“—friend,” said Willis, quietly.
Mr. Shaw gave him a look less of fire than of hearth.
“—friend,” he said.
Willis turned to leave, then stopped to gaze back at that strange old figure propped against the dark storage wall.
“I—I’m afraid to go. I have this fear something may happen to you.”
“I shall survive,” replied Shaw tartly, “but only if you warn your Captain that a vast meteor shower approaches. He must shift course a few hundred thousand miles. Done?”
“Done.” But still Willis did not leave.
“Mr. Shaw,” he said, at last. “What . . . what do you do while the rest of us sleep?”
“Do? Why, bless you. I listen to my tuning fork. Then, I write symphonies between my ears.”
Willis was gone.
In the dark, alone, the old man bent his head. A soft hive of dark bees began to hum under his honey-sweet breath.
Four hours later, Willis, off watch, crept into his sleep-cubicle.
In half-light, the mouth was waiting for him.
Clive’s mouth. It licked its lips and whispered:
“Everyone’s talking. About you making an ass out of yourself visiting a two-hundred-year-old intellectual relic, you, you, you. Jesus, the psychomed’ll be out tomorrow to X-ray your stupid skull!”
“Better that than what you men do all night every night,” said Willis.
“What we do is us.”
“Then why not let me be me?”
“Because it’s unnatural.” The tongue licked and darted. “We all miss you. Tonight we piled all the grand toys in the midst of the wild room and—”
“I don’t want to hear it!”
“Well, then,” said the mouth, “I might just trot down and tell all this to your old gentleman friend—”
“Don’t go near him!”
“I might.” The lips moved in the shadows. “You can’t stand guard on him forever. Some night soon, when you’re asleep, someone might—tamper with him, eh? Scramble his electronic eggs so he’ll talk vaudeville instead of Saint Joan? Ha, yes. Think. Long journey. Crew’s bored. Practical joke like that, worth a million to see you froth. Beware, Charlie. Best come play with us.”
Willis, eyes shut, let the blaze out of him.
“Whoever dares to touch Mr. Shaw, so help me God, I’ll kill!”
He turned violently on his side, gnawing the back of his fist.
In the half-dark, he could sense Clive’s mouth still moving.
“Kill? Well, well. Pity. Sweet dreams.”
An hour later, Willis gulped two pills and fell stunned into sleep.
In the middle of the night he dreamed that they were burning good Saint Joan at the stake and, in the midst of burning, the plain-potato maiden turned to an old man stoically wrapped around with ropes and vines. The old man’s beard was fiery red even before the flames reached it, and his bright blue eyes were fixed fiercely upon Eternity, ignoring the fire.
“Recant!” cried a voice. “Confess and recant! Recant!”
“There is nothing to confess, therefore no need for recantation,” said the old man quietly.
The flames leaped up his body like a mob of insane and burning mice.
“Mr. Shaw!” screamed Willis.
He sprang awake.
Mr. Shaw.
The cabin was silent. Clive lay asleep.
On his face was a smile.
The smile made Willis pull back, with a cry. He dressed. He ran.
Like a leaf in autumn he fell down the air-tube, growing older and heavier with each long instant.
The storage pit where the old man “slept” was much more quiet than it had a right to be.
Willis bent. His hand trembled. At last, he touched the old man.
“Sir—?”
There was no motion. The beard did not bristle. Nor the eyes fire themselves to blue flames. Nor the mouth tremble with gentle blasphemies . . .
“Oh, Mr. Shaw,” he said. “Are you dead, then, oh God, are you really dead?”
The old man was what they called dead when a machine no longer spoke or tuned an electric thought or moved. His dreams and philosophies were snow in his shut mouth.
Willis turned the body this way and that looking for some cut, wound, or bruise on the skin.
He thought of the years ahead, the long traveling years and no Mr. Shaw to walk with, gibber with, laugh with. Women in the storage shelves, yes, women in the cots late at night, laughing their strange taped laughters and moving their strange machined motions, and saying the same dumb things that were said on a thousand worlds on a thousand nights.
