That evening she doubled her fist and gave him such a blow beneath his rib cage, that his eyes watered and his side hurt for almost an hour.
The next day he avoided the girl with the blonde, twirled ponytail who was browsing in the HISTORICAL NOVELS section of the Public Library. He had had a glimpse often enough-of the future-to know what this one meant. She was married, despondent, and did not wear her ring out of hostility for her husband. He saw himself in an unpleasant situation involving the girl, the librarian, and the library guard.
He avoided the library.
As the week wore through, as Arthur realized he had never developed the techniques other men used to snare girls, he knew his time was running out. As he walked the streets late at night, pa.s.sing few people, but still people who were soon to perish in a flaming death, he knew his time was slipping away with terrible swiftness.
Now it was no mere desire. Now it was a drive, an urge within him that obsessed his thoughts, that motivated him as nothing else in life ever had. And he cursed Mother for her fine, old Southern ways, for her white flesh that had bound him in umbilical impotence. Her never-demanding, always-pleasant ways, that had made it so simple to live on in a pastel world of strifeless, effortless complacency.
To die a-flaming with the rest of the world...empty.
The streets were chill, and the lamp posts had wavering, unearthly halos about them. From far off came the sound of a car horn, lost in the darkness; and a truck, its diesel gut rumbling, shifting into gear as a stop light changed, then coughing away. The pavement had the sick pallor of rotting flesh, and the stars were lost in inkiness on a moonless night. He bunched himself tightly inside his topcoat, and bent into the vague, leaf-picking breeze slanting toward him. A dog howled briefly somewhere, and a door slammed on another block. Abruptly, he was ultrasensitive to these sounds, and wanted to be joined to them, inside with the love and humor of a home. But had he been a pariah, a criminal, a leper, he could not have been more alone. He hated the philosophy of his culture that allowed men like himself to mature without direction, without hope, without love. All of which he needed so desperately.
At the intersection, halfway down the block, a girl emerged from shadows, her heels tock-tock- tocking rhythmically on the sidewalk, then the street, as she stepped across, and went her way.
He was cutting across the lawn of a house, and converging on her from right angles before he realized what he was doing, what his intentions were. By then, his momentum had carried him.
Rape.
The word flowered in his mind like a hot-house flower, with blood-red petals, grew to monstrous proportions, and withered, black at the edges, even as he scooted briskly, head down and hands in coat pockets, toward their point of intersection.
Could he do it? Could he carry it off? She was young and beautiful, desirable, he knew. She would have to be. He would take her down on the gra.s.s; and she would not scream, but would be pliant and acquiescent. She had to be.
He raced ahead to the spot where she would meet him, and he lay down on the moist, brown earth, inside the cover of bushes, waiting for her. In the distance he could hear her heels counting off the steps till he was upon her.
Then, even as his desire ate at him, other pictures came. A twisted, half-naked body lying in the street, a mob of men screaming and brandishing a rope, a picture of Mother, her face ashen and transfigured with horror. He crammed his eyes shut, and pressed his cheek to the ground. It was the all-mother, consoling him. He was the child who had done wrong, and his need was great. The all-mother comforted him, directed him, caressed him with propriety and deep devotion. He lay there as the girl clacked past.
The heat in his face died away, and it was the day of the end, before he fully returned to sanity and a sense of awareness.
He had escaped b.e.s.t.i.a.lity, perhaps at the cost of his soul.
It was, it was, indeed. The day it would happen. He had several glimpses that day, so shocking, so brilliant in his mind, that they reaffirmed his knowledge of the coming of the event. Today it would come.
Today the world would spark and burn. One vision showed great buildings, steel and concrete, flashing like magnesium flares, burning as though they were crepe paper. The sun was dull-looking, as though it might have been an eye that someone had gouged out. The sidewalks ran like b.u.t.ter; and charred, smoldering shapes lay in the gutters and on the rooftops. It was hideous, and it was now.
He knew his time was up.
Then the idea of the money came to him. He withdrew every cent. Every penny of the four thousand dollars; the vice president of the bank had a peculiar expression on his face, and he asked if everything was all right. Arthur answered him with an epigram, and the vice president was unhappy.
All that day at the office-of course he went to work, he would not have known any other way to spend that last day of all days-he was on edge. He continually turned at his desk to stare out the window, waiting for the blood-red glaze that would paint the sky. But it did not come.
Shortly after the coffee break that afternoon, he found the sensation of nausea growing in him. He went to the men"s room and locked himself in one of the cubicles. He sat down on the toilet with its top closed, and held his head in his hands.
A glimpse was coming to him.
Another glimpse, vaguely connected to the ones of the holocaust, but now-like a strip of film running backward-he saw himself entering a bar.
There were words in twisting neon outside, and repeated again on the small dark-gla.s.s window.
The words said: THE NITE OWL. He saw himself in his blue suit, and he knew the money was in his pocket.
There was a woman at the bar.
