There was a tiny shock as the hull found its berth. Lewis reached over to cut off the engines. When they died, Corinth’s ears rang with the sudden quiet. He had not realized how much a part of him that ceaseless drumming was.
“Come on!” He was out of his seat and across the narrow cabin before Lewis had stirred. His fingers trembled as they wove across the intricate pattern of the electronic lock. The inner door swung smoothly open, and then the outer door was open too, and he caught a breath of salt air, blown in from the sea.
Sheila! Where is Sheila? He tumbled down the ladder in the cradle, his form dark against the metal of the hull. It was pocked and blistered, that metal, streaked with curious crystallization-patterns, the ship had traveled far and strangely. When he hit the ground he overbalanced, falling, but he was up again before anyone could help him.
“Sheila,” he cried.
Felix Mandelbaum stepped forth, holding out his hands. He looked very old and tired, burned out by strain. He took Corinth’s hands in his own but did not speak.
“Where’s Sheila?” whispered Corinth. “Where is she?”
Mandelbaum shook his head. Lewis was climbing down now, more cautiously. Rossman went to meet him, looking away from Corinth. The others followed—they were all Brookhaven people, no close friends, but they looked away.
Corinth tried to swallow and couldn’t. “Dead?” he asked. The wind murmured around him, ruffling his hair. “No,” said Mandelbaum. “Nor is she mad. But—”
He shook his head, and the beaked face wrinkled up. “No.”
Corinth drew a breath that shuddered in his lungs. Looking at him, they saw the blankness of will descend. He would not let himself weep.
“Go ahead,” he said. “Tell me.”
“It was about six weeks ago,” Mandelbaum said. “She couldn’t stand any more, I guess. She got hold of an electric-shock machine.”
Corinth nodded, very slowly. “And destroyed her brain,” he finished.
“No. Not that, though it was touch and go for a while.” Mandelbaum took the physicist’s arm. “Let’s put it this way: she is the old Sheila, like before the change. Almost.”
Corinth was dimly aware how fresh and live the sea wind felt in his nostrils.
“Come along, Pete,” said Mandelbaum. “I’ll take you to her.”
Corinth followed him off the field.
The psychiatrist Kearnes met them at Bellevue. His face was like wood, but there was no feeling of shame in him and none of blame in Corinth. The man had done his best, with the inadequate knowledge at his disposal, and failed; that was a fact of reality, nothing more.
“She fooled me,” he said. “I thought she was straightening out. I didn’t realize how much control even an insane person would have with the changed nervous system. Nor, I suppose, did I realize how hard it was for her all along. None of us who endured the change will ever know what a nightmare it must have been for those who couldn’t adapt.”
Dark wings beating, and Sheila alone. Nightfall, and Sheila alone.
“She was quite insane when she did it?” asked Corinth. His voice was flat.
“What is sanity? Perhaps she did the wisest thing. Was the eventual prospect of being cured, when we learn how, worth that kind of existence?”
“What were the effects?”
“Well, it was a clumsy job, of course. Several bones were broken in the convulsions, and she’d have died if she hadn’t been found in time.” Kearnes laid a hand on Corinth’s shoulder. “The actual volume of destroyed cerebral tissue was small, but of course it was in the most critical area of the brain.”
“Felix told me she’s—making a good recovery.”
“Oh, yes.” Kearnes smiled wryly, as if he had a sour taste in his mouth. “It isn’t hard for us to understand pre-change human psychology—now. I used the triple-pronged approach developed by Gravenstein and de la Garde since the change. Symbological re-evaluation, cybernetic neurology, and somatic co-ordination treatments. There was enough sound tissue to take over the functions of the damaged part, with proper guidance, once the psychosis had been lifted. I think she can be discharged from here in about three months.”
He drew a deep breath. “She will be a normal, healthy pre-change human with an I.Q. of about 150.”
“I see—” Corinth nodded. “Well—what are the chances of restoring her?”
