“All those years, all those hours, why didn’t you tell me?”
“I didn’t want to make you unhappy.”
“Good God!” I cried.
And then, “I don’t believe you.”
“It’s true.”
“I don’t believe you,” I said, fighting to control my breath. “It was too wonderful, it was too great, it was—no, no, you couldn’t have lied each time, every time.” I stopped and stared at her. “You’re making this up to tie it in with this Father Reilly thing. That’s it, isn’t it?”
“Honest to God—”
“Watch it. You’re certified now! That’s blasphemy!”
“Just ‘honest’ then. No lie.”
I lapsed back into hot confusion.
There was a long silence.
“We could still have lunch,” she said. “Someday.”
“No thanks. I couldn’t stand it. To see you and have to sit across from you and not touch, oh, Lord! Where’s my hat? Was I wearing one?”
I put my hand on the doorknob.
“Where are you going?” she cried.
I shook my head, eyes shut. “I don’t know. Yes, I do. To join the Unitarian Church!”
“What?”
“Unitarians. You know.”
“But you can’t do that!”
“Why?”
“Because—”
“Because?”
“They never mention God or Jesus. They’re embarrassed if you talk about them.”
“Right.”
“Which means, when I see you I wouldn’t be able to mention God or Jesus.”
“Right.”
“You wouldn’t join them!”
“No? You made the first move. Now it’s mine. Checkmate.”
I turned the doorknob and said:
“I’ll call you next Tuesday, a last time. But if I do, don’t ask me to marry you.”
“Don’t call,” she said.
“Oh, love that I still dearly love,” I said, “goodbye.”
I went out and shut the door. Quietly.
Mr. Pale
“He’s a very sick man.”
“Where is he?”
“Up above on Deck C. I got him to bed.”
The doctor sighed. “I came on this trip for a vacation. All right, all right. Excuse me,” he said to his wife. He followed the private up through the ramps of the spaceship and the ship, in the few minutes while he did this, pushed itself on in red and yellow fire across space, a thousand miles a second.
“Here we are,” said the orderly.
The doctor turned in at the portway and saw the man lying on the bunk, and the man was tall and his flesh was sewed tight to his skull. The man was sick, and his lips fluted back in pain from his large, discolored teeth. His eyes were shadowed cups from which flickers of light peered, and his body was as thin as a skeleton. The color of his hands was that of snow. The doctor pulled up a magnetic chair and took the sick man’s wrist.
“What seems to be the trouble?”
The sick man didn’t speak for a moment, but only licked a colorless tongue over his sharp lips.
“I’m dying,” he said, at last, and seemed to laugh.
“Nonsense, we’ll fix you up, Mr … ?”
“Pale, to fit my complexion. Pale will do.”
“Mr. Pale.” This wrist was the coldest wrist he had ever touched in his life. It was like the hand of a body you pick up and tag in the hospital morgue. The pulse was gone from the cold wrist already. If it was there at all, it was so faint that the doctor’s own fingertips, pulsing, covered it.
“It’s bad, isn’t it?” asked Mr. Pale.
The doctor said nothing but probed the bared chest of the dying man with his silver stethoscope.
There was a faint far clamor, a sigh, a musing upon distant things, heard in the stethoscope. It seemed almost to be a regretful wailing, a muted screaming of a million voices, instead of a heartbeat, a dark wind blowing in a dark space and the chest cold and the sound cold to the doctor’s ears and to his own heart, which gave pause in hearing it.
“I was right, wasn’t I?” said Mr. Pale.
The doctor nodded. “Perhaps you can tell me … “
“What caused it?” Mr. Pale closed his eyes smilingly over his colorlessness. “I haven’t any food. I’m starving.”
“We can fix that.”
“No, no, you don’t understand,” whispered the man. “I barely made it to this rocket in time to get aboard. Oh, I was really healthy there for awhile, a few minutes ago.”
The doctor turned to the orderly. “Delirious.”
“No,” said Mr. Pale, “no.”
“What’s going on here?” said a voice, and the captain stepped into the room. “Hello, who’s this? I don’t recall … “
“I’ll save you the trouble,” said Mr. Pale. “I’m not on the passenger list. I just came aboard.”
“You couldn’t have. We’re ten million miles away from Earth.”
