They Shall Have Stars
Page 15
The deck of the Bride was splitting up the middle.
After a moment more, the uproar dimmed, and the speaker said, in Charity's normal voice: "Eva, you too, please. Acknowledge please. This is it unless everybody comes on duty at once, the Bridge may go down within the next hour."
"Let it," Eva responded quietly.
There was a brief, startled silence, and then a ghost of a human sound. The voice was Senator Wagoner's, and the sound just might have been a chuckle.
Charity's circuit clicked Out.
The mighty death of the Bridge continued to resound in the little room.
After a while, the man and the woman went to the window, and looked past the discarded bulk of Jupiter at the near horizon, where there had always been visible a few stars.
CODA: Brookhaven National Laboratories (the piledump)
But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despite fully use you, and persecute you; That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust. For if ye love them which love you, what reward, have ye? do not even the publicans the same? And if ye salute your brethren only, what do ye more? do not even the publicans so?
"Evay END," Wagoner wrote on the wall of his cell on the last day, "is a new beginning. Perhaps in a thousand years my Earthmen will come home again. Or in two thousand, or four, if they still remember home then. They'll come back, yes; but I hope they won't stay. I pray they will not stay."
He looked at what he had written and thought of signing his name. While he debated that, he made the mark for the last day on his calendar, and the point on his stub of pencil struck stone under the calcimine and snapped, leaving nothing behind it but a little coronet of frayed, dirty blond wood. He could wear that away against the window ledge, at least enough to expose a little graphite, but instead he dropped the stub in the waste can.
There was writing enough in the stars that he could see, because he had written it there. There was a constellation* called Wagoner, and every star in the sky belonged to it. That was surely enough.
Later that day, a man named MacHinery said: "Bliss Wagoner is dead."
As usual, MacHinery was wrong.
Table of Contents
Contents
Five Cultural Portraits
BOOK ONE
PRELUDE: Washington
CHAPTER ONE New York
CHAPTER TWO: Jupiter V
CHAPTER THREE: New York
CHAPTER FOUR: Jupiter V
BOOK TWO
INTERMEZZO: Washington
CHAPTER FIVE: New York
CHAPTER SIX: Jupiter V
CHAPTER SEVEN: New York
CHAPTER EIGHT: Jupiter V
BOOK THREE
ENTRACTE: Washington
CHAPTER NINE: New York
CHAPTER TEN: Jupiter V
CHAPTER ELEVEN: Jupiter V