Maybe there was a further note. He searched the water for a bottle; he whisked the light here and there, sweeping out an enormous area.
No bottle. Nothing.
Mali came up beside him. "Anything?"
"No," he said curtly.
"Do you know what I think?" Mali said. "I think, as I've always thought, that he's fated to fail. The Book is right and Harper Baldwin is right. Faust always fails and Glimmung is an incarnation of Faust. The striving, the restless intensity... it's all there; the legend is fulfilled, in fact is being fulfilled right now as we stand here."
"Maybe so," Joe said, still lashing the water with shafts of white light.
Mali took his arm and nuzzled close to him. "It's safe, now. We could leave. The Black One isn't after us anymore."
"I'm staying here." Joe moved away from her, still sweeping the water with his torch. No thoughts crossed his mind; mentally he was blank, merely listening passively, waiting. Waiting for a clue, a sign. Any sign of what was going on below.
All at once the water stirred. He swung the torch, lit up that general area. He strained to see.
Something enormous was attempting to come to the surface. What was it? Heldscalla? Glimmung? Or—the Black Cathedral? He waited, trembling. The vast object made the water boil and hiss; clouds of steam traveled upward and the night was alive with a full roaring, a cauldron of haste and activity and titanic effort.
Mali said quietly, "It's Glimmung. And he's badly hurt."
15
The hoop of fire had been extinguished. Only one hoop turned, the hoop of water, and it grated piercingly... as if, Joe thought, a machine is dying, not a living creature.
The others of the group made their way to the wharf. "He's failed," the red jelly supported by the metal frame said. "You can see; he's beginning to die."
"Yes," Joe said, aloud, and was surprised to hear his own voice; it rang harshly in the midst of the moans rising from the injured Glimmung. Several others in the group echoed his word; it was as if he had pronounced a ban, as if it was his decision to make, whether Glimmung would live or not live. "But we can't be really sure until we get out there," he said. He set down his torch and descended the wooden ladder to the parked boat. "I'm going to go and find out," he said; he reached for his torch and then, squatting and shivering in the chill night wind, started the engine of the boat.
"Don't go," Mali said.
Joe grated, "I'll see you in a little while." He guided the boat from its dock, out into the furiously lapping waves created by the thrashing bulk of Glimmung's body.
An enormity of injury, he thought as the boat rose and fell, put-putting its way anxiously forward. Injury on a scale which we really can't understand. Damn it, he thought with bitterness. Why does it have to end this way? Why couldn't it have been otherwise? He felt numb, as if death were assailing him, too. As if he and Glimmung--.
The huge shape wallowed in the water, and, as it lay, blood poured from it; like Christ on the cross it bled eternally, as if its blood supply was infinite. As if, Joe thought, this moment is going to last forever: me in the boat, trying to get close, and him floundering and bleeding and dying. God, he thought; this is awful, truly awful. And yet he guided the boat on, closer and closer.
From the depths of himself Glimmung said, "I—need you. All of you."
"What can we do?" He continued on, closer and closer; now the periphery of the body strained and twisted only a yard from the prow of the boat. Water and blood swamped its way into the boat; Joe felt it sink below him. He gripped the sides, tried to shift his weight. But blood and water continued to pour in. I will be drowned, he thought, in another few seconds.
Reluctantly, he reversed direction; he backed away from Glimmung. The boat ceased taking liquid. And yet he felt no better. His fear and agony remained the same, his empathic identification with his dying employer.
Glimmung sputtered, "I—I—" He slobbered, now, rolling on his side, unable to control the thrashing of his maimed body.
"Whatever it is," Joe said, "we'll do it."
"That's—inordinately receptive—of you," Glimmung managed to whisper, and then he revolved entirely; he sank below the surface, so that speech, for him, became impossible.
The end, Joe thought, has come.
Wretchedly, he turned the boat about and, misery weighing him down, steered for the wharf once more. It was over.
As he tied up the boat, Mali and Harper Baldwin and several nonhumanoids reached to help him.
"Thanks," he said, and clumsily ascended the wooden ladder. "He's dead," Joe said. "Or almost dead. Virtually dead." He let Miss Reiss and Mali sweep a blanket over him, a warm cloak which settled into place over his foam- and blood-drenched body. My god, he realized. I'm soaking wet. He had no memory of it; at the time he had been concerned with what he saw only. With Glimmung. Now he turned his attention on himself... and found that he was wet, freezing, and filled with despair.
"Here's a local cigarette," Mali said; she placed it between his trembling lips. "Get inside. Don't watch. There's nothing you can do. You tried."
Joe said, shakily, "He asked for our help."
"I know," Mali said. "We heard him." The others of the group nodded silently, their faces bleached with unyielding pain.
"But I don't know what it is," Joe said. "The help we can do. I don't see anything we can do, but he was trying to say. Maybe if he could have said it we could have done it. The last thing he said, did, was to thank me." He let Mali lead him under the hermetically sealed dome and into the radiant heat of the staging center.
"We'll leave this planet tonight," Mali said presently, as the two of them stood together.
"Okay," he said. He nodded.
"Come to my planet with me," Mali said. "Don't go back to Earth; you'd be so unhappy there."
"Yeah," he agreed. It was true. Beyond any doubt, any possible doubt whatever. As W. S. Gilbert would have put it. "Where's Willis?" he asked, looking around. "I want to trade quotes with him."
"Quotations," Mali corrected.
He nodded in agreement. "Yes," he said. "I meant to say quotations."
"You're really tired."
"Hell," he said, "I don't know why I should be; all I did was paddle out there in a boat to try to talk with him."
"The responsibility," Mali said.
"What responsibility? I couldn't even hear him."
"But the promise you made. Regarding us all."
Joe said, "Anyhow I failed."
"_He_ failed. It's not your fault. You were listening—we all were listening. He never managed to say it."
"Is he still on the surface?" Joe asked; he peered past her, across the wharf, at the water beyond.
"He's on the surface, slowly drifting this way."
Joe tossed down the cigarette, ground it out with his heel, and started for the wharf.
"Stay in here," Mali said, trying to stop him. "It's sealed against the cold. You're still wet; you'll die."
"Do you know how Gilbert died?" he asked her. "William Schwenck Gilbert? He had a heart attack trying to rescue a girl who was drowning." He pushed past her, through the thermal barrier, and outdoors onto the wharf once more. "I won't die," he said to her as she followed after him. "Which in a sense is too bad." Maybe it would be more useful, he thought, to die with Glimmung. That way, at least, we could show how we felt. But who would notice? Who is left to notice? Spiddles and werjes, he thought. And robots. He continued on, pushing his way through the group, until he reached the edge of the wharf.