The Short Happy Life of the Brown Oxford and Other Classic Stories (26 page)

“Blake!” Eller struggled to his knees. The tottering figure that had been Silvia lurched and fell. Eller caught hold of Blake’s arms. The two figures swayed back and forth. Blake trying to pull away. Suddenly Eller’s strength gave out. He slipped back down, his head striking the metal floor. Nearby, Silvia lay, silent and inert.

“Get away from me,” Blake snarled, waving the disc. “I can destroy you the way I did her. Do you understand?”

“You killed her,” Eller screamed.

“It’s your own fault. You see what you gained by fighting? Stay away from me! If you come near me I’ll turn the cloud on you again. It’ll be the end of you.”

Eller did not move. He stared at the silent form.

“All right,” Blake’s voice came to him, as if from a great distance. “Now listen to me. We’re continuing toward Terra. You’ll guide the ship for me while I work down in the laboratory. I can follow your thoughts, so if you attempt to change course I’ll know at once. Forget about her! It still leaves two of us, enough to do what we must. We’ll be within the system in a few days. There’s much to accomplish, first.” Blake’s voice was calm, matter of fact. “Can you get up?”

Eller rose slowly, holding onto the hull railing.

“Good,” Blake said. “We must work everything out very carefully. We may have difficulties with the Terrans at first. We must be prepared for that. I think that in the time remaining I will be able to construct the necessary equipment that we will need. Later on, when your development catches up with my own, we will be able to work together to produce the things we need.”

Eller stared at him. “Do you think I’ll ever go along with you?” he said. His glance moved toward the figure on the floor, the silent, unmoving figure. “Do you think after that I could ever—”

“Come, come, Eller,” Blake said impatiently. “I’m surprised at you. You must begin to see things from a new position. There is too much involved to consider—”

“So this is how mankind will be treated! This is the way you’ll save them, by ways like this!”

“You’ll come around to a realistic attitude,” Blake said calmly. “You’ll see that as men of the future—”

“Do you really think I will?”

The two men faced each other.

Slowly a flicker of doubt passed over Blake’s face. “You must, Eller! It’s our duty to consider things in a new way. Of course you will.” He frowned, raising the disc a little. “How can there be any doubt of that?”

Eller did not answer.

“Perhaps,” Blake said thoughtfully, “you will hold a grudge against me. Perhaps your vision will be clouded by this incident. It is possible…” The disc moved. “In that case I must adjust myself as soon as possible to the realization that I will have to go on alone. If you won’t join me to do the things that must be done then I will have to do them without you.” His fingers tightened against the disc. “I will do it all alone, Eller, if you won’t join me. Perhaps this is the best way. Sooner or later this moment might come, in any case. It is better for me to—”

Blake screamed.

From the wall a vast, transparent shape moved slowly, almost leisurely, out into the control room. Behind the shape came another, and then another, until at last there were five of them. The shapes pulsed faintly, glimmering with a vague, internal glow. All were identical, featureless.

In the center of the control room the shapes came to rest, hovering a little way up from the floor, soundlessly, pulsing gently, as if waiting.

Eller stared at them. Blake had lowered his disc and was standing, pale and tense, gaping in astonishment. Suddenly Eller realized something that made chill fear rush through him. He was not seeing the shapes at all. He was almost completely blind. He was sensing them in some new way, through some new mode of perception. He struggled to comprehend, his mind racing. Then, all at once, he understood. And he knew why they had no distinct shapes, no features.

They were pure energy.

Blake pulled himself together, coming to life. “What—” he stammered, waving the disc. “Who—”

A thought flashed, cutting Blake off. The thought seared through Eller’s mind, hard and sharp, a cold, impersonal thought, detached and remote.

“The girl. First.”

Two of the shapes moved toward Silvia’s inert form, lying silently beside Eller. They paused a slight distance above her, glowing and pulsing. Then part of the glimmering corona leaped out, hurtling toward the girl’s body, bathing her in a shimmering fire.

