“I—I’m afraid to go. I have this fear something may happen to you.”
“I shall survive,” replied Shaw tartly, “but only if you warn your Captain that a vast meteor shower approaches. He must shift course a few hundred thousand miles. Done?”
“Done.” But still Willis did not leave.
“Mr. Shaw,” he said, at last. “What . . . what do you do while the rest of us sleep?”
“Do? Why, bless you. I listen to my tuning fork. Then, I write symphonies between my ears.”
Willis was gone.
In the dark, alone, the old man bent his head. A soft hive of dark bees began to hum under his honey-sweet breath.
Four hours later, Willis, off watch, crept into his sleep-cubicle.
In half-light, the mouth was waiting for him.
Clive’s mouth. It licked its lips and whispered:
“Everyone’s talking. About you making an ass out of yourself visiting a two-hundred-year-old intellectual relic, you, you, you. Jesus, the psychomed’ll be out tomorrow to X-ray your stupid skull!”
“Better that than what you men do all night every night,” said Willis.
“What we do is us.”
“Then why not let me be me?”
“Because it’s unnatural.” The tongue licked and darted. “We all miss you. Tonight we piled all the grand toys in the midst of the wild room and—”
“I don’t want to hear it!”
“Well, then,” said the mouth, “I might just trot down and tell all this to your old gentleman friend—”
“Don’t go near him!”
“I might.” The lips moved in the shadows. “You can’t stand guard on him forever. Some night soon, when you’re asleep, someone might—tamper with him, eh? Scramble his electronic eggs so he’ll talk vaudeville instead of Saint Joan? Ha, yes. Think. Long journey. Crew’s bored. Practical joke like that, worth a million to see you froth. Beware, Charlie. Best come play with us.”
Willis, eyes shut, let the blaze out of him.
“Whoever dares to touch Mr. Shaw, so help me God, I’ll kill!”
He turned violently on his side, gnawing the back of his fist.
In the half-dark, he could sense Clive’s mouth still moving.
“Kill? Well, well. Pity. Sweet dreams.”
An hour later, Willis gulped two pills and fell stunned into sleep.
In the middle of the night he dreamed that they were burning good Saint Joan at the stake and, in the midst of burning, the plain-potato maiden turned to an old man stoically wrapped around with ropes and vines. The old man’s beard was fiery red even before the flames reached it, and his bright blue eyes were fixed fiercely upon Eternity, ignoring the fire.
“Recant!” cried a voice. “Confess and recant! Recant!”
“There is nothing to confess, therefore no need for recantation,” said the old man quietly.
The flames leaped up his body like a mob of insane and burning mice.
“Mr. Shaw!” screamed Willis.
He sprang awake.
Mr. Shaw.
The cabin was silent. Clive lay asleep.
On his face was a smile.
The smile made Willis pull back, with a cry. He dressed. He ran.
Like a leaf in autumn he fell down the air-tube, growing older and heavier with each long instant.
The storage pit where the old man “slept” was much more quiet than it had a right to be.
Willis bent. His hand trembled. At last, he touched the old man.
“Sir—?”
There was no motion. The beard did not bristle. Nor the eyes fire themselves to blue flames. Nor the mouth tremble with gentle blasphemies . . .
“Oh, Mr. Shaw,” he said. “Are you dead, then, oh God, are you really dead?”
The old man was what they called dead when a machine no longer spoke or tuned an electric thought or moved. His dreams and philosophies were snow in his shut mouth.
Willis turned the body this way and that looking for some cut, wound, or bruise on the skin.
He thought of the years ahead, the long traveling years and no Mr. Shaw to walk with, gibber with, laugh with. Women in the storage shelves, yes, women in the cots late at night, laughing their strange taped laughters and moving their strange machined motions, and saying the same dumb things that were said on a thousand worlds on a thousand nights.
“Oh, Mr. Shaw,” he murmured at last. “Who did this to you?”
Silly boy, whispered Mr. Shaw’s memory voice. You know.
I know, thought Willis.
He whispered a name and ran away.
“Damn you, you killed him!”
Willis seized Clive’s bedclothes, at which instant Clive, like a robot, popped wide his eyes. The smile remained constant.
“You can’t kill what was never alive,” he said.
“Son of a bitch!”
He struck Clive once in the mouth, after which Clive was on his feet, laughing in some strange wild way, wiping blood from his lips.
“What did you do to him?” cried Willis.
