up.
Move over, gnome, I said.
But that was wrong, I knew. It was defeatist talk. It was dramatizing. When the time came to try again, when and if I caught a glimmer of a hope, I’d get up and go.
But now I simply sat and felt sorry for myself-and not only for myself, but for all the rest of us. Although why I should feel sorry for Smith or Tuck or Sara, I didn’t really know. They’d gotten what they wanted.
Down in the twilight of the street a shadow moved, a darkness in the gray, and a twinge of terror went fluttering through me, but I didn’t stir. If whatever might be down there wanted to come up and get me it would find me here, beside the campfire ashes. I still had the sword and I was awkward with it, but I’d still put up a fight.
My nerves must have been worn down to frayed ends for me to be thinking this. There was no reason to believe there was anything in the city that was out to get me. The city was deserted and abandoned; nothing moved in it but shadows.
But the shadow, as I watched, kept on moving. It left the street and came up the ramp toward me, moving jerkily, like an old man stumping down a narrow lane that offered uneven footing.
I saw that it was Roscoe and, poor thing that be was, I was glad to have him back. As he came nearer I rose to greet him.
He stopped just before he reached the door and speaking carefully, as if he might be fighting against falling into his rhyming routine, he said, slowly and deliberate, with a pause between each word, “You will come with me.”
“Roscoe,” I said, “thanks for coming back. What is going on?”
He stood in the twilight, staring stupidly at me, then he said, still slowly, carefully, with each word forced out of him: “If the mathematics work ...” Then came to a halt. Mathematics had given him quite a bit of trouble.
“I had troubles,” he said. “I was confused. But I have worked it out and I am better now. Working it out helped to get me better.” He was talking with somewhat less difficulty, but it still wasn’t easy for him. The long speech had been an effort for him. You could feel him forcing himself to speak correctly.
“Take it easy, Roscoe,” I counseled. “Don’t try too hard. You are doing fine. Just take it easy now.”
But he wasn’t about to take it easy. He was full of what he had had to say. It had been bottled up inside of him for a long time and it was bubbling to get out.
“Captain Ross,” he said, “I was fearful for a time. Fearful I would never work it out. For there are two things on this planet and they both struggled for expression and I could not get them sorted, sported, forted, courted ...”
I moved forward quickly and grabbed him by the arm. “For the love of God,” I pleaded, “take it easy. You have all the time there is. There isn’t any hurry. I’ll wait to hear you out. Don’t try to talk too fast.”
“Thank you, captain,” he said with an effort at great dignity, “for your forebearance and your great consideration.”
“We’ve traveled a long road,” I told him. “We can take a little time. If you have any answers, I can wait for them. Myself, I’m fresh out of anything like answers.”
“There is the structure,” he said. “The white structure of which the city is made and the spaceport floored and the spaceships sealed.”
He stopped and waited for so long that I was afraid something might have happened to him. But after a time he spoke again.
“In ordinary matter,” he said, “the bonding between the atoms involves only the outer shells. Do you understand?’
“I think I do,” I said. “Rather foggily.”
“In the white material,” he said, “bonding extends deeper than the outer orbits of the electrons, down deep into the shell. You grasp the implication?”
I gasped as I understood at least a little of what he had just told me.
“All hell,” I said, “couldn’t break the bond.”
“Precisely,” he declared. “That is what was thought. Now you will come with me, captain, if you please.”
“But just a minute,” I protested. “You haven’t told it all. You said there were two things.”
He looked at me for a long moment, as if he might be debating if he should tell me further, then he asked a question, “What do you know, captain, of reality?”
I shrugged. It was a foolish question. “At one time,” I told him, doubtfully, “I would have told you I could recognize reality. Now I’m not so sure.”
“This planet,” he said, “is layered in realities. There are at least two realities. There may be many more.”
He was almost fluent now, although there still were times he stuttered and had to force his words out and his delivery of them was spaced imperfectly.
“But how,” I asked, “do you know all this? About the bonding and reality?”
“I do not know,” he said. “I only know I know it. And now, please, can we go?”
He turned and went down the ramp and I followed him. What had I to lose? I had nothing going for me and maybe he had nothing going for him, either, maybe all he said were just empty words born of an enlarged imagination, but I was at a point where I was ready to make a grab at any straw.
The idea of more tightly bonded atoms made a feeble sort of sense, although as I ran it through my mind I couldn’t figure out how it might be done. But this business of a many-layered reality was outright gibberish. It made no sense at all.
