This Way to the End Times

by Robert Silverberg

  Then we had to get out and walk on into Gresham, because they had decided that the best thing for us all to do was get onto the Greater Portland Area Rapid Public Transit Lines, since there had been so many breakdowns that the charter bus company didn’t have any more buses to send out to pick us up. The walk was wet, and rather dull, except when we passed the Cold Mountain Commune. They have a wall around it to keep out unauthorized persons, and a big neon sign out front saying COLD MOUNTAIN COMMUNE and there were some people in authentic jeans and ponchos by the highway selling macramé belts and sandcast candles and soybean bread to the tourists. In Gresham, I took the 4:40 GPARPTL Superjet Flyer train to Burnside and East 230th, and then walked to 217th and got the bus to the Goldschmidt Overpass, and transferred to the shuttlebus, but it had boiler trouble, so I didn’t reach the downtown transfer point until ten after eight, and the buses go on a once-an-hour schedule at 8:00, so I got a meatless hamburger at the Longhorn Inch-Thick Steak House Dinerette and caught the nine o’clock bus and got home about ten. When I let myself into the apartment, I flipped the switch to turn on the lights, but there still weren’t any. There had been a power outage in West Portland for three weeks. So I went feeling about for the candles in the dark, and it was a minute or so before I noticed that somebody was lying on my bed.

  I panicked, and tried again to turn the lights on.

  It was a man, lying there in a long thin heap. I thought a burglar had got in somehow while I was away and died. I opened the door so I could get out quick or at least my yells could be heard, and then I managed not to shake long enough to strike a match, and lighted the candle, and came a little closer to the bed.

  The light disturbed him. He made a sort of snorting in his throat and turned his head. I saw it was a stranger, but I knew his eyebrows, then the breadth of his closed eyelids, then I saw my husband.

  He woke up while I was standing there over him with the candle in my hand. He laughed and said, still half-asleep, “Ah, Psyche! From the regions which are holy land.”

  Neither of us made much fuss. It was unexpected, but it did seem so natural for him to be there, after all, much more natural than for him not to be there, and he was too tired to be very emotional. We lay there together in the dark, and he explained that they had released him from the Rehabilitation Camp early because he had injured his back in an accident in the gravel quarry, and they were afraid it might get worse.

  If he died there, it wouldn’t be good publicity abroad, since there have been some nasty rumors about deaths from illness in the Rehabilitation Camps and the Federal Medical Association Hospitals, and there are scientists abroad who have heard of Simon, since somebody published his proof of Goldbach’s Hypothesis in Peking. So they let him out early, with eight dollars in his pocket, which is what he had in his pocket when they arrested him, which made it, of course, fair. He had walked and hitched home from Coeur D’Alene, Idaho, with a couple of days in jail in Walla Walla for being caught hitchhiking. He almost fell asleep telling me this, and when he had told me, he did fall asleep. He needed a change of clothes and a bath, but I didn’t want to wake him. Besides, I was tired, too. We lay side by side and his head was on my arm. I don’t suppose that I have ever been so happy. No; was it happiness? Something wider and darker, more like knowledge, more like the night: joy.

  IT WAS DARK FOR so long, so very long. We were all blind. And there was the cold, a vast, unmoving, heavy cold. We could not move at all. We did not move. We did not speak. Our mouths were closed, pressed shut by the cold and by the weight. Our eyes were pressed shut. Our limbs were held still. Our minds were held still. For how long? There was no length of time; how long is death? And is one dead only after living, or before life as well? Certainly we thought, if we thought anything, that we were dead; but if we had ever been alive, we had forgotten it.

  There was a change. It must have been the pressure that changed first, although we did not know it. The eyelids are sensitive to touch. They must have been weary of being shut. When the pressure upon them weakened a little, they opened. But there was no way for us to know that. It was too cold for us to feel anything. There was nothing to be seen. There was black.

  But then—“then,” for the event created time, created before and after, near and far, now and then—“then” there was the light. One light. One small, strange light that passed slowly, at what distance we could not tell. A small, greenish white, slightly blurred point of radiance, passing.

