“I want a favor of you, Roadstrum,” the big fellow answered inside Roadstrum’s head. “Promise to grant me one small favor, and I’ll let you throw me.” And he smashed Roadstrum one with the “Samoyed sledge.”
“Anything to soothe my pride and save my reputation,” Roadstrum thought back into the big fellow’s head. “Let me throw you then, and make me look real good.” And he sent the big fellow crashing with the “down-under dingo-trip.”
“It is a bargain,” the big fellow thought back into Roadstrum’s head. And he did make it look good. He turned green when Roadstrum clamped him with the “Ruttigan rib-racker,” he went down in pain when the great Captain applied the “double bull-whack,” and he allowed himself to be pinned in the “big spider.”
Roadstrum was the victor. Roadstrum was the saltiest sky-dog of them all.
“You men go enjoy yourselves for the nonce,” said great Roadstrum, “and take the pleasures of the planet. I have certain soothing things to say to this glorious vanquished man. Be you away. It becomes a private thing.”
The men, their plaudits sunk now to a mild roar, trekked off whooping and hollering and praising their Captain.
“And what is the small favor I am to do for you, big fellow?” Roadstrum asked graciously.
“Mind the booth for me, Roadstrum, while I go to the john. I have no relief man here.”
“Why of course I will. That’s a small enough favor.”
“It is more important and more intricate than it appears,” the big man said. “Let me explain it to you.” And he explained to Roadstrum the use and importance of the telescopes and earphones and instruments and instrumental scopes.
“It is fantastic,” Roadstrum said. “And it really is of such importance? I’ll do it, of course. I’m a man of my word. But I had no idea that so much depended on it. The responsibility worries me a little. You will be right back, you say?”
“I will go to the john, Roadstrum, and I will come right back,” the big fellow said. The big fellow left. And Roadstrum devoted himself to the business of watching the booth. It was intricate almost beyond belief; it required a degree of concentration that took a lot out of a man.
The down-telescope through the planet had a sixteen-way prismatic mirror on the other end of it (where it emerged downside planet), and integrating those sixteen sectors into a meaningful hemisphere was a mind-straining task.
The three sets of headphones that he was wearing now brought neither audio nor radio to the ears of Roadstrum, but rather three families of cosmic tones. The instruments and scopes led him to sense the various waves and fields of the universes. But none of these was the main thing. The main thing was the centrality of his mind that was tangential to every body in the all-everything-extent. What did not touch him in one of his senses or apperceptions was not.
“I am holding it,” said Roadstrum. “It may be that I am the only one holding it at the moment. And if I let it go, if I fail, then everything fails. A few dozen or a few million bodies cannot survive alone. Each one that drops into the void of inattention will weaken the whole and topple the balance.
“It pulses, it all pulses with my own effort. The balance holds, and the lost ones are plucked out of the void each time. But it was near that time there! I must be stronger. And it becomes still nearer every time that the lost ones should careen the sound ones and draw all into the void with them.
“Why doesn’t the big fellow come back!”
You see, the big fellow didn’t come back right away. Quite a few of those hasty days and nights flipped past, and Roadstrum realized that a great part of an equivalent day had already gone.
Roadstrum could not leave the booth until the big man returned. Captain Puckett had offered to watch the booth for Roadstrum. Various crewmen had offered to watch it, but Roadstrum had to refuse. They were all good men, but they just weren’t good enough. The responsibility was too great. Roadstrum must maintain the booth till the big man came back. If he did not, the skies would stagger and fall down, and it would all be gone.
Now rankling anxiety and envy rose up in him. He swore that he’d let the worlds fall down after all if the big fellow didn’t return soon; but he knew he’d never do that. He would keep the thing going as long as he possibly could. If everything ended, it would be the end of himself also.