Her hair was faintly auburn in the dim light of the bar. She sat on the bar stool, her long legs gracefully crossed, revealing a laced edge of slip. Her face was held at an odd angle, half-up toward the concealed streamer of light over the bar mirror. He could see the dark eyes and the heavy makeup that somehow did not detract from the sharp, unrelieved lines of her face. It was a hard face, but the lips were full, and not thinned. She was staring at nothing.
Then, as abruptly as it had come, the vision pa.s.sed, and his mouth was filled with the slippery vileness of nausea.
He got to his feet and flipped open the toilet. Then he was thoroughly sick, but not messy.
Afterward, he went back to the office and found the yellow pages of the phone book. He turned to "Bars" and ran his finger down the column till he came to "The Nite Owl" on Morrison and 58th Streets.
He went home especially to freshen up...to get into his blue suit.
She was there. The long legs in the same position, the edge of slip showing, the head at that strange angle, the hair and eyes as he had seen them.
It was almost as though he was reliving a dramatic part he had once played; he walked up to her, and slid onto the empty stool. "May I, may I buy you a drink, Miss?"
She only acknowledged his presence and his question with a half-nod and soft grunt. He motioned to the black-tied bartender and said, "I"d like a gla.s.s of ginger ale. Give the young lady whatever she, uh, she wants please."
The woman quirked an eyebrow and mumbled, "Bourbon and water, Ned." The bartender moved away. They sat silently till he returned with the drinks. Then the girl said, "Thanks." Arthur nodded, and moved the gla.s.s around in its own circle of moisture. "I like ginger ale. Never really got to like alcohol, I guess. You don"t mind?"
Then she turned, and stared at him. She was really quite attractive, with little lines in her neck, around her mouth and eyes. "Why the h.e.l.l should I care if you drink ginger ale? You could drink goat"s milk and I couldn"t care less." She turned back.
Arthur hurriedly answered, "Oh, I didn"t mean any offense. I was only-"
"Forget it."
"But I-"
She looked at him with vehemence. "Look Mac, you on the make, or what? You got a pitch?
Come on, it"s late."
Now, confronted with it, Arthur found himself terrified. He wanted to cry. It wasn"t the way he had thought it would be. His throat had a choke lost in it. "I-I, why I-"
"Oh, Jeezus, wouldn"t "cha know it. A freak. My luck, always my luck." She bolted the rest of her drink and slid off the stool. She smoothed the miniskirt over her thighs and backside as she moved toward the door of the bar.
Arthur felt panic rising in him. This was the last chance, and it was important, terribly important!
He spun on the stool and called after her, "Miss-"
She stopped and turned. "Yeah?"
"I thought we might, uh, could I speak to you?"
She seemed to sense his difficulty, and a wise look came across her features. She came back and stopped very close to him. "What now, what is it?"
"Are you, uh, are you do, doing anything this evening?"
Her sly look became businesslike. "It"ll cost you fifteen. You got that much?"
Arthur was petrified. He could not answer. But as though it realized the time had come for action, his hand dipped into his jacket pocket and came up with the four thousand dollars. Eight five hundred dollar bills, crackling and fresh. He held them out for her to see, then the hand returned them to the pocket.
The hand was the businessman, himself merely the bystander.
"Wow," she murmured, her eyes bright. "You"re not as bad as I thought, fella. You got a place?"
They went to the big, silent house, and he undressed in the bathroom, for it was the first time, and he held a granite chunk of fear in his chest.
When it was over, and he lay there warm and happy, she rose from the bed and moved to his jacket. He stared at her, and there was a strange feeling in him. He knew it for what it was, for he had felt a distant relative to it, in his feelings for Mother. Arthur Fulbright knew love, of a sort, and he watched her as she fished out the bills.
"Jesus," she murmured, touching the money reverently.
"Take it," he said softly.
"What? How much?"
"All of it. It doesn"t mean anything." Then he added, as if it was the highest compliment he could summon: "You are a very good woman."
"Why, thanks, honey."
She held the money tightly. Four thousand dollars. What a simple little b.a.s.t.a.r.d. There he lay in the bed, and with nothing to show for it. But his face held such a strange light, as though he had something very important, as though he owned the world.
She chuckled softly, standing there by the window, the faint pink glow of midnight bathing her naked, moist body, and she knew what counted. She held it in her hand.
The pink glow turned rosy, then red, then blood crimson.
Arthur Fulbright lay on the bed, and there was a peace deep as the ocean in him. The woman stared at the money, knowing what really counted.
The money turned to ash a scant instant before her hand did the same. Arthur Fulbright"s eyes closed slowly.
While outside, the world turned so red and hot, and that was all.
Night Vigil
DARKNESS SEEPED IN around the little Quonset. It oozed out of the deeps of s.p.a.ce and swirled around Ferreno"s home. The automatic scanners turned and turned, whispering quietly, their message of wariness unconsciously rea.s.suring the old man.
He bent over and plucked momentarily at a bit of lint on the carpet. It was the only speck of foreign matter on the rug, reflecting the old man"s perpetual cleanliness and almost fanatical neatness.