“Not much, just—”
But that was the end of their conversation.
“On posts!” a voice cried. “Collision course!”
Bells rang. Sirens shrieked.
In the midst of their shared rage, Willis and Clive turned cursing to seize emergency spacesuits and helmets off the cabin walls.
“Damn, oh, damn, oh—d—”
Half-through his last damn, Clive gasped. He vanished out a sudden hole in the side of the rocket.
The meteor had come and gone in a billionth of a second. On its way out, it had taken all the air in the ship with it through a hole the size of a small car.
My God, thought Willis, he’s gone forever.
What saved Willis was a ladder he stood near, against which the swift river of air crushed him on its way into Space. For a moment he could not move or breathe. Then the suction was finished, all the air in the ship gone.
There was only time to adjust the pressure in his suit and helmet, and glance wildly around at the veering ship which was being bombarded now as in a space war. Men ran, or rather floated, shouting wildly, everywhere.
Shaw, thought Willis unreasonably, and had to laugh. Shaw.
A final meteor in a tribe of meteors struck the motor section of the rocket and blew the entire ship apart. Shaw, Shaw, oh, Shaw, thought Willis.
He saw the rocket fly apart like a shredded balloon, all its gases only impelling it to more disintegration. With the bits and pieces went wild crowds of men, dismissed from school, from life, from all and everything, never to meet face to face again, not even to say farewell, the dismissal was so abrupt and their deaths and isolation such a swift surprise.
Good-bye, thought Willis.
But there was no true good-bye. He could hear no weeping and no laments over his radio. Of all the crew, he was the last and final and only one alive, because of his suit, his helmet, his oxygen, miraculously spared. For what? To be alone and fall?
To be alone. To fall.
Oh, Mr. Shaw, oh, sir, he thought.
“No sooner called than delivered,” whispered a voice.
It was impossible, but . . .
Drifting, spinning, the ancient doll with the wild red beard and blazing blue eyes fell across darkness as if impelled by God’s breath, on a whim.
Instinctively, Willis opened his arms.
And the old party landed there, smiling, breathing heavily, or pretending to breathe heavily, as was his bent.
“Well, well, Willis! Quite a treat, eh?”
“Mr. Shaw! You were dead!”
“Poppycock! Someone bent some wires in me. The collision knocked things back together. The disconnection is here below my chin. A villain cut me there. So if I fall dead again, jiggle under my jaw and wire me up, eh?”
“Yes, sir!”
“How much food do you carry at this moment, Willis?”
“Enough to last two hundred days in Space.”
“Dear me, that’s fine, fine! And self-recycling oxygen units, also, for two hundred days?”
“Yes, sir. Now, how long will your batteries last, Mr. Shaw?”
“Ten thousand years!” the old man sang out happily. “Yes, I vow, I swear! I am fitted with solar-cells which will collect God’s universal light until I wear out my circuits.”
“Which means you will outtalk me, Mr. Shaw, long after I have stopped eating and breathing.”
“At which point you must dine on conversation, and breathe past participles instead of air. But, we must hold the thought of rescue uppermost. Are not the chances good?”
“Rockets do come by. And I am equipped with radio signals—”
“Which even now cry out into the deep night: I’m here with ramshackle Shaw, eh?”
I’m here with ramshackle Shaw, thought Willis, and was suddenly warm in winter.
“Well, then, while we’re waiting to be rescued, Charles Willis, what next?”
“Next? Why—”
They fell away down Space alone but not alone, fearful but elated, and now grown suddenly quiet.
“Say it, Mr. Shaw.”
“Say what?”
“You know. Say it again.”
“Well, then.” They spun lazily, holding to each other. “Isn’t life miraculous? Matter and force, yes, matter and force making itself over into intelligence and will.”
“Is that what we are, sir?”
“We are, bet ten thousand bright tin-whistles on it, we are. Shall I say more, young Willis?”
“Please, sir,” laughed Willis. “I want some more!”
And the old man spoke and the young man listened and the young man spoke and the old man hooted and they fell around a corner of Universe away out of sight, eating and talking, talking and eating, the young man biting gumball foods, the old man devouring sunlight with his solar-cell eyes, and the last that was seen of them they were gesticulating and babbling and conversing and waving their hands until their voices faded into Time and the solar system turned over in its sleep and covered them with a blanket of dark and light, and whether or not a rescue ship named Rachel, seeking her lost children, ever came by and found them, who can tell, who would truly ever want to know?
The end
