A large anthology of sci.., p.426
A Large Anthology of Science Fiction, page 426
“What is it?”
“I haven’t even opened it.”
THEY laughed together, her merriment bubbling aloud in her cabin, his echoing silently inside her mind.
“I haven’t time to read a novel,” his thought came, “and drama always bored me, but I must confess to a weakness for poetry. I love to read it aloud, to throw myself into a heroic ballad and rush along, spouting grand phrases as though they were my own and feeling for a moment as though I were really striding the streets of ancient Rome, pushing west on the American frontier or venturing out into space in the first wild, reckless, heroic days of rocket travel. But I soon founder. I get swept away by the rhythm, lost in the intricacies of cadence and rhyme, and, when the pace slows down, when the poem becomes soft and delicate and the meaning is hidden behind a foliage of little gentle words, I lose myself entirely.”
She said softly, “Perhaps I could help you interpret some verses.”
Then she waited, clasping her hands to keep them from trembling with the tiny thrill of excitement she felt.
“That would be kind of you,” he said after a pause. “You could read, there, and I could listen, here, and feel what you feel as you read . . . or, if you wished . . .” Another pause. “Would you care to come down?”
She could not help smiling. “You’re too good a mind reader. A girl can’t have any secrets any more.”
“Now look here,” he burst out. “I wouldn’t have said anything, but I was so lonely and you’re the only friendly person I’ve come in contact with and . . .”
“Don’t be silly,” she laughed. “Of course I’ll come down and read to you. I’d love to. What’s your cabin number?”
“It hasn’t got a number because—actually I work on this ship so I’m away from the passengers’ quarters. But I can direct you easily. Just start down the hall to your left and . . .”
“My dear sir,” she cried, “just wait a minute! I can’t come visiting in my robe, you know; I’ll have to change. But while I dress, you must take your spying little thoughts away. If I detect you peeking in here at the wrong moment, I’ll run straight to Captain Blake and have him prepare his special lead-lined cell for one unhappy telepath. So you just run along. When I’m ready, I’ll call you and you can lead me to your lair.”
He thought only the one word, “Hurry,” but in the silence after he was gone she fancied she heard her heart echoing him, loud in the stillness.
SHE laughed gaily to herself. “Now stop acting like a schoolgirl before the Junior Prom. You’ve got to get busy and wash and dress and comb and brush.” And then to her reflection in the mirror: “Aren’t you a lucky girl? You’re still millions and billions of miles from Earth and it’s starting already, and he’s going to do research there for some time, and maybe at the university in your home town if you tell him just how nice it is, and he doesn’t know any other girls, you’d have an inside track. Now you’d better get going or you’ll never be ready.
“For reading poetry, don’t you think this dress is just the thing, this nice soft blue one that goes so well with your tan and shows your legs, which are really quite pretty, you know . . . And your silver sandals and those silver pins . . . just a touch of perfume . . . That’s right; and now a little lipstick. You do have a pretty smile . . . There, that’s right. Now stop admiring yourself and let’s go.”
She moved to the bookshelf, frowning now, considered, selected and rejected. Finally she settled on three slim books bound in russet leather, in glossy plastic, in faded cloth. She took a little purse from the table, put the cigarette case into it. Then, with a laugh, she took one cigarette and slipped it into a tiny pocket on her skirt.
“I really meant to bring you one,” she whispered to the empty air, “but wasn’t I mean to tease?”
In the corridor, she walked quickly past the rows of closed doors to the tiny refreshment stand at the foot of the dining room stairs. The attendant rose from his stool as she approached, and came to the counter.
“I’d like two frosted starlights, please,” she said, “on a tray.”
“Two,” said the attendant, and nothing more, but his eyebrow climbed up his forehead, hung for a second, then slowly drooped back to normal, as if to say that after all these years he no longer puzzled about a lovely young girl who came around in the middle of a Wednesday rest period, dressed like Saturday night and smelling of perfume, ordering two intoxicating drinks—when she was obviously traveling alone.
