All of this took place in a terrible silence on his part. And the other men chatted. That one man, Lespere, went on and on with his talk about his wife on Mars, his wife on Venus, his wife on Jupiter, his money, his wondrous times, his drunkenness, his gambling, his happiness. On and on, while they all fell, fell. Lespere reminisced on the past, happy, while he fell to his death.
It was so very odd. Space, thousands of miles of space, and these voices vibrating in the center of it. No one visible at all, and only the radio waves quivering and trying to quicken other men into emotion.
“Are you angry, Hollis?”
“No.” And he was not. The abstraction had returned and he was a thing of dull concrete, forever falling nowhere.
“You wanted to get to the top all your life, Hollis. And I ruined it for you. You always wondered what happened. I put the black mark on you just before I was tossed out myself.”
“That isn’t important,” said Hollis. And it was not. It was gone. When life is over it is like a flicker of bright film, an instant on the screen, all of its prejudices and passions condensed and illumined for an instant on space, and before you could cry out. There was a happy day, there a bad one, there an evil face, there a good one, the film burned to a cinder, the screen was dark.
From this outer edge of his life, looking back, there was only one remorse, and that was only that he wished to go on living. Did all dying people reel this way, as if they had never lived? Does life seem that short, indeed, over and down before you took a breath? Did it seem this abrupt and impossible to everyone, or only to himself, here, now with a few hours left to him for thought and deliberation?
One of the other men was talking. “Well, I had me a good life. I had a wife on Mars and one on Venus and one on Earth and one on Jupiter. Each of them had money and they treated me swell. I had a wonderful time. I got drunk and once I gambled away twenty thousand dollars.”
“But you’re here now,” thought Hollis. “I didn’t have any of those things. When I was living I was jealous of you, Lespere, when I had another day ahead of me I envied you your women and your good times. Women frightened me and I went into space, always wanting them, and jealous of you for having them, and money, and as much happiness as you could have in your own wild way. But now, falling here, with everything over, I’m not jealous of you any more, because it’s over for you as it is over for me, and right now it’s like it never was.” Hollis craned his face forward and shouted into the telephone.
“It’s all over, Lespere!”
Silence.
“It’s just as if it never was, Lespere!”
“Who’s that?” Lespere’s faltering voice.
“This is Hollis.”
He was being mean. He felt the meanness, the senseless meanness of dying. Applegate had hurt him, now he wanted to hurt another. Applegate and space had both wounded him.
“You’re out here, Lespere. It’s all over. It’s just as if it had never happened, isn’t it?”
“No.”
“When anything’s over, it’s just like it never happened. Where’s your life any better than mine, now? While it was happening, yes, but now? Now is what counts. Is it any better, is it?”
“Yes, it’s better!”
“How!”
“Because I got my thoughts; I remember!” cried Lespere, far away, indignant, holding his memories to his chest with both hands.
And he was right. With a feeling of cold water gushing through his head and his body, Hollis knew he was right. There were differences between memories and dreams. He had only dreams of things he had wanted to do, while Lespere had memories of things done and accomplished. And this knowledge began to pull Hollis apart, with a slow, quivering precision.
“What good does it do you?” he cried to Lespere. “Now? When a thing’s over it’s not good any more. You’re no better off than me.”
“I’m resting easy,” said Lespere. “I’ve had my turn. I’m not getting mean at the end, like you.”
“Mean?” Hollis turned the word on his tongue. He had never been mean, as long as he could remember, in his life. He had never dared to be mean. He must have saved it all of these years for such a time as this. “Mean.” He rolled the word into the back of his mind. He felt tears start in his eyes and roll down his face. Someone must have heard his gasping voice.
“Take it easy, Hollis.”
It was, of course, ridiculous. Only a minute before he had been giving advice to others, to Stimson, he had felt a braveness which he had thought to be the genuine thing, and now he knew that it had been nothing but shock and the objectivity possible in shock. Now he was trying to pack a lifetime of suppressed emotion into an interval of minutes.