The racks of book spools were all binding-to-binding, set flush with the lips of the shelves; the bed was made with a military tightness that allowed a coin to bounce high three times; the walls were free of fingerprints-dusted and wiped clean twice a day; there was no speck of lint or dust on anything in the one- room Quonset.
When Ferreno had flicked the single bit of matter from his fingers, into the incinerator, the place was immaculate.
It reflected twenty-four years of watching, waiting, and living alone. Living alone on the edge of Forever, waiting for something that might never come. Tending blind, dumb machines that could say Something is out here, but also said, We don"t know what it is.
Ferreno returned to his pneumo-chair, sank heavily into it, and blinked, his deep-set gray eyes seeking into the farthest rounded corner of the Quonset"s ceiling. His eyes seemed to be looking for something. But there was nothing there he did not already know. Far too well.
He had been on this asteroid, this spot lost in the darkness, for twenty-four years. In that time, nothing had happened.
There had been no warmth, no women, no feeling, and only a brief flurry of emotion for almost twenty of those twenty-four years.
Ferreno had been a young man when they had set him down on The Stone. They had pointed out there and said to him: "Beyond the farthest spot you can see, there"s an island universe. In that island universe there"s an enemy, Ferreno. One day he"ll become tired of his home and come after yours.
"You"re here to watch for him."
And they had gone before he could ask them.
Ask them: who were the enemy? Where would they come from, and why was he here, alone, to stop them? What could he do if they came? What were the huge, silent machines that bulked monstrous behind the little Quonset? Would he ever go home again?
All he had known was the intricate dialing process for the invers.p.a.ce communicators. The tricky- fingered method of sending a coded response half across the galaxy to a waiting Mark Lx.x.xII brain- waiting only for his frantic pulsations.
He had known only that. The dialing process and the fact that he was to watch. Watch for he- knew-not-what!
There at first he had thought he would go out of his mind. It had been the monotony. Monotony intensified to a frightening degree. The ordeal of watching, watching, watching. Sleeping, eating from the self-replenishing supply of protofoods in the greentank, reading, sleeping again, rereading the book spools tin their casings crackled, snapped, and lost panes. Then the rebinding-and re-rereading. The horror of knowing every pa.s.sage of a book by heart.
He could recite from Stendhal"s Le Rouge et le Noir and Hemingway"s Death In The Afternoon and Melville"s Moby d.i.c.k, till the very words lost meaning, sounded strange and unbelievable in his ears.
First had come living in filth and throwing things against the curving walls and ceilings. Things designed to give, and bounce-but not to break. Walls designed to absorb the impact of a thrown drink-ball or a smashing fist. Then had come the extreme neatness, then a moderation, and finally back to the neat, prissy fastidiousness of an old man who wants to know where everything is at any moment.
No women. That had been a persistent horror for the longest time. A mounting pain in his groin and belly that had wakened him during the arbitrary night, swimming in his own sweat, his mouth and body aching. He had gotten over it slowly. He had even attempted emasculation. None of it had worked, of course, and it had only pa.s.sed away when his youth had pa.s.sed away.
He had taken to talking to himself. And answering himself. Not madness, just the fear that the ability to speak might be lost.
Madness had descended many times during the early years. The blind, clawing urgency to get out! Get out into the airless vastness of The Stone. At least to die, to end this nowhere existence.
But they had constructed the Quonset without a door. The plasteel-sealed slit his deliverers had used as an exit, had been closed irrevocably behind them, and there was no way out.
Madness had come often.
But they had selected him wisely. He clung to his sanity; he knew it was his only escape. He knew it would be a far more horrible thing to end out his days in this Quonset a helpless maniac, than to remain sane.
He swung back over the line and soon grew content with his world in a sh.e.l.l. He waited, for there was nothing else he could do; and in his waiting a contentment grew out of frantic restlessness. He began to think of it as a jail, then as a coffin, then as the ultimate black of the Final Hole. He would wake in the arbitrary night, choking, his throat constricted, his hands warped into claws that scrabbled at the foam rubber of the sleeping couch with fierceness.
The time was spent. A moment after it had pa.s.sed, he could not tell how it had been spent. His life became dust-dry and at times he could hardly tell he was living. Had it not been for the sealed, automatic calendar, he would hardly have known the years were pa.s.sing.
And ever, ever, ever-the huge, dull, sleeping eye of the warning buzzer. Staring back at him, veiled, from the ceiling.
It was hooked up with the scanners. The scanners that hulked behind the Quonset. The scanners in turn were hooked up to the net of tight invers.p.a.ce rays that interlocked each other out to the farthest horizon Ferreno might ever know.
And the net, in turn, joined at stop-gap junctions with the doggie-guards, also waiting, watching with dumb metal and plastic minds for that implacable alien enemy that might someday come.
They had known the enemy would come, for they had found the remnants of those the enemy had destroyed. Remnants of magnificent and powerful cultures, ground to microscopic dust by the heel of a terrifying invader.