Big Book of Science Fiction (27 page)

Bolton cleared his throat. “Mr.
Field?”

“Yes, yes, don’t bother me.”

“I’ve some bad news, sir.”

Field jerked his grey head up. “What?
The time element?”

“You’d better tell Wolfe to hurry
his work. The connection may break some time this week,” said Bolton, softly.

“I’ll give you another million
dollars if you keep it going!”

“It’s not money, Mr. Field. It’s
just plain physics right now. I’ll do everything I can. But you’d better warn
him, is all I say.”

The old man shriveled away into
his chair and was small. “But you can’t take him away from me now, not when he’s
doing so well. You should see the outline he sent through, an hour ago, the
stories, the sketches. Here, here’s one on spatial tides, another on meteors.
Here’s a short novel begun called
Thistledown and Fire—”

“I’m sorry.”

“If we lose him now, can we get
him again?”

“I’d be afraid to tamper too
much.”

The old man was frozen. “Only one
thing to do then. Arrange to have Wolfe type his work, if possible, or dictate
it, to save time, rather than have him use pencil and paper, he’s got to use a
machine of some sort. See to it!”

The machine ticked away by the
hour into the night and into the dawn and through the day. The old man slept
only in faint dozes, blinking awake when the machine stuttered to life, and all
of space and travel and existence came to him through the mind of another:

“. . . the great starred meadows
of space . . .

The machine jumped.

“Keep at it, Tom, show them!” The
old man waited.

The phone rang.

It was Bolton.

“We can’t keep it up, Mr. Field.
The time contact will fade some time in the next minute.”

“Do something!”

“I can’t.”

The teletype chattered. In a cold
fascination, in a horror, the old man watched the black lines form.

“. . . the Martian cities,
immense and unbelievable, as numerous as stones thrown from some great mountain
in a rushing and incredible avalanche, resting at last in shining mounds . . .”

“Tom!” cried the old man.

“Now,” said Bolton, on the phone.

The teletype hesitated, typed a
word, and fell silent.

“Tom!” screamed the old man.

He shook the teletype.

“It’s no use,” said the telephone
voice. “He’s gone. I’m shutting off the Time Machine.”

“No! Leave it on!”

“But—”

“You heard me—leave it! We’re not
sure he’s gone.”

“He is. It’s no use, we’re
wasting energy.”

“Waste it, then!”

He slammed the phone down.

He turned to the teletype, to the
unfinished sentence.

“Come on, Tom, they can’t get rid
of you that way, you won’t let them, will you, boy, come on. Tom, show them,
you’re big, you’re bigger than time or space or their damned machines, you’re
strong and you’ve a will like iron, Tom, show them, don’t let them send you
back!”

The teletype snapped one key.

The old man bleated. “Tom! You
are
there, aren’t you? Can you still write? Write, Tom, keep it coming, as
long as you keep it rolling, Tom, they
can’t
send you back!”

“The,” typed the machine.

“More, Tom, more!”

“Odors of,” clacked the machine.

“Yes?”

“Mars,” typed the machine, and
paused. A minute’s silence. The machine spaced, skipped a paragraph, and began:

The odors of Mars, the cinnamons
and cold spice winds, the winds of cloudy dust and winds of powerful bone and
ancient pollen—

“Tom, you’re still alive!”

For answer the machine, in the
next ten hours, slammed out six chapters of
Flight Before Fury
in a
series of fevered explosions.

~ * ~

“Today
makes six weeks, Bolton, six whole weeks, Tom gone, on Mars, through the
Asteroids. Look here, the manuscripts. Ten thousand words a day, he’s driving
himself, I don’t know when he sleeps, or if he eats, I don’t care, he doesn’t
either, he only wants to get it done, because he knows the time is short.”

“I can’t understand it,” said
Bolton. “The power failed because our relays wore out. It took us three days to
manufacture and replace the particular channel relays necessary to keep the
Time Element steady and yet Wolfe hung on. There’s a personal factor here, Lord
knows what, we didn’t take into account. Wolfe lives here, in this time, when
he
is
here, and can’t be snapped back, after all. Time isn’t as flexible
as we imagined. We used the wrong simile. It’s not like a rubber band. More
like osmosis; the penetration of membranes by liquids, from Past to Present,
but we’ve got to send him back, can’t keep him here, there’d be a void there, a
derangement. The one thing that really keeps him here now is himself, his
desire, his work. After it’s over he’ll go back as naturally as pouring water
from a glass.”

“I don’t care about reasons, all
I know is Tom is finishing it. He has the old fire and description, and
something else, something more, a searching of values that supersede time and
space. He’s done a study of a woman left behind on Earth while the brave rocket
heroes leap into space that’s beautiful, objective and subtle; he calls it
Day of the Rocket,
and it is nothing more than an afternoon of a typical
surburban housewife who lives as her ancestral mothers lived, in a house,
raising her children, her life not much different from a cave-woman’s, in the midst
of the splendor of science and the trumpetings of space projectiles; a true and
steady and subtle study of her wishes and frustrations. Here’s another
manuscript called
The Indians,
in which he refers to the Martians as
Cherokees and Iroquois and Blackfoots, the Indian nations of space, destroyed
and driven back. Have a drink, Bolton, have a drink!”

