The 27th Golden Age of Science Fiction

by Stanley G. Weinbaum

  “Nick!” she cried. “Don’t go away! I’m more afraid when I can’t see you—afraid that he—” She broke off sobbing.

  “All right, Honey. I’ll turn my back.”

  She slipped out from under the blanket, found the pins, and repaired her ruined costume. The frock was torn, crushed and bedraggled; she pinned it together at the throat, though her trembling fingers made the task difficult. She pulled it on and took a tentative step toward the door.

  “Nick!” she called as a wave of dizziness sent her swaying against the wall.

  “What’s the matter, Honey?” He turned anxiously at her cry.

  “I’m dizzy,” she moaned. “My head aches, and—I’m scared!”

  “Pat, darling! You can’t go out alone like this—and,” he added miserably, “I can’t take you!” He slipped his arm around her tenderly, supporting her to the couch. “Honey, what’ll we do?”

  “I’ll be—all right,” she murmured. “I’ll go in a moment.” The dizziness was leaving her; strength was returning.

  “You must!” he said dolefully. “What a parting, Pat! Never to see you again, and then having this to remember as farewell!”

  “I know, Nick. You see, I love you too.” She turned her dark, troubled eyes on him. “Honey, kiss me good-bye! We’ll have that to remember, anyway!” Tears were again on her cheeks.

  “Do I dare?” he asked despondently. “After the things these lips of mine have said, and what these arms have done to you?”

  “But you didn’t, Nick! Could I blame you for—that other?”

  “God! You’re kind, Pat! Honey, if ever I win out in this battle, if ever I know I’m the final victor, I’ll—No,” he said his tones dropping abruptly. “I’ll never come back to you, Pat. It’s far too dangerous, and—can I ever be certain? Can I?”

  “I don’t know, Nick. Can you?”

  “I can’t be, Pat! I’ll never be sure that he isn’t just dormant, as he was before, waiting for my weakness to betray me! I’ll never be certain, Honey! It has to be good-bye!”

  “Then kiss me!”

  She clung to him; the room that had been so recently a chamber of horrors was transformed. As she held him, as her lips were pressed to his, she thought suddenly of the words of the demon, that Heaven and Hell were always the same place. They had taken on a new meaning, those words; she drew away from Nick and turned her tear-bright eyes tenderly on his.

  “Honey,” she murmured, “I don’t want you to leave me. I don’t want you to go!”

  “Nor do I want to, Pat! But I must.”

  “You mustn’t! You’re to stay, and we’ll fight it out together—be married, or any way that permits us to fight it through together.”

  “Pat! Do you think I’d consent to that?”

  “Nick,” she said. “Nick darling—It’s worth it to me! I’m realizing it now; I thought it wasn’t—but it is! I can’t lose you, Nick—anything, even that other, is better than losing you.”

  “You’re sweet, Pat! You know I’d trade my very soul for that, but—No. I can’t do it! And don’t Honey, torture me by suggesting it again.”

  “But I will, Nick!” She was speaking softly, earnestly. “You’re worth anything to me! If he should kill me, you’d still be worth it!” She gazed tenderly at him. “I’d want to die anyway without you!”

  “No more than I without you,” he muttered brokenly. “But I won’t do it, Pat! I won’t do that to you!”

  “I love you, Nick!” she said in a low voice. “I don’t want to live without you. Do you understand me, dear? I don’t want to live without you!”

  He stared at her somberly. “I’ve thought of that too,” he said. “Pat—if I only believed that we’d be together after, together anywhere, I’d say yes. If only I believed there were an afterwards!”

  “Doesn’t he prove that by his very existence?”

  “Your Doctor would deny that.”

  “Doctor Carl never saw him, Nick. And anyway, even oblivion together would be better than being separated, and far better than this!”

  He gazed at her silently. She spoke again. “That doesn’t frighten me, Nick. It’s only losing you that frightens me, especially the fear of losing you to him.”

  He continued his silent gaze. Suddenly he drew her close to him, held her in a tight, tender embrace.

