Truth was, it scared everyone that looked at it.
But they kept looking and kept seeing it and kept feeling the absolute, almost cosmic horror of Fabrini’s degeneration. That grinning mouth of peg-teeth… gray, crumbling teeth like old headstones; the body that was more rags and bones and worm-holed oak than man; those eyes which were just hollow, mocking pits like maybe Fabrini had clawed his own eyes out rather than look at what and who was around him. Yeah, they kept looking and the reality, the truth of this particular nightmare covered them, drowned them, invaded secret places and defiled their very souls. For what they saw and what they knew, it had… weight. The sort of weight that would crush them, squeeze the pulp right out of them.
About then, they turned away.
Cushing was trying hard not to cry, not to rage, not to turn on one of them… maybe Saks, probably Saks… and take it out on them. George was feeling the same thing: like a dozen uncontainable emotions had suddenly burst in him like a shower of black sparks, and he was burning, just burning up inside, the heat turning his mind to sauce.
And they all had to wonder what awful set of circumstances could have mummified Fabrini like that and what… dear God… what had he looked upon to wrench and warp and buckle his face like that? To turn that handsome, swarthy face of his to something like a twisted tribal fetish mask carved from deadwood?
“No, no, no,” Menhaus was saying. “That ain’t Fabrini. No fucking way that’s Fabrini… this, this thing it’s been dead longer than Christ…”
“It’s him, all right,” Saks said.
And there really was no doubt of that.
Because they could see the tarnished chain around its neck that had once been gold and knew that this collection of rags and threadbare hides was Fabrini. But to look at him, at that scarecrow body and grisly deathmask, you could not get past the fact that he looked like he had been physically dead thousands of years like that Neolithic iceman pulled out of the Swiss Alps.
Physically dead… yet his voice raged on beyond the ionized field. Discorporeal, insane, and bleak, yet pathetically aware and alive. A disembodied voice screaming its sanity away in a buzzing, silent blizzard of nothingness: “Help me… help me… help me. .. oh dear God somebody please help me help me-”
Saks went over to the alien machine and kicked it. It made a popping, crackling sound and the flow instantly cut out. The generator fading to a low hum and then nothing at all.
And George was trying to pull his mind together, trying to hold it tight in his fist before it flew apart into fragments. He was not a physicist, but he understood enough of Greenberg’s theories now to formulate one of his own. Fabrini had jumped into some dimension where time was not what it was here. In that terrible place, time was subverted, bent, blown all out of sane proportions. Fabrini had died over there. Starved to death or suffocated, an insane and gibbering thing thousands of years before. Yet his mind had not died. His consciousness did not particulate and dissolve. It was eternal and aware. While minutes passed here, thousands of years passed there in a place where time had no true meaning. Imagine that, George thought, alone in that void for countless millennia with nothing but crawling alien geometries for company, things that could not probably even see you or know you were there. Alone, alone, alone… alone with the barren geography of your own mind for ten thousand years or a million. Jesus.
And Fabrini would always be alive in that black, godless dimension.
A stream of atoms forever drifting and dissipating, but alive and aware and insane beyond any insanity ever known or conceived of. A tormented consciousness fading into eternity, alone, always alone, undying.
Nobody said anything for a time.
Nobody could say anything.
At least Saks had had the sense to turn that awful machine off so they didn’t have to listen to Fabrini, to the blasphemy of his endless, bodiless agony. A tactile creature in a world of shadows and anti-matter and non- existence.
He was flaking away, just crumbling now like a vampire in the rays of the sun. Flecks of dust lit off him, bits of him went to powder and rained gradually to the deck like grains of sand. One of his arms fell off, hit the floor and shattered into dirt and debris like it had been sculpted from dry clay. Very dry clay. It was probably the sudden immersion in this atmosphere, after countless centuries in that other.
As they stood there, Fabrini kept breaking apart until he looked like a heap of debris dumped from a vacuum cleaner bag.
Menhaus looked positively slack like his bones had gone to poured rubber. He could barely support his own weight. He just slouched there, drained and beaten and broken, his eyes livid and hurtful.
“So much for Fabrini,” Saks said.
That warmed up Menhaus. He stood up straight, his eyes blazing with an almost animal ferocity. It was too much. First Cook, then Pollard, and now Fabrini. He went right at Saks. Went right up to him and punched him square in the face. Saks almost went down, a trail of blood coming out of his mouth.
“You!” Menhaus bellered. “You knew something like this would happen and you wanted it to happen!”
Saks nodded, a vile and bleeding thing.
Then he and Menhaus went at other with claws and teeth, hitting and kicking and scratching and it took both George and Cushing to pull them apart. George had to hit Saks three times until he fell away and Cushing had to toss Menhaus to the floor.
“Dead man,” Saks told him, spitting out blood. “You’re a dead man, you fucking faggot! I’ll kill you! Swear to God, I’ll kill you!”
And whether that was directed at George or Menhaus or both of them, it was really hard to tell. Elizabeth stood there, shaking her head, not surprised at the ways of men, but generally disappointed as she was now.
“Let’s go,” she said. “I’ve had enough.”
And that sounded good.
Except Menhaus wasn’t done. He came up now with George’s. 45 in his hand. It had been on the floor where George dropped it and now Menhaus had it. He leveled it and George and Cushing got out of the way.
“What’re you gonna do with that, you pussy?” Saks said.
So Menhaus showed him.
He pulled the trigger and put a slug in his guts.
Saks gasped, a flower of blood blossoming at his belly. Drops of it oozed between his clasped fingers. He staggered back, looked like he’d fall, and staggered over to the doorway. They heard him stumbling up the companionway, swearing and gasping.
George slapped Menhaus across the face and he dropped the gun.
“He had it coming,” was all Menhaus would say. “That bastard’s been asking for it.”
And George, numb from toes to eyebrows, thought, yes, he did at that.
22
They couldn’t find Saks.
They looked and looked for over an hour, canvassing that ship and although their thoughts were still dark and their moods just as gray as stormy skies, getting away from that room and the remains of Pollard and Fabrini and that alien husk had been good for them. Searching for Saks, having something to do, it was even better.
Finally, they gave up.
Elizabeth said a few words over the remains of Pollard and Fabrini and they all bowed their heads, remembering things that made them smile and other things that made them cry. But mostly just bowing their heads because gravity seemed to be pulling them down and they had all they could do not to give in and go to their knees.
“All right,” George finally said. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”
They poled their way back to the Mystic through the weave of dense fog, past the carcasses of dead ships caught in the weed. They took their turns on the poles and said very little and wondered a great deal.
Taking a break and lighting a cigarette with shaking fingers, George told Cushing what he thought had
