Suddenly, as his own mind was on the terror, a car fluttering through the snow about a hundred yards away went into a spin. Ralph stood transfixed, appalled, as the black machine, mindless, yet possessed by its own inner necessities, lazed through wide chaotic circles in the unbounded street, then bumped up and stopped against a telephone pole that reared out of the shifting snow like a black cross. Oh my God, my God! How much time? A man got out, startling Ralph. He had somehow forgot to expect a man. Ralph felt the old impulse, the impulse to flee, but he overrode it; the recent years, while sobering, had engendered a new kind of courage. It was what emerged and took over, he supposed, when the old irrational constructs of hope and their false comforts were cut away. He stumbled through the snow toward the man, wind nearly blinding him.
The man looked up, smiled, shook his head. “Damn!” he said. “Just like a merry-go-round!”
“Are you all right?”
“Yeah.” The man laughed nervously. “But I’m gonna leave her stuck right where she’s at and walk the rest of the way. Boy! She really come in like a lion, didn’t she?”
Ralph nodded, but did not return the stupid smile. The man’s indifference to the experience angered him. They shook gloved hands, and the man left him. His heart still racing, Ralph considered the car and the pole. When the man was out of sight, Ralph glanced about to assure himself of the snow’s effective screen, then kicked a dent in the door. “Goddamn you!” he whispered. The rest of the walk home, the machine coiled and spun in maddening sweeps before his eyes.
On his porch, he mechanically checked the mailbox, then remembered it was Sunday. He tugged off the galoshes and stepped inside to greet his cats, Grendel, Nabob, Melpomene, Nyx, and Omar. They were hungry and so attended his presence. Nabob twisted and coiled, rubbing against his moving leg. It was not love. Their emotional range was between indifference and pure hate. He could accept that, yet at times it hurt him, for, against his will, he could not help loving them. He turned into the kitchen and Nabob nearly tripped him up — he brought his foot down on a paw. He removed hake from the freezer and put it to boil. He poured them some milk, but they lapped at it distractedly, their minds on the fish. Nyx sulked. He slipped her a piece of chicken liver. Nyx was a big pure-black animal with a long straight nose. Ralph feared her. “You hot black bitch!” he whispered at her.
While the fish thawed and cooked, he sat down at his desk in the front room and recorded the car accident in the P.O. — Personal Observations — journal. While constructing an essentially objective system, Ralph did not entirely reject subjectivity from it: the mere fact that it was he who had assumed the responsibility of this task was in itself a subjective element, and he recognized it. It was not proven, after all, that the force was mindless — the purity of its mathematics would in fact argue the contrary — and were it not mindless, he could well expect to be regarded as its enemy. He unwrapped last Sunday’s Guardian and Times, sent to him airmail, clipped out pertinent articles, recorded data from them.
The cats protested. He returned to the kitchen, poured the boiling water into the sink, dumped the fish on the cats’ plate. With his foot, he blocked Nyx’ approach to the plate, made sure the other four had got their share. She clawed his ankle, but he laughed and held her back a little longer. “One day …!” he warned her.
At his desk once more, he withdrew his scratchpad, did some hurried calculations. Still, the augmentation, the emergent numerical pattern, the cyclical behavior. Incredible! He sighed, chewed meditatively on the pencil, then began the task of carrying his figures all the way out. No, there was no escaping it. At the present rate of severity increase, mankind would necessarily be overcome within the next six or seven years. Six or seven years! Meticulously he rechecked his figures, and with graph paper he described a varied set of conceivable curves based on the slightly different scales he used in the different journal categories. And each time, it resulted in the same forecast — or suggested an even earlier date. Grotesque! It would be grotesque!
This had happened before, of course, signs leading to the immediacy of catastrophe, and dates had in fact been passed, but always he had uncovered some fundamental error in the schematism itself, some critical factor omitted in ignorance from his computations. For example, at the very beginning he had simply listed all events as numerically equal, an appalling lack of sophistication that now amazed and embarrassed him in retrospect. But time and error had brought wisdom. Now, he was convinced, the system could not be more complete. There was no hope in it, given the human condition, for omniscient finality, to be sure, but it had to be taken seriously.
The phone rang, startling him. What now? But it was only Jim Elliott, the Chamber of Commerce secretary. He was working at home on the new industrial brochure and needed information on certain zoning ordinances, which of course Ralph had at the office, not here at home. Elliott was a stupid arrogant ass. Himebaugh explained the problem. “But listen, Jim, if you really need the ordinances, I’ll go get them for you.”
“Aw hell, no, Ralph! Not out in that fucking mess. I just thought you might, you know, have them at hand, or something.”
“No, but I really don’t mind. It is a nasty day, but—”
“Don’t think twice about it! Anyhow, there’s a game on TV, and I’m sick of this goddamn brochure anyway. We’ll do it tomorrow.”
“Well, if you insist. But do come in the first thing tomorrow. You know I wish to help all I can. How’s your family?”
“Oh, everybody’s fine, thanks. Fat and lazy. Sally’s sore at me because I wouldn’t let her go out in the storm to a movie, but I think she’ll get over it.”
Ralph chuckled cordially, chewed irritably on his pencil. Would the fool never shut up? He and the mayor were the two men Ralph hated most in this stupid town. They never wearied of imposing on his good will with their infantile little games and incredibly insignificant problems. And, God, they monologized without cease. Now it was that hateful brochure. And it was useless, utterly useless. They would never recover from the mine disaster, of that Ralph was sure. But what good would it do to tell them? They were all sick.
“See you tomorrow then, Ralph.”
“Yes, I’ll keep the day entirely free for you, Jim. Give my best to your good wife.”
“Thanks, I’ll do that. Hang loose, now!”
Ralph laughed lightly, as he supposed he was expected to do, and cradled the receiver. The idiot! The cats, fed, had composed themselves about the house. One of them scratched in the sand in the pantry. Ralph stood at a window and gazed out on a gradually darkening world, vanishing under the deadweight of snow. The wind had diminished, but the snow still sifted down heavily. There would be accident suits and insurance claims.
He poured himself a snifter of cognac, brushed Omar out of the armchair, and curled up moodily in it, alongside his several scrapbooks and records. He started back about seven years, flipped slowly through, disaster after disaster, pausing meditatively at unusually significant events or peculiarly grotesque ones, letting his mind drift unanchored through the accumulating morass of woe and rot and grief. Slowly the black shape grew. It came to bear, as it had every day for nearly two months, upon the explosion at the Deepwater Number Nine Coalmine, seemed to hover like thick black fumes over that ravaged pit. What did it mean, why was it that single horror so impressed him? He knew full well it was purblind to place exaggerated emphasis on one event merely because of its proximity, yet he could not rid his mind of the possibility that this disaster, this one in particular, provided him, him in particular, some vital urgent message: as though — as though he had been the intended victim and had in some incredible manner escaped, and now he had one more chance, one more chance to find the way out, to discover the system that would allow him to predict and escape the next blow.