Now And Forever Part 17

"Why, if that's the sort of shower that falls from s.p.a.ce," Downs said, "I'll run out in that rain."

"Yes! As children run in spring showers!"

And I thought, His poetry has won me, but not his facts.

The captain now turned to Quell and said, "Good Quell, you read my mind. Are not fair weather there and rain and minted silver coins lost in a high new gra.s.s?"

And Quell had no answer.

"Redleigh?"

"d.a.m.n you, sir."

"No sooner d.a.m.ned than saved," replied the captain. "Salvation rings me in. Listen to its sound. Small? Downs?"

"Aye, sir!" said both.

"Quell? Ishmael?" A pause. "Your silence is affirmative." And, turning to Redleigh: "Where is your mutiny now?"

"You have bought them, sir!" said Redleigh, "Bid then, and buy them back," replied the captain.

Later, in the privacy of my own bunk, I made the following entry in my personal journal: We have run from old radio voices, shunned lost moons with lost cities, refused to share glad drinks and fine laughs with lonely s.p.a.cemen, and ignored rare priests searching for their lost sons. The list of our sins grows long. Oh G.o.d! I must listen then, to s.p.a.ce, to see what else is there, what other crimes we might commit in ignorance.

Putting the journal down, I touched a contact on the room's radio set. At first there was nothing but cold static and then came music, a symphony stranger than any I'd ever heard.

I turned it up and listened with my eyes shut.

The sound of the music caused the sleeping Quell to stir. I switched it off, and from his side of the room came Quell's voice, urgent.

"Turn it back on, quickly."

I touched the contact again, and the music returned. It was beautiful, a requiem for the living to be mourned like the dead.

I knew it haunted Quell, for his mind now embraced mine.

"Oh, listen," he whispered. "Do you hear? Music from my far world."

"Yours?" I said. "Billions of miles off? Oh, Lord!"

"Lord indeed," said Quell. "Music that has traveled all the way from my galaxy, and more. That is the music of my father's father's suffering and death."

The music continued to play, somber and funereal.

I felt tears sting my eyes for no reason, and Quell went on: "The dirge my grandfather composed for his own funeral, his great lament."

"Why, listening," I wondered aloud, "do I mourn for myself?"

Then Quell reached out with an unseen hand and an invisible mind and spoke to Downs.

"Downs," he said. "Can you put aside your s.h.i.+p's tasks for a while and make me a special s.p.a.ce suit?"

"I would, sir, if I knew how," came Downs's reply.

"I will draw it," said Quell, "and give you the plan. Come here now."

"Quell!" I said, alarmed. "What's this about?"

I sat up, and saw Quell at his desk, his strange hand drawing a strange shape on the computer screen before him.

"There," said Quell. "The proper suit, decorated with symbols of my lost world."

"Is this to be your coffin, then?" said Downs, as he entered our room and looked at Quell's plans.

"All beings in s.p.a.ce suits inhabit future coffins of their own use and shape. This is but a darker thing. Cut it from night, solder it with shadows."

"But why?" Downs wanted to know. "Why do you want a suit of death?"

"Listen," I urged.

I turned up the otherworldly music. Downs listened and his eyes trembled and his hands began to move.

"G.o.d, look at my fingers. It's as if they have a mind of their own. That dirge does this. Oh, Quell, good Quell, I guess there's no way but that I must make this terrible suit."

"Quell," I interrupted, "that music has been to the far side of the universe and back. Why does it arrive here, now?"

"Because it is the proper time."

"Quell!"

But silent, he sat there, staring in a fixed position at nothingness.

"Quell," I urged. "Listen to me."

Downs put a hand on my shoulder. "He doesn't hear you."

"He must feel what I think!" I replied.

"No," said Downs. "I've seen the like before. Whether among the natives in the lost seas of Earth or the far side of s.p.a.ce, it's much the same. Death is speaking to him."

"Don't listen, Quell!" I said, and put my hands over his ears, which was stupid, for as Downs then said: "His whole body hears. How will you stop that?"

"Like this!" I cried. "Like this!"

I wrapped my arms around Quell and held him tight, very tight.

Downs said, softly, "Let it be. You might as well try to breathe life into the white marble on a tomb."