  Our eyes were certainly open, “then,” for we saw it. We saw the moment. The moment is a point of light. Whether in darkness or in the field of all light, the moment is small, and moves, but not quickly. And “then” it is gone.

  It did not occur to us that there might be another moment. There was no reason to assume that there might be more than one. One was marvel enough: that in all the field of the dark, in the cold, heavy, dense, moveless, timeless, placeless, boundless black, there should have occurred, once, a small slightly blurred, moving light! Time need be created only once, we thought.

  But we were mistaken. The difference between one and more than one is all the difference in the world. Indeed, that difference is the world.

  The light returned.

  The same light, or another one? There was no telling.

  But, “this time,” we wondered about the light: Was it small and near to us, or large and far away? Again there was no telling; but there was something about the way it moved, a trace of hesitation, a tentative quality, that did not seem proper to anything large and remote. The stars, for instance. We began to remember the stars.

  The stars had never hesitated.

  Perhaps the noble certainty of their gait had been a mere effect of distance. Perhaps in fact they had hurtled wildly, enormous furnace-fragments of a primal bomb thrown through the cosmic dark; but time and distance soften all agony. If the universe, as seems likely, began with an act of destruction, the stars we had used to see told no tales of it. They had been implacably serene.

  The planets, however . . . . We began to remember the planets. They had suffered certain changes both of appearance and of course. At certain times of the year Mars would reverse its direction and go backward through the stars. Venus had been brighter and less bright as she went through her phases of crescent, full, and wane. Mercury had shuddered like a skidding drop of rain on the sky flushed with daybreak. The light we now watched had that erratic, trembling quality. We saw it, unmistakably, change direction and go backward. It then grew smaller and fainter; blinked—an eclipse?—and slowly disappeared.

  Slowly, but not slowly enough for a planet.

  Then—the third “then!”—arrived the indubitable and positive Wonder of the World, the Magic Trick, watch now, watch, you will not believe your eyes, mama, mama, look what I can do—

  Seven lights in a row, proceeding fairly rapidly, with a darting movement, from left to right. Proceeding less rapidly from right to left, two dimmer, greenish lights. Two-lights halt, blink, reverse course, proceed hastily and in a wavering manner from left to right. Seven-lights increase speed, and catch up. Two-lights flash desperately, flicker, and are gone.

  Seven-lights hang still for some while, then merge gradually into one streak, veering away, and little by little vanish into the immensity of the dark.

  But in the dark now are growing other lights, many of them: lamps, dots, rows, scintillations—some near at hand, some far. Like the stars, yes, but not stars. It is not the great Existences we are seeing, but only the little lives.

  IN THE MORNING SIMON TOLD me something about the Camp, but not until after he had had me check the apartment for bugs. I thought at first he had been given behavior mod and gone paranoid. We never had been infested. And I’d been living alone for a year and a half; surely they didn’t want to hear me talking to myself? But he said, “They may have been expecting me to come here.”

  “But they let you go free!”

  He just lay there and laughed at me. So I checked everywh
ere we could think of. I didn’t find any bugs, but it did look as if somebody had gone through the bureau drawers while I was away in the Wilderness. Simon’s papers were all at Max’s, so that didn’t matter. I made tea on the Primus, and washed and shaved Simon with the extra hot water in the kettle—he had a thick beard and wanted to get rid of it because of the lice he had brought from Camp—and while we were doing that he told me about the Camp. In fact he told me very little, but not much was necessary.

  He had lost about twenty pounds. As he only weighed 140 to start with, this left little to go on with. His knees and wrist bones stuck out like rocks under the skin. His feet were all swollen and chewed-looking from the Camp boots; he hadn’t dared take the boots off, the last three days of walking, because he was afraid he wouldn’t be able to get them back on. When he had to move or sit up so I could wash him, he shut his eyes.

  “Am I really here?” he asked. “Am I here?”

