The old man read until he was hoa.r.s.e, and then Bolton read, and then the others, far into the night, when the machine stopped transcribing words and they knew that Tom Wolfe was in bed, then, on the rocket, flying to Mars, probably not asleep, no, he wouldn"t sleep for hours yet, no, lying awake, like a boy the night before a circus, not believing the big jeweled black tent is up and the circus is on, with ten billion blazing performers on the high wires and the invisible trapezes of s.p.a.ce.
"There," breathed the old man, gentling aside the last pages of the first chapter. "What do you think of that, Bolton?"
"It"s good."
"Good h.e.l.l!" shouted Field. "It"s wonderful! Read it again, sit down, read it again, d.a.m.n you!"
It kept coming through, one day following another, for ten hours at a time. The stack of yellow papers on the floor, scribbled on, grew immense in a week, unbelievable in two weeks, absolutely impossible in a month.
"Listen to this!" cried the old man, and read.
"And this!" he said.
"And this chapter here, and this little novel here, it just came through, Bolton, t.i.tled The s.p.a.ce War, a complete novel on how it feels to fight a s.p.a.ce war. Tom"s been talking to people, soldiers, officers, men, veterans of s.p.a.ce. He"s got it all here. And here"s a chapter called "The Long Midnight," and here"s one on the Negro colonization of Mars, and here"s a character sketch of a Martian, absolutely priceless!"
Bolton cleared his throat. "Mr. Field?"
"Yes, yes, don"t bother me."
"I"ve some bad news, sir."
Field jerked his gray head up. "What? The time element?"
"You"d better tell Wolfe to hurry his work. The connection may break sometime this week," said Bolton, softly.
"I"ll give you anything, anything if you keep it going!"
"It"s not money, Mr. Field. It"s just plain physics right now. I"ll do everything I can. But you"d better warn him."
The old man shriveled in his chair and was small. "But you can"t take him away from me now, not when he"s doing so well. You should see the outline he sent through an hour ago, the stories, the sketches. Here, here"s one on spatial tides, another on meteors. Here"s a short novel begun, called Thistledown and Fire-"
"I"m sorry."
"If we lose him now, can we get him again?"
"I"d be afraid to tamper too much."
The old man was frozen. "Only one thing to do then. Arrange to have Wolfe type his work, if possible, or dictate it, to save time; rather than have him use pencil and paper, he"s got to use a machine of some sort. See to it!"
The machine ticked away by the hour into the night and into the dawn and through the day. The old man slept only in faint dozes, blinking awake when the machine stuttered to life, and all of s.p.a.ce and travel and existence came to him through the mind of another: ". . . the great starred meadows of s.p.a.ce..."
The machine jumped.
"Keep at it, Tom, show them!" The old man waited.
The phone rang.
It was Bolton.
"We can"t keep it up, Mr. Field. The continuum device will absolute out within the hour."
"Do something!"
"I can"t."
The teletype chattered. In a cold fascination, in a horror, the old man watched the black lines form.
". . . the Martian cities, immense and unbelievable, as numerous as stones thrown from some great mountain in a rushing and incredible avalanche, resting at last in shining mounds..."
"Tom!" cried the old man.
"Now," said Bolton, on the phone.
The teletype hesitated, typed a word, and fell silent.
"Tom!" screamed the old man.
He shook the teletype.
"It"s no use," said the telephone voice. "He"s gone. I"m shutting off the time machine."
"No! Leave it on!"
"But-"
"You heard me-leave it! We"re not sure he"s gone."
"He is. It"s no use, we"re wasting energy."
"Waste it, then!"
He slammed the phone down.
He turned to the teletype, to the unfinished sentence.
"Come on, Tom, they can"t get rid of you that way, you won"t let them, will you, boy, come on. Tom, show them, you"re big, you"re bigger than time or s.p.a.ce or their d.a.m.ned machines, you"re strong and you"ve a will like iron, Tom, show them, don"t let them send you back!"
