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So we talked.
Whether it was for five minutes or an hour, I don't really know. I remember telling her, though, about the girl buried on another world, whose death had set me to ru
Then another feeling gradually came upon me, and a really terrible feeling it was: There _must_ be a time and a place best suited for each person who has ever lived. After the worst of my grief had left me and I had come to terms with the vanished past, I wondered about a man's place in time and space. Where, and _when_ in the cosmos would I most like to live out the balance of my days? --To live at my fullest potential? The past _was_ dead, but perhaps a better time waited on some as yet undiscovered world, waited at one yet-to-be recorded moment in its history. How could I _ever_ know? How could I ever be sure that my Golden Age did not lay but one more world away, and that I might be struggling in a Dark Era while the Renaissance of my days was but a ticket, a visa and a diary-page removed? That was my _second_ despair. I did know the answer until I came to the Land of the Swan. I do not know why I loved you Eleanor, but I did, and that was my answer. Then the rains came.
When the lights returned we sat there and smoked. She had told me of her husband, who had died a hero's death in time to save him from the delirium tremors which would have ended his days. Died as the bravest die--not knowing why--because of a reflex, which after all had been a part of him, a reflex which had made him cast himself into the path of a pack of wolf-like creatures attacking the exploring party he was with--off in that forest at the foot of Saint Stephen's--to fight them with a machete and to be torn apart by them while his companions fled to the camp, where they made a stand and saved themselves. Such is the essence of valor: an unthinking moment, a spark along the spinal nerves, predetermined by the sum total of everything you have ever done, wished to do or not to do, and wish you had done, or hadn't, and then comes the pain.
We watched the gallery on the wall. Man is the reasoning animal? Greater than beasts but less than angels? Not the murderer I shot that night. He wasn't even the one who uses tools or buries his dead. --Laughs, aspires, affirms? I didn't see any of those going on. --Watches himself watch himself doing what he knows is absurd? Too sophisticated. He just did the absurd without watching. Like ru
The creature who loves?
That's the only one I might not be able to gainsay.
I saw a mother holding her daughter up on her shoulders while the water swirled about her armpits, and the little girl was holding her doll up above _her_ shoulders, in the same way. But isn't that--the love--a part of the total? Of everything you have ever done, or wished? Positive or neg? I know that it is what made me leave my post, ru
I didn't get there in time.
I shall never forget how glad I was that someone else did. Joh
"It's all right. They're okay. Even the doll."
"Good," I said, and headed back.
As I set the ship down on its balcony landing, one figure came toward me. As I stepped down, a gun appeared in Chuck's hand.
"I wouldn't kill you, Juss," he began, "but I'd wound you. Face the wall. I'm taking the flyer."
"Are you crazy?" I asked him.
"I know what I'm doing. I need it, Juss."
"Well, if you need it, there it is. You don't have to point a gun at me. I just got through needing it myself. Take it."
"Lottie and I both need it," he said. "Turn around!"
I turned toward the wall.
"What do you mean?" I asked.
"We're going away, together--now!"
"You _are_ crazy," I said. "This is no time..."
"C'mon, Lottie," he called, and there was a rush of feet behind me and I heard the flyer's door open.
"Chuck!" I said. "We need you now! You can settle this thing peacefully, in a week, in a month, after some order has been restored. There _are_ such things as divorces, you know."
"That won't get me off this world, Juss."
"So how is _this_ going to help?"
I turned, and I saw that he had picked up a large canvas bag from somewhere and had it slung over his left shoulder, like Santa Claus.
"Turn back around! I don't want to shoot you," he warned.
The suspicion came, grew stronger.
"Chuck, have you been looting?" I asked him.
"Turn around!"
"All right, I'll turn around. How far do you think you'll get?"
"Far enough," he said. "Far enough so that no one will find us--and when the time comes, we'll leave this world."
"No," I said. "I don't think you will, because I know you."
"We'll see." His voice was further away then.
I heard three rapid footsteps and the slamming of a door. I turned then, in time to see the flyer rising from the balcony.
I watched it go. I never saw either of them again.
Inside, two men were unconscious on the floor. It turned out that they were not seriously hurt. After I saw them cared for, I rejoined Eleanor in the Tower.
All that night did we wait, emptied, for morning.
Somehow, it came.
We sat and watched the light flow through the rain. So much had happened so quickly. So many things had occurred during the past week that we were unprepared for morning.
It brought an end to the rains.
A good wind came from out of the north and fought with the clouds, like En-ki with the serpent Tiamat. Suddenly, there was a canyon of cobalt.
A cloudquake shook the heavens and chasms of light opened across its dark landscape.
It was coming apart as we watched.
I heard a cheer, and I croaked in unison with it as the sun appeared.
The good, warm, drying, beneficial sun drew the highest peak of Saint Stephen's to its face and kissed both its cheeks.
There was a crowd before each window. I joined one and stared, perhaps for ten minutes.
When you awaken from a nightmare you do not normally find its ruins lying about your bedroom. This is one way of telling whether or not something was only a bad dream, or whether or not you are really awake.
We walked the streets in great boots. Mud was everywhere. It was in basements and in machinery and in sewers and in living room clothes closets. It was on buildings and on cars and on people and on the branches of trees. It was broken brown blisters drying and waiting to be peeled off from clean tissue. Swarms of skytoads rose into the air when we approached, hovered like dragon-flies, returned to spoiling food stores after we had passed. Insects were having a heyday, too. Betty would have to be deloused. So many things were overturned or fallen down, and half-buried in the brown Sargassos of the streets. The dead had not yet been numbered. The water still ran by, but sluggish and foul. A stench was begi