“Oh, Mr. Shaw,” he murmured at last. “Who did this to you?”
Silly boy, whispered Mr. Shaw’s memory voice. You know.
I know, thought Willis.
He whispered a name and ran away.
“Damn you, you killed him!”
Willis seized Clive’s bedclothes, at which instant Clive, like a robot, popped wide his eyes. The smile remained constant.
“You can’t kill what was never alive,” he said.
“Son of a bitch!”
He struck Clive once in the mouth, after which Clive was on his feet, laughing in some strange wild way, wiping blood from his lips.
“What did you do to him?” cried Willis.
“Not much, just—”
But that was the end of their conversation.
“On posts!” a voice cried. “Collision course!”
Bells rang. Sirens shrieked.
In the midst of their shared rage, Willis and Clive turned cursing to seize emergency spacesuits and helmets off the cabin walls.
“Damn, oh, damn, oh—d—”
Half-through his last damn, Clive gasped. He vanished out a sudden hole in the side of the rocket.
The meteor had come and gone in a billionth of a second. On its way out, it had taken all the air in the ship with it through a hole the size of a small car.
My God, thought Willis, he’s gone forever.
What saved Willis was a ladder he stood near, against which the swift river of air crushed him on its way into Space. For a moment he could not move or breathe. Then the suction was finished, all the air in the ship gone. There was only time to adjust the pressure in his suit and helmet, and glance wildly around at the veering ship which was being bombarded now as in a space war. Men ran, or rather floated, shouting wildly, everywhere.
Shaw, thought Willis unreasonably, and had to laugh. Shaw.
A final meteor in a tribe of meteors struck the motor section of the rocket and blew the entire ship apart. Shaw, Shaw, oh, Shaw, thought Willis.
He saw the rocket fly apart like a shredded balloon, all its gases only impelling it to more disintegration. With the bits and pieces went wild crowds of men, dismissed from school, from life, from all and everything, never to meet face to face again, not even to say farewell, the dismissal was so abrupt and their deaths and isolation such a swift surprise.
Good-bye, thought Willis.
But there was no true good-bye. He could hear no weeping and no laments over his radio. Of all the crew, he was the last and final and only one alive, because of his suit, his helmet, his oxygen, miraculously spared. For what? To be alone and fall?
To be alone. To fall.
Oh, Mr. Shaw, oh, sir, he thought.
“No sooner called than delivered,” whispered a voice.
It was impossible, but . . .
Drifting, spinning, the ancient doll with the wild red beard and blazing blue eyes fell across darkness as if impelled by God’s breath, on a whim.
Instinctively, Willis opened his arms.
And the old party landed there, smiling, breathing heavily, or pretending to breathe heavily, as was his bent.
“Well, well, Willis! Quite a treat, eh?”
“Mr. Shaw! You were dead!”
“Poppycock! Someone bent some wires in me. The collision knocked things back together. Th
e disconnection is here below my chin. A villain cut me there. So if I fall dead again, jiggle under my jaw and wire me up, eh?”
“Yes, sir!”
“How much food do you carry at this moment, Willis?”
“Enough to last two hundred days in Space.”
“Dear me, that’s fine, fine! And self-recycling oxygen units, also, for two hundred days?”
“Yes, sir. Now, how long will your batteries last, Mr. Shaw?”
“Ten thousand years!” the old man sang out happily. “Yes, I vow, I swear! I am fitted with solar-cells which will collect God’s universal light until I wear out my circuits.”
“Which means you will outtalk me, Mr. Shaw, long after I have stopped eating and breathing.”
“At which point you must dine on conversation, and breathe past participles instead of air. But, we must hold the thought of rescue uppermost. Are not the chances good?”
“Rockets do come by. And I am equipped with radio signals—”
“Which even now cry out into the deep night: I’m here with ramshackle Shaw, eh?”
