Viken sat down. He spent a while without speaking.
Then, enormously slow and carefuclass="underline" «Do you mean Joe is Ed?»
«Or Ed is Joe. Whatever you like. He calls himself Joe now I think—as a symbol of freedom—but he is still himself. What is the ego but continuity of existence?
«He himself did not fully understand this. He only knew—he told me, and I should have believed him—that on Jupiter he was strong and happy. Why did the K tube oscillate? A hysterical symptom! Anglesey’s subconscious was not afraid to stay on Jupiter—it was afraid to come back!
«And then, today, I listened in. By now, his whole self was focused on Joe. That is, the primary source of libido was Joe’s virile body not Anglesey’s sick one. This meant a different pattern of impulses—not too alien to pass the filters, but alien enough to set up interference. So he felt my presence. And he saw the truth just as I did.
«Do you know the last emotion I felt as Joe threw me out of his mind? Not anger any more. He plays rough, him, but all he had room to feel was joy.
«I knew how strong a personality Anglesey has! Whatever made me think an overgrown child brain like Joe’s could override it? In there, the doctors—bah! They’re trying to salvage a hulk which has been shed because it is useless!»
Cornelius stopped. His throat was quite raw from talking. He paced the floor, rolled cigar smoke around his mouth but did not draw it any farther in.
When a few minutes had passed, Viken said cautiously, «All right. You should know—as you said, you were there. But what do we do now? How do we get in touch with Ed? Will he even be interested in contacting us?»
«Oh, yes, of course,» said Cornelius. «He is still himself, remember. Now that he has none of the cripple’s frustrations, he should be more amiable. When the novelty of his new friends wears off, he will want someone who can talk to him as an equal.»
«And precisely who will operate another pseudo?» asked Viken sarcastically. «I’m quite happy with this skinny frame of mine, thank you!»
«Was Anglesey the only hopeless cripple on Earth?» asked Cornelius quietly.
Viken gaped at him.
«And there are aging men, too,» went on the psionicist, half to himself. «Someday, my friend, when you and I feel the years close in, and so much we would like to learn—maybe we too would enjoy an extra lifetime in a Jovian body.» He nodded at his cigar. «A hard, lusty, stormy kind of life, granted—dangerous, brawling, violent—but life as no human, perhaps, has lived it since the days of Elizabeth the First. Oh, yes, there will be small trouble finding Jovians.»
He turned his head as the surgeon came out again.
«Well?» croaked Viken.
The doctor sat down. «It’s finished,» he said. They waited for a moment, awkwardly.
«Odd,» said the doctor. He groped after a cigarette he didn’t have. Silently, Viken offered him one. «Odd. I’ve seen these cases before. People who simply resign from life. This is the first one I ever saw that went out smiling—smiling all the time.»
PRAYER IN WAR
TOMORROW’S CHILDREN
On the world’s loom
Weave the Norns doom,
Nor may they guide it nor change.
Ten miles up, it hardly showed. Earth was a cloudy green and brown blur, the vast vault of the stratosphere reaching changelessly out to spatial infinities, and beyond the pulsing engine there was silence and serenity no man could ever touch. Looking down, Hugh Drummond could see the Mississippi gleaming like a drawn sword, and its slow curve matched the contours shown on his map. The hills, the sea, the sun and wind and rain, they didn’t change. Not in less than a million slow-striding years, and human efforts flickered too briefly in the unending night for that.
Farther down, though, and especially where cities had been—The lone man in the solitary stratojet swore softly, bitterly, and his knuckles whitened on the controls. He was a big man, his gaunt rangy form sprawling awkwardly in the tiny pressure cabin, and he wasn’t quite forty. But his dark hair was streaked with gray, in the shabby flying suit his shoulders stooped, and his long homely face was drawn into haggard lines. His eyes were black-rimmed and sunken with weariness, dark and dreadful in their intensity. He’s seen too much, survived too much, until he began to look like most other people of the world. Heir of the ages, he thought dully.
Mechanically, he went through the motions of following his course. Natural landmarks were still there, and he had powerful binoculars to help him. But he didn’t use them much. They showed too many broad shallow craters, their vitreous smoothness throwing back sunlight in the flat blank glitter of a snake’s eye, the ground about them a churned and blasted desolation. And there were the worse regions of—deadness. Twisted dead trees, blowing sand, tumbled skeletons perhaps at night a baleful blue glow of fluorescence. The bombs had been nightmares, riding in on wings of fire and horror to shake the planet with the death blows of cities. But the radioactive dust was worse than any nightmare.
He passed over villages, even small towns. Some of them were deserted, the blowing colloidal dust, or plague, or economic breakdown making them untenable. Others still seemed to be living a feeble half-life. Especially in the Midwest, there was a pathetic struggle to return to an agricultural system, but the insects and blights—
Drummond shrugged. After nearly two years of this, over the scarred and maimed planet, he should be used to it. The United States had been lucky. Europe, now—
Der Untergang des Abendlandes, he thought grayly. Spengler foresaw the collapse of a topheavy civilization. He didn’t foresee atomic bombs, radioactive-dust bombs, bacteria bombs, blight bombs—the bombs, the senseless inanimate bombs flying like monster insects over the shivering world. So he didn’t guess the extent of the collapse.
Deliberately he pushed the thoughts out of his conscious mind. He didn’t want to dwell on them. He’d lived with them two years, and that was two eternities too long. And anyway, he was nearly home now.
The capital of the United States was below him, and he sent the stratojet slanting down in a long thunderous dive toward the mountains. Not much of a capital, the little town huddled in a valley of the Cascades, but the waters of the Potomac had filled the grave of Washington. Strictly speaking, there was no capital. The officers of the government were scattered over the country, keeping in precarious touch by plane and radio, but Taylor, Oregon, came as close to being the nerve center as any other place.