  “Yes,” I said. “You are here. What I don’t understand is how you got here.”

  “Oh, it wasn’t bad so long as I kept moving. All you need is to know where you’re going—to have someplace to go. You know, some of the people in Camp, if they’d let them go, they wouldn’t have had that. They couldn’t have gone anywhere. Keeping moving was the main thing. See, my back’s all seized up, now.”

  When he had to get up to go to the bathroom he moved like a ninety-year-old. He couldn’t stand straight, but was all bent out of shape, and shuffled. I helped him put on clean clothes. When he lay down on the bed again, a sound of pain came out of him, like tearing thick paper. I went around the room putting things away. He asked me to come sit by him and said I was going to drown him if I went on crying. “You’ll submerge the entire North American continent,” he said. I can’t remember what he said, but he made me laugh finally. It is hard to remember things Simon says, and hard not to laugh when he says them. This is not merely the partiality of affection: He makes everybody laugh. I doubt that he intends to. It is just that a mathematician’s mind works differently from other people’s. Then when they laugh, that pleases him.

  It was strange, and it is strange, to be thinking about “him,” the man I have known for ten years, the same man, while “he” lay there changed out of recognition, a different man. It is enough to make you understand why most languages have a word like “soul.” There are various degrees of death, and time spares us none of them. Yet something endures, for which a word is needed.

  I said what I had not been able to say for a year and a half: “I was afraid they’d brainwash you.”

  He said, “Behavior mod is expensive. Even just the drugs. They save it mostly for the VIPs. But I’m afraid they got a notion I might be important after all. I got questioned a lot the last couple of months. About my ‘foreign contacts.’” He snorted. “The stuff that got published abroad, I suppose. So I want to be careful and make sure it’s just a Camp again next time, and not a Federal Hospital.”

  “Simon, were they . . . are they cruel, or just righteous?”

  He did not answer for a while. He did not want to answer. He knew what I was asking. He knew by what thread hangs hope, the sword, above our heads.

  “Some of them . . .” he said at last, mumbling.

  Some of them had been cruel. Some of them had enjoyed their work. You cannot blame everything on society. “Prisoners, as well as guards,” he said.

  You cannot blame everything on the enemy.

  “Some of them, Belle,” he said with energy, touching my hand—”some of them, there were men like gold there—”

  The thread is tough; you cannot cut it with one stroke.

  “What have you been playing?” he asked.

  “Forrest, Schubert.”

  “With the quartet?”

  “Trio, now. Janet went to Oakland with a new lover.”

  “Ah, poor Max.”

  “It’s just as well, really. She isn’t a good pianist.”

  I make Simon laugh, too, though I don’t intend to. We talked until it was past time for me to go to work. My shift since the Full Employment Act last year is ten to two. I am an inspector in a recycled paper bag factory. I have never rejected a bag yet; the electronic inspector catches all the defective ones first. It is a rather depressing job. But it’s only four hours a day, and it takes more time than that to go through all the lines and physical and mental examinations; and fill out all the forms, and talk to all the welfare counselors and inspectors every week in order to qualify as Unemployed, and then line up every day for the ration stamps and the dole. Simon thought I ought to go to work as usual. I tried to, but I couldn’t. He had felt very hot to the touch when I kissed him good-bye. I went instead and got a blackmarket doctor. A girl at the factory had recommended her, for an abortion, if I ever wanted one without going through the regulation two years of sex-depressant drugs the fed-meds make you take when they give you an abortion. She was a jeweler’s assistant in a shop on Alder Street, and the girl said she was convenient because if you didn’t have enough cash you could leave something in pawn at the jeweler’s as payment. Nobody ever does have enough cash, and of course credit cards aren’t worth much on the black market.