I’m here with ramshackle Shaw, thought Willis, and was suddenly warm in winter.
“Well, then, while we’re waiting to be rescued, Charles Willis, what next?”
“Next? Why—”
They fell away down Space alone but not alone, fearful but elated, and now grown suddenly quiet.
“Say it, Mr. Shaw.”
“Say what?”
“You know. Say it again.”
“Well, then.” They spun lazily, holding to each other. “Isn’t life miraculous? Matter and force, yes, matter and force making itself over into intelligence and will.”
“Is that what we are, sir?”
“We are, bet ten thousand bright tin-whistles on it, we are. Shall I say more, young Willis?”
“Please, sir,” laughed Willis. “I want some more!”
And the old man spoke and the young man listened and the young man spoke and the old man hooted and they fell around a corner of Universe away out of sight, eating and talking, talking and eating, the young man biting gumball foods, the old man devouring sunlight with his solar-cell eyes, and the last that was seen of them they were gesticulating and babbling and conversing and waving their hands until their voices faded into Time and the solar system turned over in its sleep and covered them with a blanket of dark and light, and whether or not a rescue ship named Rachel, seeking her lost children, ever came by and found them, who can tell, who would truly ever want to know?
A BLADE OF GRASS
IT HAD BEEN DECIDED ALREADY that Ultar was guilty. The members of the Council sat, luxuriously relaxing as the attendants lubricated and oiled their viselike hands and their slender metal joints.
Kront was most vehement of the seventeen. His steel hand snapped and his round gray visuals flamed red.
“He’s an insufferable experimentalist,” said Kront. “I recommend the Rust!”
“The Rust?” exclaimed Ome. “Isn’t that too drastic?”
Kront thrust his alloyed skull-case forward.
“No. Not for ones like him. He’ll undermine the entire Obot State before he’s finished.”
“Come now,” suggested Lione, philosophically. “It would be better to short-circuit him for a few years, as punishment. Why be so sadistic and bitter about it, Kront?”
“In the name of the Great Obot!” said Kront. “Don’t you see the danger? Experimenting with protoplasm!”
“I agree,” said one of the others. “Nothing is too severe a punishment. If Ultar insists on concluding his present experiments, he may undermine a civilization that has existed for three hundred thousand years. Take Ultar out to sea, unoiled, and fully aware. Drop him in. It will take him many years to Rust, and he will be aware, all of those years, of crumbling and rusting. Be sure that his skull-case is intact, so his awareness will not be short-circuited by water.” The others trembled a quiet, metal, hidden trembling.
Kront swayed to his feet, his oblong face gleaming ice-blue and hard. “I want a show of opinion, a vote. The Rust for Ultar. Vote!”
There was an indecisive moment. Kront’s fifteen feet of towering, alloyed metal shifted uneasily in the lubrication cell.
Vises came up, arms came up. Six at first. Then four more. Ome and five others declined to vote. Kront counted the vises with an instantaneous flare of his visuals.
“Good. There’s an express rocket for Ultar’s laboratory in one hundred seconds from Level CV. If we hurry we’ll make it!”
Huge, magnetic plates clung to the floor as metal bodies heaved upward with oiled quiet.
They hurried to a wide portal. Ome and the five dissenters followed. He stopped Kront at the portal. “There’s a thing I want to ask you, Kront.”
“Hurry. We haven’t time.”
“You’ve—seen it.”
“Protoplasm?”
“Yes. You’ve looked at it?”
Kront nodded. “Yes. I have seen.”
Ome said, “What is it like?”
Kront did not answer for a long moment and then he said, very slowly. “It is enough to freeze the motion of all Obot Things. It is horror. It is unbelievable. I think you had better come and see this for yourself.”
Ome deliberated. “I’ll come.”
“Hurry then. We have fifty seconds.”
They followed the others.
