Quell let us go, dropping his arms, his eyes closed.
“Oh, God…,” Redleigh said, touched and anguished.
“God, yes,” said Small. “No more, no more of this. It must be stopped.”
Quell drew in a breath, and then again the captain’s voice came. “Eternal noons, I asked, O Lord! Eternal midnight, my reward. O whiteness there! My pale and wandering lust. O spirit dread, stand forth! This time I will not swerve. My path is fixed beyond the gravities! Tracked like the worlds that fire about the sun, so runs my soul in one trajectory.
“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, I demand—let it go! This very instant, stop! I’ll be very angry with you, if this goes on. I won’t speak to you again! I’ll, I’ll…” And here I paused, for I could not breathe. “I shall weep.”
I was surprised by my own tears and pulled back to see them falling on my numbed palms. I held out my hands to Quell, showing him those tears.
“Quell, look, please look,” I pleaded.
But Quell did not see.
I tried to think what I must do.
And then I turned and stabbed at the radio contact on the console. The far funeral music died.
I stared at Quell and waited. An echo of the music lingered in the room.
“He still hears it,” said Downs.
Suddenly, breaking the silence, a horn, a klaxon, a bell, and a voice: “Red alert! Crew to stations! Red alert!”
I turned and ran, following Downs along the corridor toward the main deck.
Reaching my post, I brought up the lights on the multilevel screen before me. A pattern of atomic light, many-colored, played before my eyes.
“What is that?” I wondered aloud.
Redleigh came to stand behind me, and posed the question, “Leviathan?”
The captain approached with his pulsing electric sound.
“No. The great comet’s beyond, still some distance away. It sends a messenger ahead to warn us off. It fires a storm of gravities, atomic whirlwinds, dust storms of meteors, cosmic bombardments, solar explosions. Pay it no mind. That is but a mere mote of dust compared to Leviathan.”
I tuned into the sensors on my console, and it was as the captain said. Somewhere, nearly out of range, far off but approaching fast, was a behemoth of unimaginable size and power.
Our spacecraft trembled.
CHAPTER 9
The trembling became more convulsive, the light on the screen more erratic. The sound grew loud, but, we knew, it was not the immense sound Leviathan might make when it arrived.
“Captain,” said Redleigh. “Permission to turn back. We’ll be destroyed.”
“Head on, Mr. Redleigh,” said the captain. “It’s merely testing us.”
The storm on the screen rose and fell and rose again. And then, a sudden silence.
“What?” said Redleigh.
The captain said, “What, what, indeed!”
“It’s gone,” I said, checking my screen again in disbelief. “The storm that ran before the comet is gone. But what of Leviathan itself?”
I ran some more scans, searching the vast expanse around our ship for hostile entities. “The comet! It’s vanished, too! It’s gone from the sensors.”
“No!” said the captain.
“Yes,” I said. “According to the readings, all the space around us is empty.”
“Thank God,” said Redleigh, almost to himself.
“No, I say, no!” the captain yelled. “My eyes see nothing. Yet—it
must be there. I can almost touch it. I feel it. It is—”
A familiar voice broke in. “Gone,” Quell said, quietly, staring at the emptiness of space on the computer screen. “Gone.”
“Quell!” I cried. “You’ve come back! Thank God.”
Quell said nothing.
“Quell, what happened,” I asked. “Out there?”
Quell moved forward slowly. “The funeral music—it’s gone. Our traveling burial grounds, gone. The comet, the nightmare, all…gone.”
“Yes,” I said. “But why?”
Quell remained silent.
“Out with it, man!!” cried the captain.
Quell finally turned away from the screen and spoke to us. “That storm has wounded Time. We have turned a corner in Eternity. The very stuff of the void, the abyss has been…turned wrong side out…atom on atom…molecule on molecule…particle on particle reversed…I feel it…so.”
And Quell reached out a hand as if his mind had fled.
“It can’t be!” I heard myself say.
“So say I!” said the captain, disbelieving.
“Space says otherwise,” said Quell, calmly. “The storm has picked us up and thrown us back two thousand years. The past has become our present.”
“If this is now the past,” said Redleigh, “what year is it?”
Quell thought for a few moments. “Before Columbus? Yes, certainly. Before the birth of Christ? Most likely. Before your Caesar built his Roman roads through Britain’s moors, or Plato spoke or Aristotle listened? Maybe. That great star, the beast, it pities us.”
“Pity?” said the captain. “How can you say pity?”
Quell searched through space with eye and mind. “It would not fight with us. Instead, it would hide us deep, so it would not be forced to war against us. It has given us a chance, a path away from it.
That, sir, is pity.”
“I will have none!” the captain said.
> “Elijah,” I whispered.
“What?” the captain turned toward my voice.
“Elijah. The day before our liftoff from Earth. Elijah said—”
“Said what?” the captain demanded impatiently.
“‘Far out in space, there’ll come a time when you see land where there is no land, find time where there is no time; when ancient kings will reflesh their bones and reseat their crowns…’”
“Is that time now?” asked Redleigh.
And Quell replied, “Yes, now. For look. And…feel.”
I finished the memory of Elijah’s words: “‘Then, oh then, ship, ship’s captain, ship’s men, all, all will be destroyed! All save one.’”
All save one, I thought, as the captain exploded with rage. “Fools, damn fools!” he cried. “We do not take this past, accept these ancient years. We do not hide in pyramids or run from locust plagues to cower, grovel underneath the robes of Christ! We will stand forth.”
He turned and strode toward the lift to the upper reaches. “The airlock, open it! Although blind, I will go forth and find the monster myself!”
CHAPTER 10
Quell’s mind moved outside the ship to find the captain, alone.
And though I could not see, I heard, and what the captain finally said was this: “What? Nothing? All quiet, gone, spent? Is this the end? No more the hunt, the journey, and the goal? That terrifies me most: No more the goal! From here on then, what is the captain for? What does he do, if time and circumstance knock all the mountains down to one dull flat and endless plain, one long bleak winter afternoon, not even tea and simple bread to brighten it?
“Oh Christ, the thought of mindless noons that have no ends, or end in maunderings, stale tea leaves in a cup which tell no murders and no blood, and so no life—that breaks my bones. The sound of one leaf turning in a book would crack my spine. One dust mote burning on a sunlit hearth would smother my soul. The simple things that snug themselves in halls too clean, too quiet, that lie in well-made beds and smile idiot smiles! Oh, turn away. Such peace is a winepress to crush your soul.
“And yet…God, feel…the universe itself fills me this hour with quiet joy. Unseen by me, there one small fire goes out, but yet another freshens itself forth in birth. It is my heart’s midnight, but yet some foundling sun reminds me that somewhere a million light-years on, a boy gets out of bed in cold well-water morn; the circus now arrives, a life’s begun with animals and flags and bunting and bright lights. Would I deny his right, his joy at rising to run forth and greet the show? I would deny, I would!