  CHAPTER 28

  Lunar Omen

  After a considerable interval, during which Nick held the girl tightly and silently in his arms, he released her, sat with his head resting on his cupped palms in an attitude of deep study. Pat, beside him, fell mechanically to repinning the throat of her frock, which had opened during the moments of the embrace. He rose to his feet, pacing nervously before her.

  “It isn’t a thing to do on the impulse of a moment, Pat,” he muttered, pausing at her side. “You must see that.”

  “It isn’t the impulse of a moment.”

  “But one doesn’t abandon everything, the whole world, so easily, Honey. One doesn’t cast away a last hope, however forlorn a hope it may be!”

  “Is there a hope, Nick?” she asked gently. “Is there a chance left to us?”

  “I don’t know!” His voice held an increasing tenseness. “Before God—I—don’t know!”

  “If there’s a chance, the very slightest shadow of the specter of a chance, we’ll take it, won’t we? Because the other way is always open to us, Nick.”

  “Yes. It’s always open.”

  “But we won’t take that chance,” she continued defiantly, “if it involves my losing you, Honey. I meant what I said, Nick: I don’t want to live without you!”

  “What chance have we?” he queried somberly. “Those are our alternatives—life apart, death together.”

  “Then you know my choice!” she cried desperately. “Nick, Honey—don’t let’s draw it out in futile talking! I can’t stand it!”

  He moved his hand in a gesture of bewilderment and frustration, and turned away, striding nervously toward the window whose blind she had raised. He leaned his hands on the table, peering dejectedly out upon the street below.

  “What time,” he asked irrelevantly in a queer voice, “did the Doctor say the moon rose? Do you remember?”

  “No,” she said tensely. “Oh, Honey! Please—don’t stand there with your back to me now, when I’m half crazy!”

  “I’m thinking,” he responded. “It rises a little earlier each night—or is it later? No matter; come here, Pat.”

  She rose wearily and joined him; he slipped his arm about her, and drew her against him.

  “Look there,” he said, indicating the night-dark vista beyond the window.

  She looked out upon a dim-lit street or court, at the blind end of which the house was apparently situated. Far off at the open end, across a distant highway where even at this hour passed a constant stream of traffic, flashed a narrow strip of lake; and above it, rising gigantic from the coruscating moon-path, lifted the satellite. She watched the remote flickering of the waves as they tossed back the broken bits of the light strewn along the path. Then she turned puzzled eyes on her companion.

  “That’s Heaven,” he said pointing a finger at the great flowing lunar disk. “There’s a world that never caught the planet-cancer called Life, or if it ever suffered, it’s cured. It’s clean—burned clean by the sun and scoured clean by the airless zero of space. A dead world, and therefore not an unhappy one.”

  The girl stared at him without comprehension. She murmured, “I don’t understand, Nick.”

  “Don’t you, Pat?” He pointed again at the moon. “That’s Heaven, the dead world, and this is Hell, the living one. Heaven and Hell swinging forever about their common center!” He gestured toward the sparkling moon-path on the water. “Look, Pat! The dead world strews flowers on the grave of the living one!”

 
Some of his bitter ecstasy caught the girl; she felt his somber mood of exaltation.

  “I love you, Nick!” she whispered, pressing closely to him.

  “What difference does it make—our actions?” he queried. “There’s the omen, that lifeless globe in the sky. Where we go, all humanity now living will follow before a century, and in a million years, the human race as well! What if we go a year or a million years before the rest? Will it make any difference in the end?” He looked down at her. “All we’ve been valuing here is hope. To the devil with hope! Let’s have peace instead!”

  “I’m not afraid, Nick.”

  “Nor I. And if we go, he goes, and he’s mortally afraid of death!”

  “Can he—prevent you?”

  “Not now! I’m the stronger now. For this time, I’m master.”