~ * ~

Tom
Wolfe returned to Earth at the end of eight weeks.

He arrived in fire as he had left
in fire, and his huge steps were burned across space, and in the library of
Henry William Field’s house were towers of yellow paper, with lines of black
scribble and type on them, and these were to be separated out into the six
sections of a master-work that, through endurance, and a knowing that the sands
were, dwindling from the glass, had mushroomed day on day.

Tom Wolfe came back to Earth and
stood in the library of Henry William Field’s house and looked at the massive
outpourings of his heart and his hand and when the old man said, “Do you want
to read it, Tom?” he shook his great head and replied, putting back his thick
mane of dark hair with his big pale hand, “No. I don’t dare start on it. If I
did, I’d want to take it home with me. And I can’t do that, can I?”

“No, Tom, you can’t.”

“No matter
how
much I
wanted to?”

“No, that’s the way it is. You
never wrote another novel in that year, Tom. What was written here must stay
here, what was written there must stay there. There’s no touching it.”

“I see.” Tom sank down into a
chair with a great sigh. “I’m tired. I’m mightily tired. It’s been hard, but it’s
been good. What day is it?”

“This is the sixtieth day.”

“The
last
day?”

The old man nodded and they were
both silent awhile.

“Back to 1938 in the stone
cemetery,” said Tom Wolfe, eyes shut. “I don’t like that. I wish I didn’t know
about that, it’s a horrible thing to know.” His voice faded and he put his big
hands over his face and held them tightly there.

The door opened. Bolton let
himself in and stood behind Tom Wolfe’s chair, a small phial in his hand.

“What’s that?” asked the old man.

“An extinct virus. Pneumonia.
Very ancient and very evil,” said Bolton. “When Mr. Wolfe came through, I had
to cure him of his illness, of course, which was immensely easy with the
techniques we know today, in order to put him in working condition for his job,
Mr. Field. I kept this pneumonia culture. Now that he’s going back, he’ll have
to be reinoculated with the disease.”

“Otherwise?”

Tom Wolfe looked up.

“Otherwise, he’d get well, in
1938.”

Tom Wolfe arose from his chair. “You
mean, get well, walk around, back there, be well, and cheat the mortician?”

“That’s what I mean.”

Tom Wolfe stared at the phial and
one of his hands twitched. “What if I destroyed the virus and refused to let
you inoculate me?”

“You can’t do that!”

“But—supposing?”

“You’d ruin things.”

“What things?”

“The pattern, life, the way
things are and were, the things that can’t be changed. You can’t disrupt it.
There’s only one sure thing, you’re to die, and I’m to see to it.”

Wolfe looked at the door. “I
could run off, go back by myself.”

“We control the machine. You
wouldn’t get out of the house. I’d have you back here, by force, and
inoculated. I anticipated some such trouble when the time came; there are five
men waiting down below. One shout from me—you see, it’s useless. There, that’s
better. Here now.”

Wolfe had moved back and now had
turned to look at the old man and the window and this huge house. “I’m afraid I
must apologize. I don’t want to die. So very much I don’t want to die.”

The old man came to him and shook
his hand. “Think of it this way; you’ve had two more months than anyone could
expect from life, and you’ve turned out another book, a last book, a new book,
think of that, and you’ll feel better.”

“I want to thank you for this,”
said Thomas Wolfe, gravely. “I want to thank both of you. I’m ready.” He rolled
up his sleeve. “The inoculation.”

And while Bolton bent to his
task, with his free hand Thomas Wolfe pencilled two black lines across the top
of the first manuscript and went on talking:

“There’s a passage from one of my
old books,” he said, scowling to remember it. “. . .
of wandering forever
and the earth . . . Who owns the Earth? Did we want the Earth? that we should
wander on it? Did we need the Earth that we were never still upon it? Whoever
needs the Earth shall have the Earth; he shall be upon it, he shall rest within
a little place, he shall dwell in one small room forever . . .”

Wolfe was finished with the
remembering.

“Here’s my last book,” he said,
and on the empty yellow paper facing it he blocked out vigorous huge black
letters with pressures of the pencil:
Forever and the Earth,
by Thomas
Wolfe.

He picked up a ream of it and
held it tightly in his hands, against his chest, for a moment. “I wish I could
take it back with me. It’s like parting with my son.” He gave it a slap and put
it aside and immediately thereafter gave his quick hand into that of his
employer, and strode across the room, Bolton after him, until he reached the
door where he stood framed in the late afternoon light, huge and magnificent. “Goodbye,
goodbye!” he cried.