“It will take years, at best, before we’re able to recreate nervous tissue. It doesn’t regenerate, you know, even with artificial stimulation. We’ll have to create life itself synthetically, and telescope a billion years of evolution to develop the human brain cell, and duplicate the precise gene pattern of the patient, and even then—I wonder.”
“I see.”
“You can visit her for a short while. We have told her you were alive.”
“What did she do?”
“Cried a good deal, of course. That’s a healthy symptom. You can stay about half an hour if you don’t excite her too much.” Kearnes gave him the room number and went back into his office.
Corinth took the elevator and walked down a long quiet hallway that smelled of rain-wet roses. When he came to Sheila’s room, the door stood ajar and he hesitated a little, glancing in. It was like a forest bower, ferns and trees and the faint twitter of nesting birds; a waterfall was running somewhere, and the air had the tingle of earth and greenness. Mostly illusion, he supposed, but if it gave her comfort—
He went in, over to the bed which rested beneath a sun-dappled willow. “Hello, darling,” he said.
The strangest thing was that she hadn’t changed. She looked as she had when they were first married, young and fair, her hair curled softly about a face which was still a little pale, her eyes full of luster as they turned to him. The white nightgown, a fluffy thing from her own wardrobe, made her seem only half grown.
“Pete,” she said.
He stooped over and kissed her, very gently. Her response was somehow remote, almost like a stranger’s. As her hands caressed his face, he noticed that the wedding ring was gone.
“You lived.” She spoke it with a kind of wonder. “You came back.”
“To you, Sheila,” he said, and sat down beside her.
She shook her head. “No,” she answered.
“I love you,” he said in his helplessness.
“I loved you too.” Her voice was still quiet, far away, and he saw the dreaminess in her eyes. “That’s why I did this.”
He sat holding himself in, fighting for calm. There were thunders in his head.
“I don’t remember you too well, you know,” she said. “I suppose my memory was damaged a little. It all seems many years ago, and you like a dream I loved.” She smiled. “How thin you are, Pete! And hard, somehow. Everybody has grown so hard.”
“No,” he said. “They all care for you.”
“It isn’t the old kind of caring. Not the kind I knew. And you aren’t Pete anymore.” She sat up, her voice rising a little. “Pete died in the change. I watched him die. You’re a nice man, and it hurts me to look at you, but you aren’t Pete.”
“Take it easy, darling,” he said.
“I couldn’t go ahead with you,” she said, “and I wouldn’t give you—or myself—that kind of burden. Now I’ve gone back. And you don’t know how wonderful it is. Lonely but wonderful. There’s peace in it.”
“I still want you,” he said.
“No. Don’t lie to me. Don’t you see, it isn’t necessary.” Sheila smiled across a thousand years. “You can sit there like that, your face all frozen—why, you aren’t Pete. But I wish you well.”
He knew then what she needed, and let himself go, surrendering will and understanding. He knelt by her bed and wept, and she comforted him as well as she could.
CHAPTER 20
THERE is an island in mid-Pacific, not far off the equator, which lies distant from the world of man. The old shipping routes and the later transoceanic airlines followed tracks beyond its horizon, and the
atoll had been left to sun and wind and the crying of gulls.
For a brief while it had known humankind. The slow blind patience of coral polyps had built it up, and days and nights had ground its harsh wet face into soil, and the seeds of plants had been blown on a long journey to find it. A few coconuts washed up in the surf, and presently there were trees. They stood for hundreds of years, perhaps, until a canoe came over the world’s rim.
Those were Polynesians, tall brown men whose race had wandered far in the search for Hawaiki the beautiful. There was sun and salt on them, and they thought little of crossing a thousand miles of emptiness, for they had the stars and the great sea currents to guide them and their own arms to paddle, tohiha, hioha, itoki, itoki! When they drew their boat ashore and had made sacrifice to shark-toothed Nan, they wound hibiscus blooms in their long hair and danced on the beach; for they had looked on the island and found it good.