  He turned again to stare at the glowing satellite as it rose imperceptibly from the horizon. “There’s nothing to regret,” he murmured, “except one thing—the loss of beauty. Beauty like that—and like you, Pat. That’s bitterly hard to foreswear!” He leaned forward toward the remote disk of the moon; he spoke as if addressing it, in tones so low that the girl, pressed close to him, had to quiet the sound of her own breath to listen. He said:

  “Long miles above cloud-bank and blast,

  And many miles above the sea,

  I watch you rise majestically

  Feeling your chilly light at last—

  Cold beauty in the way you cast

  Split silver fragments on the waves,

  As if this planet’s life were past,

  And all men peaceful in their graves.”

  Pat was silent for a moment as he paused, then she murmured a low phrase. “Oh, I love you, Nick!” she said.

  “And I you, dear,” he responded. “Have we decided anything? Are we—going through with it?”

  “I’ve not faltered,” she said soberly. “I meant it, Nick. Without you, life would be as empty as that airless void you speak of. I’m not afraid. What’s there to be afraid of?”

  “Only the transition, Pat. That and the unknown—but no situation could possibly be more terrible than our present one. It couldn’t be! Oblivion, annihilation—they’re preferable, aren’t they?”

  “Oh, yes! Nothing I can imagine could be other than a change for the better.”

  “Then let’s face it!” His voice took on a note of determination. “I’ve thought to face it a dozen times before this, and each time I’ve hesitated. The hesitation of a coward, Pat.”

  “You’re no coward, dear. It was that illusion of hope; that always weakens one. No one’s strong who hasn’t given up hope.”

  “Then,” he repeated, “let’s face it!”

  “How, Nick?”

  “My father has left us the means. There in the cabinet are a hundred deaths—swift ones, lingering ones, painful, and easy! I don’t know one from the other; our choice must be blind.” He strode over to the case, sending slivers of glass from the shattered front glistening along the floor. “I’d choose an easy one, Dear, if I knew, for your sake. Euthanasia!”

  He stared hesitantly at the files of mysterious drugs with their incomprehensible labels.

  Suddenly the scene appeared humorous to the girl, queerly funny, in some unnatural horrible fashion. Her nerves, overstrained for hours, were on the verge of breaking; without realization of it, she had come to the border of hysteria.

  “Shopping for death!” she choked, trying to suppress the wild laughter that beat in her throat. “Which one’s most suitable? Which one’s most becoming? Which one”—an hysterical laughing sob shook her—“will wear the longest?”

  He turned, gazing at her with an illogical concern in his face.

  “What’s the difference?” she cried wildly. “I don’t care—painful or pleasant, it all ends in the same grave! Close your eyes and choose!”

  Suddenly he was holding her in his arms again, and she was sobbing, clinging to him frantically. She was miserably unstrung; her body shook under the impact of her gasping breath. Then gradually, she quieted, and was silent against him.

  “We’ve been mad!” he murmured. “It’s been an insane idea—for me to inflict this on you, Pat. Do you think I could consider the destruction of your beauty, Dear? I’ve been lying to myself, stifling my judgment with poetic imagery, when all the while it was just that I’m afraid to face the thing alone!”

  “No,” she murmured, burying her face against his shoulder. “I’m the coward, Nick. I’m the one that’s frightened, and I’m the one that broke down! It’s just been—too much, this evening; I’m all right now.”

  “But we’ll not go through with this, Pat!”

  “But we will! It’s better than life without you, Dear. We’ve argued and argued, and at last forgotten the one truth, the one thing I’ll never retract: I can’t face living without you, Nick! I can’t!”

  He brushed his hand wearily before his eyes. “Back at the starting point,” he muttered. “All right, Honey. So be it!”

  He strode again to the cabinet. “Corrosive sublimate,” he murmured. “Cyanide of Potassium. They’re both deadly, but I think the second is rapid, and therefore less painful. Cyanide let it be!”

  He extracted two small beakers from the glassware on the shelf. He filled them with water from a carafe on the table, and, while the girl watched him with fascinated eyes, he deliberately tilted a spoonful or so of white crystals into each of them. The mixture swirled a moment, then settled clear and colorless, and the crystals began to shrink as they passed swiftly into solution.