The teletype snapped one key.
The old man bleated. "Tom! You are there, aren"t you? Can you still write? Write, Tom, keep it coming, as long as you keep it rolling, Tom, they can"t send you back!"
The, typed the machine.
"More, Tom, more!"
Odors of, clacked the machine.
"Yes?"
Mars, typed the machine, and paused. A minute"s silence. The machine s.p.a.ced, skipped a paragraph, and began: The odors of Mars, the cinnamons and cold spice winds, the winds of cloudy dust and winds of powerful bone and ancient pollen- "Tom, you"re still alive!"
For answer the machine, in the next ten hours, slammed out six chapters of Flight Before Fury in a series of fevered explosions.
"Today makes six weeks, Bolton, six whole weeks, Tom gone, on Mars, through the Asteroids. Look here, the ma.n.u.scripts. Ten thousand words a day, he"s driving himself, I don"t know when he sleeps, or if he eats, I don"t care, he doesn"t either, he only wants to get it done, because he knows the time is short."
"I can"t understand it," said Bolton. "The power failed because our relays wore out. It took us three days to manufacture and replace the particular channel relays necessary to keep the Time Element steady, and yet Wolfe hung on. There"s a personal factor here, Lord knows what, we didn"t take into account. Wolfe lives here, in this time, when he is here, and can"t be snapped back, after all. Time isn"t as flexible as we imagined. We used the wrong simile. It"s not like a rubber band. More like osmosis; the penetration of membranes by liquids, from Past to Present, but we"ve got to send him back, can"t keep him here, there"d be a void there, a derangement. The one thing that really keeps him here now is himself, his drive, his desire, his work. After it"s over he"ll go back as naturally as pouring water from a gla.s.s."
"I don"t care about reasons, all I know is Tom is finishing it. He has the old fire and description, and something else, something more, a searching of values that supersede time and s.p.a.ce. He"s done a study of a woman left behind on Earth while the d.a.m.n rocket heroes leap into s.p.a.ce that"s beautiful, objective, and subtle; he calls it "Day of the Rocket," and it is nothing more than an afternoon of a typical suburban housewife who lives as her ancestral mothers lived, in a house, raising her children, her life not much different from a cavewoman"s, in the midst of the splendor of science and the trumpetings of s.p.a.ce projectiles; a true and steady and subtle study of her wishes and frustrations. Here"s another ma.n.u.script, called "The Indians," in which he refers to the Martians as Cherokees and Iroquois and Blackfoots, the Indian nations of s.p.a.ce, destroyed and driven back. Have a drink, Bolton, have a drink!"
Tom Wolfe returned to Earth at the end of eight weeks.
He arrived in fire as he had left in fire, and his huge steps were burned across s.p.a.ce, and in the library of Henry William Field"s house were towers of yellow paper, with lines of black scribble and type on them, and these were to be separated out into the six sections of a masterwork that, through endurance, and a knowing that the sands were dwindling from the gla.s.s, had mushroomed day after day.
Tom Wolfe came back to Earth and stood in the library of Henry William Field"s house and looked at the ma.s.sive outpourings of his heart and his hand and when the old man said, "Do you want to read it, Tom?" he shook his great head and replied, putting back his thick mane of dark hair with his big pale hand, "No. I don"t dare start on it. If I did, I"d want to take it home with me. And I can"t do that, can I?"
"No, Tom, you can"t."
"No matter how much I wanted to?"
"No, that"s the way it is. You never wrote another novel in that year, Tom. What was written here must stay here, what was written there must stay there. There"s no touching it."
"I see." Tom sank down into a chair with a great sigh. "I"m tired. I"m mightily tired. It"s been hard, but it"s been good. What day is it?"
"This is the fifty-sixth day."
"The last day?"
The old man nodded and they were both silent awhile.