LENORE felt a thrill of secret pleasure go through her, a feeling of possessing a delicious secret, a delightful sensation of reckless gaiety, of life stirring throughout the sleepy ship, of a web of secrets and countersecrets hidden from everyone but this unconcerned observer.
She walked back down the corridor, balancing the tray. When a little splashed over the rim of the tall glasses, she took a sip from each, tasting the sweet, cold liquid in her throat.
When she came to the head of the stairs, she realized that she did not even know her telepath’s name. Closing her eyes, she said very slowly and distinctly inside her head, “Mr. Fairheart?”
Instantly his thought was with her, overpowering, as breathless as an embrace. “Where are you?”
“At the head of the central stairs.”
“Down you go.”
She went down the stairs, through more corridors, down more stairs, while he guided her steps. Once she paused to sip again at each glass when the liquid splashed as she was going down. The ice tickled her nose and made her sneeze.
“You live a long way down,” she said.
“I’ve got to be near my charges,” he answered. “I told you I work on the ship; I’m a zoologist classifying any of the new specimens of extraterrestrial life they’re always picking up. And I always get stuck with the worst quarters on the ship. Why, I can’t even call all my suite my own. The whole front room is filled with some sort of ship’s gear that my steward stumbles over every meal time.”
She went on and on, down and down. “How many flights?” she wondered. “Two or twelve or twenty?” Now, why couldn’t she remember? Only four little sips and her mind felt so cloudy. Down another corridor, and what was that funny smell? These passages were poorly ventilated in the lower levels; probably that was what made her feel so dizzy.
“Only one more flight,” he whispered. “Only one more.”
Down and along and then the door. She paused, conscious of rising excitement, conscious of her beating heart.
Dimly she noticed the sign on the door. “You—you mean whatever it is you’re taking care of is in there with you?”
“Don’t be frightened,” his persuasive thought came. “It can’t hurt you. It’s locked in a cage.”
Then she slid the bolt and turned the handle. Her head hurt for an instant; and she was inside, a blue and silver shadow in the dim anteroom, with the tray in her hand and the books under her arm and her pulse hammering.
She looked around the dim anteroom, at the spidery tangle of orange and black ropes against the left-hand wall; then at the doorway in the right-hand wall with the warm light streaming through. He was standing in the second room, one hand on the chair for support, the other extended toward her. For the first time he spoke aloud.
“Hello, butterfly,” he said.
“Hello,” she said. She smiled and walked forward into the light. She reached out for his hand.
Then she stopped short, her hand pressed against an impenetrable wall.
SHE could see him standing there, smiling, reaching for her hand, but there was an invisible barrier between them. Then, slowly, his room began to fade, the light dimmed, his figure grew watery, transparent, vanished. She was standing, staring at the riveted steel bulkhead of a compartment which was lit only by the dim light filtering through the thick glass over the transom.
She stood there frozen, and the ice in the glasses tinkled nervously. Then the tray slipped from her fingers and clattered to the floor. Icy liquid splashed the silver sandals. In the silent gloom she stood immobile, her eyes wide in her white face, her fist pressed to her mouth, stifling a scream.
Something touched her gently at head and wrist and ankle—all over her body. The web clung, delicate as lace, strong as steel.
Even if she had been able to move, she could not have broken free as the thing against the wall began to clamber down the strands on eight furred legs.
“Hello, butterfly,” he said again.
DEATH OF A SPACEMAN
Walter M. Miller, Jr.
The manner in which a man has lived is often the key to the way he will die. Take old man Donegal, for example. Most of his adult life was spent in digging a hole through space to learn what was on the other side. Would he go out the same way?
OLD DONEGAL was dying. They had all known it was coming, and they watched it come—his haggard wife, his daughter, and now his grandson, home on emergency leave from the pre-astronautics academy. Old Donegal knew it too, and had known it from the beginning, when he had begun to lose control of his legs and was forced to walk with a cane. But most of the time, he pretended to let them keep the secret they shared with the doctors—that the operations had all been failures, and that the cancer that fed at his spine would gnaw its way brainward until the paralysis engulfed vital organs, and then Old Donegal would cease to be. It would be cruel to let them know that he knew. Once, weeks ago, he had joked about the approaching shadows.
