“Then you came to me. Do they know you’re here?”
“I don’t think so. Just walked out, didn’t meet anybody.” He could finish the drink now, the glass rattling against his teeth.
“Are you through with them, Abraham?”
He cried out: “Christ, I had every chance to ask myself, ‘What’s a political party doing, paying a man to invent — to discover — I knew! I must have known, and wouldn’t look. Just some important abstract research, Bill said — yes, that’s something Bill said to me, when I was curious—”
“Quiet down, friend. Probably what Hodding thought himself, at least when it started. He used to be a good scientist. Emotional flaw somewhere, maybe just an overdeveloped ability to kid himself about anything not related to his field—”
“But why didn’t I — why didn’t I—”
“Why don’t you get some sleep?”
He raved then about how he’d only bring trouble to me too. I won’t record that. There were questions I could have asked. Nicholas, “taking it easy in a lounge chair,” must certainly have known what Walker had with him. Max perhaps didn’t know until too late. Max and Nicholas together could surely have overpowered Walker and taken the thing away. I asked none of those questions. I fetched a sleeping pill and made the boy swallow it.
So it’s out there, Drozma — probably. I cling to frail scraps of possibility. Walker stole the wrong test tube — no, because Hodding discovered the loss in a horribly sober morning and knew what it meant.
Maybe it’s not as “successful” as Hodding thought. He couldn’t be positive that the human organism has no defenses. Maybe wind will sweep it away, and factors not discoverable in the laboratory will make it not so viable. Maybe the tube fell unbroken in the river. Oh sure, Drozma, maybe there are “canals” on Mars.
5
Sunrise was gradual and deep this morning. I sat by one of my living-room windows and saw the grayness above the East River take on a slow flush and then a hint of gold. Spires and rooftops on the Brooklyn side were catching hold of light like cobwebs on the grass after a rain. I watched a tug slip across the river on some errand clothed in magic by the latter end of night. It drew a soft line of smoke on the water, for there was a small breeze out of the east. The line broadened to a pathway, white and gold at my end, total mystery beyond.
Abraham stirred and sighed. Without turning my head, I knew it when he crept into the room with his shoes in his hand. I said: “Don’t go.”
He set the shoes on the floor and limped toward me in stockinged feet. In that dimness I could see that his face was calm, without anger and perhaps without fear. An empty calm, spent, like despair. “Lordy, didn’t you even go to bed?”
“I never need much sleep. You don’t need to go, Abraham.”
“But I do.”
“Well, where?”
“I don’t know — haven’t thought.”
“Not back to Keller and Nicholas.”
“No…. I can’t bring on you the trouble I bring to everyone who knows me.”
“That’s nothing but vanity upside down. Something made you come here, so why go away?”
“I had to talk to someone who could listen. Selfish need. So I — did talk. But—”
“You never brought any trouble on Keller and Nicholas. They brought it on you. You could see that if you’d look at it straight.”
“I don’t know….” He knelt at the window sill, staring out with his chin on his arms. “Good, isn’t it? And doesn’t need the human to be good. Except for eyes to see it. Ears for the boat whistles — that won’t be there if — oh well, who’s to say a chipmunk couldn’t enjoy a sunrise? But then, maybe there won’t even be—” He was silent a long time. “Have you thought about it that way? Will? What if all those buildings over there were empty? Heaps of steel and stone. How long would they stand, with nobody to care about ’em? Maybe not even any rats to gnaw away at the wooden parts. Birds might use the roofs, don’t you think? Gulls — where do seagulls build?”
“Dead trees.”
“Other birds might use ’em, though. They ought to make good small mountains, cliffs. A world of birds and bugs and reptiles. Orioles, ephemerids, little snakes with nobody to tread and kill ’em. Trees everywhere, or grass. First just a funny little green finger between two paving stones, and then before too long — you know, I read somewhere that the water level is rising much faster than in the last century. Maybe that’ll take care of everything. The big waves would make short work of the best of towers, I’m sure of that. Nice old Hudson an inland sea. And the Mohawk Valley. New England would be a big island, New York State a bunch of little mountainous islands, and just nobody to bother the garter snakes.”
“Kind of rough on Gimbel’s Basement. Abe, the Black Death of the fourteenth century probably knocked over only about half of Europe, and that was in a time when everybody and his brother had fleas, to make things easy for Bacillus pestis. The flu of 1918 killed more than the First World War, but statistically it hardly made a dent in the human race.”
He rolled his forehead on his arms. “Yes, they might find it necessary to use a few hydrogen bombs to help things along. That’ll do it, that and a rising water level.”
“Abe, I really do believe there’s time for coffee before the end of the world.”
He sighed sharply and stood up, smiling faintly, perhaps making up his mind, or yielding to my insistence only because he no longer cared much about anything. “All right. Let me get it. I won’t run away.”
“You mean you won’t ever run away from anything again?”
He glanced back at me from the doorway, stooping to push his shoes on. “Why, I wouldn’t even predict, and I quote, whether the baby will have a harelip. You like it strong and black?”
“Strong enough to grow short hair on a billiard ball.”
We were still lingering over breakfast in the kitchen — a good breakfast at that, and Abraham didn’t refuse to enjoy it — when Sharon came.
I write that baldly, because I don’t know any words that tell what it is that happens when someone enters a room. The air changes. The whole orientation is something that never happened before. If the person is Sharon, the changed air has spice and sparkle, the orientation is toward warmth, toward what we call hope: merely another name for a desire to go on living. A lot of talk, maybe, for the process of hearing the doorbell, telling Abraham to sit still, walking through to the door, seeing a bright bit of human stuff in a wrapping of bunny fur — and of course, being Sharon, no hat.
“I’m coming in anyway, so may I? How can anyone be so early? How do I know it’s early? Because you’ve still got egg on your chin.” She kicked the door shut behind her. “Nup, on this side.” She rubbed the place with a peewee handkerchief and pulled me down to kiss it. “Just to make it well, poor egg.” She flung the coat somewhere or other. She was wearing leaf-brown trousers — they don’t call ’em slacks any more — and a crisp yellow blouse that made music with ocean-blue eyes. It’s always trousers nowadays except for evening dress-up, unfortunate for fat girls but fine for Sharon. “Smoke me a light, Will — I mean light me — I mean I couldn’t stay away. You won.”