But he’d like to be having fun, as Puckett and the crewmen were. It was all a frolic on Kentron. This was one place where laughter was literally heard around the world. Roadstrum was amazed and amused to hear the booming laughter of Crewman Trochanter coming to him from every horizon. He’d have been more amused if he could have added his own laughter to it. There seemed also to be quite an amount of female glee mixed in with the large lilting voices of the crewmen. They were all on an antic, a revel. And Roadstrum, whose present business was to sense everything everywhere, could not help but feel it all.
“Bless the bony-headed, splayfooted bunch of them,” Roadstrum said. “Bless the fine native folk who are entertaining them so gaily. And curse the big man if he do not come back quickly. I’m crushed under the weight of this job. I’m avid to be at the pleasures of this world.”
But the big man did not come back right away, not for an equivalent day, not for three of them, not for an equivalent week. Roadstrum, of course, could not allow himself to sleep, hardly to blink. The responsibility was far too great. His eyes had become red-rimmed, and his ears were turned into sounding brass. His mind was in such a tangle that the far worlds reeled drunkenly, and only with the greatest effort could Roadstrum steady them again.
“The strength, the grandeur, the majesty of that big man,” Roadstrum said in awe. “He has held it all going for years and centuries, so he said, and I am weary after two weeks of it? Imagine his concentration, his width and depth of mind, his spaciousness, the power and the tide of him who could master it all so easily, and I stumble awkwardly through it. Imagine the serenity of that man, the peace-in-power, the scope, the dynamism, the balance! Imagine him with a spit run through him end to end and he roasting on it! Why don’t he come back?”
For it was a fact that the big fellow didn’t come back right away. There was a lot going on there on Kentron, and Roadstrum was missing it. He was not missing it completely, of course, for whatever he missed completely simply was not. He monitored Kentron as he monitored every world everywhere. It was the personal participation in it that he missed.
For one thing, it was now carnival season on Kentron. There had seemed a sort of carnival atmosphere about the place from the beginning, but now it was real carnival. There was high roistering going on such as you do not find everywhere every day.
“Ah, I have relief,” Roadstrum said suddenly. “And from World, of all places! He’s a curious round-headed young boy, a Living Buddha is what he is, and he holds it all in his concentration and observation without instruments. I’m freed for the moment. I’ll go find the big fellow and see what’s been taking him so long. I will—
“No, I will not! The young boy slipped beyond it. He is tricky. He really wished to exterminate it all then, after he had such a good hold on it. Had he lulled me and perhaps two or three others, he’d have done it too. We barely saved it in time. Aren’t there any others now? Ah, there’s a solitary creature on Goffgorina who holds it all and lets it go and holds it again; but he isn’t a steady creature. Now there’s a mountain-strider on Peluria who holds it all for a while. Those fellows are all quite capable, to do it without instruments, but none of them understands the importance of it. At any moment there may be a dozen sustaining persons scattered through the universes, but they cannot be trusted allwhere and allwhen. And what if there comes the moment when there are none? The responsibility is more than I can bear.
“I have to see it all in total depth all the time!” he bawled out. “I have to see every apple tree on World, every apple on every tree, every worm in every apple, every entrail-parasite of every worm, every cell of every parasite, every molecule of e
very cell. I have to see and understand every nucleate particle of every heat-happy sun, I must know every follicle of every trinominal plant on Ghar, every awn and glume of the eimer-wheat fields of New Dakota, every eagle of the Nine-Sky worlds, every mite in the under-feathers of every eagle, every microbe on every mite.
“I must know in which hand Crewman Clamdigger holds the coin in the game he plays with the girl at this moment. I must know the date and the head on that coin, and the flaw-stamping in the obverse lower scroll. I must know the man who made the slightly-flawed die that stamped that coin. I must know his niece. I must know the fellow she went out with three years ago once only. I must know the little kernel growing on his adrenal and beginning to give him trouble. And I must know the million rogue cells in that kernel that will be ten million tomorrow. I must know every object everywhere in many powers deeper depth.