The sea lay quietly as a huge, pallidly relaxed hand. In the vein and artery of that vast hand nothing moved but the gray blood tides. Moved silently and with the motion of one lunar tide against another. The deeps were not stirred by any other thing. The sea was lifeless and clear of any gill or eye or fin or any moving thing save the soft sea dust which arose, filtering, when the tides changed. The sea was dead.
The forests were silent. The brush was naked, the trees high and forlorn in a wilderness of quiet. There were no bird songs, or cracklings of sly animal paws in autumnal leaves, there were no loon cries or far off calls of moose or chipmunk. Only the wind sang little songs of memory it had learned three hundred thousand years before from things called birds. The forest and the land under the forest was dead. The trees were dead, turned to stone, upright, shading the hard stony soil forever. There was no grass and no flowers. The land was dead, as dead as the sea.
Now, over the dead land, in the birdless sky, came a metal sound. The sound of a rocket singing in the dead air.
Then it was gone, leaving a vein of pale gold powder in its wake. Kront and his fellows, on their way to the fortress of Ultar. . . .
A door opened as the ship landed. Kront and the others came forth from the ship.
“I’ve been waiting for you,” said Ultar, standing in the open portal of the laboratory. “I knew you’d bring the Council with you, Kront. Step in, all of you. I can tell by the immediate temperature of your bodies, that I am already condemned to Rust. We shall see. Step in, anyway.”
The door rang shut behind the Council. Ultar led the way down a tubular hall which issued forth into a dark room.
“Be seated, Obot Rulers. It is an unusual thing, this reception for the Great. I am flattered.”
Kront clicked angrily. “Before you die, you must show us this protoplasm, so it can be judged and destroyed.”
“Must I? Must you? Must it?”
“Where is it?”
“Here.”
“Where!”
“Patience, Kront.”
“I’ve no patience with blasphemers!”
“That is apparent.”
In one corner of the room was a large square box, from which a glow illumined the nearby walls. Over the box hung a yellow cloth which hid the contents from view.
Ultar, with a certain sure sense of the dramatic, moved to this box and made several adjustments of heat-dials. His visuals were glowing. Grasping the yellow cloth, he lifted it up and away from the box.
A hard, rattling tremor passed through the group. Visuals blinked and changed color. Bodies made a
n uneasy whining of metal. What lay before them was not pleasant. They drifted forward until they circled the box and peered into it. What they saw was blasphemous and sacrilegious and more than horrible.
Something that grew.
Something that expanded and built upon itself, changed and reproduced. Something that actually lived and died.
Died.
How silly! No one need die, ever, ever!
Something that could rot away into nothingness and run blood and be tortured. Something that felt and could be burned or hurt or made to feel hot or cold. Silly, silly something, horrid, horrid something, all incomprehensible and nightmarish and unpredictable!
Pink flesh formed six feet tall with long, long fleshy arms and flesh hands and two long flesh legs. And—they remembered from myth-dreams—those two unnecessary things—a mouth and nose!
Ome felt the silent coggery within himself grind slow. It was unbelievable! Like the half-heard myths of an Age of Flesh and Darkness. All those little half-truths, rumors, those dim little mutterings and whispers of creatures that grew instead of being built!
Who ever heard of such blasphemy? To grow instead of being built? How could a thing be perfect unless it was built and tendered every aid to perfection by an Obot scientist? This fleshy pulp was imperfect. The least jar and it broke, the least heat and it melted, the least cold and it froze. And as for the amazing fact that it grew, well, what of that? It was only luck that it grew to be anything. Sheer luck.
Not so the inhabitants of the Obot State! They were perfect to begin with and grew, paradoxically, more perfect as time progressed. It was nothing, nothing at all for them to exist one hundred thousand years, two hundred thousand years. Ome himself was past thirty-thousand, a youth, still a youth!
But—flesh? Depending upon the whims of some cosmic Nature to give it intellect, health, longevity? How silly a joke, how pointless, when it could be installed in parcels and packages, in wheels and cogs and red and blue wires and sparkling currents!