"Why, it's Dr. Becklund," he said, after he had blinked at me for a moment—self-possessed devil! "What a great pleasure, my dear Willis! I had thought you were dead."
"So I am, Kneffie. So we both are, and what else is new?"
He peered at me with that opaque, nearsighted smile I had seen so often, in Huntsville and at the Cape and all the places in between, masking whatever quick reassessments were going on in his mind. He was even uglier than he had been at the launch. He was also quite shabbily dressed. They had not valeted him well in his ultimate prison, and of course the natural chemistry under the swampy ground had not improved his appearance. "So 1 have died," he said, nodding as he comprehended and accepted the position. "To be sure. It is only what I had expected. And yourself, my dear Willis?"
"Even deader. Or at least, I have been dead longer, though perhaps not as thoroughly."
He gave me the ghost of that tolerant smile, the look of being apologetic that masked his utter confidence that he had never had anything to apologize for. A Peace rose bobbed annoyingly through his mouth as he spoke. "I do not think I quite understand. If we are not alive then, please, what are we?"
"We are nonlinear equations, Kneffie, and it is not important that you understand. I didn't rouse you to answer your questions but for you to answer mine."
"To be sure." He pursed his lips. Decay or none, he still possessed that broad, clear brow, so awfully and proudly the mark of the master race, and he smiled with the expression of a person addressing an inferior whom it is not yet time to chastise. "Please do ask what you will, my dear Willis," he said warmly.
"I shall," I said, but the truth was that I was not sure how to proceed, although I had formed the questions a hundred thousand times: What is it like to be a dragonfly, rather than a worm? What does Chandrasekhar's other limit look like from the far side? But I could not concentrate for, among other reasons, the rose was still annoying me. He had moved slightly and now it was dipping in and out of his ear.
That at least I could deal with. I gave us both substance. He sprang away as his form took flesh and the rose's thorns ripped across his cheek. "That was wickedly done!" he cried, rubbing the wound.
"I have done it to myself too, old man," I said, since the thorns had found me; but the experience was interesting as well as painful and I let it stand. "Be grateful that you can feel at all," I advised.
He glowered at me, then quickly controlled himself. It was the old, known Kneffie who rapped: "Your questions, then, if you please."
"Very well." I glanced about the dim and moonlit jungle, as though there were someone who might hear this Wal-purgis conference, before I plunged in. "1 want to know if, after you died, you were judged?"
Knefhausen looked at me opaquely, and then at the blood on his fingers. "What a curious question," he murmured, ripping the lining out of a pocket to wipe his hand clean before he replied. "But I understand the curiosity, it is only that it is strange coming, from a person in your position. Nevertheless! The answer is that I have no recollection of meeting the Herr God. I have no recollections at all, after coughing very severely and feeling very ill, until I saw you standing here."
"Not even—" I hesitated.
"Not anything at all," he said firmly, "and certainly no sort of what you would call 'judgment.' What would I be judged for, my dear Willis?"
I had thought I was past anger, but even as a revenant he was insufferable! "You have the arrogance to ask me that, Knefhausen?"
"Ah, I see," he said, nodding, "you refer to my experiment. To be sure. One can see that, from the point of view of the subject, the exercise was, what shall I say, quite disconcerting—"
"Disconcerting!"
He stood up to my anger. "Disconcerting, yes! As a subject, one could not enjoy it, naturally. But the purposes, dear Willard! The sublime purposes! It was purely an experiment, conducted with great ends in view, and you must admit that it succeeded for you yourself are the proof. Judge me? Of course, if you wish! Anyone may judge me, but the success of the experiment, that is my defense!" It would have been sensible of him to stop there, but the old peacock could not help but preen: "To be sure," he smirked, "one does not expect the schoolboy to welcome the birch."
"Shut up!" I shouted—not only in words.
So, of course, he could not help but shut up as ordered. He stood frozen there, neither wave nor motion, while I calmed myself down.
It was a temptation to send the old bastard back to his grave!
Dead or alive, Knefhausen was a slippery and evil person—enough to piss off a preacher, as we used to say; enough, enough, to anger as dead a person as I. The fact that I have lost the flesh does not mean that I do not feel its fury. Throb of blood in the temple, rush of adrenaline, trembling of the building of rage—I feel them all; if I am an illusion I create for myself, at least I create it in all details.
Even feeling rage is better than feeling nothing. Any feeling is welcome, when you have known very few for some time. It was like the physical circumstance of my having given us flesh. I itched. My skin stung where the roses had pricked. The back of my neck was a target for blood-seeking bugs. (And what did they gain from that?)
An orgasm, after all, is nothing but the explosive easing of an almost unbearable itch. These itches I could end at any moment, by dissolving away the flesh; so I could almost enjoy them.
Not, however, so tranquilly that I did not want to hurt von Knefhausen. I took my revenge. "You are an arrogant son of a bitch," I told him, "so try a little humility." And I caused him to shrink to half his height and twice his breadth. I lengthened his nose to a Roman hook worthy of the worst posters of his childhood.
"Vot? Vot?" he gasped. "Vot are you doink to me?"
"I'm teaching you a lesson, Knefhausen," I told him, pleased with my joke.
He clapped a hand to his forehead. "Oy veh! Lessons I need, a dead person already?"
"It doesn't matter what you need. A lesson is what you're going to get."
He shrugged immensely, and I could see the half-snarl fading into his usual opaque smile. What control! "So ven is comink de lessons, bubbeleh?" he demanded.
"You bastard," I said, but what was the use of anger in this situation?
"Such a mensch," he sneered. "One deader plays tricks on another!" " "All right," I said. "I'll let you off the accent, but I won't change the way you look. I want to discuss something with you."
"Thank you," he said stiffly, squinting to look at his nose. "But you have no grounds for this. It is unjust to charge me with the deeds of others, which took place when I was only a child. Still! You are the person in authority, is that not so? And so I must play this game by your rules. Tell me then what you want of me."
I said unwillingly, "I want to know what to do."
"Do? My dear Willis! Whatever you wish, of course! In what respect?"
"I would like to help these people," I said, "and I don't know how."
He nodded slowly, his fingers feeling the shape of his nose and lips. "I too wanted to help these people," he said. "And with your help I believe I did. Do you follow me? No? Let me explain. It is necessary to cut in order to cure, and I was willing to cut. The world you left—-with my assistance—was on the verge of destroying itself. It had almost no hope of surviving. I made the assumption that the knowledge that could be gained—by you!— from my little experiment might in some unpredictable way save it. And so it did! You made the final cataclysm impossible. Now are you going to throw away your success?"