“I know how you feel, Hollis,” said Lespere, now twenty thousand miles away, his voice fading. “I don’t take it personally.”
But aren’t we equal, his wild mind wondered. Lespere and I? Here, now? If a good thing’s over it’s done, and what good is it? You die anyway. But he knew he was rationalizing, for it was like trying to tell the difference between a live man and a corpse. There was a spark in one, and not in the other, an aura, a mysterious element.
So it was with Lespere and himself; Lespere had lived a good full life, and it made him a different man now, and he, Hollis, had been as good as dead for many years. They came to death by separate paths and, in all likelihood, if there were kinds of deaths, their kinds would be as different as night from day. The quality of death, like that of life, must be of infinite variety, and if one has already died once, then what is there to look for in dying for once and all, as he was now?
It was a second later that he discovered his right foot was cut sheer away. It almost made him laugh. The air was gone from his suit again, he bent quickly, and there was blood, and the meteor had taken flesh and suit away to the ankle. Oh, death in space was most humorous, it cut you away, piece by piece, like a black and invisible butcher. He tightened the valve at the knee, his head swirling into pain, fighting to remain aware, and with the valve tightened, the blood retained, the air kept, he straightened up and went on falling, falling, for that was all there was left to do.
“Hollis?”
Hollis nodded sleepily, tired of waiting for death.
“This is Applegate again,” said the voice.
“Yes.”
“I’ve had time to think. I listened to you. This isn’t good. It makes us mean. This is a bad way to die. It brings all the bile out. You listening, Hollis?”
“Yes.”
“I lied. A minute ago. I lied. I didn’t blackball you. I don’t know why I said that. Guess I wanted to hurt you. You seemed the one to hurt. We’ve always fought. Guess I’m getting old fast and repenting fast. I guess listening to you be mean made me ashamed. Whatever the reason, I want you to know I was an idiot, too. There’s not an ounce of truth in what I said. To heck with you.”
Hollis felt his heart began to work again. It seemed as if it hadn’t worked for five minutes, but now all of his limbs began to take color and warmth. The shock was over, and the successive shocks of anger and terror and loneliness were passing. He felt like a man emerging from a cold shower in the morning, ready for breakfast and a new day.
“Thanks, Applegate.”
“Don’t mention it. Up your nose, you slob.” “Where’s Stimson, how is he?”
“Stimson?”
They listened.
No answer.
“He must be gone.”
“I don’t think so. Stimson!”
They listened again.
They could hear a long, slow, hard breathing in their phones.
“That’s him. Listen.”
“Stimson!”
No reply.
Only the slow, hard breathing.
“He won’t answer.”
“He’s gone insane, God help him.”
“That’s it. Listen.”
The silent breathing, the quiet.
“He’s closed up like a cla
m. He’s in himself, making a pearl. Listen to the poet, will you. He’s happier than us now, anyway.”
They listened to Stimson float away.
“Hey,” said Stone.
“What?” Hollis called across space, for Stone, of all of them, was a good friend.
“I’ve got myself into a meteor swarm, some little asteroids.”
“Meteors?”
“I think it’s the Myrmidone cluster that goes out past Mars and in toward Earth once every five years. I’m right in the middle. It’s like a big kaleidoscope. You get all kinds of colors and shapes and sizes. God, it’s beautiful, all the metal.”
Silence.
“I’m going with them,” said Stone. “They’re taking me off with them. I’ll be damned.” He laughed tightly.
Hollis looked to see, but saw nothing. There were only the great jewelries of space, the diamonds and sapphires and emerald mists and velvet inks of space, with God’s voice mingling among the crystal fires. There was a kind of wonder and imagination in the thought of Stone going off in the meteor swarm, out past Mars for years and coming in toward Earth every five years, passing in and out of the planet’s ken for the next million years, Stone and the Myrmidone cluster eternal and unending, shifting and shaping like the kaleidoscope colors when you were a child and held the long tube to the sun and gave it a twirl.
