“Blind, my body aches and is one eye! I’ll weave eclipse to darken you who dared to darken me. Your veil will be your winding sheet. Your mindless gossamer I’ll bind to strangle you. Leviathan! Leviathan!”
We felt his hands reach out to grasp and hold and kill.
And, last: “Can I do this and bank my fires?”
Quell echoed, in his own weary voice, “Fires.”
And we were silent, standing there, and the captain said no more.
Chapter 7
At last Redleigh said, “Well?”
And Downs lifted his head and looked straight at the first mate and said, “That was unlawful, uncommon, criminal eavesdropping. We have no right!”
“Upon uncommon dangers!”
“Would you mutiny, sir?” said Small.
Redleigh pulled back, a horrified look on his face. “Mutiny?!”
Quell broke in. “He would…take over.”
And we answered mutely, with our own horrified faces.
Redleigh said, “Have you not just heard what is in his heart, what he intends to do?”
Downs replied, “We have. But those thoughts of the captain’s which we have borrowed…why, how do they differ from ours? All men are poet-murderers in their souls, ashamed to bleed it out.”
Small said, “You ask us to judge thoughts!”
“Judge actions then!” Redleigh responded. “Leviathan comes. We are changing our course to meet it. Someone has tampered with the computer—just twenty-four hours ago it said one thing, now it says another.”
Downs said, “And so it goes with machines. Astronomical sums are nice, but blood is best. Flesh is easier. Mind and will are excellent. The captain is all these. The computer doesn’t know I live. The captain does. He looks, he sees, he interprets, he decides. He tells me where to go. And as he is my captain, so I go.”
“Straight to hell,” said Redleigh.
“Then hell it is.” Downs shrugged. “The comet’s birthing-place. The captain has the beast in his sights. I hate beasts too. My captain rouses me with No! And I am his dearest echo.”
Little said, “And I!”
“Quell?” said Redleigh, turning to the green alien.
“I have said too much,” said Quell. “And all of it the captain’s.”
“Ishmael?” said Redleigh.
“I,” I replied, “am afraid.”
Downs and Small stepped away. “Excused, Mr. Redleigh?”
“No!” shouted Redleigh. “Sweet Jesus, he’s blinded you, too. How can I make you see?”
“It’s late in the day for that, Redleigh,” said Small.
“But see you will, dammit! I’m going to the captain. Now. You must stand behind if not with me. You’ll hear it from his own mouth.”
“Is that a command, sir?”
“It is.”
“Well, then,” said Small, “aye, sir.”
“And aye, I guess,” said Downs.
And the three crewmen walked away, Quell and me following, listening for the strange electronic pulse of the captain, near but far.
Chapter 8
“Mr. Redleigh, you have come to mutiny.”
The captain had granted us entrance to his quarters and he stood within, facing us, his strange white eyes seeming to stare.
“Sir,” said Redleigh. “The simple fact is—”
The captain interrupted. “Simple? The sun’s temperature is 20,000 degrees. Yet it will burn Earth. Simple? I distrust people who come with plain facts and then preach calamities. Now, Redleigh, listen. I am giving over command of this spacecraft to you.”
“Captain!” cried Redleigh in surprise.
“Captain no more. You will take the credit for the grand destiny ahead.”
“I have no desire for destinies,” said Redleigh.
“Once you know it, you will desire it. You come with facts? Leave with more than that. Who has seen a comet up close?”
“Why no one, sir, save you.”
“Who has touched a comet’s flesh?”
“Again, no one that we know.”
“What is a comet’s stuff that we should run to welcome it?”
“To the point, Captain.”
“The point! We go as fishers with our nets. We go as miners to a deep and splendid mine of minerals both raw and beautiful. That school of fish, which is Leviathan in space, is most certainly the largest treasure of all time.
Dip our nets in that and bring up miracles of fish, pure energies that put the miracles at Galilee to shame. In that vast treasure house we shall unlock and take of as we will. There must be ten billion mines, so vast their glitter would burn your eyes. Such black diamonds fall from space each night, all night, throughout all our lives, and burn to nothing. We catch that rain. We save its most bright tears to sell in common markets most uncommonly. Who says no to this?”
“Not I—as yet,” said Redleigh, warily.
“Then siphon off the very breath of that great ghost. Its breath is hydrogen and mixtures of such flaming vapors as will light entire civilizations for our children’s children’s lifetimes. Such energy, harnessed, controlled, collected, kept, released, will work atomic wonders for our race, and cause such further wonders of recompense. I see rare bank accounts that will retire us all early, on to madness.”