Mr. Pale sighed. “I almost didn’t make it. It took all my energy to catch you. If you’d been a little farther out … “
“A stowaway, pure and simple,” said the captain. “And drunk, too, no doubt.”
“A very sick man,” said the doctor. “He can’t be moved. I’ll make a thorough examination … “
“You’ll find nothing,” said Mr. Pale, faintly, lying white and long and alone in the cot, “except I’m in need of food.”
“We’ll see about that,” said the doctor, rolling up his sleeves.
An hour passed. The doctor sat back down on his magnetic chair. He was perspiring. “You’re right. There’s nothing wrong with you, except you’re starved. How could you do this to yourself in a rich civilization like ours?”
“Oh, you’d be surprised,” said the cold, thin, white man. His voice was a little breeze blowing ice through the room. “They took all my food away an hour or so ago. It was my own fault. You’ll understand in a few minutes now. You see, I’m very very old. Some say a million years, some say a billion. I’ve lost count. I’ve been too busy to count.”
Mad, thought the doctor, utterly mad.
Mr. Pale smiled weakly as if he had heard this thought. He shook his tired head and the dark pits of his eyes flickered. “No, no. No, no. Old, very old. And foolish. Earth was mine. I owned it.
I kept it for myself. It nurtured me, even as I nurtured it. I lived well there, for a billion years, I lived high. And now here I am, in the name of all that’s darkest, dying too. I never thought I could die. I never thought I could be killed, like everyone else. And now I know what the fear is, what it will be like to die. After a billion years I know, and it is frightening, for what will the universe be without me?”
“Just rest easily, now, we’ll fix you up.”
“No, no. No, no, there’s nothing you can do. I overplayed my hand. I lived as I pleased. I started wars and stopped wars. But this time I went too far, and committed suicide, yes, I did. Go to the port there and look out.” Mr. Pale was trembling, the trembling moved in his fingers and his lips. “Look out. Tell me what you see.”
“Earth. The planet Earth, behind us.”
“Wait just a moment, then,” said Mr. Pale.
The doctor waited.
“Now,” said Mr. Pale, softly. “It should happen about now.”
A blind fire filled the sky.
The doctor cried out. “My God, my God, this is terrible!”
“What do you see?”
“Earth! It’s caught fire. It’s burning!”
“Yes,” said Mr. Pale.
The fire crowded the universe with a dripping blue yellow flare. Earth blew itself into a thousand pieces and fell away into sparks and nothingness.
“Did you see?” said Mr. Pale.
“My God, my God.” The doctor staggered and fell against the port, clawing at his heart and his face. He began to cry like a child.
“You see,” said Mr. Pale, “what a fool I was. Too far. I went too far. I thought, What a feast. What a banquet. And now, and now, it’s over.”
The doctor slid down and sat on the floor, weeping. The ship moved in space. Down the corridors, faintly, you could hear running feet and stunned voices, and much weeping.
The sick man lay on his cot, saying nothing, shaking his head slowly back and forth, swallowing convulsively. After five minutes of trembling and weeping, the doctor gathered himself and crawled and then got to his feet and sat on the chair and looked at Mr. Pale who lay gaunt and long there, almost phosphorescent, and from the dying man came a thick smell of something very old and chilled and dead.
“Now do you see?” said Mr. Pale. “I didn’t want it this way.”
“Shut up.”
“I wanted it to go on for another billion years, the high life, the picking and choosing. Oh, I was king.”
“You’re mad!”
“Everyone feared me. And now I’m afraid. For there’s no one left to die. A handful on this ship. A few thousand left on Mars. That’s why I’m trying to get there, to Mars, where I can live, if I make it.
For in order for me to live, to be talked about, to have an existence, others must be alive to die, and when all the living ones are dead and no one is left to die, then Mr. Pale himself must die, and he most assuredly does not want that. For you see, life is a rare thing in the universe. Only Earth lived, and only I lived there because of the living men. But now I’m so weak, so weak. I can’t move. You must help me.”
“Mad, mad!”
“It’s another two days to Mars,” said Mr. Pale, thinking it through, his hands collapsed at his sides. “In that time you must feed me. I can’t move or I would tend myself. Oh, an hour ago, I had great power, think of the power I took from so much and so many dying at once.
But the effort of reaching this ship dispersed the power, and the power is self-limiting. For now I have no reason to live, except you, and your wife, and the twenty other passengers and crew, and
