‘No matter,’ said the second man. ‘The dragon can smell us miles off, anyway. God’s breath, it’s cold. I wish I was back at the castle.’
‘It’s death, not sleep, we’re after ’
‘Why? Why? The dragon never sets foot in the town!’
‘Quiet, fool! He eats men travelling alone from our town to the next!’
‘Let them be eaten and let us get home!’
‘Wait now; listen!’
The two men froze.
They waited a long time, but there was only the shake of their horses’ nervous skin like black velvet tambourines jingling the silver stirrup buckles, softly, softly.
‘Ah.’ The second man sighed. ‘What a land of nightmares. Everything happens here. Someone blows out the sun; it’s night. And then, and then, oh, God, listen! This dragon, they say his eyes are fire. His breath a white gas; you can see him burn across the dark lands. He runs with sulphur and thunder and kindles the grass. Sheep panic and die insane. Women deliver forth monsters. The dragon’s fury is such that tower walls shake back to dust. His victims, at sunrise, are strewn hither and thither on the hills. How many knights, I ask, have gone for this monster and failed, even as we shall fail?’
‘Enough of that!’
‘More than enough! Out here in this desolation I cannot tell what year this is!’
‘Nine hundred years since the Nativity.’
‘No, no,’ whispered the second man, eyes shut. ‘On this moor is no Time, is only Forever. I feel if I ran back on the road the town would be gone, the people yet unborn, things changed, the castles unquarried from the rocks, the timbers still uncut from the forests; don’t ask how I know, the moor knows, and tells me. And here we sit alone in the land of the fire dragon, God save us!’
‘Be you afraid, then gird on your armour!’
‘What use? The dragon runs from nowhere; we cannot guess its home. It vanishes in fog, we know not where it goes. Aye, on with our armour, we’ll die well-dressed.’
Half into his silver corselet, the second man stopped again and turned his head.
Across the dim country, full of night and nothingness from the heart of the moor itself, the wind sprang full of dust from clocks that used dust for telling time. There were black suns burning in the heart of this new wind and a million burnt leaves shaken from some autumn tree beyond the horizon. This wind melted landscapes, lengthened bones like white wax, made the blood roil and thicken to a muddy deposit in the brain. The wind was a thousand souls dying and all time confused and in transit. It was a fog inside of a mist inside of a darkness, and this place was no man’s place and there was no year or hour at all, but only these men in a faceless emptiness of sudden frost, storm, and white thunder which moved behind the great falling pane of green glass that was the lightning. A squall of rain drenched the turf, all faded away until there was unbreathing hush and the two men waiting alone with their warmth in a cool season.
‘There,’ whispered the first man. ‘Oh, there .. .’
Miles off, rushing with a great chant and a roar – the dragon.
In silence, the men buckled on their armour and mounted their horses. The midnight wilderness was split by a monstrous gushing as the dragon roared nearer, nearer; its flashing yellow glare spurted above a hill and then, fold on fold of dark body, distantly seen, therefore indistinct, flowed over that hill and plunged vanishing into a valley.
‘Quick!’
They spurred their horses forward to a small hollow.
‘This is where it passes!’
They seized their lances with mailed fists, and blinded their horses by flipping the visors down over their eyes.
‘Lord!’
‘Yes, let us use His name.’
On the instant, the dragon rounded a hill. Its monstrous amber eye fed on them, fired their armour in red glints and glitters. With a terrible wailing cry and a grinding rush it flung itself forward.
‘Mercy, God!’
The lance struck under the unlidded yellow eye, buckled, tossed the man through the air. The dragon hit, spilled him over, down, ground him under. Passing, the black brunt of its shoulder smashed the remaining horse and rider a hundred feet against the side of a boulder, wailing, wailing, the dragon shrieking, the fire all about, around, under it, a pink, yellow, orange sun-fire with great soft plumes of blinding smoke.
‘Did you see it?’ cried a voice. ‘Just like I told you!’
‘The same! The same! A knight in armour, by the Lord Harry! We hit him!’
‘You goin’ to stop?’
