They’re so careless, Joan Hiashi thought. She watched without saying anything further as Percy X snatched up Paul’s laser rifle and threw it over a nearby slope; the big Neeg-part leader was laughing now, with the gloating snarl of a victor, and he continued laughing, but more quietly, to himself, as he strode toward the entrance of the cave.
Joan returned her attention to the ant colony on the ground before her. And frowned.
Something had further upset the ants. They had begun to wander aimlessly, instead of going about their business in their usual orderly fashion.
She heard a moan and glanced questioningly up again.
Paul Rivers had dragged himself to his feet, shaking his head vigorously in an effort to clear it. He peered into the cave, saw Percy X at the entrance and, although still by no means recovered from the judo chop, started toward Percy X at a clumsy, weaving run. Percy X looked back, saw Paul coming, and sprang through the entrance into the dark interior of the cavern. A moment later Paul, too, had disap-
peared into the cave; Joan heard the sound of scuffling and then a strangled, half-human cry, followed by silence.
Hearing nothing more after an interval she bent down to examine the ants more closely. Suddenly a bird fell nearby, still fluttering; then another and another.
With a trace of amusement Joan thought, It’s raining birds.
A thought came to Marshal Koli from one of the leaders of the clock faction, a thought tinged with annoyance. “Mekkis just tuned in.”
Koli shrugged. What difference, he thought, does that make?
He stretched out his tongue toward the firing button, noticing with real alarm a peculiar effect of light and a sensation of deja vu, as if he had done this same thing many times before.
It’s just the excitement, he decided.
Then, it seemed to him, the button started to move away from him. His tongue grew longer and longer, reaching for it, but still it moved away. Now his tongue had become longer than his body and was yet growing; the button, however, remained no closer than before. With a madness bom out of panic Koli guessed—correctly—that the button was moving away from him not in space but in time.
What’s going on here? he demanded of the Great Common, and, as if to answer his question, he suddenly found himself in the mind of the turncoat Mekkis.
Mekkis thought, All right, you great and glorious
Common. I, Rudolph Balkani, am killing you, and you know that I am killing you and you will go on knowing it for a long time. Into the sensory withdrawal tank, all of you worms!
Trying to remember who he himself was, Koli found that his name had escaped him. He knew only that it was neither Mekkis nor Balkani; he was someone who had intended to push a button, Ah, I know, he thought, I am Percy X! And he found himself reaching with a dark-skinned finger for a pushbutton on a small but somehow infinitely potent machine in a cave within Terran mountains.
And then the light bent and bent and bent, making a tube of greenish gray, a tunnel down which the one huge dark-skinned finger slowly moved, year after year.
If you decide to use the thing, he thought, don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.
Then he felt the needle enter his Percy-Koli- Balkani arm.
The dark finger at last reached the button, while a cloud of eyes watched in mute horror and all the stars in space screamed in pain ecstasy. The dark finger pushed the button, while armies of pyrotechnic phantasms flickered in and out of being like a movie rushing through a projector at breakneck speed: whole scenes appeared super-imposed over one another. And music sounded, too, also playing itself out at a frantic pace, so high-pitched that only an animal should have been able to hear it yet he could hear it anyhow.
And then the finger broke, and the bent light, unable to take any more stress, broke also, and as the
sound abruptly faded out and the light dimmed away to nothingness his last thought sounded in the emptiness. Who am I?
Becoming darkness, he could not answer his own question, because darkness does not speak. Nor think. Nor feel. It only sees.
XVI
Gus Swenesgard stood before the cracked bureau mirror in his room, the finest in the hotel, and toasted himself in expensive pre-war Cutty Sark Scotch. To the future world ruler, he said to himself, and drained the tall cracked glass. An unnatural lighting effect began to manifest itself, a sort of tunnel vision combined with a graying of the light; Gus, however, ignored it, supposing it to be only a consequence of the liquor.
This stuff, he reflected with slurred approval, has really got the old puzoom!
Then the lights winked out.
I’d better call one of the maintenance Toms, he thought with annoyance.
But when he tried to speak, nothing happened. It was as if, he realized, he had no vocal cords, or even any tongue or lips. He tried to move his hands up to touch his face—only to find that his hand, also, was missing.
And, he discovered, so were his feet and legs and body.
He listened, and heard not the slighest sound in the darkness. Not even the beating of his own heart. Good God, he thought. I’m dead!
He strained to make out something, anything, even if it consisted of nothing more than a figment of his own mind. The only item, however, which he could conjure up appeared to be a faint afterimage of that which he had been watching at the moment the darkness came: his'own reflection in the cracked old hotel mirror.
Now, experiencing himself as—not a person—but a disembodied ghost, he stared at his pseudoreflection and felt sudden and enormous aversion. All that flesh, that sweating, ugly, bloated flesh! He sprang back from it, watched with relief as it grew smaller and dimmer in the distance.
A detached feeling of freedom came over him, as if he could now, having shed his solid body, fly through space and even time without hindrance.
So this is what it’s like, he said to himself, to be an angel.
There has been a terrible mistake, Mekkis thought in the blackness.
This in no way resembled what he had anticipated on the basis of Dr. Balkani’s Oblivion Therapy. He had expected horrors, hallucinations, a variety of grotesque and fantastic images or perhaps light phenomena composed of whirling discs of pure color. All that he had read in the papers, books and monographs of Balkani, plus all that he had heard about the illusion projectors used by the Neeg- parts—
But nothing, Mekkis thought. “Nothing” is not right.
Even more painful than the experience itself was the thought that Balkani had been wrong, fundamentally wrong.
What deluded game have I been playing with myself? he wondered. I’m not Balkani. I’m not even a worm called Mekkis. I am a part, not a whole; I am just one of many organs in the great body called the Common, but lam a cancerous organ, and now I’ve succeeded in killing the entity of which I am a part.
Without the aid of creeches no Gany median of the ruling class could survive more than a few days. And in this darkness neither he nor anyone else could summon a single creech.
This is death, Mekkis thought: death for all of us. But it’s not as I imagined it would be. I thought I would be able to savor the agonies of my enemies in the Common; I believed it would be a grand and spectacular doom, like the final chords of something made of music. But it is not.
It is nothing, absolutely nothing. And I am utterly alone in it.
Somewhere in the desolation of the Ganymedian administrator’s mind a voice seemed to be saying, “Your death will be much worse.” The Oracle. And it spoke the truth.
I’ve failed, Paul Rivers thought, lying buried in the darkness. I had a grip on his throat but he was too strong for me and we were too close to the machine. Somehow he managed to reach it and turn it on. And now he’s stopped the clock at last.