‘Captain?’
The nightmare flicked away.
‘Here.’ He worked in the soft warm rain that fell from the upper decks. He fumbled at the auxiliary pump. ‘Damn it!’ He jerked the feed line. When it came, it’d be the quickest death in the history of dying. One moment, yelling: a warm flash later only the billion billion tons of spacefire would whisper, unheard, in space. Popped like strawberries in a furnace, while their thoughts lingered on the scorched air a long breath after their bodies were charred roast and fluorescent gas.
‘Damn!’ He stabbed the auxiliary pump with a screwdriver. ‘Jesus!’ He shuddered. The complete annihilation of it. He clamped his eyes tight, teeth tight. God, he thought, we’re used to more leisurely dyings, measured in minutes and hours. Even twenty seconds now would be a slow death compared to this hungry idiot thing waiting to eat us!
‘Captain, do we pull out or stay?’
‘Get the Cup ready. Take over, finish this, Now!’
He turned and put his hand to the working mechanism of the huge Cup: shoved his fingers into the robot Glove. A twitch of his hand here moved a gigantic hand, with gigantic metal fingers, from the bowels of the ship. Now, now, the great metal hand slid out holding the huge Copa de Oro, breathless, into the iron furnace, the bodiless body and the fleshless flesh of the sun.
A million years ago, thought the captain, quickly, quickly, as he moved the hand and the Cup, a million years ago a naked man on a lonely northern trail saw lightning strike a tree. And while his clan fled, with bare hands he plucked a limb of fire, broiling the flesh of his fingers, to carry it, running in triumph, shielding it from the rain with his body, to his cave, where he shrieked out a laugh and tossed it full on a mound of leaves and gave his people summer. And the tribe crept at last, trembling, near the fire, and they put out their flinching hands and felt the new season in their cave, this small yellow spot of changing weather, and they, too, at last, nervously, smiled. And the gift of fire was theirs.
‘Captain!’
It took all of four seconds for the huge hand to push the empty Cup to the fire. So here we are again, today, on another trail, he thought, reaching for a cup of precious gas and vacuum, a handful of different fire with which to run back up cold space, lighting our way, and take to Earth a gift of fire that might burn forever. Why?
He knew the answer before the question.
Because the atoms we work with our hands, on Earth, are pitiful: the atomic bomb is pitiful and small and our knowledge is pitiful and small, and only the sun really knows what we want to know, and only the sun has the secret. And besides, it’s fun, it’s a chance, it’s a great thing coming here, playing tag, hitting and running. There is no reason, really, except the pride and vanity of little insect men hoping to sting the lion and escape the maw. My God, we’ll say, we did it! And here is our cup of energy, fire, vibration, call it what you will, that may well power our cities and sail our ships and light our libraries and tan our children and bake our daily breads and simmer the knowledge of our universe for us for a thousand years until it is well done. Here, from this cup, all good men of science and religion: drink! Warm yourselves against the night of ignorance, the long snows of superstition, the cold winds of disbelief, and from the great fear of darkness in each man. So: we stretch out our hand with the beggar’s cup…
‘Ah.’
The Cup dipped into the sun. It scooped up a bit of the flesh of God, the blood of the universe, the blazing thought, the blinding philosophy that set out and mothered a galaxy, that idled and swept planets in their fields and summoned or laid to rest lives and livelihoods.
‘Now, slow,’ whispered the captain.
‘What’ll happen when we pull it inside? That extra heat now, at this time, Captain?’
‘God knows.’
‘Auxiliary pump all repaired, sir.’
‘Start it!’
The pump leaped on.
‘Close the lid of the Cup and inside now, slow, slow.’
The beautiful hand outside the ship trembled, a tremendous image of his own gesture, sank with oiled silence into the ship body. The Cup, lid shut, dripped yellow flowers and white stars, slid deep. The audiothermometer screamed. The refrigerator system kicked; ammoniated fluids banged the walls like blood in the head of a shrieking idiot.
He shut the outer air-lock door.