“The spyglasses, the scopes, the instruments are but mnemonics and guides. At every moment I must see and feel the totality of it and all the ultimate detail in this great mind of mine. I stagger under the load of it.
“WHY DON’T THAT GUY COME BACK?”
The big fellow, you remember, had not come back right away, and now several equivalent months had gone by. Carnival season was over now, though there was still a lot of whooping and hollering on Kentron. Now it was the cloud-catcher season. The fleet went out, and the crewmen took the two hornets along with it (they told Roadstrum they’d be back for him bye and bye). The fleet spread its webs of spidery silver and silver nitrate, and caught and formed clouds in the nets. They dragged their catch back to Kentron with them and forced it to rain and lighten on the little world. So it was another festival-time, the Lightning-Lupercal that out-carnivaled the carnival.
Then it was hunting season on Kentron, then field-sports season, then social-sports season. All the men were having howlers, except Roadstrum.
“If I have to see every atom in the universes, why can’t I see the big fellow and know what’s delaying him?” Roadstrum asked himself. “Why? Because he’s a Subjective, that’s why. He’s a Subjective, just as I unhappily also am at the moment. I wish the big fellow would come back.”
The big fellow came back.
“Thanks, Roadstrum,” he said, “I’ll take the booth over again.”
Roadstrum tore the equipment off himself and collapsed to the ground from the steep weariness of it all.
“Where were you?” he moaned. “You were gone six equivalent months.”
“Roadstrum, I’d been tied to that booth for a couple hundred years. Now I’m ready to go for another long spell. But a man does need a break sometimes.”
“I had no idea it was so difficult or that so much was involved in it.”
“I tried to tell you, but words will not convey it. One has to be inside it to comprehend the magnitude.”
“How did such a thing begin?”
“Don’t you understand? It was the beginning. It’s the only thing there is. But it was haphazard for so many aeons that it spooks me to think about it. There were always three or four maintaining it, but there was no one person shouldering the responsibility. ‘Somewhere there must be one person strong enough to take it all over,’ I said to myself in a direful moment, but the strongest person I could think of was myself. I’ve been doing it ever since. A few centuries ago Berkeley gave it a philosophical basis, but could I get him to shoulder the thing itself? Yes, for a year or so. And then the flannel-mouthed Irishman talked his way out of it and I had it again. Well, it’s a job.”
“Is it really so important in every detail?”
“Yes. You are a detail, Roadstrum. If I put you out of my mind for a moment, then you are not. By my attention I hold it all in being. Nothing exists unless it is perceived. If perception fails for a moment, then that thing fails forever.”
“Suppose you neglected but one aspect of a faraway thing for but one moment?”
“Sometimes I do. On several of the worlds there are beautiful roses that have no odor. It is because I forgot to smell them for one brief instant. There are several curious bobtailed little animals in various systems. It is because, for an instant, I forgot to think of the ends of their tails. Here you will find a blind or deaf or halt creature; it is because I did not give them my full attention in one moment.”
“Well, you are certainly a sturdy man to stand up under it.”
“Yes, but I hate to be misjudged. They say that I bear it all on my shoulders, as though I were a stud or a balk. It is not my great shoulders, it is the amazing head on my great shoulders that maintains it all.”
The crewmen were ready to go. They heard of a world that made all others seem trivial. Now that Roadstrum was freed from watching the booth, they said to come along, Captain, and let’s be with it.
So they readied the hornets.
“I never did know your name, big fellow,” Roadstrum said in parting.
“Atlas.”
What thing they were and what an architecture yet,
What song they sang is not beyond conjecture yet.
Where heroes’ bones for ages strewed the shore about!
A murdering song that men can say no more about!
They came in cresting waves and boldly tried for it,
And broke and blanched and balked and burned and died for it.
A tune that must ensorcel them and rot them all!
The missing note was really what had got them all.
Ibid
They came to Sireneca. “There is something the matter with the spelling of that,” Roadstrum said. “It doesn’t look right.” This was the world of the Siren-Zo, the Siren-Animal, which is either a creature or a musical mountain or a manifestation or a group of very peculiar folks.
