“I sense,” Garnett put in, ‘you’re trying to get some message over to me.”
“The message is that, even after you had done all those things, still there would come a day when an intelligent being could survey the universe and find no trace of your existence.”
“It wouldn’t alter the fact that I had existed. It doesn’t matter how short a time I live—if I make something good, the fact that I did so will be just as real after a billion years as after ten minutes.”
“Horsefeathers!” Janice looked mildly surprised. “I think that’s the first time I ever said that word. The proper occasion must never have arisen before, but it did just then.”
“Same to you. Let’s get out before we have a stand-up fight.” Garnett drained his glass and they went out into the bright, impersonal infinities of the summer afternoon. He was relieved there was no need to talk as they walked, for this time he was determined nothing should go wrong between them yet he had felt himself being drawn into another row by her determined futility. At least, he thought, it provided a working explanation for the aimlessness of her personal life. Garnett found himself wishing Janice was not so blindingly attractive—born into a more homely body she might have been forced to explore the possibilities of a permanent relationship. As it was she had no shortage of philosophical fellow-travellers. Men, he admitted, like Tony Garnett.
They spent the afternoon walking in the village and its environs. Garnett’s pockets filled with pipe cleaners and boxes of matches as he worked round the local shops trying to talk to people without being conspicuous. Finally he had to give up. Almost by instinct he could put his finger on the subtlest flaw hidden behind the massed symbolism of an engineering drawing, but this village, as far as Garnett was concerned, remained simply an ordinary village.
He rolled the big car gently down the coast to Llanbedr and found the motel, which turned out to be a scattering of pink chalets on a hillside overlooking a sea-lapped airfield. Numb with excitement Garnett rented two chalets from the sports-coated proprietor, noting with satisfaction how the man gaped at Janice. The motel, he learned, had no restaurant facilities but a reasonable dinner could be had at the hotel in Llanbedr.
“My feet hurt,” Janice said as they walked up the winding path to the little single-roomed buildings. “Give me a couple of hours to get them back into shape, then I’ll be ready to eat.”
As he set the bags down inside her doorway she stepped out of her shoes and turned to him. Their first kiss was good, just as he had always known it would be; he kept his eyes open to print the few racing seconds on his memory.
“Easy, Tony, easy,” she murmured. “We’ve got lots of time.”
Garnett stepped back reluctantly and lifted his case. “We solipsists are all the same, you know. See you about eight.” His throat was dry.
In the silence of his own chalet he shaved, changed his clothes and lay tensely on the unfamiliar bed watching a pale, three-quarters moon slide across the window. Since the establishment of the permanent Lunar bases in the mid-Seventies, ten years earlier, Garnett had come to regard the moon as just another geographical location, a place he might visit someday. But tonight it was just the same old moon the poets knew, and nobody could ever walk on that.
He called on Janice at eight and found her standing at her door, smoking as usual, and wearing a white dress fastened with gold clasps giving it a faintly classical look which suited the Delian atmosphere of the lush summer evening. They walked to the hotel in Llanbedr, had several drinks, a simple dinner, and returned to the motel in the twilight. Garnett thought vaguely that they should go to her chalet but Janice stopped determinedly at his so he led her in and closed the door.
Their second kiss was much longer, even more perfect than the first and Garnett felt her lithe body drive forward against his own with a force he could barely match. It was everything he could have asked for, except for one tiny thing—the words. The words were unimportant but suddenly Garnett found himself greedy for them, needing them, and they forced themselves up from his throat.
“I love you, Janice.” He waited, and felt her arms untwine slightly. You fool, he screamed inwardly, what are you doing?
“I like you, Tony,” she said. “I like you a lot.”
It isn’t too late, he thought, she has said she likes me and maybe that’s better than love—why ruin it all now? But aloud he found himself demanding the age-old response and in a few thunderous seconds they were standing apart, arguing. The words, all the wrong ones, came too fast for him to comprehend, and Janice stuck to everything she had ever said about human relationships with a ruthless, uncompromising honesty which filled him with rage. The realisation that he would have been content for her to lie about loving him made Garnett even more furious. Finally she turned away from him, shrugged, and took a cigarette from her purse.
“If you light that thing,” he said coldly, “I’m leaving.”
Janice flicked her lighter on. “What is the saying about ultimatums? You should never issue an ultimatum because …’
Garnett snatched the cigarette from her mouth, crumpled it and shouldered his way outside, slamming the door behind him. He had taken a dozen steps in the darkness towards where he imagined his chalet to be when he remembered they had been in his chalet. Swearing incoherently he began to turn back then realised the ludicrousness would be too much for him. Once into Janice’s chalet, he ripped off his jacket and lay down on her bed, sick with dismay. He had no expectations of sleep, but the exhaustion inherited from the accident closed black arms around him within a matter of minutes and he dropped into an uneasy sleep.
The explosion came hours later.
Garnett sat up gasping in pitch darkness, so disorientated that for one panicky moment he was unable to find even his own identity. The air was still filled with reverberations from the heart-stopping blast and not far away someone had begun to scream patiently and regularly, like breathing. A shifting orange light was beginning to move across the window when Garnett got to his feet and opened the door. The light was coming from flames that were fanning up through the crazily twisted roof of the chalet where he …
Janice!
Garnett ran quickly, risking a broken ankle on the strange ground, and threw himself through the chalet’s gaping doorway, beyond which the air was almost solid with billowing mortar dust. Please Janice, he pleaded, please be all right. He found her, still in the white dress, lying face downwards beneath curling streamers of flowered wallpaper which the explosion had stripped from the walls. Sliding his hands under her, he lifted then hesitated, sickened, knowing he had no business moving a human body which felt like that. The flames increased their grip on the wreckage. Garnett clenched his teeth, stood up with the limp body in his arms and carried it out on to the grass where people in night clothes had begun to gather. He knew as he folded Janice down on the ground she was at that moment launching out across the eternity of which she had always been so afraid. Incredibly, her lips moved for a moment, so slightly that at first he thought it might be shadow movements from the fire. He put his ear to her mouth.
‘… difficult, very difficult. Late. I have it. I have it now, Xoanon. I …’ The words stopped with unmistakable finality and Garnett rolled away from her, burying his face in the grass. When he stood up again somebody had covered Janice with a yellow raincoat and the world was rocking around him, reduced to a meaningless montage of luridly-lit faces, black tree-shapes arid distant black reaches of impassive sea. The floating faces spoke to him excitedly, questioning, but he ignored them, standing beside the body until an ambulance arrived and the attendants loaded the strangely small bundle into it. The boyish-looking doctor’s eyes narrowed professionally as he looked at Garnett and suggested that he lie down, but Garnett brushed him away—for the second time that night nothing could satisfy him but ancient, formal words, this time with the police. F’accuse!