“So long, Hollis.” Stone’s voice, very faint now. “So long.”
“Good luck,” shouted Hollis across thirty thousand miles.
“Don’t be funny,” said Stone, and was gone.
The stars closed in.
Now all the voices were fading, each on their own trajectories, some to the sun, others into farthest space.
And Hollis himself. He looked down. He, of all the others, was going back to Earth alone.
“So long.”
“Take it easy.”
“So long, Hollis.” That was Applegate.
The many good-bys. The short farewells. And now the great loose brain was disintegrating. The components of the brain, which had worked so beautifully and efficiently in the skull case of the rocket ship racing through space, were dying off one by one, the meaning of their life together was falling apart. And as a body dies when the brain ceases functioning, so the spirit of the ship and their long time together and what they meant to one another was dying. Applegate was now no more than a finger blown from the parent body, no longer to be despised and worked against. The brain was exploded, and the senseless, useless fragments of it were far-scattered. The voices faded and now all of space was silent. Hollis was alone, falling.
They were all alone. Their voices had died like echoes of the words of God spoken and vibrating in the starred space. There went the captain to the sun; there Stone with the meteor swarm; there Stimson, tightened and unto himself; there Applegate toward Pluto; there Smith and Turner and Underwood and all the rest, the shards of the kaleidoscope that had formed a thinking pattern for so long, now hurled apart.
And I? thought Hollis. What can I do? Is there anything I can do now to make up for a terrible and empty life? If I could do one good thing to make up for the meanness I collected all these years and didn’t even know was in me? But there’s no one here, but myself, and how can you do good all alone? You can’t. Tomorrow night I’ll hit Earth’s atmosphere.
I’ll bum, he thought, and be scattered in ashes all over the continental lands. I’ll be put to use. Just a little bit, but ashes are ashes and they’ll add to the land.
He fell swiftly, like a bullet, like a pebble, like an iron weight, objective, objective all of the time now, not sad or happy or anything, but only wishing he could do a good thing now that everyone was gone, a good thing for just himself to know about.
When I hit the atmosphere, I’ll bum like a meteor.
“I wonder,” he said. “If anyone’ll see me?”
The small boy on the country road looked up and screamed. “Look, Mom, look! A falling star!”
The blazing white star fell down the sky of dusk in Illinois.
“Make a wish,” said his mother. “Make a wish.”
Jack Vance - I’LL BUILD YOUR DREAM CASTLE
If anyone had told me, back in 1950, that we would not only have unmanned Tel-star s but also manned Vostoks and Mercury-Atlases by the beginning of the 1960s, I would have laughed him down. Impossible! I would have said. Not, I would hedge, because of basic scientific reasons, though, even back there in 1950, but rather from the point of view of specific technology and of cost. So if anyone tells you that the kind of space operation undertaken by the hero of this tale is unlikely ever to happen, you just laugh him down ... Of course, I do doubt that you or I will witness this particular sort of “far-out” (pun intended) building technique in our lifetimes—but then, I may be wrong again!
When Farrero first met Douane Angker, of Marlais & Angker, Class III Structors, something in his brain twisted, averted itself; and, looking down at the curl on Angker’s tough mouth, he knew the feeling went double. Angker, short and solid, had concentrated in him a heavy unctuous vitality, the same way a cigar stump holds the strongest juices.
Farrero did not, on this occasion, meet Leon Marlais, the other half of the firm, nor did he during the entire length of his job. He would not have recognized him face to face on the pedestrip—because Marlais had an odd mania for privacy, secluded himself behind a coded door-press, an unlisted telescreen. When he used his private copter stage, a polarizing field jarred the view to dazzle and shimmer.
Angker held to no such aloofness. The panel to his office stood always wide. All day the technicians in the adjoining workroom could look in to see him shouldering, driving, battering through his work; watch him barking orders into the telescreen, flourishing a clenched hand for emphasis.