‘Now.’
They waited. The ship’s pulse ran. The heart of the ship rushed, beat, rushed, the Cup of Gold in it. The cold blood raced around about down through, around about down through.
The captain exhaled slowly.
The ice stopped dripping from the ceiling. It froze again.
‘Let’s get out of here.’
The ship turned and ran.
‘Listen!’
The heart of the ship was slowing, slowing. The dials spun on down through the thousands; the needles whirred, invisible. The thermometer voice chanted the change of seasons. They were all thinking now, together: Pull away and away from the fire and the flame, the heat and the melting, the yellow and the white. Go on out now to cool and dark. In twenty hours perhaps they might even dismantle some refrigerators, let winter die. Soon they would move in night so cold it might be necessary to use the ship’s new furnace, draw heat from the shielded fire they carried now like an unborn child.
They were going home.
They were going home and there was some little time, even as he tended to the body of Bretton lying in a bank of white winter snow, for the captain to remember a poem he had written many years before:
Sometimes I see the sun a burning Tree,
Its golden fruit swung bright in airless air,
Its apples wormed with man and gravity,
Their worship breathing from them everywhere,
As man sees Sun as burning Tree…
The captain sat for a long while by the body, feeling many separate things. I feel sad, he thought, and I feel good, and I feel like a boy coming home from school with a handful of dandelions.
‘Well,’ said the captain, sitting, eyes shut, sighing. ‘Well, where do we go now, eh, where are we going?’ He felt his men sitting or standing all about him, the terror dead in them, their breathing quiet. ‘When you’ve gone a long, long way down to the sun and touched it and lingered and jumped around and streaked away from it, where are you going then? When you go away from the heat and the noonday light and the laziness, where do you go?’
His men waited for him to say it out. They waited for him to gather all of the coolness and the whiteness and the welcome and refreshing climate of the word in his mind, and they saw him settle the word, like a bit of ice cream, in his mouth, rolling it gently.
‘There’s only one direction in space from here on out,’ he said at last.
They waited. They waited as the ship moved swiftly into cold darkness away from the light.
‘North,’ murmured the captain. ‘North.’
And they all smiled, as if a wind had come up suddenly in the middle of a hot afternoon.
Powerhouse
The horses moved gently to a stop, and the man and his wife gazed down into a dry, sandy valley. The woman sat lost in her saddle; she hadn’t spoken for hours, didn’t know a good word to speak. She was trapped somewhere between the hot, dark pressure of the storm-clouded Arizona sky and the hard, granite pressure of the wind-blasted mountains. A few drops of cool rain fell on her trembling hands.
She looked over at her husband wearily. He sat his dusty horse easily, with a firm quietness. She closed her eyes and thought of how she had been all of these mild years until today. She wanted to laugh at the mirror she was holding up to herself, but there was no way of doing even that; it would be somewhat insane. After all, it might just be the pushing of this dark weather, or the telegram they had taken from the messenger on horseback this morning, or the long journey now to town.
There was still an empty world to cross, and she was cold.
‘I’m the lady who
was never going to need religion,’ she said quietly, her eyes shut.
‘What?’ Berty, her husband, glanced over at her.
‘Nothing,’ she whispered, shaking her head. In all the years, how certain she had been. Never, never would she have need of a church. She had heard fine people talk on and on of religion and waxed pews and calla lilies in great bronze buckets and vast bells of churches in which the preacher rang like a clapper. She had heard the shouting kind and the fervent, whispery kind, and they were all the same. Hers was simply not a pew-shaped spine.
‘I just never had a reason ever to sit in a church,’ she had told people. She wasn’t vehement about it. She just walked around and lived and moved her hands that were pebble-smooth and pebble-small. Work had polished the nails of those hands with a polish you could never buy in a bottle. The touching of children had made them soft, and the raising of children had made them temperately stern, and the loving of a husband had made them gentle.
And now, death made them tremble.