‘Did once; found nothing. Don’t like to stop on this moor. I get the willies. Got a feel, it has.’
‘But we hit something !’
‘Gave him plenty of whistle; chap wouldn’t budge.’
A steaming blast cut the mist aside.
‘We’ll make Stokely on time. More coal, eh, Fred?’
Another whistle shook dew from the empty sky. The night train, in fire and fury, shot through a gully, up a rise, and vanished over cold earth, towards the north, leaving black smoke and steam to dissolve in the numbed air minutes after it had passed and gone for ever.
The End of the Beginning
HE stopped the lawnmower in the middle of the yard because he felt that the sun at just that moment had gone down and the stars come out. The fresh-cut grass that had showered his face and body died softly away. Yes, the stars were there, faint at first, but brightening in the clear desert sky. He heard the porch screen-door tap shut and felt his wife watching him as he watched the night.
‘Almost time,’ she said.
He nodded; he did not have to check his watch. In the passing moments he felt very old, then very young, very cold, then very warm, now this, now that. Suddenly, he was miles away. He was his own son talking steadily, moving briskly to cover his pounding heart and the resurgent panics as he felt himself slip into fresh uniform, check food supplies, oxygen-flasks, pressure helmet, space-suiting and turn, as every man on earth tonight turned, to gaze at the swiftly filling sky.
Then, quickly, he was back, once more, the father of the son, hands gripped to the lawnmower handle. His wife called, ‘Come sit on the porch.’
‘I’ve got to keep busy!’
She came down the steps and across the lawn. ‘Don’t worry about Robert; he’ll be all right.’
‘But it’s all so new,’ he heard himself say. ‘It’s never been done before. Think of it – a manned rocket going up tonight to build the first space-station. Good Lord, it can’t be done, it doesn’t exist, there’s no rocket, no proving-ground, no take-off time, no technicians. For that matter, I don’t even have a son named Bob. The whole thing’s too much for me!’
‘Then what are you doing out here, staring?’
He shook his head. ‘Well, late this morning, walking to the office, I heard someone laugh out loud. It shocked me so I froze in the middle of the street. It was me, laughing! Why? Because finally I really knew what Bob was going to do tonight; at last I believed it. Holy is a word I never use, but that’s how I felt stranded in all that traffic. Then, middle of the afternoon I caught myself humming. You know the song. A wheel in a wheel. Way in the middle of the air. I laughed again. The space-station, of course, I thought. The big wheel with hollow spokes where Bob’ll live six or eight months, then get along to the moon. Walking home, I remembered more of the song. Little wheel run by faith, Big wheel run by the grace of God. I wanted to jump, yell, and flame-out myself!’
His wife touched his arm. ‘If we stay out here, let’s at least be comfortable.’
They placed two wicker rockers in the centre of the lawn and sat quietly as the stars dissolved out of darkness in pale crushings of rock-salt strewn from horizon to horizon.
‘Why,’ said his wife, at last, ‘it’s like waiting for the fireworks at Sisley Field every year.’
‘Bigger crowd tonight….’
‘I keep thinking – a billion people watching the sky right now, their mouths all
open at the same time.’
They waited, feeling the earth move under their chairs.
‘What time is it now?’
‘Eleven minutes to eight.’
‘You’re always right; there must be a clock in your head.’
‘I can’t be wrong, tonight. I’ll be able to tell you one second before they blast off. Look! The ten-minute warning!’
On the western sky they saw four crimson flares open out, float shimmering down the wind, above the desert, then sink silently to the extinguishing earth.
In the new darkness, the husband and wife did not rock in their chairs.
After a while, he said, ‘Eight minutes.’ A pause. ‘Seven minutes.’ What seemed a much longer pause. ‘Six …’
His wife, her head back, studied the stars immediately above her and murmured, ‘Why?’ She closed her eyes. ‘Why the rockets, why tonight? Why all this? I’d like to know.’
He examined her face, pale in the vast powdering light of the Milky Way. He felt the stirring of an answer, but let his wife continue.
