“Back to 1938 in the stone cemetery,” said Tom Wolfe, eyes shut. “I don’t like that. I wish I didn’t know about that, it’s a horrible thing to know.” His voice faded and he put his big hands over his face and held them tightly there.
The door opened. Bolton let himself in and stood behind Tom Wolfe’s chair, a small vial in his hand.
“What’s that?” asked the old man.
“An extinct virus. Pneumonia. Very ancient and very evil,” said Bolton. “When Mr. Wolfe came through, I had to cure him of his illness, of course, which was immensely easy with the techniques we know today, in order to put him in working condition for his job, Mr. Field. I kept this pneumonia culture. Now that he’s going back, he’ll have to be reinoculated with the disease.”
“Otherwise?”
Tom Wolfe looked up.
“Otherwise, he’d get well, in 1938.”
Tom Wolfe arose from his chair. “You mean, get well, walk around, back there, be well, and cheat the mortician?”
“That’s what I mean.”
Tom Wolfe stared at the vial and one of his hands twitched. “What if I destroyed the virus and refused to let you inoculate me?”
“You can’t do that!”
“But—supposing?”
“You’d ruin things.”
“What things?”
“The pattern, life, the way things are and were, the things that can’t be changed. You can disrupt it. There’s only one sure thing, you’re to die, and I’m to see to it.”
Wolfe looked at the door. “I could run off.”
“We control the machine. You wouldn’t get out of the house. I’d have you back here, by force, and inoculated. I anticipated some such trouble when the time came; there are five men waiting down below. One shout from me—you see, it’s useless. There, that’s better. Here now.”
Wolfe had moved back and now had turned to look at the old man and the window and this huge house. “I’m afraid I must apologize. I don’t want to die. So very much I don’t want to die.”
The old man came to him and took his hand. “Think of it this way: you’ve had two more months than anyone could expect from life, and you’ve turned out another book, a last book, a fine book, think of that.”
“I want to thank you for this,” said Thomas Wolfe, gravely. “I want to thank both of you. I’m ready.” He rolled up his sleeve. “The inoculation.”
And while Bolton bent to his task, with his free hand Thomas Wolfe penciled two black lines across the top of the first manuscript and went on talking:
“There’s a passage from one of my old books,” he said, scowling to remember it. “. . . of wandering forever and the Earth… Who owns the Earth? Did we want the Earth? That we should wander on it?
Did we need the Earth that we were never still upon it? Whoever needs the Earth shall have the Earth; he shall be upon it, he shall rest within a little place, he shall dwell in one small room forever…”
Wolfe was finished with the remembering.
“Here’s my last book,” he said, and on the empty yellow paper facing the manuscript he blocked out vigorous huge black letters with pressures of the pencil:
FOREVER AND THE EARTH, by Thomas Wolfe.
He picked up a ream of it and held it tightly in his hands, against his chest, for a moment. “I wish I could take it back with me. It’s like parting with my son.” He gave it a slap and put it aside and immediately thereafter gave his quick hand into that of his employer, and strode across the room, Bolton after him, until he reached the door where he stood framed in the late-afternoon light, huge and magnificent. “Good-bye, good-bye!” he cried.
The door slammed. Tom Wolfe was gone.
They found him wandering in the hospital corridor.
“Mr. Wolfe!”
“What?”
“Mr. Wolfe, you gave us a scare, we thought you were gone!”
“Gone?”
“Where did you go?”
“Where? Where?” He let himself be led through the midnight corridors. “Where? Oh, if I told you where, you’d never believe.”
“Here’s your bed, you shouldn’t have left it.”
Deep into the white death bed, which smelled of pale, clean mortality awaiting him, a mortality which had the hospital odor in it; the bed which, as he touched it, folded him into fumes and white starched coldness.
“Mars, Mars,” whispered the huge man, late at night. “My best, my very best, my really fine book, yet to be written, yet to be printed, in another year, three centuries away . . .”
“You’re tired.”
“Do you really think so?” murmured Thomas Wolfe. “Was it a dream? Perhaps. A good dream.”
His breathing faltered. Thomas Wolfe was dead.
In the passing years, flowers are found on Tom Wolfe’s grave. And this is not unusual, for many people travel to linger there. But these flowers appear each night. They seem to drop from the sky. They are the color of an autumn moon, their blossoms are immense, and they burn and sparkle their cold, long petals in a blue and white fire.
And when the dawn wind blows they drip away into a silver rain, a shower of white sparks on the air. Tom Wolfe has been dead many, many years, but these flowers never cease. . . .
The End
