in the galaxy."
Dran considered his response to this, as the world wheeled several times about its sun.
"True," he finally agreed, "there may."
After several months Drax shot back, "If there is, we ought to find out."
"Why?" asked Dran with equal promptness, which caused the other to suspect that he, too, had been thinking along these lines.
So he measured his next statement out cautiously, first testing each word within the plated retort of his reptilian skull.
"Our kingdom is rather underpopulated at present," he observed. "It would be good to have many subjects once more."
Dran regarded him askance, then slowly turned his head. He closed one eye and half-closed the other, taking full stock of his co-ruler, whose appearance, as he had suspected, was unchanged since the last time he had looked.
"That, also, is true," he noted. "What do you suggest we do?"
This time Drax turned, reappraising him, eye to eye.
I think we ought to find out if there is life on other planets in the galaxy."
"Hmm."
Two quick rounds of the seasons went unnoticed, then, "Let me think about it," he said, and turned away.
After what he deemed a polite period of time, Drax coughed.
"Have you thought sufficiently?"
"No."
Drax struggled to focus his eyes on the near-subliminal streak of bluish light which traversed, re-traversed and re-re-traversed the Hall as he waited.
"Zindrome!" he finally called out.
The robot slowed his movements to a statue-like immobility to accommodate his master. A feather duster protruded from his right limb.
"You called, great Lord of Glan?"
"Yes, Zindrome, worthy subject. Those old spaceships which we constructed in happier days, and never got around to using. Are any of them still capable of operation?"
"I'll check, great Lord."
He seemed to change position slightly.
"There are three hundred eighty-two," he announced, "of which four are in functioning condition, great Lord. I've checked all the operating circuits."
"Drax," warned Dran, "you are arrogating unauthorized powers to yourself once more. You should have conferred with me before issuing that order."
"I apologize," stated the other. "I simply wanted to expedite matters, should your decision be that we conduct a survey."
"You have anticipated my decision correctly," nodded Dran, "but your eagerness seems to bespeak a hidden purpose."
"No purpose but the good of the realm," smiled the other.
"That may be, but the last time you spoke of 'the good of the realm' the civil strife which ensued cost us our other robot."
"I have learned my lesson and profited thereby. I shall be more judicious in the future."
"I hope so. Now, about this investigation--which part of the galaxy do you intend to investigate first?"
A tension-filled pause ensued.
"I had assumed," murmured Drax, "that you would conduct the expedition. Being the more mature monarch, yours should be a more adequate decision as to whether or not a particular species is worthy of our enlightened ru
le."
"Yes, but your youth tends to make you more active than I. The journey should be more expeditiously conducted by you." He emphasized the word "expeditiously."
"We could both go, in separate ships," offered Drax. "That would be truly expeditious--"
Their heated debating was cut short by a metallic cough-equivalent.
"Masters," suggested Zindrome, "the half-life of radioactive materials being as ephemeral as it is, I regret to report that only one spaceship is now in operational condition."
"That settles it, Dran. _You_ go. It will require a steadier _rrand_ to manage an underpowered ship."
"And leave you to foment civil strife and usurp unfranchised powers? No, you go!"
"I suppose we could _both_ go," sighed Drax.
"Fine! Leave the kingdom leaderless! _That_ is the kind of muddleheaded thinking which brought about our present political embarrassment."
"Masters," said Zindrome, "if _someone_ doesn't go soon the ship will be useless."
They both studied their servant, approving the rapid chain of logic forged by his simple statement.
"Very well," they smiled in unison, "_you_ go."
Zindrome bowed quite obsequiously and departed from the great Throne Hall of Glan.
"Perhaps we should authorize Zindrome to construct facsimiles of himself," stated Dran, tentatively. "If we had more subjects we could accomplish more."
The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth and Other Stories Page 20