The workmen trotted up to him, grimy and panting. Krane gaped at them in a mixture of fury and bewilderment.
“Hallmyer!” he shouted. “Hallmyer!”
Hallmyer pushed through the crowd. His eyes gleamed with triumph.
“Too bad,” he said. “I’m sorry, Steven—”
“You bastard!” Krane shouted. He grasped Hallmyer by the lapels and shook him once. Then he dropped him and started into the shed.
Hallmyer snapped orders to the workmen and an instant later a body hurtled against Krane’s calves and spilled him to the ground. He lurched to his feet, fists swinging. Umber was alongside, growling over the roar of the flames. Krane battered a man in the face, and saw him stagger back against a second. He lifted a knee in a vicious drive that sent the last workman crumpling to the ground. Then he ducked his head and plunged into the shop.
The scorch felt cool at first, but when he reached the ladder and began mounting to the port, he screamed with the agony of his burns. Umber was howling at the foot of the ladder, and Krane realized that the dog could never escape from the rocket blasts. He reached down and hauled Umber into the ship.
Krane was reeling as he closed and locked the port. He retained consciousness barely long enough to settle himself in the spring hammock. Then instinct alone prompted his hands to reach out toward the control board; instinct and the frenzied refusal to let his beautiful ship waste itself in the flames. He would fail—yes. But he would fail trying.
His fingers tripped the switches. The ship shuddered and roared. And blackness descended over him.
How long was he unconscious? There was no telling. Krane awoke with cold pressing against his face and body, and the sound of frightened yelps in his ears. Krane looked up and saw Umber tangled in the springs and straps of the hammock. His first impulse was to laugh, then suddenly he realized; he had looked up! He had looked up at the hammock.
He was lying curled in the cup of the crystal nose. The ship had risen high—perhaps almost to Roche’s zone, to the limit of the Earth’s gravitational attraction, but then without guiding hands at the controls to continue its flight, had turned and was dropping back toward Earth. Krane peered through the crystal and gasped.
Below him was the ball of the Earth. It looked three times the size of the Moon. And it was no longer his Earth. It was a globe of fire mottled with black clouds. At the northernmost pole there was a tiny patch of white, and even as Krane watched, it was suddenly blotted over with hazy tones of red, scarlet, and crimson. Hallmyer had been right.
Krane lay frozen in the cup of the nose as the ship descended, watching the flames gradually fade away to leave nothing but the dense blanket of black around the Earth. He lay numb with horror, unable to understand—unable to reckon up a people snuffed out, a green fair planet reduced to ashes and cinders. Everything that was once dear and close to him—gone. He could not think of Evelyn.
Air, whistling outside, awoke some instinct in him. The few shreds of reason left told him to go down with his ship and forget everything in the thunder and destruction, but the instinct of life forced him to action. He climbed up to the store chest and prepared for the landing. Parachute, a small oxygen tank—a knapsack of supplies. Only half aware of what he was doing he dressed for the descent, buckled on the ‘chute and opened the port. Umber whined pathetically, and he took the heavy dog in his arms and stepped out into space.
But space hadn’t been so clogged, the way it was now. Then it had been difficult to breathe. But that was because the air had been rare—not filled with clogging grit like now.
Every breath was a lungful of ground glass—or ashes—or cinders—he had returned to a suffocating black present that hugged him with soft weight and made him fight for breath. Krane struggled in panic, and then relaxed.
It had happened before. A long time past he’d been buried deep under ashes when he’d stopped to remember. Weeks ago—or days—or months. Krane clawed with his hands, inching out of the mound of cinders that the wind had thrown over him. Presently he emerged into the light again. The wind had died away. It was time to begin his crawl to the sea once more.
The vivid pictures of his memory scattered again before the grim vista that stretched out ahead. Krane scowled. He remembered too much, and too often. He had the vague hope that if he remembered hard enough, he might change one of the things he had done—just a very little thing—and then all this would become untrue. He thought: It might help if everyone remembered and wished at the same time—but there isn’t any everyone. I’m the only one. I’m the last memory on Earth. I’m the last life.
