'Joe,' she said with this look on her face, 'I got a new LP of the Brahms Serenade Number One. It's on top of the stack. Would you tell me what you think of it?'
So he put it on and they sat sipping rhine wine and seltzer and he turned it over and they sat sipping rhine wine and seltzer until both sides were played. And she kept watching him. Not adoringly.
'Well,' she asked with this new look, 'what did you think of it?”
He told her, of course. There was some comment on Brahms'
architectonics and his resurrection of the contrapuntal style. Because he'd sneaked a look at the record's envelope he was able to spend a couple of minutes on Brahms' debt to Haydn and the young Beethoven in the fifth movement (allegro, D Major) and the gay rondo of the—
'Joe,' she said, not looking at him. 'Joe,' she said, 'I got that record at one hell of a discount down the street. It's a wrong pressing. Somehow the first side is the first half of the Serenade but the second half is Schumann's Symphonic Studies Opus Thirteen. Somebody noticed it when they played it in a booth. But I guess you didn't notice it.'
'Get out of this one, braino,' I told him.
He got up and said in a strangled voice, 'And I thought you were my friend. I suppose I’ll never learn.' He walked out I suppose he never will.
God help me, I ought to know.
The Remorseful
It does not matter when it happened. This is because he was alone and time had ceased to have any meaning for him. At first he had searched the rubble for other survivors, which kept him busy for a couple of years. Then he wandered across the continent in great, vague quarterings, but the plane one day would not take off and he knew he would never find anybody anyway. He was by then in his forties, and a kind of sexual delirium overcame him. He searched out and pored over pictures of women, preferring leggy, high-breasted types. They haunted his dreams; he masturbated incessantly with closed eyes, tears leaking from them and running down his filthy bearded face. One day that phase ended for no reason and he took up his wanderings again, on foot. North in the summer, south in the winter on weed-grown U.S. 1, with the haversack of pork and beans on his shoulders, usually talking as he trudged, sometimes singing.
It does not matter when it happened. This is because the Visitors were eternal; endless time stretched before them and behind, which mentions only two of the infinities of infinities that their 'lives'
in-cluded. Precisely when they arrived at a particular planetary system was to them the most trivial of irrelevancies. Eternity was theirs; eventually they would have arrived at all of them.
They had won eternity in the only practical way: by outnumbering it.
Each of the Visitors was a billion lives as you are a billion lives— the billion lives, that is, of your cells. But your cells have made the mistake of specializing. Some of them can only contract and relax. Some can only strain urea from your blood. Some can only load, carry, and unload oxygen. Some can only transmit minute electrical pulses and others can only manufacture chemicals in a desperate at-tempt to keep the impossible Rube Goldberg mechanism that you are from breaking down. They never succeed and you always do. Per-haps before you break down some of your specialized cells unite with somebody else's specialized cells and grow into another impossible, doomed contraption.
The Visitors were more sensibly arranged. Their billion lives were not cells but small, unspecialized, insect-like creatures linked by an electromagnetic field subtler than the coarse grapplings that hold you together. Each of the billion creatures that made up a Visitor could live and carry tiny weights, could manipulate tiny power tools, could carry in its small round black head, enough brain cells to feed, mate, breed, and work—and a few million more brain cells that were pooled into the field which made up the Visitor's consciousness.
When one of the insects died there were no rites; it was matter-of-factly pulled to pieces and eaten by its neighboring insects while it was still fresh. It mattered no more to the Visitor than the growing of your hair does to you, and the growing of your hair is accomplished only by the deaths of countless cells.
'Maybe on Mars!' he shouted as he trudged. The haversack jolted a shoulder blade and he arranged a strap without breaking his stride.
Birds screamed and scattered in the dark pine forests as he roared at them: 'Well, why not? There must of been ten thousand up there easy.
Progress, God damn it! That's progress, man! Never thought it'd come in my time. But you'd think they would of sent a ship back by now so a man wouldn't feel so all alone. You know better than that, man. You know God damned good and well it happened up there too. We had Northern Semisphere, they had Southern Semisphere, so you know God damned good and well what happened up there. Semisphere?
Hemisphere. Hemi-semi-demisphere.'
That was a good one, the best one he'd come across in years. He roared it out as he went stumping along.
When he got tired of it he roared: 'You should of been in the Old Old Army, man. We didn't go in for this Liberty Unlimited crock in the Old-Old Army. If you wanted to march in step with somebody else you marched in step with somebody else, man. None of this crock about you march out of step or twenty lashes from the sergeant for limiting your liberty.'
That was a good one too, but it made him a little uneasy. He tried to remember whether he had been in the army or had just heard about it.
He realized in time that a storm was blowing up from his depths; unless he headed it off he would soon be sprawled on the bro-ken concrete of U.S. 1, sobbing and beating his head with his fists. He went back hastily to Sem-isphere, flem-isphere, Hem-i-sem-i-de/n-isphere, roaring it at the scared birds as he trudged.
There were four Visitors aboard the ship when it entered the plan-etary system. One of them was left on a cold outer planet rich in metal outcrops to establish itself in a billion tiny shelters, build a bil-lion tiny forges, and eventually—in a thousand years or a million; it made no difference—construct a space ship, fission into two or more Visitors for company, and go Visiting. The ship had been getting crowded; as more and more information was acquired in its voyaging it was necessary for the swarms to increase in size, breeding more insects to store the new facts.
The three remaining Visitors turned the prow of their ship toward an intermediate planet and made a brief, baffling stop there. It was uninhabited except for about ten thousand entities—far fewer than one would expect, and certainly not enough for an efficient first-con-tact study. The Visitors made for the next planet sunward after only the sketchiest observation. And yet that sketchy observation of the entities left them figuratively shaking their heads. Since the Visitors had no genitals they were in a sense without emotions—but you would have said a vague air of annoyance hung over the ship never-theless.
They ruminated the odd facts that the entities had levitated, ap-peared at the distance of observation to be insubstantial, appeared at the distance of observation to be unaware of the Visitors. When you are a hundred-yard rippling black carpet moving across a strange land, when the dwellers in this land soar aimlessly about you and above you, you expect to surprise, perhaps to frighten at first, and at least to provoke curiosity. You do not expect to be ignored.
They reserved judgment pending analysis of the sunward planet's entities—possibly colonizing entities, which would explain the sparseness of the outer planet's population, though not its indifference.
They landed.
He woke and drank water from a roadside ditch. There had been a time when water was the problem. You put three drops of iodine in a canteen. Or you boiled it if you weren't too weak from dysentery. Or you scooped it from the tank of a flush toilet in the isolated farm-house with the farmer and his wife and their kids downstairs gro- tesquely staring with their empty eye sockets at the television screen for the long-ago-spoken latest word. Disease or dust or shattering supersonics broadcast from the bullhorn of a low-skimming drone— what did it matter? Safe water was what mattered.
