It’s dying, he realized. The universe. The thermal haze spread on and on until it became only a disturbance, nothing more; the sky glowed weakly with it and then flickered. Even the uniform thermal disbursement was expiring. How strange and goddam awful, he thought. He got to his feet, moved a step toward the door.
And there, on his feet, he died.
They found him an hour later. Seth Morley stood with his wife at the far end of the knot of people jammed into the small room and said to himself, To keep him from helping with the prayer.
“The same force that shut down the transmitter,” Ignatz Thugg said. “They knew; they knew if he phrased the prayer it would go through. Even without the relay.” He looked gray and frightened. All of them did, Seth Morley noticed. Their faces, in the light of the room, had a leaden, stone-like cast. Like, he thought, thousand-year-old idols.
Time, he thought, is shutting down around us. It is as if the future is gone, for all of us. Not just for Tallchief.
“Babble, can you do an autopsy?” Betty Jo Berm asked. “To a certain extent.” Dr. Babble had seated himself beside Tallchief ‘s body and was touching him here and there. “No visible blood. No sign of an injury. His death could be natural, you all realize; it might be that he had a cardiac condition. Or, for example, he might have been killed by a heat gun at close range… but then, if that’s the case, I’ll find the burn marks.” He unfastened Tallchief’s collar, reached down to explore the chest area. “Or one of us might have done it,” he said. “Don’t rule that out.”
“They did it,” Maggie Walsh said.
“Possibly,” Babble said. “I’ll do what I can.” He nodded to Thugg and Wade Frazer and Glen Belsnor. “Help me carry him into the clinic; I’ll start the autopsy now.”
“None of us even knew him,” Mary said.
“I think I probably saw him last,” Seth Morley said. “He wanted to bring his things from his noser here to his living area. I told him I’d help him later on, when I had time. He seemed to be in a bad mood; I tried to tell him we needed him to compose a prayer but he didn’t seem interested. He just wanted to move his things.” He felt acutely guilty. Maybe if I had helped him he’d still be alive, he said to himself. Maybe Babble’s right; maybe it was a heart attack, brought on by moving heavy cartons. He kicked at the box of books, wondering if this box had done it—this box and his own refusal to help. Even when I was asked I wouldn’t give it, he realized.
“You didn’t see any indication of a suicidal attitude at work, did you?” Dr. Babble asked.
‘‘No.”
“Very strange,” Babble said. He shook his head wearily. “Okay, let’s get him to the infirmary.”
6
The four men carried Tallchief’s body across the dark, nocturnal compound. Cold wind licked at them and they shivered; they drew together against the hostile presence of Delmak-O—the hostile presence which had killed Ben Tallchief.
Babble switched on lights here and there. At last they had Tallchief up on the high, metal-topped table.
“I think we should retire to our individual living quarters and stay there until Dr. Babble has finished his autopsy,” Susie Smart said, shivering.
Wade Frazer spoke up. “Better if we stay together, at least until Dr. Babble’s report is in. And I also think that under these unexpected circumstances, this terrible event in our lives, that we must immediately elect a leader, a strong one who can keep us together as a group, when in fact right now we are not, but should be—must be. Doesn’t everyone agree?”
After a pause Glen Belsnor said, “Yeah.”
“We can vote,” Betty Jo Berm said. “In a democratic way. But I think we must be careful.” She struggled to express herself. “We mustn’t give a leader too much power. And we should be able to recall him when and if at any time we’re not satisfied with him; then we can vote him out as our leader and elect someone else. But while he is leader we should obey him—we don’t want him to be too weak, either. If he’s too weak we’ll just be like we are now: a mere collection of individuals who can’t function together, even in the face of death.”
“Then let’s get back to the briefing room,” Tony Dunkelwelt said, “rather than to our personal quarters. So we can start casting votes. I mean, it or they could kill us before we have a leader; we don’t want to wait.”
In a group they made their way somberly from Dr. Babble’s infirmary to the briefing room. The transmitter and receiver were still on; each person, entering, heard the dull, low hum.
“So big,” Maggie Walsh said, gazing at the transmitter. “And so useless.”
“Do you think we should arm ourselves?” Bert Kosler said, plucking at Morley’s sleeve. “If there’s someone after us to kill all of us—”
“Let’s wait for Babble’s autopsy report,” Seth Morley said.
Seating himself, Wade Frazer said in a business-like way, “We’ll vote by a show of hands. Everybody sit down and be quiet and I’ll read off our names and keep the tally. Is that satisfactory to everyone?” There was a sardonic undertone to his voice, and Seth Morley did not like it.
Ignatz Thugg said, “You won’t get it, Frazer. No matter how badly you want it. Nobody in this room is going to let somebody like you tell them what to do.” He dropped into a chair, crossed his legs, and got a tobacco cigarette from his jacket pocket.
As Wade Frazer read off the names and took the tally, several others made their own notations. They don’t trust Frazer to make an accurate account, Seth Morley realized. He did not blame them.
“The greatest number of votes for one person,” Frazer said, when all the names had been read, “goes to Glen Belsnor.” He dropped his tally sheet with a blatant sneer… as if, Morley thought, the psychologist is saying ‘Go ahead and doom yourselves. It’s your lives, if you want to toss them away.’ But it seemed to him that Belsnor was a good choice; on his own very limited knowledge he had himself voted for the electronics maintenance man. He was satisfied, even if Frazer was not. And by their relieved stir he guessed that most of the others were, too.
“While we’re waiting for Dr. Babble’s report,” Maggie Walsh said, “perhaps we should join in a group prayer for Mr. Tallchief ‘s psyche to be taken immediately into immortality.”
“Read from Specktowsky’s Book,” Betty Jo Berm said. She dipped into her pocket and brought out her own copy, which she passed to Maggie Walsh. “Read the part on page 70 about the Intercessor. Isn’t it the Intercessor that we want to reach?”
From memory, Maggie Walsh intoned the words which all of them knew. “‘By His appearance in history and creation, the Intercessor offered Himself as a sacrifice by which the Curse could be partially nullified. Satisfied as to the redemption of His creation by this manifestation of Himself, this signal of His great—but partial—victory, the Deity “died” and then remanifested Himself to indicate that He had overcome the Curse and hence death, and, having done this, moved up through the concentric circles back to God Himself.’ And I will add another part which is pertinent. “The next—and last—period is the Day of Audit, in which the heavens will roll back like a scroll and each living thing—and hence all creatures, both sentient man and man-like nonterrestrial organisms—will be reconciled with the original Deity, from whose unity of being everything has come (with the possible exception of the Form Destroyer).’” She paused a moment and then said, “Repeat what I say after me, all of you, either aloud or in your thoughts.”