“That will suffice,” a second thought came, after a few moments. The corona retreated. “Now, the one with the weapon.”

A shape moved toward Blake. Blake retreated toward the door behind him. His withered body shook with fear.

“What are you?” he demanded, raising the disc. “Who are you? Where did you come from?”

The shape came on.

“Get away!” Blake cried. “Get back! If you don’t—”

He fired. The blue cloud entered the shape. The shape quivered for a moment, absorbing the cloud. Then it came on again. Blake’s jaw fell. He scrambled into the corridor, stumbling and falling. The shape hesitated at the door. Then it was joined by a second shape which moved up beside it.

A ball of light left the first shape, moving toward Blake. It enveloped him. The light winked out. There was nothing where Blake had stood. Nothing at all.

“That was unfortunate,” a thought came. “But necessary. Is the girl reviving?”

“Yes.”

“Good.”

“Who are you?” Eller asked. “What are you? Will Silv be all right? Is she alive?”

“The girl will recover.” The shapes moved toward Eller, surrounding him. “We should perhaps have intervened before she was injured but we preferred to wait until we were certain the one with the weapon was going to gain control.”

“Then you knew what was happening?”

“We saw it all.”

“Who are you? Where did you—where did you come from?”

“We were here,” the thought came.

“Here?”

“On the ship. We were here from the start. You see,
we
were the first to receive the radiation; Blake was wrong. So our transformation began even before his did. And in addition, we had much farther to go. Your race has little evolution ahead of it. A few more inches of cranium, a little less hair, perhaps. But not really so much. Our race, on the other hand, had just begun.”

“Your race? First to receive the radiation?” Eller stared around him in dawning realization. “Then you must be—”

“Yes,” the calm, inflexible thought came. “You are right. We are the hamsters from the laboratory. The pigs carried for your experiments and tests.” There was almost a note of humor in the thought. “However, we hold nothing against you, I assure you. In fact, we have very little interest in your race, one way or another. We owe you a slight debt for helping us along our path, bringing our destiny onto us in a few short minutes instead of another fifty million years.

“For that we are thankful. And I think we have already repaid you. The girl will be all right. Blake is gone. You will be allowed to continue on your way back to your own planet.”

“Back to Terra?” Eller faltered. “But—”

“There is one more thing that we will do before we go,” the calm thought came. “We have discussed the matter and we are in complete agreement on this. Eventually your race will achieve its rightful position through the natural course of time. There is no value in hurrying it prematurely. For the sake of your race and the sake of you two, we will do one last thing before we depart. You will understand.”

A swift ball of flame rose from the first shape. It hovered over Eller. It touched him and passed on to Silvia. “It is better,” the thought came. “There is no doubt.”

They watched silently, staring through the port scope. From the side of the ship the first ball of light moved, flashing out into the void.

“Look!” Silvia exclaimed.

The ball of light increased speed. It shot away from the ship, moving at incredible velocity. A second ball oozed through the hull of the ship, out into space behind the first.

After it came a third, a fourth, and finally a fifth. One by one the balls of light hurtled out into the void, out into deep space.

When they were gone Silvia turned to Eller, her eyes shining. “That’s that,” she said. “Where are they going?”

“No way to tell. A long way, probably. Maybe not anywhere in this galaxy. Some remote place.” Eller reached out suddenly, touching Silvia’s dark-brown hair. He grinned. “You know, your hair is really something to see. The most beautiful hair in the whole universe.”

Silvia laughed. “Any hair looks good to us, now.” She smiled up at him, her red lips warm. “Even yours, Cris.”

Eller gazed down at her a long time. “They were right,” he said at last.

“Right?”

“It
is
better.” Eller nodded, gazing down at the girl beside him, at her hair and dark eyes, the familiar lithe, supple form. “I agree—There is no doubt of it.”

Doc Labyrinth leaned back in his lawn chair, closing his eyes gloomily. He pulled his blanket up around his knees.