Then they went away, but the next year—or the year after that, or the year after that, for the ocean was big and time was forever—they came back with others, bringing pigs and women, and that night fires burned tall on the beach. Afterward a village of thatch huts arose, and naked brown children tumbled in the surf, and fishermen went beyond the lagoon with much laughter. And this lasted for a hundred years, or two hundred, before the pale men came.
Their big white-winged canoes stopped only a few times at this island, which was not an important one, but nonetheless faithfully discharged their usual cargo of smallpox, measles, and tuberculosis, so that there were not many of the brown folk left. Afterward some resistance was built up, aided by Caucasian blood, and it was time for copra planters, religion, Mother Hubbards, and international conferences to determine whether this atoll, among others, belonged to London, Paris, Berlin, or Washington—large villages on the other side of the world.
A modus vivendi was finally reached, involving copra, Christianity, tobacco, and trading schooners. The island people, by this time a mixture of several races, were reasonably satisfied, though they did have many toothaches; and when one of their young men, who through a long chain of circumstances had studied in America, came back and sighed for the old days, the people laughed at him. They had only vague memories of that time, handed down through a series of interested missionaries.
Then someone in an office on the other side of the world decided that an island was needed. It may have been for a naval base, or perhaps an experimental station—the pale men had so many wars, and spent the rest of their time preparing for them. It does not matter any longer why the atoll was desired, for there are no men on it now and the gulls don’t care. The natives were moved elsewhere, and spent some quiet years in a sick longing for home. Nobody paid any attention to this, for the island was needed to safeguard the freedom of man, and after a time the older generation died off and the younger generation forgot. Meanwhile the white men disturbed the gulls for a little, putting up buildings and filling the lagoon with ships.
Then, for some unimportant reason, the island was abandoned. It may have been through treaty, possibly through a defeat in war or an economic collapse. The wind and rain and creeping vines had never been defeated, only contained. Now they began the task of demolition.
For a few centuries, men had disturbed the timelessness of days and nights, rain and sun and stars and hurricanes, but now they were gone again. The surf rolled and chewed at the reef, the slow chill sliding of underwater currents gnawed at the foundations, but there were many polyps and they were still building. The island would endure for a goodly fraction of a million years, so there was no hurry about anything. By day fish leaped in the waters, and gulls hovered overhead, and the trees and bamboo grew with frantic haste; at night the moon was cold on tumbling surf and a phosphorescent track swirled behind the great shark who patrolled the outer waters. And there was peace.
The airjet whispered down out of darkness and the high bright stars. Invisible fingers of radar probed earthward, and a voice muttered over a beam. “Down—this way—okay, easy does it.” The jet bounced to a halt in a clearing, and two men came out.
They were met by others, indistinct shadows in the moon-spattered night. One of them spoke with a dry Australian twang: “Dr. Grunewald, Dr. Manzelli, may I present Major Rosovsky—Sri Ramavashtar—Mr. Hwang Pu-Yi—” He went on down the list; there were about a score present, including the two Americans.
Not so long ago, it would have been a strange, even impossible group: a Russian officer, a Hindu mystic, a French philosopher and religious writer, an Irish politician, a Chinese commissar, an Australian engineer, a Swedish financier—it was as if all the earth had gathered for a quiet insurrection. But none of them were now what they had been, and the common denominator was a yearning for something lost.
“I’ve brought the control apparatus,” said Grunewald briskly. “How about the heavy stuff?”
“It’s all here. We can start anytime,” said the Irishman.
Grunewald glanced at his watch. “It’s a couple of hours to midnight,” he said aloud. “Can we be ready by then?”
“I think so,” said the Russian. “It is almost all assembled.”
Walking down toward the beach, he gestured at the bulking shape which lay black and awkward on the moon-whitened lagoon. He and one comrade had gotten the tramp steamer months ago and outfitted her with machines such that they two could sail her around the world. That had been their part of the job: not too difficult for determined men in the confusion of a dying civilization. They had sailed through the Baltic, picking up some of their cargo in Sweden, and had also touched in France, Italy, Egypt, and India on their way to the agreed destination. For some days, now, the work of assembling the spaceship and her load had progressed rapidly.
