The neutron, properly placed, had struck the nucleus; and the spreading chain was propagating rapidly through their world. What was it going to be from now on? They did not know; does a fissioned atom know what elements it will change into? It must change; and so it changes. “I guess we did something, eh?” said Denzer. “But ... I don’t know. If it hadn’t been us, I expect it would have been someone else. Something had to give.” For it doesn’t matter which nucleus fissions first. Once the mass is critical the chain reaction begins; it is as simple as that.
“Let’s get that drink, Denzer,” said Maggie Frome.
They flagged a cab, and all the way out to Arlington-Alex it chuckled at them as they kissed. The cab spared them its canned thoughts, and that was as they wished it. But that was not why they were in each other’s arms.
A GENTLE DYING
ELPHEN DeBeckett lay dying. It was time. He had lived in the world for one hundred and nine years, though he had seen little enough of it except for the children. The children, thank God, still came. He thought they were with him now: “Coppie,” he whispered in a shriveled voice, “how nice to see you.” The nurse did not look around, although she was the only person in the room besides himself, and knew that he was not addressing her.
The nurse was preparing the injections the doctor had ordered her to have ready. This little capsule for shock, this to rally his strength, these half-dozen others to shield him from his pain. Most of them would be used. DeBeckett was dying in a pain that once would have been unbearable and even now caused him to thresh about sometimes and moan.
DeBeckett’s room was a great twelve-foot chamber with hanging drapes and murals that reflected scenes from his books. The man himself was tiny, gnomelike. He became even less material while death (prosey biology, the chemistry of colloids) drew inappropriately near his head. He had lived his life remote from everything a normal man surrounds himself with. He now seemed hardly alive enough to die.
DeBeckett lay in a vast, pillared bed, all the vaster for the small burden he put on it, and the white linen was whiter for his merry brown face. “Darling Ved-die, please don’t cry,” he whispered restlessly, and the nurse took up a hypodermic syringe. He was not in unusual pain, though, and she put it back and sat down beside him.
The world had been gentle with the gentle old man. It had made him a present of this bed and this linen, this great house with its attendant horde of machines to feed and warm and comfort him, and the land on which stood the tiny, quaint houses he loved better. It had given him a park in the mountains, well stocked with lambs, deer and birds of blazing, spectacular color, a fenced park where no one ever went but DeBeckett and the beloved children, where earth-moving machines had scooped out a Very Own Pond (“My Very Own Pond/Which I sing for you in this song/Is eight Hippopotamuses Wide/And twenty Elephants long.”) He had not seen it for years, but he knew it was there. The world had given him, most of all, money, more money than he could ever want. He had tried to give it back (gently, hopefully, in a way pathetically), but there was always more. Even now the world showered him with gifts and doctors, though neither could prevail against the stomping pitchfire arsonist in the old man’s colon. The disease, a form of gastroenteritis, could have been cured; medicine had come that far long since. But not in a body that clung so lightly to life.
He opened his eyes and said strongly, “Nurse, are the children there?”
The nurse was a woman of nearly sixty. That was why she had been chosen. The new medicine was utterly beyond her in theory, but she could follow directions; and she loved Elphen DeBeckett. Her love was the love of a child, for a thumbed edition of Cop-pie Brambles had brightened her infancy. She said, “Of course they are, Mr. DeBeckett.”
He smiled. The old man loved children very much. They had been his whole life. The hardest part of his dying was that nothing of his own flesh would be left, no son, no grandchild, no one. He had never married. He would have given almost anything to have a child of his blood with him now-almost anything, except the lurid, grunting price nature exacts, for DeBeckett had never known a woman. His only children were the phantoms of his books . . . and those who came to visit him. He said faintly, “Let the little sweet-lings in.”
The nurse slipped out and the door closed silently behind her. Six children and three adults waited patiently outside, DeBeckett’s doctor among them. Quickly she gave him the dimensions of the old man’s illness, pulse and temperature, and the readings of the tiny gleaming dials by his pillow as well, though she did not know what they measured. It did not matter. She knew what the doctor was going to say before he said it: “He can’t last another hour. It is astonishing that he lasted this long,” he added, “but we will have lost something when he goes.”
“He wants you to come in. Especially you-“ She glanced around, embarrassed. “Especially you children.” She had almost said “little sweetlings” herself, but did not quite dare. Only Elphen DeBeckett could talk like that, even to children. Especially to children.
Especially to these children, poised, calm, beautiful, strong and gay. Only the prettiest, sweetest children visited Elphen DeBeckett, half a dozen or a score every day, a year-in, year-out pilgrimage. He would not have noticed if they had been ugly and dull, of course. To DeBeekett all children were sweet, beautiful and bright.
They entered and ranged themselves around the bed, and DeBeckett looked up. The eyes regarded them and a dying voice said, “Please read to me,” with such resolute sweetness that it frightened. “From my book,” it added, though they knew well enough what he meant.
The children looked at each other. They ranged from four to eleven, Will, Mike, blonde Celine, brown-eyed Karen, fat Freddy and busy Pat. “You,” said Pat, who was seven.
“No,” said five-year-old Freddy. “Will.”
“Celine,” said Will. “Here.”
The girl named Celine took the book from him and began obediently. “ ‘Coppie thought to herself-‘”
“No,” said Pat. “Open.”
The girl opened the book, embarrassed, glancing at the dying old man. He was smiling at her without amusement, only love. She began to read:
Coppie thought to herself that the geese might be hungry, for she herself ate Lotsandlots. Mumsie often said so, though Coppie had never found out what that mysterious food might be. She could not find any, so took some bread from Brigid Marie Ann-Erica Evangeline, the Cook Whose Name Was So Long That She Couldn’t Remember It All Herself. As she walked along Dusty Path to Coppie Brambles’s Very Own Pond-Celine hesitated, looking at the old man with sharp worry, for he had moaned faintly, like a flower moaning. “No, love,” he said. “Go on.” The swelling soft bubble before his heart had turned on him, but he knew he still had time. The little girl read:
As she walked along Dusty Path to Coppie Brambles’s Very Own Pond, she thought and thought, and what she thought finally came right out of her mouth. It was a Real Gay Think, to be Thought While Charitably Feeding Geese: They don’t make noise like little girls and boys, And all day long they’re aswimming. They never fret and sputter ‘cause they haven’t any butter,