‘I mean it’s not that old thing again, is it, when people asked why men climbed Mount Everest and they said, “Because it’s there”? I never understood. That was no answer to me.’
Five minutes, he thought. Time ticking … his wrist-watch … a wheel in a wheel … little wheel run by … big wheel run by … way in the middle of … four minutes! … the men snug in the rocket by now, the hive, the control board lit like Christmas morning….
His lips moved.
‘All I know is it’s really the end of the beginning. The Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age; from now on we’ll lump all those together under one big name for when we walked on Earth and heard the birds at morning and cried with envy. Maybe we’ll call it the Earth Age, or maybe the Age of Gravity. Millions of years we fought gravity. When we were amoebas and fish we struggled to get out of the sea without gravity crushing us. Once safe on the shore we fought to stand upright without gravity breaking our new invention, the spine; tried to walk without stumbling, run without falling. A billion years, Gravity kept us home, mocked us with wind and clouds, cabbage-moths and locusts. That’s what’s so god-awful big about tonight … it’s the end of old man Gravity and the Age we’ll remember him by, for once and all. I don’t know where they’ll divide the Ages, at the Persians who dreamt of flying-carpets, or the Chinese who all unknowing celebrated birthdays and New Years with strung ladyfingers and high skyrockets, or some minute, some incredible second in the next hour. But we’re in at the end of a billion years’ trying, the end of something long and to us humans, anyway, honourable.’
Three minutes … two minutes, fifty-nine seconds … two minutes fifty-eight seconds.…
‘Yes …’ He could hardly hear his wife’s voice. ‘Yes … I believe that’s true.’
Two minutes, he thought. Ready? Ready? Ready? The far radio voice calling. Ready! Ready! Ready! The quick faint replies from the humming rocket. Check! Check! Check!
Tonight, he thought, even if we fail with this first, we’ll send a second and a third ship and move on out to all the planets and, later, all the stars. We’ll just keep going until the big words like immortal and for ever take on meaning. Big words, yes, that’s what we want. Continuity. Since our tongues first moved in our mouths, we’ve asked, What does it all mean? No other question made sense, with death breathing down our necks. But just let us settle in on ten thousand worlds spinning around ten thousand alien suns and the question will fade away. Man will be endless and infinite, even as space is endless and infinite. Man will go on, as space goes on, for ever. Individuals will die, as always, but our history will reach as far as we’ll ever need to see into the future, and with the knowledge of our survival for all time to come, we’ll know security and thus the answer we’ve always searched for. Gifted with life, the least we can do is preserve and pass on the gift to infinity. That’s a goal worth shooting for.
The wicker chairs whispered ever so softly on the grass.
One minute.
‘One minute,’ he said, aloud.
‘Oh!’ His wife moved suddenly, to seize his hands. ‘I hope that Bob…
‘He’ll be all right!’
‘Oh, God, take care.…’
Thirty seconds.
‘Watch, now.’
Fifteen, ten, five …
‘Watch!’
Four, three, two, one.
‘There! There! Oh, there, there!’
They both cried out. They both stood. The chairs toppled back, fell flat on the lawn. The man and his wife swayed, their hands struggled to find each other, grip hold. They saw the brightening colour in the sky and, ten seconds later, the great uprising comet burn the air, put out the stars, and rush away in firelight to become another star in the returning profusion of the Milky Way. The man and wife held each other as if they had stumbled on the rim of an incredible cliff that faced an abyss so deep and dark there seemed no end to it. Staring up, they heard themselves sobbing and crying. Only after a long time were they able to speak.
‘It got away, it did, didn’t it?’
‘Yes …’
‘It’s all right, isn’t it?’
‘Yes … yes …’
‘It didn’t fall back…?’
‘No, no, it’s all right, Bob’s all right, it’s all right.’
They stood away from each other at last.
He touched his face with his hand and looked at his wet fingers. ‘I’ll be damned,’ he said, ‘I’ll be damned.’
They waited another five and then ten minutes until the darkness in their heads, the retina, ached with a million specks of fiery salt. Then they had to close their eyes.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘now let’s go in.’
