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"_Go back!_" I heard the machine say through its projected angel, for Henry had entered the cave.
"My God!" I heard him say. "Who's that?"
"Get Doc!" I said. "Hurry! I'll explain later. It's a matter of life! Climb back to where your communicator will work, and tell him it's Dawson's Plague--a bad local bug! Hurry!"
"I'm on my way," he said and was.
"There _is_ a doctor?" she asked.
"Yes. Only about two hours away. Don't worry....I still don't see how anyone could have gotten you up here to the top of this mountain, let alone a load of machines."
"We're on the big mountain--the forty-miler?"
"Yes."
"How did _you_ get up?" she asked.
"I climbed it."
"You really climbed Purgatorio? On the outside?"
"Purgatorio? That's what you call it? Yes, I climbed it, that way."
"We didn't think it could be done."
"How else might one arrive at its top?"
"It's hollow inside," she said. "There are great caves and massive passages. It's easy to fly up the inside on a pressurized jut car. In fact, it was an amusement ride. Two and a half dollars per person. An hour and a half each way. A dollar to rent a pressurized suit and take an hour's walk around the top. Nice way to spend an afternoon. Beautiful view...?" She gasped deeply.
"I don't feel so good," she said. "Have you any water?"
"Yes," I said, and I gave her all I had.
As she sipped it, I prayed that Doc had the necessary serum or else would be able to send her back to ice and sleep until it could be gotten. I prayed that he would make good time, for two hours seemed long when measured against her thirst and the red of her flesh.
"My fever is coming again," she said. "Talk to me, Whitey, please....Tell me things. Keep me with you till he comes. I don't want my mind to turn back upon what has happened...."
"What would you like me to tell you about, Linda?"
"Tell me why you did it. Tell me what it was like, to climb a mountain like this one. Why?"
I turned my mind back upon what had happened.
"There is a certain madness involved," I said, "a certain envy of great and powerful natural forces, that some men have. Each mountain is a deity, you know. Each is an immortal power. If you make sacrifices upon its slopes, a mountain may grant you a certain grace, and for a time you will share this power. Perhaps that is why they call me...."
Her hand rested in mine. I hoped that through it whatever power I might contain would hold all of her with me for as long as ever possible.
"I remember the first time that I saw Purgatory, Linda," I told her. "I looked at it and I was sick. I wondered, where did it lead...?"
(Stars.
Oh let there be.
This once to end with.
Please.)
"Stars?"
This Moment of the Storm
Back on Earth, my old philosophy prof--possibly because he'd misplaced his lecture notes--came into the classroom one day and scrutinized his sixteen victims for the space of half a minute. Satisfied then, that a sufficiently profound tone had been established, he asked:
"What is a man?"
He had known exactly what he was doing. He'd had an hour and a half to kill, and eleven of the sixteen were coeds (nine of them in liberal arts, and the other two stuck with an Area Requirement).
One of the other two, who was in the pre-med program, proceeded to provide a strict biological classification.
The prof (McNitt was his name, I suddenly recall) nodded then, and asked:
"Is that all?"
And there was his hour and a half.
I learned that Man is a Reasoning Animal, Man is the One Who Laughs, Man is greater than beasts but less than angels, Man is the one who watches himself watching himself doing things he knows are absurd (this from a Comparative Lit gal), Man is the culture-transmitting animal, Man is the spirit which aspires, affirms, loves, the one who uses tools, buries his dead, devises religions, and the one who tries to define himself. (That last from Paul Schwartz, my roommate--which I thought pretty good, on the spur of the moment. Wonder whatever became of Paul?)
Anyhow, to most of these I say "perhaps" or "partly, but--" or just plain "crap!" I still think mine was the best, because I had a chance to try it out, on Tierra del Cygnus, Land of the Swan...
I'd said, "Man is the sum total of everything he has done, wishes to do or not to do, and wishes he hadn't done, or hadn't."
Stop and think about it for a minute. It's purposely as general as the others, but it's got room in it for the biology and the laughing and the aspiring, as well as the culture-transmitting, the love, and the room full of mirrors, and the defining. I even left the door open for religion, you'll note. But it's limiting, too. Ever met an oyster to whom the final phrases apply?
Tierra del Cygnus, Land of the Swan--delightful name.
Delightful place too, for quite awhile...
It was there that I saw Man's definitions, one by one, wiped from off the big blackboard, until only mine was left.
...My radio had been playing more static than usual. That's all.
For several hours there was no other indication of what was to come.
My hundred-thirty eyes had watched Betty all morning, on that clear, cool spring day with the sun pouring down its honey and lightning upon the amber fields, flowing through the streets, invading western store-fronts, drying curbstones, and washing the olive and umber buds that speared the skin of the trees there by the roadway; and the light that wrung the blue from the flag before Town Hall made orange mirrors out of windows, chased purple and violet patches across the shoulders of Saint Stephen's Range, some thirty miles distant, and came down upon the forest at its feet like some supernatural madman with a million buckets of paint--each of a different shade of green, yellow, orange, blue and red--to daub with miles-wide brushes at its heaving sea of growth.
Mornings the sky is cobalt, midday is turquoise, and sunset is emeralds and rubies, hard and flashing. It was halfway between cobalt and seamist at 1100 hours, when I watched Betty with my hundred-thirty eyes and saw nothing to indicate what was about to be. There was only that persistent piece of static, accompanying the piano and strings within my portable.
It's fu
Sometimes, however, they do come to take on the attributes of sex. Usually, this is in the case of small cities near to the Mediterranean, back on Earth. Perhaps this is because of the sex-ridden nouns of the languages which prevail in that vicinity, in which case it tells us more about the inhabitants than it does about the habitations. But I feel that it goes deeper than that.
Betty was Beta Station for less than ten years. After two decades she was Betty officially, by act of Town Council. Why? Well, I felt at the time (ninety-some years ago), and still feel, that it was because she was what she was--a place of rest and repair, of surface-cooked meals and of new voices, new faces, of landscapes, weather, and natural light again, after that long haul through the big night, with its casting away of so much. She is not home, she is seldom destination, but she is like unto both. When you come upon light and warmth and music after darkness and cold and silence, it is Woman. The oldtime Mediterranean sailor must have felt it when he first spied port at the end of a voyage. _I_ felt it when I first saw Beta Station-Betty-and the second time I saw her, also.