The surf roared and rumbled, a deep full noise that shivered underfoot, and spouted whitely toward the constellations. Sand and coral scrunched beneath boots, the palms and bamboos rustled dryly with the small wind, and a disturbed parakeet racketed in the dark. Beyond this little beating of sound, there were only silence and sleep.
Further on, the ruin of an old barracks moldered in its shroud of vines. Grunewald smelled the flowers there, and the heavy dampness of rotting wood—it was a pungency which made his head swim. On the other side of the ruin stood some tents, recently put up, and above them towered the spaceship.
That was a clean and beautiful thing, like a pillar of gray ice under the moon, poised starward. Grunewald looked at her with a curious blend of feelings: taut fierce glory of conquest, heart-catching knowledge of her loveliness, wistfulness that soon he would not understand the transcendent logic which had made her swift designing and building possible.
He looked at Manzelli. “I envy you, my friend,” he said simply.
Several men were to ride her up, jockey her into an orbit, and do the final work of assembling and starting the field generator she bore. Then they would die, for there had not been time to prepare a means for their return.
Grunewald felt time like a hound on his heels. Soon the next star ship would be ready, and they were building others everywhere. Then there would be no stopping the march of the race, and of time. Tonight the last hope of mankind—human mankind—was being readied; there could not be another, if this failed.
“I think,” he said, “that all the world will cry with relief before sunrise.”
“No,” said the Australian practically. “They’ll be mad-der’n a nest of hornets. You’ll have to allow a while for them to realize they’ve been saved.”
Well, there would be time, then. The spaceship was equipped with defenses beyond the capacity of pre-change man to overcome in less than a century. Her robots would destroy any other ships or missiles sent up from Earth. And man, the whole living race, would have a chance to catch his breath and remember his first loves, and after that he would not want to attack the spaceship.
The others had unloaded the jet from America and brought its delicate cargo to this place. Now they laid the crates on
the ground, and Grunewald and Manzelli began opening them with care. Someone switched on a floodlight, and in its harsh white glare they forgot the moon and the sea around them.
Nor were they aware of the long noiseless form which slipped overhead and hung there like a shark swimming in the sky, watching. Only after it had spoken to them did they look up.
The amplified voice had been gentle, there was almost a note of regret in it. “Sorry to disappoint you, but you’ve done enough.”
Staring wildly upward, Grunewald saw the steel shimmer above and his heart stumbled within him. The Russian yanked out a pistol and fired, the shots yammering futilely under the steady beat of surf. A gabble came from wakened birds, and their wings flapped loud among the soughing palms.
Manzelli cursed, whirled on his heel, and plunged into the spaceship. There were guns in it which could bring down that riding menace, and—Grunewald, diving for cover, saw a turret in the vessel’s flank swing about and thrust a nose skyward. He threw himself on his belly. That cannon fired atomic shells!
From the hovering enemy sprang a beam of intense, eye-searing flame. The cannon muzzle slumped, glowed white. The thin finger wrote destruction down the flank of the ship until it reached the cones of her gravitic drive. There it played for minutes, and the heat of melting steel prickled men’s faces.
A giant atomic-hydrogen torch—Grunewald’s mind was dazed. We can’t take off now—
Slowly, the very walls of the crippled spaceship began to glow red. The Swede screamed and pulled a ring off his finger. Manzelli stumbled out of the ship, crying. The force-field died, the machines began to cool again, but there was something broken in the men who stood waiting. Only the heavy sobs of Manzelli spoke.
The enemy craft—it was a star ship, they saw now—remained where it was, but a small antigravity raft floated out of her belly and drifted earthward. There were men standing on it, and one woman. None of the cabal moved as the raft grounded.
Grunewald took one step forward then, and stopped with his shoulders slumping. “Felix,” he said in a dead voice. “Pete. Helga.”
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