He crawled. Elbows, knee, elbows, knee—And then Hallmyer was crawling alongside and making a great game of it. He chortled and plunged in the cinders like a happy sea lion.
Krane said: “But why do we have to get to the sea?”
Hallmyer blew a spume of ashes.
“Ask her,” he said, pointing to Krane’s other side.
Evelyn was there, crawling seriously, intently, mimicking Krane’s smallest action.
“It’s because of our house,” she said. “You remember our house, darling? High on the cliff. We were going to live there forever and ever. I was there when you left. Now you’re coming back to the house at the edge of the sea. Your beautiful flight is over, dear, and you’re coming back to me. We’ll live together, just we two, like Adam and Eve—”
Krane said: “That’s nice.”
Then Evelyn turned her head and screamed: “Oh, Steven! Watch out!” and Krane felt the menace closing in on him again. Still crawling, he stared back at the vast gray plains of ash, and saw nothing. When he looked at Evelyn again he saw only his shadow, sharp and black. Presently, it, too, faded away as the marching shaft of sunlight passed.
But the dread remained. Evelyn had warned him twice, and she was always right. Krane stopped and turned, and settled himself to watch. If he was really being followed, he would see whatever it was, coming along his tracks.
There was a painful moment of lucidity. It cleaved through his fever and bewilderment, bringing with it the sharpness and strength of a knife.
I’m mad, he thought. The corruption in my leg has spread to my brain. There is no Evelyn, no Hallmyer, no menace. In all this land there is no life but mine—and even ghosts and spirits of the underworld must have perished in the inferno that girdled the planet. No—there is nothing but me and my sickness. I’m dying—and when I perish, everything will perish. Only a mass of lifeless cinders will go on.
But there was a movement.
Instinct again—Krane dropped his head and lay still. Through slitted eyes he watched the ashen plains, wondering if death was playing tricks with his eyes. Another façade of rain was beating down toward him, and he hoped he could make sure before all vision was obliterated.
Yes. There.
A quarter mile back, a gray-brown shape was flitting along the gray surface. Despite the drone of the distant rain, Krane could hear the whisper of trodden cinders and see the little clouds kicking up. Stealthily he groped for the revolver in the knapsack as his mind reached feebly for explanations and recoiled from fear.
The thing approached, and suddenly Krane squinted and understood. He recalled Umber kicking with fear and springing away from him when the ‘chute landed them on the ashen face of the Earth.
“Why, it’s Umber,” he murmured. He raised himself. The dog halted. “Here, boy!” Krane croaked gaily. “Here, boy!”
He was overcome with joy. He realized that loneliness had hung over him, a horrible sensation of oneness in emptiness. Now his was not the only life. There was another. A friendly life that could offer love and companionship. Hope kindled again.
“Here, boy!” he repeated. “Come on, boy—”
After a while he stopped trying to snap his fingers. The Mastiff hung back, showing fangs and a lolling tongue. The dog was emaciated and its eyes gleamed red in the dusk. As Krane called once more, the dog snarled. Puffs of ash leaped beneath its nost
rils.
He’s hungry, Krane thought, that’s all. He reached into the knapsack and at the gesture the dog snarled again. Krane withdrew the chocolate bar and laboriously peeled off the paper and silver foil. Weakly he tossed it toward Umber. It fell far short. After a minute of savage uncertainty, the dog advanced slowly and snapped up the food. Ashes powered its muzzle. It licked its chops ceaselessly and continued to advance on Krane.
Panic jerked within him. A voice persisted: This is no friend. He has no love or companionship for you. Love and companionship have vanished from the land along with life. Now there is nothing left but hunger.
“No—” Krane whispered. “That isn’t right that we should tear at each other and seek to devour—”
But Umber was advancing with a slinking sidle, and his teeth showed sharp and white. And even as Krane stared at him, the dog snarled and lunged.