“Buy the plot back where people won’t walk over it, Martha,” he said. “Get it way back under the cedars—next to the fence. There aren’t many graves back there yet. I want to be alone.”
“Don’t talk that way, Donny!” his wife had choked. “You’re not dying.”
His eyes twinkled maliciously. “Listen, Martha, I want to be buried face-down. I want to be buried with my back to space, understand? Don’t let them lay me out like a lily.”
“Donny, please!”
“They oughta face a man the way he’s headed,” Donegal grunted. “I been up—way up. Now I’m going straight down.”
Martha had fled from the room in tears. He had never done it again, except to the interns and nurses, who, while they insisted that he was going to get well, didn’t mind joking with him about it.
Martha can bear my death, he thought, can bear pre-knowledge of it. But she couldn’t bear thinking that he might take it calmly. If he accepted death gracefully, it would be like deliberately leaving her, and Old Donegal had decided to help her believe whatever would be comforting to her in such a troublesome moment.
“When’ll they let me out of this bed again?” he complained. “Be patient, Donny,” she sighed. “It won’t be long. You’ll be up and around before you know it.”
“Back on the moon-run, maybe?” he offered, “Listen, Martha, I been planet-bound too long. I’m not too old for the moon-run, am I? Sixty-three’s not so old.”
That had been carrying things too far. She knew he was hoaxing, and dabbed at her eyes again. The dead must humor the mourners, he thought, and the sick must comfort the visitors. It was always so.
But it was harder, now that the end was near. His eyes were hazy, and his thoughts unclear. He could move his arms a little, clumsily, but feeling was gone from them. The rest of his body was lost to him. Sometimes he seemed to feel his stomach and his hips, but the sensation was mostly an illusion offered by higher nervous centers, like the “ghost-arm” that an amputee continues to feel. The wires were down, and he was cut off from himself.
He lay wheezing on the hospital bed, in his own room, in his own rented flat. Gaunt and unshaven, gray as winter twilight, he lay staring at the white net curtains that billowed gently in the breeze from the open window. There was no sound in the room but the sound of breathing and the loud ticking of an alarm clock. Occasionally he heard a chair scraping on the stone terrace next door, and the low mutter of voices, sometimes laughter, as the servants of the Keith mansion arranged the terrace for late afternoon guests.
With considerable effort, he rolled his head toward Martha who sat beside the bed, pinchfaced and weary.
“You ought to get some sleep,” he said.
“I slept yesterday. Don’t talk, Donny. It tires you.”
“You ought to get more sleep. You never sleep enough. Are you afraid I’ll get up and run away if you go to sleep for awhile?”
She managed a brittle smile. “There’ll be plenty of time for sleep when . . . when you’re well again.” The brittle smile fled and she swallowed hard, like swallowing a fish-bone. He glanced down, and noticed that she was squeezing his hand spasmodically.
There wasn’t much left of the hand, he thought. Bones and ugly tight-stretched hide spotted with brown. Bulging knuckles with yellow cigarette stains. My hand. He tried to tighten it, tried to squeeze Martha’s thin one in return. He watched it open and contract a little, but it was like operating a remote-control mechanism. Goodbye, hand, you’re leaving me the way my legs did, he told it. I’ll see you again in hell. How hammy can you get, Old Donegal? You maudlin ass.
“Requiescat,” he muttered over the hand, and let it lie in peace.
Perhaps she heard him. “Donny,” she whispered, leaning closer, “won’t you let me call the priest now? Please.”
He rattled a sigh and rolled his head toward the window again. “Are the Keiths having a party today?” he asked. “Sounds like they’re moving chairs out on the terrace.”
“Please, Donny, the priest?”
