The sense of irrelevance grows into the outlines of his radiation, pushing them back towards the gold-rimmed books that line the wall behind the criss-cross metal over the shelves, penetrating the labyrinthine knowledge of alternate proofs and truths within his strange profession built on the failures of men. It makes a noise in a non-natural impulse like a distracted sea, lapping, withdrawing and advancing at a jerky rhythm governed by some mad moon or other somewhere in parabolic orbit around the business in hand, bouncing its signals of distress on a short wave-length back to it, pulsating, gasping so that you must decide one way or another what you will do. I mean to say, you know very well she hasn’t a legal leg to stand on. If you really want to fight her on her own ground just say the word and I can settle it quite differently.
— My dear Edwin.
The pain behind the eyes resolves the unrhythmic signal in the dark as with a change of lenses, and the well-living swarthy face looks back with gentle eyes behind the horn-rimmed glasses, but as I have said before, it doesn’t matter.
— Well, nothing matters, if it comes to that, I quite agree. But we must run some sort of show to keep going at all, mustn’t we. I gather she may ask for the discretion of the court in respect of. Does she intend to marry this chap, er — Stanley –
— Of course not.
— Surely you see that I can’t act for you if you don’t instruct me. And, in this case, give cause.
— I only want to find some simple place where I can live out my second life in complete solitude.
— Desertion. Well, all right. It takes three years.
— I can’t stand seeing, hearing, inside myself, seeing the whole of — oh, something, I don’t know what, but it frightens me, I feel as if I lived backwards in time, consisting of anti-atoms, or had lost something vital and positive which I must go away and find. Silence perhaps, merely.
— You have seen what you have seen.
— I didn’t say that.
— No, I did.
— Edwin –
— You don’t need to explain. Have it your way. Physician heal thyself. I never go anywhere, I just sit here and work people out of trouble in their best interests if any.
— Please do what you think best, Edwin. But don’t take it out on … anyone, least of all –
— The children. I know. They all say that.
— Sometimes I feel I have none. Never had.
— Well, you haven’t that many. Still, schooling and –
— Five, four.
— Larry! Come back. Come back.
— Two.
— Good boy.
Inside the mirror on the landing the shape stares back its map-like contours of some unknown region, continent, galaxy perhaps, with two starless coalsacks radiating nothing. And yet something creates the wavering undulations and if not the eyes then some nebulous memory, surely, behind the eyes, some electron of love or fear spiralling at high velocity in some magnetic field, so that the forces of acceleration in its orbits cause it to emanate on a long wave-length in a metre band. The pain behind the eyes that close to avoid the issue of their death resolves the optical image in the dark like a change of lenses, and the thin man stares back, as before death, before recovery, as when life took its normal course through blood vessels, nerve fibres, muscle spindles, bones, flesh and such that comfort. Their returned presence mocks the wavering outlines that grow suddenly monstrous before vanishing as if they had not wavered there at all, pulsating, breathing in and out in long undulations doubling, trebling each other’s trebles on a map of ocean depths, filling the entire mirror or, with some others, the whole room, bursting its walls, the house, the street, the square, and the whole sky.
My dear Larry,
Forgive me for not answering your letter at once. I had to go to Virginia on an assignment, oddly enough connected with the work up at your place: a programme about the radio-telescope at Green Bank where, as you may know, they have started again on Project Ozma, begun some years ago but abandoned as having yielded no results. It seems that according to new calculations, a new wavelength might prove more fruitful in sending out non-natural impulses to Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani in the Whale and River constellations, and perhaps getting a reply if any intelligent life exists or has existed many light years ago at the same stage as ours on any of their planets, if they have planets. They would apparently recognise the impulses as non-natural. I apologise for telling you what you probably know already from your wife, patients and friends in your unusual surroundings as psychiatrist to the university science faculty, but I got all excited about it in a layman-like way, so that it all seems as new to me as it must seem old-hat to you.
Anyway, nobody forwarded your letter, and I found it here when I got back. Of course I remember our Cambridge days. I would have reminded you at the time of that unfortunate interview, but I realised then that you had no idea, and very little grip on reality as yet. Besides, I have changed considerably as middle age creeps on, I realise that.
I should indeed very much like to see you again, and soon. But the metropolis ties me down just at the moment, at any rate for the next six weeks. Might anything in the way of business or pleasure bring you down? Do please let me know, I can even put you up on my sofa if you come alone. Otherwise it will have to wait until some other assignment takes me up your way, which indeed could occur as we may do a follow-up programme on your own chaps. Not for some time however. So I hope you can manage something sooner than that for I would greatly enjoy seeing you, your real self I mean, now that you’ve fully recovered. I don’t mind telling you that you really frightened me, and not many of the people I interview succeed in doing that. Besides, I have an idea I’d like to discuss with you.
Looking forward to hearing from you,
Yours ever,
Telford.
A secretary has typed the letter, behind a door perhaps with a round window in it many light-years or months ago, and no handwriting bleeps across the dial in peaks and plains except the name, but then why should it in busy days thus approached by a region that has receded at half the speed of life its light only now reaching us? Tell-Star persists in his verbal pedantry, and worms in the head squirm as he sharpens his beak in non-natural impulses that draw the line as a rule between one solar system and another though looking forward to a reply. The higher the temperature, however, the faster the vibrations, and consequently the higher the frequency of the radiation emitted, so that devices like the brain become unsuitable on account of the inertia associated with matter of relatively large mass.
— But father, no one could call you large, or even massive. Tall, yes, but not large. And certainly not old.
— How did you get in?
— I rang the bell, the landlady let me in.
— Oh. The fat woman, you mean?
— I suppose so. I wouldn’t call her fat either.
— What do you want, Martin?
— Just to see you, father. How goes it?
— She shouldn’t have sent you.
— Who shouldn’t?
— Your mother. She should know better than that.
— She didn’t send me. I just came. I mean, Mr Mellek wrote to me at school, at the end of the term, and told me of your, well, how things stood. He gave me your address, in case.
— In case of what?
— In case … I should want to see you. I’ve just come off the train. Just passing through, you know.