Mark sat there on the pavement, laughing at his joke. “Let them come. I can fool them all!”
New York distracted Saul. It was meant to distract—meant to keep his attention with its unholy beauty, after so many months away from it. Instead of attacking Mark he could only stand, drinking in the alien but familiar scene.
He shut his eyes. “No.” And fell forward, dragging Mark with him. Horns screamed in his ears. Brakes hissed and caught violently. He smashed at Mark’s chin.
Silence.
Mark lay on the sea bottom.
Taking the unconscious man in his arms, Saul began to run, heavily.
New York was gone. There was only the wide soundlessness of the dead sea. The men were closing in around him. He headed for the hills with his precious cargo, with New York and green country and fresh springs and old friends held in his arms. He fell once and struggled up. He did not stop running.
Night filled the cave. The wind wandered in and out, tugging at the small fire, scattering ashes.
Mark opened his eyes. He was tied with ropes and leaning against the dry wall of the cave, facing the fire.
Saul put another stick on the fire, glancing now and again with a catlike nervousness at the cave entrance.
“You’re a fool.”
Saul started.
“Yes,” said Mark, “you’re a fool. They’ll find us. If they have to hunt for six months they’ll find us. They saw New York, at a distance, like a mirage. And us in the center of it. It’s too much to think they won’t be curious and follow our trail.”
“I’ll move on with you then,” said Saul, staring into the fire.
“And they’ll come after.”
“Shut up!”
Mark smiled. “Is that the way to speak to your wife?”
“You heard me!”
“Oh, a fine marriage this is—your greed and my mental ability. What do you want to see now? Shall I show you a few more of your childhood scenes?”
Saul felt the sweat coming out on his brow. He didn’t know if the man was joking or not. “Yes,” he said.
“All right,” said Mark, “watch!”
Flame gushed out of the rocks. Sulfur choked him. Pits of brimstone exploded, concussions rocked the cave. Heaving up, Saul coughed and blundered, burned, withered by hell!
Hell went away. The cave returned.
Mark was laughing.
Saul stood over him. “You,” he said coldly, bending down.
“What else do you expect?” cried Mark. “To be tied up, toted off, made the intellectual bride of a man insane with loneliness—do you think I enjoy this?”
“I’ll untie you if you promise not to run away.”
“I couldn’t promise that. I’m a free agent. I don’t belong to anybody.”
Saul got down on his knees. “But you’ve got to belong, do you hear? You’ve got to belong. I can’t let you go away!”
“My dear fellow, the more you say things like that, the more remote I am. If you’d had any sense and done things intelligently, we’d have been friends. I’d have been glad to do you these little hypnotic favors. After all, they’re no trouble for me to conjure up. Fun, really. But you’ve botched it. You wanted me all to yourself. You were afraid the others would take me away from you. Oh, how mistaken you were. I have enough power to keep them all happy. You could have shared me, like a community kitchen. I’d have felt quite like a god among children, being kind, doing favors, in return for which you might bring me little gifts, special tidbits of food.”
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” Saul cried. “But I know those men too well.”
“Are you any different? Hardly! Go out and see if they’re coming. I thought I heard a noise.”
Saul ran. In the cave entrance he cupped his hands, peering down into the night-filled gully. Dim shapes stirred. Was it only the wind blowing the roving clumps of weeds? He began to tremble a fine, aching tremble.
“I don’t see anything.” He came back into an empty cave.
He stared at the fireplace. “Mark!”
Mark was gone.
There was nothing but the cave, filled with boulders, stones, pebbles, the lonely fire flickering, the wind sighing. And Saul standing there, incredulous and numb.
“Mark! Mark! Come back!”
The man had worked free of his bonds, slowly, carefully, and using the ruse of imagining he heard other men approaching, had gone—where?
The cave was deep, but ended in a blank wall. And Mark could not have slipped past him into the night. How then?
Saul stepped around the fire. He drew his knife and approached a large boulder that stood against the cave wall. Smiling, he pressed the knife against the boulder. Smiling, he tapped the knife there. Then he drew his knife back to plunge it into the boulder.
“Stop!” shouted Mark.
The boulder vanished. Mark was there.
Saul suspended his knife. The fire played on his cheeks. His eyes were quite insane.