‘Here,’ said her husband. And the horses dusted down the trail to where an odd brick building stood beside a dry wash. The building was all glazed green windows, blue machinery, red tile, and wires. The wires ran off on high-tension towers to the farthest directions of the desert. She watched them go, silently, and, still held by her thoughts, turned her gaze back to the strange storm-green windows and the burning-colored bricks.
She had never slipped a ribbon in a Bible at a certain significant verse, because though her life in this desert was a life of granite, sun, and the steaming away of the waters of her flesh, there had never been a threat in it to her. Always things had worked out before the necessity had come for sleepless dawns and wrinkles in the forehead. Somehow, the very poisonous things of life had passed her by. Death was a remote stormrumor beyond the farthest range.
Twenty years had blown in tumbleweeds, away, since she’d come West, worn this lonely trapping man’s gold ring, and taken the desert as a third, and constant, partner to their living. None of their four children had ever been fearfully sick or near death. She had never had to get down on her knees except for the scrubbing of an already well-scrubbed floor.
Now all that was ended. Here they were riding toward a remote town because a simple piece of yellow paper had come and said very plainly that her mother was dying.
And she could not imagine it—no matter how she turned her head to see or turned her mind to look in on itself. There were no rungs anywhere to hold to, going either up or down, and her mind, like a compass left out in a sudden storm of sand, was suddenly blown free of all its once-clear directions, all points of reference worn away, the needle spinning without purpose, around, around. Even with Berty’s arms on her back it wasn’t enough. It was like the end of a good play and the beginning of an evil one. Someone she loved was actually going to die. This was impossible!
‘I’ve got to stop,’ she said, not trusting her voice at all, so she made it sound irritated to cover her fear.
Berty knew her as no irritated woman, so the irritation did not carry over and fill him up. He was a capped jug: the contents there for sure. Rain on the outside didn’t stir the brew. He side-ran his horse to her and took her hand gently. ‘Sure,’ he said. He squinted at the eastern sky. ‘Some clouds piling up black there. We’ll wait a bit. It might rain. I wouldn’t want to get caught in it.’
Now she was irritated at her own irritation, one fed upon the other, and she was helpless. But rather than speak and risk the cycle’s commencing again, she slumped forward and began to sob, allowing her horse to be led until it stood and tramped its feet softly beside the red brick building.
She slid down like a parcel into his arms, and he held her as she turned in on his shoulder; then he set her down and said. ‘Don’t look like there’s people here.’ He called, ‘Hey, there!’ and looked at the sign on the door: DANGER, BUREAU OF ELECTRIC POWER.
There was a great insect humming all through the air. It sang in a ceaseless, bumbling tone, rising a bit, perhaps falling just a bit, but keeping the same pitch. Like a woman humming between pressed lips as she makes a meal in the warm twilight over a hot stove. They could see no movement within the building: there was only the gigantic humming. It was the sort of noise you would expect the sun-shimmer to make rising from hot railroad ties on a blazing summer day, when there is that flurried silence and you see the air eddy and whorl and ribbon, and expect a sound from the process but get nothing but an arched tautness of the eardrums and the tense quiet.
The humming came up through her heels, into her medium-slim legs, and thence to her body. It moved to her heart and touched it, as the sight of Berty just sitting on a top rail of the corral often did. And then it moved on to her head and slenderest niches in the skull and set up a singing, as love songs and good books had done once on a time.
The humming was everywhere. It was as much a part of the soil as the cactus. It was as much a part of the air as the heat.
‘What is it?’ she asked, vaguely perplexed, looking at the building.
‘I don’t know much about it except it’s a powerhouse,’ said Berty. He tried the door. ‘It’s open,’ he said, surprised. ‘I wish someone was around.’ The door swung wide and the pulsing hum came out like a breath of air over them, louder.
They entered together into the solemn, singing place. She held him tightly, arm in arm.