“I really wasn’t ready for another truculent world,” Roadstrum said. “We’ve had it so pleasant at all our stops since leaving Kentron Planet.”
They had been to Nine Worlds; they had taken over Nine Worlds. They had been involved in the work and recreation for which they were best fitted, and it had really been quite a pleasant interlude.
There had been leagues and anti-leagues on Nine Worlds, there had been conspiracy and war and revolution, there had been crude butchery, and there had been really fine weaponry. The twenty-plus men from the hornets made themselves at home in the situation. They were wonderful fighting men, the least competent of them able to command armies. They took command of troops on opposite sides of the broil (at one time there were five different sides to the battles), and they connived and gained.
Roadstrum himself was probably the finest fighting man in the universe, and now he discovered that he was also a master diplomat. At the time when they had had to make new tongues for themselves (after that little embarrassment on Lamos of the Giants), Roadstrum had made a forked tongue for himself. He was now as polished and pleasant a liar as you would ever want to meet, and he took all those folks in every conference.
The trouble on Nine Worlds was that things had been a little too loose. Now the hornet men came out on top, and they tightened things up a little. They brought in nine world-managers from Guild, and they laid down rules to be followed. For now Roadstrum was absolute owner of Nine Worlds.
“I know that none of you men wish to be burdened with property,” he said, “or I’d give you a world each, as long as they lasted. But since none of you have any such desire—”
“I have,” said Crewman Snow. “I want a world.”
They hadn’t known before that Snow was a grasping greedy man. It was hard to understand how a hornet crewman (they were a free and easy lot) could want to be burdened with ownership of a world and the income of billions of billions of Chancels every quarter, but there is someone like that in every crowd.
Roadstrum gave Crewman Snow title to one of the worlds with very bad grace. He sent the titles to the other eight worlds by dispatch to the men’s room attendant on Roulettenwelt, reducing his debt somewhat.
So the Nine Worlds affair had
been pleasant easy business, and now they had come to another tough world. They were already hooked on Sireneca, and they hadn’t intended to be. They had joked about it coming in, but they had known that it had its hook in them already, that they would have to kill it or be killed by it.
“Will you pour hot wax in our ears as was done the first time, Captain Roadstrum?” Crewman Clamdigger jibed. “And tie yourself to the mast? But we don’t have a mast.”
“I will pour hot lead into your throats to still your chatter,” Roadstrum said. “We are fools to be into this thing but we cannot, back off. It isn’t as good a tune as that. When we find the lost note and fit it in we will probably discover that it is a very ordinary tune.”
“We haven’t heard it yet,” Crewman Threefountains said.
“In our modern times we always hear a thing before we have heard it,” Roadstrum maintained. “Our instruments have already recorded it and broken it down. Crewman Bramble reads the score and is entranced by it, up to a point. He is the most intelligent of us and he enjoys music in the most intelligent way, reading the score without the noise to distract. The others of us, for our insufficiency, are doomed to listen vulgarly.
“But we all know that there is something wrong with that tune, even before we come to it. Our instruments are experiencing frustration, and so are we. ‘Something missing, something missing,’ they transmit. ‘Imperative that the missing element be found. Not very good tune anyhow.’ Yes, there’s the final high note missing in the tune, and we must find it or we will never sleep again. Many brave men have given their lives for this and failed. I say that we will not fail! We will force the missing note from the thing. And then we will kill it so it will no more be a hazard to farers.”
Sireneca was mostly ocean, mean ocean with steely choppy waves following a strange harmonic. They did not have free flow, nor real crest, nor tide. Something was missing from the ocean waves. Their tune was the tune of the planet, and it was an incomplete tune.
There was but one small continent or island on Sireneca, and in the middle of it was the animal, or the mountain, or the folk. The hornets had set down on the flanks of this thing, and the crewmen made ready to solve it.
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