He let his head roll aside and closed his eyes, as if asleep. The bed shook slightly as she quickly caught at his wrist to feel for a pulse.
“If I’m not dying, I don’t need a priest,” he said sleepily. “That’s not right,” she scolded softly. “You know that’s not right, Donny. You know better.”
Maybe I’m being too rough on her? he wondered. He hadn’t minded getting baptized her way, and married her way, and occasionally priest-handled the way she wanted him to when he was home from a space-run, but when it came to dying, Old Donegal wanted to do it his own way.
He opened his eyes at the sound of a bench being dragged across the stone terrace. “Martha, what kind of a party are the Keiths having today?”
“I wouldn’t know,” she said stiffly. “You’d think they’d have a little more respect. You’d think they’d put it off a few days.”
“Until—?”
“Until you feel better.”
“I feel fine, Martha. I like parties. I’m glad they’re having one. Pour me a drink, will you? I can’t reach the bottle anymore.”
“It’s empty.”
“No it isn’t, Martha, it’s still a quarter full. I know. I’ve been watching it.”
“You shouldn’t have it, Donny. Please don’t.”
“But this is a party, Martha. Besides, the doctor says I can have whatever I want. Whatever I want, you hear? That means I’m getting well, doesn’t it?”
“Sure, Donny, sure. Getting well.”
“The whiskey, Martha. Just a finger in a tumbler, no more. I want to feel like it’s a party.”
Her throat was rigid as she poured it. She helped him get the tumbler to his mouth. The liquor seared his throat, and he gagged a little as the fumes clogged his nose. Good whiskey, the best—but he couldn’t take it any more. He eyed the green stamp on the neck of the bottle on the bedtable and grinned. He hadn’t had whiskey like that since his spacedays. Couldn’t afford it now, not on a blastman’s pension.
He remembered how he and Caid used to smuggle a couple of fifths aboard for the moon-run. If they caught you, it meant suspension, but there was no harm in it, not for the blastroom men who had nothing much to do from the time the ship acquired enough velocity for the long, long coaster ride until they started the rockets again for lunar landing. You could drink a fifth, jettison the bottle through the trash lock, and sober up before you were needed again. It was the only way to pass the time in the cramped cubicle, unless you ruined your eyes trying to read by the glow-lamps. Old Donegal chuckled. If he and Caid had stayed on the run, Earth would have a ring by now, like Saturn—a ring of Old Granddad bottles.
“You said it, Donny-boy,” said the misty man by the billowing curtains. “Who else knows the Gegenschein is broken glass?”
Donegal laughed. Then he wondered what the man was doing there. The man was lounging against the window, and his unzipped space rig draped about him in an old familiar way. Loose plug-in connections and hose-ends dangled about his lean body. He was freckled and grinning.
“Caid,” Old Donegal breathed softly.
“What did you say, Donny?” Martha answered.
Old Donegal blinked hard and shook his head. Something let go with a soggy snap, and the misty man was gone. I’d better take it easy on the whiskey, he thought. You got to wait, Donegal, old lush, until Nora and Ken get here. You can’t get drunk until they’re gone, or you might get them mixed up with memories like Caid’s.
Car doors slammed in the street below. Martha glanced toward the window.
“Think it’s them? I wish they’d get here. I wish they’d hurry.”
Martha arose and tiptoed to the window. She peered down toward the sidewalk, put on a sharp frown. He heard a distant mutter of voices and occasional laughter, with group-footsteps milling about on the sidewalk. Martha murmured her disapproval and closed the window.
“Leave it open,” he said.
“But the Keiths’ guests are starting to come. There’ll be such a racket.” She looked at him hopefully, the way she did when she prompted his manners before company came.
Maybe it wasn’t decent to listen in on a party when you were dying, he thought. But that wasn’t the reason. Donegal, your chamber-pressure’s dropping off. Your brains are in your butt-end, where a spacer’s brains belong, but your butt-end died last month. She wants the window closed for her own sake, not yours.