"Back to 1938 in the stone cemetery," said Tom Wolfe, eyes shut. "I don"t like that. I wish I didn"t know about that, it"s a horrible thing to know." His voice faded and he put his big hands over his face and held them tightly there.
The door opened. Bolton let himself in and stood behind Tom Wolfe"s chair, a small vial in his hand.
"What"s that?" asked the old man.
"An extinct virus. Pneumonia. Very ancient and very evil," said Bolton. "When Mr. Wolfe came through, I had to cure him of his illness, of course, which was immensely easy with the techniques we know today, in order to put him in working condition for his job, Mr. Field. I kept this pneumonia culture. Now that he"s going back, he"ll have to be reinoculated with the disease."
"Otherwise?"
Tom Wolfe looked up.
"Otherwise, he"d get well, in 1938."
Tom Wolfe arose from his chair. "You mean, get well, walk around, back there, be well, and cheat the mortician?"
"That"s what I mean."
Tom Wolfe stared at the vial and one of his hands twitched. "What if I destroyed the virus and refused to let you inoculate me?"
"You can"t do that!"
"But-supposing?"
"You"d ruin things."
"What things?"
"The pattern, life, the way things are and were, the things that can"t be changed. You can disrupt it. There"s only one sure thing, you"re to die, and I"m to see to it."
Wolfe looked at the door. "I could run off."
"We control the machine. You wouldn"t get out of the house. I"d have you back here, by force, and inoculated. I antic.i.p.ated some such trouble when the time came; there are five men waiting down below. One shout from me-you see, it"s useless. There, that"s better. Here now."
Wolfe had moved back and now had turned to look at the old man and the window and this huge house. "I"m afraid I must apologize. I don"t want to die. So very much I don"t want to die."
The old man came to him and took his hand. "Think of it this way: you"ve had two more months than anyone could expect from life, and you"ve turned out another book, a last book, a fine book, think of that."
"I want to thank you for this," said Thomas Wolfe, gravely. "I want to thank both of you. I"m ready." He rolled up his sleeve. "The inoculation."
And while Bolton bent to his task, with his free hand Thomas Wolfe penciled two black lines across the top of the first ma.n.u.script and went on talking: "There"s a pa.s.sage from one of my old books," he said, scowling to remember it. ". . . of wandering forever and the Earth... Who owns the Earth? Did we want the Earth? That we should wander on it? Did we need the Earth that we were never still upon it? Whoever needs the Earth shall have the Earth; he shall be upon it, he shall rest within a little place, he shall dwell in one small room forever..."
Wolfe was finished with the remembering.
"Here"s my last book," he said, and on the empty yellow paper facing the ma.n.u.script he blocked out vigorous huge black letters with pressures of the pencil: FOREVER AND THE EARTH, by Thomas Wolfe.
He picked up a ream of it and held it tightly in his hands, against his chest, for a moment. "I wish I could take it back with me. It"s like parting with my son." He gave it a slap and put it aside and immediately thereafter gave his quick hand into that of his employer, and strode across the room, Bolton after him, until he reached the door where he stood framed in the late-afternoon light, huge and magnificent. "Good-bye, good-bye!" he cried.
The door slammed. Tom Wolfe was gone.
They found him wandering in the hospital corridor.
"Mr. Wolfe!"
"What?"
"Mr. Wolfe, you gave us a scare, we thought you were gone!"
"Gone?"
"Where did you go?"
"Where? Where?" He let himself be led through the midnight corridors. "Where? Oh, if I told you where, you"d never believe."
"Here"s your bed, you shouldn"t have left it."
Deep into the white death bed, which smelled of pale, clean mortality awaiting him, a mortality which had the hospital odor in it; the bed which, as he touched it, folded him into fumes and white starched coldness.
"Mars, Mars," whispered the huge man, late at night. "My best, my very best, my really fine book, yet to be written, yet to be printed, in another year, three centuries away . . ."