It was a dim undersea place, smooth and clean and polished, as if something or other was always coming through and coming through and nothing ever stayed, but always there was motion and motion, invisible and stirring and never settling. On each side of them as they advanced were what first appeared to be people standing quietly, one after the other, in a double line. But these resolved into round, shell-like machines from which the humming sprang. Each black and gray and green machine gave forth golden cables and lime-colored wires, and there were silver metal pouches with crimson tabs and white lettering, and a pit like a washtub in which something whirled as if rinsing unseen materials at invisible speeds. The centrifuge raced so fast it stood still. Immense snakes of copper looped down from the twilight ceiling, and vertical pipes webbed up from cement floor to fiery brick wall. And the whole of it was as clean as a bolt of green lightning and smelled similarly. There was a crackling, eating sound, a dry rustling as of paper; flickers of blue fire shuttled, snapped, sparked, hissed where wires joined procelain bobbins and green glass insulation.
Outside, in the real world, it began to rain.
She didn’t want to stay in this place; it was no place to stay, with its people that were not people but dim machines and its music like an organ caught and pressed on a low note and a high note. But the rain washed every window and Berty said, ‘Looks like it’ll last. Might have to stay the night here. It’s late anyhow. I’d better get the stuff in.’
She said nothing. She wanted to be getting on. Getting on to what thing in what place, there was really no way of knowing. But at least in town she would hold on to the money and buy the tickets and hold them tight in her hand and hold on to a train which would rush and make a great noise, and get off the train, and get on another horse, or get into a car hundreds of miles away and ride again, and stand at last by her dead or alive mother. It all depended on time and breath. There were many places she would pass through, but none of them would offer a thing to her except ground for her feet, air for her nostrils, food for her numb mouth. And these were worse than nothing. Why go to her mother at all, say words, and make gestures? she wondered. What would be the use?
The floor was clean as a solid river under her. When she moved forward on it, it sent echoes cracking back and forth like small, faint gunshots through the room. Any word that was spoken came back as from a granite cavern.
Behind her, she heard Berty setting down the equipment. He spread two gray blankets and put out a little collection of tinned foods.
It was night. The rain still streamed on the high green-glazed windows, rinsing and maki
ng patterns of silk that flowed and intermingled in soft clear curtains. There were occasional thunderclaps which fell and broke upon themselves in avalanches of cold rain and wind hitting sand and stone.
Her head lay upon a folded cloth, and no matter how she turned it, the humming of the immense powerhouse worked up through the cloth into her head. She shifted, shut her eyes, and adjusted herself, but it went on and on. She sat up, patted the cloth, lay back down.
But the humming was there.
She knew without looking, by some sense deep in herself, that her husband was awake. There was no year she could remember when she hadn’t known. It was some subtle difference in his breathing. It was the absence of sound, rather; no sound of breathing at all, save at long, carefully thought-out intervals. She knew then that he was looking at her in the rainy darkness, concerned with her, taking great care of his breath.
She turned in the darkness. ‘Berty?’
‘Yes?’
‘I’m awake too,’ she said.
‘I know,’ he said.
They lay, she very straight, very rigid, he in a half curl, like a hand relaxed, half bent inward. She traced this dark, easy curve and was filled with incomprehensible wonder.
‘Berty,’ she asked, and paused a long while, ‘how…how are you like you are?’
He waited a moment. ‘How do you mean?’ he said.
‘How do you rest?’ She stopped. It sounded very bad. It sounded so much like an accusation, but it was not, really. She knew him to be a man concerned with all things, a man who could see in darknesses and who was not conceited because of his ability. He was worried for her now, and for her mother’s life or death, but he had a way of worrying that seemed indifferent and irresponsible. It was neither of the two. His concern was all in him, deep; but it lay side by side with some faith, some belief that accepted it, made it welcome, and did not fight it. Something in him took hold of the sorrow first, got acquainted with it, knew each of its traceries before passing the message on to all of his waiting body. His body held a faith like a maze, and the sorrow that struck into him was lost and gone before it finally reached where it wanted to hurt him. Sometimes this faith drove her into a senseless anger, from which she recovered quickly, knowing how useless it was to criticize something as contained as a stone in a peach.