But who was the voice? And what had he left out?
“Let’s see what a party looks like now,” he said to the voice.
* * * *
The party was a masquerade; the guests were all wearing their faces. To Anders, their motives, individually and collectively, were painfully apparent. Then his vision began to clear further.
He saw that the people weren’t truly individual. They were discontinuous lumps of flesh sharing a common vocabulary, yet not even truly discontinuous.
The lumps of flesh were a part of the decoration of the room and almost indistinguishable from it. They were one with the lights, which lent their tiny vision. They were joined to the sounds they made, a few feeble tones out of the great possibility of sound. They blended into the walls.
The kaleidoscopic view came so fast that Anders had trouble sorting his new impressions. He knew now that these people existed only as patterns, on the same basis as the sounds they made and the things they thought they saw.
Gestalts, sifted out of the vast, unbearable real world.
“Where’s Judy?” a discontinuous lump of flesh asked him. This particular lump possessed enough nervous mannerisms to convince the other lumps of his reality. He wore a loud tie as further evidence.
“She’s sick,” Anders said. The flesh quivered into an instant sympathy. Lines of formal mirth shifted to formal woe.
“Hope it isn’t anything serious,” the vocal flesh remarked.
“You’re warmer,” the voice said to Anders.
Anders looked at the object in front of him.
“She hasn’t long to live,” he stated.
The flesh quivered. Stomach and intestines contracted in sympathetic fear. Eyes distended, mouth quivered.
The loud tie remained the same.
“My God! You don’t mean it!”
“What are you?” Anders asked quietly.
“What do you mean?” the indignant flesh attached to the tie demanded. Serene within its reality, it gaped at Anders. Its mouth twitched, undeniable proof that it was real and sufficient. “You’re drunk,” it sneered.
Anders laughed and left the party.
* * * *
“There is still something you don’t know,” the voice said. “But you were hot! I could feel you near me.”
“What are you?” Anders asked again.
“I don’t know,” the voice admitted. “I am a person. I am I. I am trapped.”
“So are we all,” Anders said. He walked on asphalt, surrounded by heaps of concrete, silicates, aluminum and iron alloys. Shapeless, meaningless heaps that made up the gestalt city.
And then there were the imaginary lines of demarcation dividing city from city, the artificial boundaries of water and land.
All ridiculous.
“Give me a dime for some coffee, mister?” something asked, a thing indistinguishable from any other thing.
“Old Bishop Berkeley would give a nonexistent dime to your nonexistent presence,” Anders said gaily.
“I’m really in a bad way,” the voice whined, and Anders perceived that it was no more than a series of modulated vibrations.
“Yes! Go on!” the voice commanded.
“If you could spare me a quarter—” the vibrations said, with a deep pretense at meaning.
No, what was there behind the senseless patterns? Flesh, mass. What was that? All made up of atoms.
“I’m really hungry,” the intricately arranged atoms muttered.
All atoms. Conjoined. There were no true separations between atom and atom. Flesh was stone, stone was light. Anders looked at the masses of atoms that were pretending to solidity, meaning and reason.
“Can’t you help me?” a clump of atoms asked. But the clump was identical with all the other atoms. Once you ignored the superimposed patterns, you could see the atoms were random, scattered.
“I don’t believe in you,” Anders said.
The pile of atoms was gone.
“Yes!” the voice cried. “Yes!”
“I don’t believe in any of it,” Anders said. After all, what was an atom?
“Go on!” the voice shouted. “You’re hot! Go on!”
What was an atom? An empty space surrounded by an empty space.
Absurd!
“Then it’s all false!” Anders said. And he was alone under the stars.
“That’s right!” the voice within his head screamed. “Nothing!”
But stars, Anders thought. How can one believe—
The stars disappeared. Anders was in a gray nothingness, a void. There was nothing around him except shapeless gray.
Where was the voice?
Gone.
Anders perceived the delusion behind the grayness, and then there was nothing at all.
Complete nothingness, and himself within it.
* * * *
Where was he? What did it mean? Anders’ mind tried to add it up.
Impossible. That couldn’t be true.
Again the score was tabulated, but Anders’ mind couldn’t accept the total. In desperation, the overloaded mind erased the figures, eradicated the knowledge, erased itself.
“Where am I?”
In nothingness. Alone.
Trapped.
“Who am I?”
A voice.
The voice of Anders searched the nothingness, shouted, “Is there anyone here?”
No answer.
But there was someone. All directions were the same, yet moving along one he could make contact…with someone. The voice of Anders reached back to someone who could save him, perhaps.
“Save me,” the voice said to Anders, lying fully dressed on his bed, except for his shoes and black bow tie.
DEATH WISH
The space freighter Queen Dierdre was a great, squat, pockmarked vessel of the Earth-Mars run and she never gave anyone a bit of trouble. That should have been sufficient warning to Mr. Watkins, her engineer. Watkins was fond of saying that there are two kinds of equipment—the kind that fails bit by bit, and the kind that fails all at once.
Watkins was short and red-faced, magnificently mustached, and always a little out of breath. With a cigar in his hand, over a glass of beer, he talked most cynically about his ship, in the immemorial fashion of engineers. But in reality, Watkins was foolishly infatuated with Dierdre, idealized her, humanized her, and couldn’t conceive of anything serious ever happening.
On this particular run, Dierdre soared away from Terra at the proper speed; Mr. Watkins signaled that fuel was being consumed at the proper rate; and Captain Somers cut the engines at the proper moment indicated by Mr. Rajcik, the navigator.
As soon as Point Able had been reached and the engines stopped, Somers frowned and studied his complex control board. He was a thin and meticulous man, and he operated his ship with mechanical perfection. He was well liked in the front offices of Mikkelsen Space Lines, where Old Man Mikkelsen pointed to Captain Somers’ reports as models of neatness and efficiency. On Mars, he stayed at the Officers’ Club, eschewing the stews and dives of Marsport. On Earth, he lived in a little Vermont cottage and enjoyed the quiet companionship of two cats, a Japanese houseboy, and a wife.
* * * *
His instructions read true. And yet he sensed something wrong. Somers knew every creak, rattle and groan that Dierdre was capable of making. During blastoff, he had heard something different. In space, something different had to be wrong.
“Mr. Rajcik,” he said, turning to his navigator, “would you check the cargo? I believe something may have shifted.”
“You bet,” Rajcik said cheerfully. He was an almost offensively handsome young man with black wavy hair, blasé blue eyes and a cleft chin. Despite his appearance, Rajcik was thoroughly qualified for his position. But he was only one of fifty thousand thoroughly qualified men who lusted for a berth on one of the fourteen spaceships in existence. Only Stephen Rajcik had had the foresight, appearance and fortitude to court and wed Helga, Old Man Mikkelsen’s eldest daughter.