  “There it is,” he announced grimly. “There’s peace, oblivion, forgetfulness, and annihilation for you, for me, and—for him! Beyond all doubt, the logical course for us, isn’t it? Do we take it?”

  “Please,” she said faintly. “Kiss me first, Honey. Isn’t that the proper course for lovers in this situation?” She felt a faint touch of astonishment at her own irony; the circumstances had ceased to have any reality to her, and had become merely a dramatic sequence like the happenings in a play.

  He gathered her again into his arms and pressed his lips to hers. It was a long, tender, wistful kiss; when at last it ended, Pat found her eyes again filled with tears, but not this time the tears of hysteria.

  “Nick!” she murmured. “Nick, darling!”

  He gave her a deep, somber, but very tender smile, and reached for one of the deadly beakers, “To another meeting!” he said as his fingers closed on it.

  Suddenly, amazingly, the strident ring of a doorbell sounded, the more surprising since they had all but forgotten the existence of a world about them. Interruption! It meant only the going through once more of all that they had just passed.

  “Drink it!” exclaimed Pat impulsively, seizing the remaining beaker.

  CHAPTER 29

  Scopolamine for Satan

  The glass was struck from Pat’s hand, and the water-clear contents streamed into pools and darkening blots over the table and its litter of papers. She stared unseeingly at the mess, without realizing that it was Nick who had dashed the draught from her very lips. She felt neither anger nor relief, but only a numbness, and a sense of anti-climax. Somewhere below the bell was ringing again, and a door was resounding to violent blows, but she only continued her bewildered, questioning gaze.

  “I can’t let you, Pat!” he muttered, answering her unspoken query.

  “But Nick—why?”

  “There’s somebody at the door, isn’t there? Mustn’t we find out who?”

  “What difference can it make?” she asked wearily.

  “I don’t know. I want to find out.”

  “It’s that illusion of hope again,” she murmured. “That’s all it is, Nick—and it means now that it’s all to do over again! The whole thing, from the beginning—and we were so near—the end!”


  “I know,” he said miserably. “I know all that, but—” He paused as the insistent racket below was redoubled. “I’m going to answer that bell,” he ended.

  He moved away from her, vanishing through the room’s single door. She watched his disappearance without moving, but no sooner had he passed from sight than a curious feeling of fear oppressed her. She cast off the numbness and languor, and darted after him into the darkness of the hall.

  “Nick!” she called. Somewhere ahead a light flashed on; she saw the well of a stair-case, and heard his footsteps descending. She followed in frantic haste, gaining the top step just as the pounding below ceased. She heard the click of the door, and paused suddenly at the sound of a familiar voice.

  “Where’s Pat?” The words drifted up in low, rumbling, ominous tones.

  “Dr. Carl!” she shrieked. She ran swiftly down the stairs to Nick’s side, where he stood facing the great figure of the Doctor. “Dr. Carl! How’d you find me?”

  The newcomer gave her a long, narrow-eyed, speculative survey. “I spent nearly the whole night doing it,” he growled at last. “It took me hours to locate Mueller and get this address from him.” He stepped forward, taking the girl’s arm. “Come on!” he said gruffly, without a glance at Nick standing silently beside her. “I’m taking you home!”

  She held back. “But why?”

  “Why? Because I don’t like the company you keep. Is that reason enough?”

  She still resisted his insistent tug. “Nick hasn’t done anything,” she said defiantly, with a side glance at the youth’s flushed, unhappy features.

  “He hasn’t? Look at yourself, girl! Look at your clothes, and your forehead! What’s more, I saw enough from my window; I saw him bundle you into that car!” His eyes were flashing angrily, and his grip on her arm tightened, while his free hand clenched into an enormous fist.

  “That wasn’t Nick!”

  “No. It was your devil, I suppose!” said Horker sarcastically. “Anyway, Pat, you’re coming with me before I do violence to what remains of your devil!”

  Nick spoke for the first time since the Doctor’s entrance. “Please do, Pat,” he said softly. “Please go with him.”