“It didn’t work,” he whispered. He reached down and put his hands on Mark’s throat and closed his fingers. Mark said nothing, but moved uneasily in the grip, his eyes ironic, telling things to Saul that Saul knew.
If you kill me, the eyes said, where will all your dreams be? If you kill me, where will all the streams and brook trout be? Kill me, kill Plato, kill Aristotle, kill Einstein; yes, kill all of us! Go ahead, strangle me. I dare you.
Saul’s fingers released the throat.
Shadows moved into the cave mouth.
Both men turned their heads.
The other men were there. Five of them, haggard with travel, panting, waiting in the outer rim of light.
“Good evening,” called Mark, laughing. “Come in, come in, gentlemen!”
By dawn the arguments and ferocities still continued. Mark sat among the glaring men, rubbing his wrists, newly released from his bonds. He created a mahogany-paneled conference hall and a marble table at which they all sat, ridiculously bearded, evil-smelling, sweating and greedy men, eyes bent upon their treasure.
“The way to settle it,” said Mark at last, “is for each of you to have certain hours of certain days for appointments with me. I’ll treat you all equally. I’ll be city property, free to come and go. That’s fair enough. As for Saul here, he’s on probation. When he’s proved he can be a civil person once more, I’ll give him a treatment or two. Until that time, I’ll have nothing more to do with him.”
The other exiles grinned at Saul.
“I’m sorry,” Saul said. “I didn’t know what I was doing. I’m all right now.”
“We’ll see,” said Mark. “Let’s give ourselves a month, shall we?”
The other men grinned at Saul.
Saul said nothing. He sat staring at the floor of the cave.
“Let’s see now,” said Mark. “On Mondays it’s your day, Smith.”
Smith nodded.
“On Tuesdays I’ll take Peter there, for an hour or so.”
Peter nodded.
“On Wednesdays I’ll finish up with Johnson, Holtzman, and Jim, here.”
The last three men looked at each other.
“The rest of the week I’m to be left strictly alone, do you hear?” Mark told them. “A little should be better than nothing. If you don’t obey, I won’t perform at all.”
“Maybe we’ll make you perform,” said Johnson. He caught the other men’s eye. “Look, we’re five against his one. We can make him do anything we want. If we cooperate, we’ve got a great thing here.”
“Don’t be idiots,” Mark warned the other men.
“Let me talk,” said Johnson. “He’s telling us what he’ll do. Why don’t we tell him! Are we bigger than him, or not? And him threatening not to perform! Well, just let me get a sliver of wood under his toenails and maybe burn his fingers a bit with a steel file, and we’ll see if he performs! Why shouldn’t we have performances, I want to know, every night in the week?”
“Don’t listen to him!” said Mark. “He’s crazy. He can’t be depended on. You know what he’ll do, don’t you? He’ll get you all off guard, one by one, and kill you; yes, kill all of you, so that when he’s done, he’ll be alone—just him and me! That’s his sort.”
The listening men blinked. First at Mark, then at Johnson.
“For that matter,” observed Mark, “none of you can trust the others. This is a fool’s conference. The minute your back is turned one of the other men will murder you. I dare say, at the week’s end, you’ll all be dead or dying.”
A cold wind blew into the mahogany room. It began to dissolve and became a cave once more. Mark was tired of his joke. The marble table splashed and rained and evaporated.
The men gazed suspiciously at each other with little bright animal eyes. What was spoken was true. They saw each other in the days to come, surprising one another, killing—until that last lucky one remained to enjoy the intellectual treasure that walked among them.
Saul watched them and felt alone and disquieted. Once you have made a mistake, how hard to admit your wrongness, to go back, start fresh. They were all wrong. They had been lost a long time. Now they were worse than lost.
“And to make matters very bad,” said Mark at last, “one of you has a gun. All the rest of you have only knives. But one of you, I know, has a gun.”
Everybody jumped up. “Search!” said Mark. “Find the one with the gun or you’re all dead!”
That did it. The men plunged wildly about, not knowing whom to search first. Their hands grappled, they cried out, and Mark watched them in contempt.
Johnson fell back, feeling in his jacket. “All right,” he said. “We might as well have it over now! Here, you, Smith.”
And he shot