"I will!" I said. "Oh, Quell, it's Ishmael here! Your friend. Dammit, Quell, I ask, no, I demand-let it go! This very instant, stop! I'll be very angry with you, if this goes on. I won't speak to you again! I'll, I'll..." And here I paused, for I could not breathe. "I shall weep."

I was surprised by my own tears and pulled back to see them falling on my numbed palms. I held out my hands to Quell, showing him those tears.

"Quell, look, please look," I pleaded.

But Quell did not see.

I tried to think what I must do.

And then I turned and stabbed at the radio contact on the console. The far funeral music died.

I stared at Quell and waited. An echo of the music lingered in the room.

"He still hears it," said Downs.

Suddenly, breaking the silence, a horn, a klaxon, a bell, and a voice: "Red alert! Crew to stations! Red alert!"

I turned and ran, following Downs along the corridor toward the main deck.

Reaching my post, I brought up the lights on the multilevel screen before me. A pattern of atomic light, many-colored, played before my eyes.

"What is that?" I wondered aloud.

Redleigh came to stand behind me, and posed the question, "Leviathan?"

The captain approached with his pulsing electric sound.

"No. The great comet's beyond, still some distance away. It sends a messenger ahead to warn us off. It fires a storm of gravities, atomic whirlwinds, dust storms of meteors, cosmic bombardments, solar explosions. Pay it no mind. That is but a mere mote of dust compared to Leviathan."

I tuned into the sensors on my console, and it was as the captain said. Somewhere, nearly out of range, far off but approaching fast, was a behemoth of unimaginable size and power.

Our s.p.a.cecraft trembled.

CHAPTER 9.

The trembling became more convulsive, the light on the screen more erratic. The sound grew loud, but, we knew, it was not the immense sound Leviathan might make when it arrived.

"Captain," said Redleigh. "Permission to turn back. We'll be destroyed."

"Head on, Mr. Redleigh," said the captain. "It's merely testing us."

The storm on the screen rose and fell and rose again. And then, a sudden silence.

"What?" said Redleigh.

The captain said, "What, what, indeed!"

"It's gone," I said, checking my screen again in disbelief. "The storm that ran before the comet is gone. But what of Leviathan itself?"

I ran some more scans, searching the vast expanse around our s.h.i.+p for hostile ent.i.ties. "The comet! It's vanished, too! It's gone from the sensors."

"No!" said the captain.

"Yes," I said. "According to the readings, all the s.p.a.ce around us is empty."

"Thank G.o.d," said Redleigh, almost to himself.

"No, I say, no!" the captain yelled. "My eyes see nothing. Yet-it must be there. I can almost touch it. I feel it. It is-"

A familiar voice broke in. "Gone," Quell said, quietly, staring at the emptiness of s.p.a.ce on the computer screen. "Gone."

"Quell!" I cried. "You've come back! Thank G.o.d."

Quell said nothing.

"Quell, what happened," I asked. "Out there?"

Quell moved forward slowly. "The funeral music-it's gone. Our traveling burial grounds, gone. The comet, the nightmare, all...gone."

"Yes," I said. "But why?"

Quell remained silent.

"Out with it, man!!" cried the captain.

Quell finally turned away from the screen and spoke to us. "That storm has wounded Time. We have turned a corner in Eternity. The very stuff of the void, the abyss has been...turned wrong side out...atom on atom...molecule on molecule...particle on particle reversed...I feel it...so."

And Quell reached out a hand as if his mind had fled.

"It can't be!" I heard myself say.

"So say I!" said the captain, disbelieving.

"s.p.a.ce says otherwise," said Quell, calmly. "The storm has picked us up and thrown us back two thousand years. The past has become our present."

"If this is now the past," said Redleigh, "what year is it?"

Quell thought for a few moments. "Before Columbus? Yes, certainly. Before the birth of Christ? Most likely. Before your Caesar built his Roman roads through Britain's moors, or Plato spoke or Aristotle listened? Maybe. That great star, the beast, it pities us."

"Pity?" said the captain. "How can you say pity?"

Quell searched through s.p.a.ce with eye and mind. "It would not fight with us. Instead, it would hide us deep, so it would not be forced to war against us. It has given us a chance, a path away from it. That, sir, is pity."

"I will have none!" the captain said.