Krane thrust up an arm under the dog’s muzzle, but the weight of the charge carried him backward. He cried out in agony as his broken, swollen leg was struck by the weight of the dog. With his free hand he struck weakly, again and again, scarcely feeling the grind of teeth on his left arm. Then something metallic was pressed under him and he realized he was lying on the revolver he had let fall.
He groped for it and prayed the cinders had not clogged it. As Umber let go his arm and tore at his throat, Krane brought the gun up and jabbed the muzzle blindly against the dog’s body. He pulled and pulled the trigger until the roars died away and only empty clicks sounded. Umber shuddered in the ashes before him, his body nearly shot in two. Thick scarlet stained the gray.
Evelyn and Hallmyer looked down sadly at the broken animal. Evelyn was crying, and Hallmyer reached nervous fingers through his hair in the same old gesture.
“This is the finish, Steven,” he said. “You’ve killed part of yourself. Oh—you’ll go on living, but not all of you. You’d best bury that body, Steven. It’s the corpse of your soul.”
“I can’t,” Krane said. “The wind will blow the cinders away.”
“Then burn it,” Hallmyer ordered with dream-logic.
It seemed that they helped him thrust the dead dog into his knapsack. They helped him take off his clothes and packed them underneath. They cupped their hands around the matches until the cloth caught fire, and blew on the weak flame until it sputtered and burned limply. Krane crouched by the fire and nursed it. Then he turned and once again began crawling down the ocean bed. He was naked now. There was nothing left of what-had-been but his flickering little life.
He was too heavy with sorrow to notice the furious rain that slammed and buffeted him, or the searing pains that were searing through his blackened leg and up his hip. He crawled. Elbows, knee, elbows, knee— Woodenly, mechanically, apathetic to everything … to the latticed skies, the dreary ashen plains and even the dull glint of water that lay far ahead.
He knew it was the sea—what was left of the old, or a new one in the making. But it would be an empty, lifeless sea that some day would lap against a dry, lifeless shore. This would be a planet of stone and dust, of metal and snow and ice and water, but that would be all. No more life. He, alone, was useless. He was Adam, but there was no Eve.
Evelyn waved gaily to him from the shore. She was standing alongside the white cottage with the wind snapping her dress to show the slender lines of her figure. And when he came a little closer, she ran out to him and helped him. She said nothing—only placed her hands under his shoulders and helped him lift the weight of his heavy pain-ridden body. And so at last he reached the sea.
It was real. He understood that. For even after Evelyn and the cottage had vanished, he felt the cool waters bathe his face.
Here’s the sea, Krane thought, and here am I. Adam and no Eve. It’s hopeless.
He rolled a little farther into the waters. They laved his torn body. He lay with his face to the sky, peering at the high menacing heavens, and the bitterness within him welled up.
“It’s not right!” he cried. “It’s not right that all this should pass away. Life is too beautiful to perish at the mad act of one mad creature—”
Quietly the waters laved him. Quietly … Calmly …
The sea rocked him gently, and even the death that was reaching up toward his heart was no more than a gloved hand. Suddenly the skies split apart—for the first time in all those months—and Krane stared up at the stars.
Then he knew. This was not the end of life. There could never be an end of life. Within his body, within the rotting tissues rocking gently in the sea was the source of ten million-million lives. Cells—tissues—bacteria—amoeba— Countless infinities of life that would take new root in the waters and live long after he was gone.
They would live on his rotting remains. They would feed on each other. They would adapt themselves to the new environment and feed on the minerals and sediments washed into this new sea. They would grow, burgeon, evolve. Life would reach out to the lands once more. It would begin again the same old repeated cycle that had begun perhaps with the rotting corpse of some last survivor of interstellar travel. It would happen over and over in the future ages.
And then he knew what had brought him back to the sea. There need be no Adam—no Eve. Only the sea, the great mother of life was needed. The sea had called him back to her depths that presently life might emerge once more, and he was content.
