Maybe what I really need is sleep, he said to himself. A sort of twilight of living, with only the background sound of Beethoven audible. All the rest a blur.
No, he decided; I want to be! I want to act and accomplish something. And every year it becomes more necessary. Every year, too, it slips further and further away. The thing about the Mentufacturer, he reflected, is that he can renew everything. He can abort the decay process by replacing the decaying object with a new one, one whose form is perfect. And then that decays. The Form Destroyer gets hold of it—and presently the Mentufacturer replaces that. As with a succession of old bees wearing out their wings, dying and being replaced at last by new bees. But I can’t do that. I decay and the Form Destroyer has me. And it will get only worse.
God, he thought, help me.
But not by replacing me. That would be fine from a cosmological standpoint, but ceasing to exist is not what I’m after; and perhaps you understood this when you answered my prayer.
The scotch had made him sleepy; to his chagrin he found himself nodding. To bring himself back to full wakefulness: that was necessary. Leaping up as he strode to his portable phonograph, took a visrecord at random, and placed it on the turntable. At once the far wall of the room lit up, and bright shapes intermingled with one another, a mixture of motion and of life, but unnaturally flat. He reflexively adjusted the depth-circuit; the figures began to become three dimensional. He turned up the sound as well.
“… Legolas is right. We may not shoot an old man so, at unawares and unchallenged, whatever fear or doubt be on us. Watch and wait!”
The bracing words of the old epic restored his perspective; he returned to his desk, reseated himself and got out the document which his supervisor had given him. Frowning, he studied the coded information, trying to decipher it. In numbers, punch-holes and letters it spelled out his new life, his world to come.
“…You speak as one that knows Fangorn well. Is that so?”
The visrecord played on, but he no longer heard it; he had begun to get the gist of the encoded messsage.
“What have you to say that you did not say at our last meeting?” a sharp and powerful voice said. He glanced up and found himself confronted by the gray-clad figure of Gandalf. It was as if Gandalf were speaking to him, to Ben Tallchief. Calling him to account. “Or, perhaps, you have things to unsay?” Gandalf said.
Ben rose, went over to the phonograph and shut it off. I do not feel able at this time to answer you, Gandalf, he said to himself. There are things to be done, real things; I can’t indulge myself in a mysterious, unreal conversation with a mythological character who probably never existed. The old values, for me, are suddenly gone; I have to work out what these damn punch-holes, letters and numbers mean.
He was beginning to get the drift of it. Carefully, he replaced the lid on the bottle of scotch, twisting is tight. He would go in a noser, alone; at the colony he would join roughly a dozen others, recruited from a variety of sources. Range 5 of skills: a class C operation, on a K-4 pay scale. Maximum time: two years of operation. Full pension and medical benefits, starting as soon as he arrived. An override for any instructions he had already received, hence he could go at once. He did not have to terminate his work here before leaving.
And I have the three silver dollars for the noser, he said to himself. So that is that; nothing else to worry about. Except …
He could not discover what his job would consist of. The letters, numbers and punch-holes failed to say, or perhaps it was more correct to say that he could not get them to divulge this one piece of information—a piece he would much have wanted.
But still it looked good. I like it, he said to himself. I want it. Gandalf, he thought, I have nothing to unsay; prayers are not often answered and I will take this. Aloud he said, “Gandaif, you no longer exist except in men’s minds, and what I have here comes from the One, True and Living Deity, who is completely real. What more can I hope for?” The silence of the room confronted him; he did not see Gadalf now because he had shut the record off. “Maybe someday,” he continued. “I will unsay this. But not yet; not now. You understand?” He waited, experiencing the silence, knowing that he could begin it or end it by a mere touch of the phonograph’s switch.
2
Seth Morley neatly divided the Gruyère cheese lying before him with a plastic-handled knife and said, “I’m leaving.” He cut himself a giant wedge of cheese, lifted it to his lips via the knife. “Late tomorrow night. Tekel Upharsin Kibbutz has seen the last of me.” He grinned, but Fred Gossim, the settlement’s chief engineer, failed to return the message of triumph; instead Gossim frowned even more strongly. His disapproving presence pervaded the office.
Mary Morley said quietly, “My husband applied for this transfer eight years ago. We never intended to stay here. You knew that.”
“And we’re going with them,” Michael Niemand stammered in excitement. “That’s what you get for bringing a top-flight marine biologist here and then setting him to work hauling blocks of stone from the goddam quarry. We’re sick of it.” He nudged his undersized wife, Clair. “Isn’t that right?”
“Since there is no body of water on this planet,” Gossim said gratingly, “we could hardly put a marine biologist to use in his stated profession.”
“But you advertised, eight years ago, for a marine biologist,” Mary Morley pointed out. This made Gossim scowl even more profoundly. “The mistake was yours.”
“But,” Gossim said, “this is your home. All of you—” He gestured at the group of kibbutz officials crowded around the entrance of the office. “We all built this.”
“And the cheese,” Seth Morley said, “is terrible, here. Those quakkip, those goat-like suborganisms that smell like the Form Destroyer’s last year’s underwear—I want very much to have seen the last of them and it. The quakkip and the cheese both.” He cut himself a second slice of the expensive, imported Gruyère cheese. To Niemand he said, “You can’t come with us. Our instructions are to make the flight by noser. Point A. A noser holds only two people; in this case my wife and me. Point B. You and your wife are two more people, ergo you won’t fit. Ergo you can’t come.”
“We’ll take our own noser,” Niemand said.
“You have no instructions and/or permission to transfer to Delmak-O,” Seth Morley said from within his mouthful of cheese.
“You don’t want us,” Niemand said.
“Nobody wants you,” Gossim grumbled. “As far as I’m concerned without you we would do better. It’s the Morleys that I don’t want to see go down the drain.”
Eying him, Seth Morley said tartly, “And this assignment is, a priori, ‘down the drain.’
“It’s some kind of experimental work,” Gossim said, “As far as I can discern. On a small scale. Thirteen, fourteen people. It would be for you turning the clock back to the early days of Tekel Upharsin. You want to build up from that all over again? Look how long it’s taken for us to get up to a hundred efficient, well-intentioned members. You mention the Form Destroyer. Aren’t you by your actions decaying back the form of Tekel Upharsin?”
“And my own form too,” Morley said, half to himself. He felt grim, now; Gossim had gotten to him. Gossin had always been good with words, amazing in an engineer. It had been Gossim’s silver-tongued words which had kept them all at their tasks throughout the years. But those words, to a good extent, had become vapid as far as the Morleys were concerned. The words did not work as they once had. And yet a glimmer of their past glory remained. He could just not quite shake off the bulky, dark-eyed engineer.