There was really no point in arguing with him, I told myself; he was too good for me. I was a savage splitting logic with a missionary. He knew more than I did; probably he was more intelligent. And the central question, the only one that mattered, couldn’t be answered the way I was going at it.
Aza-Kra himself was the key, not the doctrine of non-violence, not the psychology of crime.
If he was telling the truth about himself and the civilization he came from, I had nothing to worry about.
If he wasn’t then I should have left him in Chillicothe or killed him in Paris; and if I could kill him now, that was what I should do.
And I didn’t know. After all this time, I still didn’t know.
I saw the bus come back down the road and disappear towards Otaru. After a long time, I saw it heading out again. When it came back from the cape the second time, I woke Aza-Kra and we slogged down the steep path to the roadside. I waved as the bus came nearer; it slowed and rattled to a halt a few yards beyond us.
Passengers’ heads popped out of the windows to watch us as we walked toward the door. Most of them were Japanese, but I saw one Caucasian, leaning with both arms out of the window. I saw his features clearly, narrow pale nose and lips, blue eyes behind rimless glasses; sunlight glinting on sparse yellow hair. And then I saw the flat dusty road coming up to meet me.
I was lying face-up on a hard sandy slope; when I opened my eyes I saw the sky and a few blades of tough, dry grass. The first thought that came into my head was, Now I know. Now I’ve had it.
I sat up. And a buzzing voice said, “Hold your breath!” Turning, I saw a body sprawled on the slope just below me. It was the yellow-haired man. Beyond him squatted the gray form of Ajza-Kra.
“All right,” he said.
I let my breath out. “What—?”
He showed me a brown metal ovoid, cross-hatched with fragmentation grooves. A grenade.
“He was about to aim it. There was no time to warn you. I knew you would wish to see for yourself.”
I looked around dazedly. Thirty feet above, the slope ended in a clean-cut line against the sky; beyond it was a short, narrow white stripe that I recognized as the top of the bus, still parked at the side of the road.
“We have ten minutes more before the others awaken.”
I went through the man’s pockets. I found a handful of change, a wallet with nothing in it but a few yen notes, and a folded slip of glossy white paper. That was all.
I unfolded the paper, but I knew what it was even before I saw the small teleprinted photograph on its inner side. It was a copy of my passport picture—the one on the genuine document, not the bogus one I had made in Paris.
On the way back, my hands began shaking. It got so bad that I had to put them between my thighs and squeeze hard; and then the shaking spread to my legs and arms and jaw. My forehead was cold and there was a football-sized ache in my belly, expanding to a white pain every time we hit a bump. The whole bus seemed to be tilting ponderously over to the right, farther and farther but never falling down.
Later, when I had had a cup of coffee and two cigarettes in the terminal lunchroom, I got one of the most powerful irrational impulses I’ve ever known: I wanted to take the next bus back to that spot on the coast road, walk down the slope to where the yellow-haired man was, and kick his skull to flinders.
If we were lucky, the yellow-haired man might have been the only one in Otaru who knew we were here. The only way to find out was to go on to the airport and take a chance; either way, we had to get out of Japan. But it didn’t end there. Even if they didn’t know where we were now, they knew all the stops on our itinerary; they knew which visas we had. Maybe Aza-Kra would be able to gas the next one before he killed us, and then again maybe not.
I thought about Frisbee and Parst and the President— damning them all impartially—and my anger grew. By now, I realized suddenly, they must have understood that we were responsible for what was happening. They would have been energetically apportioning the blame for the last few days; probably Parst had already been court-martialed.
Once that was settled, there would be two things they could do next. They could publish the truth, admit their own responsibility, and warn the world. Or they could destroy all the evidence and keep silent. If the world went to hell in a bucket, at least they wouldn’t be blamed for it.... Providing I was dead. Not much choice.
After another minute I got up and Aza-Kra followed me out to a taxi. We stopped at the nearest telegraph office and I sent a cable to Frisbee in Washington:
HAVE SENT FULL ACCOUNT CHILLICOTHE TO TRUSTWORTHY PERSON WITH INSTRUCTIONS PUBLISH EVENT MY DEATH OR DISAPPEARANCE. CALL OFF YOUR DOGS.
It was childish, but apparently it worked. Not only did we have no trouble at Otaru airport—the yellow-haired man, as I’d hoped, must have been working alone—but nobody bothered us at Honolulu or Asuncion.
Just the same, the mood of depression and nervousness that settled on me that day didn’t lift; it grew steadily worse. Fourteen hours’ sleep in Asuncion didn’t mend it; Monday’s reports of panics and bank failures in North America intensified it, but that was incidental.
And when I slept, I had nightmares: dreams of stifling-dark jungles, full of things with teeth.
We spent twenty-four hours in Asuncion, while Aza-Kra pumped out enough catalyst to blanket South America’s seven million square miles—a territory almost as big as the sprawling monster of Soviet Eurasia.
After that we flew to Capetown—and that was it. We were finished.
We had spiraled around the globe, from the United States to England, to France, to Israel, to India, to Japan, to Paraguay, to the Union of South Africa, trailing an expanding invisible cloud behind us. Now the trade winds were carrying it eastward from the Atlantic, south from the Mediterranean, north from the Indian Ocean, west from the Atlantic.
Frigate birds and locusts, men in tramp steamers and men in jet planes would carry it farther. In a week it would have reached all the places we had missed: Australia, Micronesia, the islands of the South Pacific, the Poles.
That left the lunar bases and the orbital stations. Ours and Theirs. But they had to be supplied from Earth; the infection would come to them in rockets.
For better or worse, we had what we had always said we wanted. Ahimsa. The Age of Reason. The Kingdom of God.
And I still didn’t know whether I was Judas, or the little Dutch boy with his finger in the dike.
I didn’t find out until three weeks later.
We stayed on in Capetown, resting and waiting. Listening to the radio and reading newspapers kept me occupied a good part of the time. When restlessness drove me out of doors, I wandered aimlessly in the business section, or went down to the harbor and spent hours staring out past the castle and the breakwater.
But my chief occupation, the thing that obsessed me now, was the study of Aza-Kra.
He seemed very tired. His skin was turning dry and rough, more gray than blue; his eyes were blue-threaded and more opaque-looking than ever. He slept a great deal and moved little. The soy-bean paste I was able to get for him gave him insufficient nourishment; vitamins and minerals were lacking.
I asked him why he didn’t make what he needed in his air machine. He said that some few of the compounds could be inhaled, and he was making those; that he had had another transmuter, for food-manufacture, but that it had been taken from him; and that he would be all right; he would last until his friends came.
He didn’t know when that would be; or he wouldn’t tell me.
His speech was slower and his diction more slurred every day. It was obviously difficult for him to talk; but I goaded him, I nagged him, I would not let him alone. I spent days on one topic, left it, came back to it and asked the same questions over. I made copious notes of what he said and the way he said it.