Quietly the waters comforted him. Quietly … Calmly … The mother of life rocked the last-born of the old cycle who would become the first-born of the new. And with glazing eyes Steven Krane smiled up at the stars, stars that were sprinkled evenly across the sky. Stars that had not yet formed into the familiar constellations, and would not for another hundred million centuries.
AND 3½ TO GO
Editor’s note: This is a fragment of a story that Bester did not complete before his death. However, because it contains Bester’s unique style and trademark radical ideas, we felt it should be included in this definitive collection.
Sociologists have never agreed on whether societies through the ages have demanded conformity because they think that the status quo is perfection, or believe that the majority, ipso facto, must be the yardstick—in which case we should make way for the insects—or because they resent extraordinary talents which produce extraordinary results and sometimes strange behavior.
There have been so many of these singular sports, perhaps multitudes of mutations through the millennia, who were forced to conceal their unique powers from mob hostility or else run for cover like hunted animals. This is the story of a batch who took off singing:
One for the money,
Two for the show.
F# – Eb – A – 2# – D,
And 3½ to go!
Patience. All will be made clear very shortly.
These marvels or misfits, depending on your point of view, banded together and roamed the known universe, peddling their talents. They knew they could never settle down anywhere unless they concealed their faculties and conformed, something none was willing to, or even could, do. They were sometimes called “The Wandering Blues” and other times “The Blue Devils,” again depending on the point of view. Word about them got around.
There’s no doubt that they were often a curious blue when they emerged from their ship to sell their genius on some boondock planet or satellite. Long hauls through space forced them to conserve oxygen at the minimal survival level, turning them cyanotic. They recovered normal color if the new environment was hospitable, which, occasionally, it was most emphatically not. The same was true of their social reception now and then, forcing them to cut and run. They were, well, unusual.
Van Ryn, for instance, was a magnificent artist. (He was born Sam Katz but that’s a hell of a name for a fashionable painter.) Rynny was astigmatic. There was a distortion in the lenses of his eyes that caused rays of light from an external point to converge unequally and form warped images. This is the common-or-garden-variety of astigmatism that afflicted El Greco and cau
sed him to paint elongated faces and figures. The sixteenth century hadn’t yet got around to prescription glasses.
What was strange about Rynny’s astigmatism was the fact that some of the external point sources of light were far in the future of whatever or whoever he was painting, and he got mixed up. He didn’t know what to believe so he settled for painting anything he saw, sometimes the present, more often the future. The twenty-fifth century hadn’t yet got around to prescribing for anything as bizarre as that.
Clients got sore as hell at being depicted as decrepit ancients or embalmed corpses in the coffin (one was portrayed as a suicide hanging by the neck from a flagpole) and naturally refused to pay. But when Rynny was commissioned to paint the chateau of a royal mistress and produced a bijou of her in the garden of same, flagrante with another lover, that was the end. He had to leave, quickly.
Hertzing Matilda was a composer. He came from New South Wales, hence the odd play on the famous Aussie tune, “Waltzing Matilda,” which gave him the girl part of his nickname. He was a brilliant musician, a genius in fact, but born with a deformity in his ears which gave him the front part of his name.
You see, all of us hear the audio-frequency band from around 30 Hz to 15,000 Hz. “Hz” is the abbreviation for “hertz,” the symbol for cycles-per-second, and honoring the great physicist, Heinrich Rudolph Hertz (1857-1894). The infrasonic lies below 30 Hz, the ultrasonic is above 15,000 Hz, and only a few rare creatures can sense them, humans not among them.
Well, as Hertzing Matilda grew older, he and the rest of the world thought he was going deaf. By the time he was thirty he seemed to be stone deaf, a tragedy for a composer, and it showed in his music, for, like Beethoven, he went on composing. But his work got crazier and crazier until it was so far out that he was run out of the business. Nobody could read his scores, which looked like paradigms in symbolic logic, as in the third line of the “One for the money” jingle, which he arranged.