He could not move. Only his hand reached a long way out by itself to find the lawnmower handle. He saw what his hand had done and said, ‘There’s just a little more to do.…’
‘But you can’t see.’
‘Well enough,’ he said.’ I must finish this. Then we’ll sit on the porch awhile before we turn in.’
He helped her put the chairs on the porch and sat her down and then walked back out to put his hands on the guidebar of the lawnmower. The lawnmower. A wheel in a wheel. A simple machine which you held in your hands, which you sent on ahead with a rush and a clatter, while you walked behind with your quiet philosophy. Racket, followed by warm silence. Whirling wheel, then soft footfall of thought.
I’m a billion years old, he told himself; I’m one minute old. I’m one inch, not ten thousand miles, tall. I look down and can’t see my feet they’re so far off and gone away below.
He moved the lawnmower. The grass, showering up, fell softly around him; he relished and savoured it and felt that he was all mankind bathing at last in the fresh waters of the fountain of youth.
Thus bathed, he remembered the song again, about the wheels and the faith and the grace of God being way up there in the middle of the sky where that single star, among a million motionless stars, dared to move and keep on moving.
Then he finished cutting the grass.
The Wonderful Ice-Cream Suit
IT was summer twilight in the city and out front of the quiet-clicking pool-hall three young Mexican-American men breathed the warm air and looked around at the world. Sometimes they talked and sometimes they said nothing at all, but watched the cars glide by like black panthers on the hot asphalt or saw trolleys loom up like thunderstorms, scatter lightning, and rumble away into silence.
‘Hey,’ sighed Martinez, at last. He was the youngest, the most sweetly sad of the three. ‘It’s a swell night, huh? Swell.’
As he observed the world it moved very close and then drifted away and then came close again. People, brushing by, were suddenly across the street. Buildings five miles away suddenly leaned over him. But most of the time everything, people, cars, and buildings, stayed way out on the edge of the world and could not be touched. On this quiet warm summer evening, Martinez??
?s face was cold.
‘Nights like this you wish … lots of things.’
‘Wishing,’ said the second man, Villanazul, a man who shouted books out loud in his room, but spoke only in whispers on the street. ‘Wishing is the useless pastime of the unemployed.’
‘Unemployed?’ cried Vamenos, the unshaven. ‘Listen to him! We got no jobs, no money!’
‘So,’ said Martinez, ‘we got no friends.’
‘True.’ Villanazul gazed off towards the green plaza where the palm-trees swayed in the soft night wind. ‘Do you know what I wish? I wish to go into that plaza and speak among the businessmen who gather there nights to talk big talk. But dressed as I am, poor as I am, who would listen? So, Martinez, we have each other. The friendship of the poor is real friendship. We –’
But now a handsome young Mexican with a fine thin moustache strolled by. And on each of his careless arms hung a laughing woman.
‘Madre mía!’ Martinez slapped his own brow. ‘How does that one rate two friends?’
‘It’s his nice new white summer suit.’ Vamenos chewed a black thumbnail. ‘He looks sharp.’
Martinez leaned out to watch the three people moving away, and then the tenement across the street, in one fourth-floor window of which, far above, a beautiful girl leaned out, her dark hair faintly stirred by the wind. She had been there for ever, which was to say, for six weeks. He had nodded, he had raised a hand, he had smiled, he had blinked rapidly, he had even bowed to her, on the street, in the hall when visiting friends, in the park, downtown. Even now, he put his hand up from his waist and moved his fingers. But all the lovely girl did was let the summer wind stir her dark hair. He did not exist. He was nothing.
‘Madre mía!’ He looked away and down the street where the man walked his two friends around a corner. ‘Oh, if I had just one suit, one! I wouldn’t need money if I looked okay.’
‘I hesitate to suggest,’ said Villanazul, ‘that you see Gomez. But he’s been talking some crazy talk for a month now, about clothes. I keep on saying I’ll be in on it to make him go away. That Gomez.’
‘Friend,’ said a quiet voice.