“Well?” I said. I was standing by the barbecue pit, warming my hands. It was a clear cold day. The sunny Los Angeles sky was almost cloud-free. Beyond Labyrinth’s modest house a gently undulating expanse of green stretched off until it reached the mountains—a small forest that gave the illusion of wilderness within the very limits of the city. “Well?” I said. “Then the Machine did work the way you expected?”

Labyrinth did not answer. I turned around. The old man was staring moodily ahead, watching an enormous dun-colored beetle that was slowly climbing the side of his blanket. The beetle rose methodically, its face blank with dignity. It passed over the top and disappeared down the far side. We were alone again.

Labyrinth sighed and looked up at me. “Oh, it worked well enough.”

I looked after the beetle, but it was nowhere to be seen. A faint breeze eddied around me, chill and thin in the fading afternoon twilight. I moved nearer the barbecue pit.

“Tell me about it,” I said.

Doctor Labyrinth, like most people who read a great deal and who have too much time on their hands, had become convinced that our civilization was going the way of Rome. He saw, I think, the same cracks forming that had sundered the ancient world, the world of Greece and Rome; and it was his conviction that presently our world, our society, would pass away as theirs did, and a period of darkness would follow.

Now Labyrinth, having thought this, began to brood over all the fine and lovely things that would be lost in the reshuffling of societies. He thought of the art, the literature, the manners, the music, everything that would be lost. And it seemed to him that of all these grand and noble things, music would probably be the most lost, the quickest forgotten.

Music is the most perishable of things, fragile and delicate, easily destroyed.

Labyrinth worried about this, because he loved music, because he hated the idea that some day there would be no more Brahms and Mozart, no more gentle chamber music that he could dreamily associate with powdered wigs and resined bows, with long, slender candles, melting away in the gloom.

What a dry and unfortunate world it would be, without music! How dusty and unbearable.

This is how he came to think of the Preserving Machine. One evening as he sat in his living room in his deep chair, the gramophone on low, a vision came to him. He perceived in his mind a strange sight, the last score of a Schubert trio, the last copy, dog-eared, well-thumbed, lying on the floor of some gutted place, probably a museum.

A bomber moved overhead. Bombs fell, bursting the museum to fragments, bringing the walls down in a roar of rubble and plaster. In the debris the last score disappeared, lost in the rubbish, to rot and mold.

And then, in Doc Labyrinth’s vision, he saw the score come burrowing out, like some buried mole. Quick like a mole, in fact, with claws and sharp teeth and a furious energy.

If music had that faculty, the ordinary, everyday instinct of survival which every worm and mole has, how different it would be! If music could be transformed into living creatures, animals with claws and teeth, then music might survive. If only a Machine could be built, a Machine to process musical scores into living forms.

But Doc Labyrinth was no mechanic. He made a few tentative sketches and sent them hopefully around to the research laboratories. Most of them were much too busy with war contracts, of course. But at last he found the people he wanted. A small midwestern university was delighted with his plans, and they were happy to start work on the Machine at once.

Weeks passed. At last Labyrinth received a postcard from the university. The Machine was coming along fine; in fact, it was almost finished. They had given it a trial run, feeding a couple of popular songs into it. The results? Two small mouse-like animals had come scampering out, rushing around the laboratory until the cat caught and ate them. But the Machine was a success.

It came to him shortly after, packed carefully in a wood crate, wired together and fully insured. He was quite excited as he set to work, taking the slats from it. Many fleeting notions must have coursed through his mind as he adjusted the controls and made ready for the first transformation. He had selected a priceless score to begin with, the score of the Mozart G Minor

Quintet. For a time he turned the pages, lost in thought, his mind far away. At last he carried it to the Machine and dropped it in.

Time passed. Labyrinth stood before it, waiting nervously, apprehensive and not really certain what would greet him when he opened the compartment. He was doing a fine and tragic work, it seemed to him, preserving the music of the great composers for all eternity. What would his thanks be? What would he find? What form would this all take, before it was over?