Night of Light

“I thought we had a little device that would make us quite safe?” said Carmody, peeling off the last of his sticky clothes and heading for the shower. “Or are you not sure of it?” He laughed at Ralloux’s expression of despair and spoke from behind the veil of hot water hurtling over his head. “What’s the matter? You really scared?”

“Yes, I am. Aren’t you?”

“I, frightened? No, I have never been afraid of anything in my whole life. I’m not saying that to cover up, either. I don’t really know what it is to feel fear.”

“I strongly suspect you don’t know what it is to feel anything,” said Ralloux.”I wonder sometimes if you do have a soul. It must be there somewhere but thrust down so deep that nobody, including yourself, can see it. Otherwise...”

Carmody laughed and began soaping his hair.

“The headthumper at Johns Hopkins said I was a congenital psychopath, that I was born incapable of even understanding a moral code, I was beyond guilt, beyond virtue, not born with an illness of the mind, you understand, just lacking something, whatever it is that makes a human being human. He made no bones about telling me that I was one of those rare birds before which the science of the Year of Our Lord 2256 is completely helpless. He was sorry, he said, but I would have to be committed for the rest of my life, probably kept under mild sedation so I would be harmless and cooperative, and undoubtedly would be the subject of thousands of experiments in order to determine what it is that makes a constitutional psychopath.”

Carmody paused, stepped from the shower, and began drying himself.

“Well,” he continued, smiling, “you can see that I couldn’t put up with that. Not John Carmody. So—I escaped from Hopkins, escaped from Earth itself, got to Springboard— on the edge of the Galaxy, farthest colonized planet of the Federation, stayed there a year, made a fortune smuggling sodompears, was almost caught by Raspold—you know, the galactic Sherlock Holmes—but eluded him and got here where the Federation has no jurisdiction. But I don’t intend to stay here; not that it wouldn’t be a bad world, because I could make money here, too, the food and liquor are good, and the females are just unhuman enough to attract me. But I want to show Earth up for what it is, a stable for stupid asses. I intend to go back to Earth to live there in complete immunity from arrest. And to do pretty well what I please, though I shall be discreet about some things.”

“If you think you can do that, you must be crazy. You would be arrested the moment you stepped off the ship.”

Carmody laughed. “You think so? You know, don’ t you, that the Federal Anti-Social Bureau depends for its information and partly for its directives upon the Boojum?”

Ralloux nodded.

“Well, the Boojum after all is only a monster protein memory bank and probability computer. It has stored away in its cells all the available information about one John Carmody and it undoubtedly has issued orders that all ships leaving Dante’s Joy should be searched for him. But what if proof comes that John Carmody is dead? Then the Boojum cancels all directives concerning Carmody, and it retires the information to mechanical files. Then, when a colonist from say, Wildenwooly, who has made his pile there and wants to spend it on Earth, comes to the home planet, who is going to bother him, even if he does look remarkably like John Carmody?”

“But that’s preposterous! In the first place, how is the Boojum going to get proof positive that you are dead? In the second place, when you land on Earth, your fingers, retina, and brainwaves will be printed and identified.”

Carmody gri

“What if someone recognizes you?”

“In a world of ten billion population? I’ll take my chance.”

“What is to prevent my telling the authorities?”

“Do dead men tell?”

Ralloux paled but did not flinch. His expression was still the grave-faced gentle monk’s, his large shining black eyes staring honestly at Carmody but giving him a slightly ludicrous appearance because of their unexpectedness in that snub-nosed freckled big-lipped pitcher-eared setting. He said, “Do you intend to kill me?”

Carmody laughed uproariously. “No, it won’t be necessary. Do you think for one moment either you or Skelder will come through the Night alive or in your right mind? You’ve seen what has happened during the few brief flickers we’ve had. Those were preludes, tunings up. What of the real Night?”

“What about what happened to you?” said Ralloux, still pale.

Carmody shrugged his shoulders, ran his hand through his blue-black porcupinelike hair, now clean of blood. “Apparently my unconscious or whatever you call it is projecting pieces of Mary’s body, reconstructing the crime, you might say. How it can take a strictly subjective phenomenon and turn it into objective reality, I don’t know. Tand says there are several theories that attempt to explain the whole thing scientifically, that leaves the supernatural out. It doesn’t matter. It didn’t bother me when I cut up Mary into little pieces, and it won’t bother me to have pieces of her come floating back into my life. I could swim through her blood, or anybody else’s, to reach my goal.”

He paused, looked narrow-eyed but still gri

Ralloux, even paler, gulped. He made the sign of the cross.

“I don’t know why I should tell you. But I will. I was in Hell.”

“In Hell?”

“Burning. With the other damned. With ninety-nine percent of all those who had lived, are living, and will live. Billions upon billions.”

Sweat poured out of his face. “It was not something imagined. I felt the agony. Mine, and the others’.”

He fell silent, while Carmody cocked his head to one side like one puzzled bird trying to figure out another. Then Ralloux murmured, “Ninety-nine percent.”

“So,” Carmody said, “that is what you worry about most, that is the basic premise of your mind.”

“If so, I did not know it,” murmured the monk.

“How ridiculous can you get? Why, even your Church no longer insists upon the medieval conception of literal flames. Still, I don’t know. From what I see of most people, they ought to fry. I’d like to be supervisor of the furnaces; there are some I’ve met in my short life whose fat egotism I’d like to burn right out of them....”

Ralloux said, incredulously, “You resent egotists?”

Carmody, clean and dressed, gri

The mess, Mrs. Kri a

Five minutes later, Mrs. Kri, having injected herself with the necessary hibernatives, slammed the big iron door of the basement vault and locked herself in.

Tand bade them good-bye. “If I’m caught before I get to my own vault, I’ll have to go through the Night, willy-nilly. And once started, there’s no holding back. It’s all black and white then; you either get through or you don’t. At the end of the seventh day, you are god, corpse, or monster.”