“Madness?”
“The madness of pleasure and the good life and sweet ease. Leviathan’s breath and body are yours to bank for cash and credit. As for myself, I ask a single thing: leave its soul to me. Well?”
“Why, if that’s the sort of shower that falls from space,” Downs said, “I’ll run out in that rain.”
“Yes! As children run in spring showers!”
And I thought, His poetry has won me, but not his facts.
The captain now turned to Quell and said, “Good Quell, you read my mind. Are not fair weather there and rain and minted silver coins lost in a high new grass?”
And Quell had no answer.
“Redleigh?”
“Damn you, sir.”
“No sooner damned than saved,” replied the captain. “Salvation rings me in. Listen to its sound. Small? Downs?”
“Aye, sir!” said both.
“Quell? Ishmael?” A pause. “Your silence is affirmative.” And, turning to Redleigh: “Where is your mutiny now?”
“You have bought them, sir!” said Redleigh,
“Bid then, and buy them back,” replied the captain.
Later, in the privacy of my own bunk, I made the following entry in my personal journal: We have run from old radio voices, shunned lost moons with lost cities, refused to share glad drinks and fine laughs with lonely spacemen, and ignored rare priests searching for their lost sons.
The list of our sins grows long. Oh God! I must listen then, to space, to see what else is there, what other crimes we might commit in ignorance.
Putting the journal down, I touched a contact on the room’s radio set. At first there was nothing but cold static and then came music, a symphony stranger than any I’d ever heard.
I turned it up and listened with my eyes shut.
The sound of the music caused the sleeping Quell to stir. I switched it off, and from his side of the room came Quell’s voice, urgent.
“Turn it back on, quickly.”
I touched the contact again, and the music returned. It was beautiful, a requiem for the living to be mourned like the dead.
I knew it haunted Quell, for his mind now embraced mine.
“Oh, listen,” he whispered. “Do you hear? Music from my far world.”
“Yours?” I said. “Billions of miles off? Oh, Lord!”
“Lord indeed,” said Quell. “Music that has traveled all the way from my galaxy, and more. That is the music of my father’s father’s suffering and death.”
The music continued to play, somber and funereal.
I felt tears sting my eyes for no reason, and Quell went on: “The dirge my grandfather composed for his own funeral, his great lament.”
“Why, listening,” I wondered aloud, “do I mourn for myself?”
Then Quell reached out with an unseen hand and an invisible mind and spoke to Downs.
“Downs,” he said. “Can you put aside your ship’s tasks for a while and make me a special space suit?”
“I would, sir, if I knew how,” came Downs’s reply.
“I will draw it,” said Quell, “and give you the plan. Come here now.”
“Quell!” I said, alarmed. “What’s this about?”
I sat up, and saw Quell at his desk, his strange hand drawing a strange shape on the computer screen before him.
“There,” said Quell. “The proper suit, decorated with symbols of my lost world.”
“Is this to be your coffin, then?” said Downs, as he entered our room and looked at Quell’s plans.
“All beings in space suits inhabit future coffins of their own use and shape. This is but a darker thing. Cut it from night, solder it with shadows.”
“But why?” Downs wanted to know. “Why do you want a suit of death?”
“Listen,” I urged.
I turned up the otherworldly music. Downs listened and his eyes trembled and his hands began to move.
“God, look at my fingers. It’s as if they have a mind of their own. That dirge does this. Oh, Quell, good Quell, I guess there’s no way but that I must make this terrible suit.”
“Quell,” I interrupted, “that music has been to the far side of the universe and back. Why does it arrive here, now?”
“Because it is the proper time.”
“Quell!”
But silent, he sat there, staring in a fixed position at nothingness.
“Quell,” I urged. “Listen to me.”
Downs put a hand on my shoulder. “He doesn’t hear you.”
“He must feel what I think!” I replied.
“No,” said Downs. “I’ve seen the like before. Whether among the natives in the lost seas of Earth or the far side of space, it’s much the same. Death is speaking to him.”
“Don’t listen, Quell!” I said, and put my hands over his ears, which was stupid, for as Downs then said: “His whole body hears. How will you stop that?”
“Like this!” I cried. “Like this!”
I wrapped my arms around Quell and held him tight, very tight.
Downs said, softly, “Let it be. You might as well try to breathe life into the white marble on a tomb.”
“I will!” I said. “Oh, Quell, it’s Ishmael here! Your friend. Dammit, Quell, I ask, no,
