I heard her.
Somewhere…far off…in a bright amber cavern hung down with scintillant stalactites…swathed in a shimmering aura of goodness and cleanliness and hope…younger than the next instant…radiantly beautiful and calling to me…calling with a voice of music that was the sound of suns flaring and stars twinkling and earth moving and grass growing and small things being happy…it was she!
I listened there for a moment that spanned forever.
My head tilted to the side, I listened, and I knew what she said was truth, so simple and so pure and so real, that I turned and edged past them on the ramp, and returned to Hell again.
Her voice stopped in the moment of my touching ground.
They stared at me, and for a short time they said nothing. Then one of the men—the short, blond fellow with alert blue eyes and hardly any neck—said, “What’s the matter?”
“I’m not going,” I said. The girl ran down the ramp to me. “But why?” She almost sounded tearful. I couldn’t tell her, of course. But she was so small, so sweet, and she reminded me of my wife, when I had first met her, so I answered, “I’ve been here too long; I’m not very nice to look at—” “Oh—” and she tried to stop me, but it was a sob, so it did not interfere.
“—and you may not understand this but I—I’ve been well, content here. It’s a hard world, and it’s dark, but she’s up there—” I looked toward the black sky of Hell, “—and I wouldn’t want to go away and leave her alone. Can you understand that?”
They nodded slowly, and one of the men said, “But this is more than just you, Van Horne. This is a discovery that means a great deal to everyone on Earth.
“It’s getting worse and worse there every year. With the new antiaging drugs people just aren’t dying, and they’ve still got the Catho-Presbyte Lobby to keep any really effective birth control laws from being enacted. The crowding is terrible; that’s one of the chief reasons we’re out here, to see how Man can adapt to these worlds. Your discovery can aid us tremendously.”
“And you said the Fluhs were gone,” the other man said. “Without them, you’ll die.” I smiled at them;
“I can still do some good,” I replied quickly. “Send me a few young people. Let them come here, and we’ll study together. I can show them what I’ve found, and they can experiment here. Laboratory conditions could never match what I’ve found on Hell.”
That seemed to do it. They looked at me sadly, and the girl agreed…the other two matched her agreement in a moment.
“And, and—I couldn’t leave her here alone,” I said again.
“Goodbye, Tom Van Home,” she said, and she pressed my hand between her mittened ones. It was a kiss on the cheek, but her helmet prevented it physically, so she clasped my hand.
Then they started up the ramp.
“What will you do for air, with the Fluhs gone?” one of the men asked, stopping halfway up.
“I’ll be all right, I promise you. I’ll be here when you return.” They looked at me with doubt, but I smiled, and patted my sac, and they looked uncomfortable, and started up the ramp again.
“We’ll be back. With others.” The girl looked down at me. I waved, and they went inside. Then I loped back to the hutch, and watched them as they shattered the night with their fire and fury. When they were gone, I went outside, and stared up at the dim, so-faraway points of the dead stars.
Where she circled, up there, somewhere.
And I knew I would have something for my noon meal, and all the meals thereafter. She had told me; I suppose I knew it all along, but it hadn’t registered, so she had told me: the Fluhs were not dead. They had merely gone down to replenish their own oxygen supply from the planet itself, from the caves and porous openings where the rock trapped the air. They would be back again, long before I needed them.
The Fluhs would return.
And someday I would find her again, and it would be an unbroken time.
This world I had named, I had not properly named. Not Hell.
Not Hell at all.
Hadj
There really isn’t much to say about this next story, save that I’ve tried to make a bit of a caustic comment on the “faithful” and their faith. I have no quarrel with those who wish to believe—whether they believe in a flat Earth, the health-giving properties of sorghum and blackstrap molasses, Dianetics, the Hereafter, orgone boxes, a ghostwriter for Shakespeare, or that jazz about the manna in the desert—except to point out that nothing in this life (and presumably the next) is certain; and faith is all well and good, but even the most devout should leave a small area of their thoughts open for such possibilities as occur in
It had taken almost a year to elect Herber. A year of wild speculation, and a growing sense of the Universe’s existence. The year after the Masters of the Universe had flashed through Earth’s atmosphere and broadcast their message.
From nowhere they had come down in their glowing golden spaceship—forty miles long—and without resistance shown every man, woman, and child on Earth that they did, indeed, rule the Universe.
They had merely said: “Send us a representative from Earth.” They had then given detailed instructions for constructing what they called an “inverspace” ship, and directions for getting to their home world, somewhere across the light-galaxies.
So the ship had been constructed. But who was to go? The Earthmen who pondered this question knew the awesome responsibility of that emissary. They had to be careful whom they picked. So they had reasoned it was too big a problem to lay in the hands of mere humans, and set the machines on it. They had set the Mark XXX. the UniCompVac, the Brognagov Master Computer and hundreds of the little brains to the task.
After sixteen billion punched cards had gone through three times, the last card fell into the hopper, and Wilson Herber had been elected.