  The doctor was willing to come at once, so we rode home on the bus together. She gathered very soon that Simon and I were married, and it was funny to see her look at us and smile like a cat. Some people love illegality for its own sake. Men, more often than women. It’s men who make laws, and enforce them, and break them, and think the whole performance is wonderful. Most women would rather just ignore them. You could see that this woman, like a man, actually enjoyed breaking them. That may have been what put her into an illegal business in the first place, a preference for the shady side. But there was more to it than that. No doubt she’d wanted to be a doctor, too; and the Federal Medical Association doesn’t admit women into the medical schools. She probably got her training as some other doctor’s private pupil, under the counter. Very much as Simon learned mathematics, since the universities don’t teach much but Business Administration and Advertising and Media Skills any more. However she learned it, she seemed to know her stuff. She fixed up a kind of homemade traction device for Simon very handily and informed him that if he did much more walking for two months he’d be crippled the rest of his life, but if he behaved himself he’d just be more or less lame. It isn’t the kind of thing you’d expect to be grateful for being told, but we both were. Leaving, she gave me a bottle of about two hundred plain white pills, unlabeled. “Aspirin,” she said. “He’ll be in a good deal of pain off and on for weeks.”

  I looked at the bottle. I had never seen aspirin before, only the Super-Buffered Pane-Gon and the Triple-Power N-L-G-Zic and the Extra-Strength Apansprin with the miracle ingredient more doctors recommend, which the fed-meds always give you prescriptions for, to be filled at your FMA-approved private enterprise friendly drugstore at the low, low prices established by the Pure Food and Drug Administration in order to inspire competitive research.

  “Aspirin,” the doctor repeated. “The miracle ingredient more doctors recommend.” She cat-grinned again. I think she liked us because we were living in sin. That bottle of black-market aspirin was probably worth more than the old Navajo bracelet I pawned for her fee.

  I went out again to register Simon as temporarily domiciled at my address and to apply for Temporary Unemployment Compensation ration stamps for him. They only give them to you for two weeks and you have to come every day; but to register him as Temporarily Disabled meant getting the signatures of two fed-meds, and I thought I’d rather put that off for a while. It took three hours to go through the lines and get the forms he would have to fill out, and to answer the ’crats’ questions about why he wasn’t there in person. They smelled something fishy. Of course it’s hard for them to prove that two people are married and aren’t just adultering if you move now and then and your friends help out by sometimes registering one of you as living at their address; but they had all the bac
k files on both of us and it was obvious that we had been around each other for a suspiciously long time. The State really does make things awfully hard for itself. It must have been simpler to enforce the laws back when marriage was legal and adultery was what got you into trouble. They only had to catch you once. But I’ll bet people broke the law just as often then as they do now.

  THE LANTERN-CREATURES CAME CLOSE ENOUGH at last that we could see not only their light, but their bodies in the illumination of their light. They were not pretty. They were dark colored, most often a dark red, and they were all mouth. They ate one another whole. Light swallowed light all swallowed together in the vaster mouth of the darkness. They moved slowly, for nothing, however small and hungry, could move fast under that weight, in that cold. Their eyes, round with fear, were never closed. Their bodies were tiny and bony behind the gaping jaws. They wore queer, ugly decorations on their lips and skulls: fringes, serrated wattles, featherlike fronds, gauds, bangles, lures. Poor little sheep of the deep pastures! Poor ragged, hunch-jawed dwarfs squeezed to the bone by the weight of the darkness, chilled to the bone by the cold of the darkness, tiny monsters burning with bright hunger, who brought us back to life!

  Occasionally, in the wan, sparse illumination of one of the lantern-creatures, we caught a momentary glimpse of other, large, unmoving shapes: the barest suggestion, off in the distance, not of a wall, nothing so solid and certain as a wall, but of a surface, an angle . . . . Was it there?

  Or something would glitter, faint, far off, far down. There was no use trying to make out what it might be. Probably it was only a fleck of sediment, mud or mica, disturbed by a struggle between the lantern-creatures, flickering like a bit of diamond dust as it rose and settled slowly. In any case, we could not move to go see what it was. We had not even the cold, narrow freedom of the lantern-creatures. We were immobilized, borne down, still shadows among the half-guessed shadow walls. Were we there?