Farrero stayed pretty well away from the office, appearing only for new assignments, avoiding Angker as much as possible. He assumed his work was satisfactory. If not, he felt sure Angker would have fired him, and with gusto. However, the day he knocked at Angker’s door to report on the Westgeller job, he knew he was in for trouble.
“Come in!” called Angker, not looking up, and Farrero sauntered forward—tall, lanky, his face, long, droll, wooden, his manner very casual. He had hair the color of wet sand, the mildest of blue eyes.
“Good morning,” said Farrero. Angker, after a brief glance upward, grunted. Farrero dropped two strips of microfilm on the desk. “Ready for execution. I’ve shown them to Westgeller, got his O.K.”
“Westgeller? I suppose he can pay for the place.” He tipped the strips down the slot in his desk.
“Your credit office likes him,” said Farrero. From where he stood, Angker’s lowered and foreshortened face looked like a rudely molded mask, with a glazed shapeless nose, thick lumpy lips, eyes hidden under the thrust of his brow. “He makes heavy glass,” said Farrero. “The stuff tourist submarines are built from. He’s also got a finger in Moon Mining.”
The screen on the far wall glowed, ran with blurred colors. Angker, slipping on polarizers, saw a three-dimensional picture—a large solid house backed by a gloomy wall of fir trees. It was an old-fashioned house, warm, Earthy-looking, with high gables and many chimneys, as if it were intended to light year after year of winter snow. Its colors were a dark red, with gray, white, and green trim, and the sun cells of the roof glowed a rich burnished copper. Behind, the great fir trees marched almost up to the house; and the trunks of many others could be seen dwindling off through the dim aisles. At the front a wide lawn, vivid as argon fire, rolled gently down to a coruscation of bright flower beds. It was clearly a Class III house.
“Ah ... ah,” Angker grunted. “Nice piece of work, Farrero. Where’s the site?”
“Fifty miles from ... er, Minusinsk, on the Yenisei.” Farrero dropped into a chair, crossed his legs. “Fifty-four degrees latitude, thereabouts.”
“Take him hours to get there,” commented Angker sourly.
Farrero shrugged. “He says
he likes it. Likes the winter—snow—solitude. The untouched forests, wild life, wolves, peasants, things like that. He’s got a lifetime lease on three hundred acres.”
Angker grunted again, leaned back in his chair. “What’s the cost estimate?”
Farrero laid his head back, against the support, halfclosed his eyes. “Cost us 28,000 munits to build. Plus ten per cent makes 30,800. I gave it to Westgeller as 31,000.”
Angker leveled a sudden under-eyebrow glance at Farrero, squared up in his seat. He pressed a button. A cutaway section of the first floor flicked upon the screen. He pressed again. The second floor. Again. Detailed wall plans. He looked up, and the lines from his nostrils down seemed to gather, purse his mouth, pull it out into a hard lump.
“How do you fix on that figure?” he jerked a pencil
toward the screen. “I say that house’ll run upwards of
40.000. Ten per cent puts our bid somewhere near
44.000, 45,000.”
“I really don’t think so,” said Farrero politely. “What is the basis for your estimate?” inquired Angker, as gently.
Farrero clasped his hands around his knee. “Well— look at it from this angle. One of the shortcomings of modem civilization—ancient civilization too, for that matter—is that the average man never gets all he wants of the most desirable products, never makes his life fit his dreams. Very few people can afford space yachts, Venusian fruit, good film libraries, Class III houses. I suppose it could be said that these always unfulfilled ambitions create an incentive to work, to make money, to—”
Angker made a guttural noise. “Less philosophy, Farrero. Leave that for the college professors. I want to know how you’re going to build a 40,000 munit house for 20,000 munits.”
“Well,” said Farrero, “as a matter of fact, I’ve worked out a construction technique to bring Class III prices closer to Class I and II.”
“Ah—you have indeed?” Angker was still polite. “Perhaps you’ll explain?”
Great Stories of Space Travel Page 6