The deft gesture of Mme. Storm’s right hand evoked a nonexistent fan, over which her old eyes shone with a far from old warmth. “Please, my dear. Don’t make another noble speech. You see, you’ve done it. When you said he loved me once. I have to correct that: He still loves me.”
“Then he is here!”
“Come,” she said, and moved from the room like a bride.
The great and dying Kleinbach was trying to listen; Jon Arthur could see that. The mechanisms of bones and veins which had once been hands plucked senselessly at the covers, and the pallid eyes stared at the face of Mme. Storm (with the mouth of a coquette and the eyes of a widow) or at nothing at all. But Arthur could feel, almost extrasensorily, the desire to respond.
“You can save us,” he insisted. “An authentic message from you—I’ll take care of identity checks that will satisfy every expert. You’re the man that they’ll all listen to. To the Academy, you’re the one man that even Weddergren feels damned near humble before. To the Populists—maybe not to their leaders, but to the millions who act and vote—you’re a symbol, as Einstein was before you and as no Academist is: a symbol of something wonderful and strange but very human. You’re the bridge, the link, the greatness that synthesizes opposites. A word from you—and the Center falls together behind that word, leaving the extremists where they belong, on the sidelines of man’s march . . .”
“Shh!” Mme. Storm whispered. She had sensed the effort in the sunken face before Arthur could realize that the old man intended to speak.
The first words were in German: “Es irrt der Mensch . . .”
The emaciated voice dwindled to nothing. Arthur remembered the passage from Faust; something about how man must still strive and err as he strives . . .
The next words were in English, and were two: “Man’s reach . . .”
Then there was silence in the little room. From some faraway world, certainly no nearer this than the orbit of Mercury, came sounds of scales and vocalizing, those jarring preliminaries to beauty which characterize a school of singing.
Arthur never knew how long the room was silent before he realized that it was too silent.
There had been three different rhythms of breathing. Now there were two.
Mme. Storm looked up at him, at once older and younger than he had yet seen her. “It’s all right,” she whispered. “Don’t blame yourself. You didn’t . . . It was only days, perhaps hours . . .”
He leaned over and kissed her on the thin roughed lips. “ From him,” he said. He looked at the dried thing on the bed. “Cover his face,” he said gently. “He died old.”
To musicians, artists, writers, Venusberg means The Colony; to spacemen it means the most wide-open port in the system.
The first aspect had afforded Jon Arthur his excuse for coming; the second provided oblivion against the tragic failure of a mission.
It was two weeks before he even attempted to sober up. It was another week before he emerged from the pea soup fog of his hangover.
He emerged to find a batch of cryptically phrased spacegrams from Steele Morrison, Morrison, whose general tenor was “any luck?” and another batch from his managing editor, whose general tenor was “Where the hell is the first article of the series on Storm?” He tore up both batches unanswered.
“The dark night of the soul” is a phrase invented by a great mystic to describe a certain indescribable and enviable state of mystic communion and dissolution, but it sounds as though it described what a less mystic religious writer called “the Slough of Despond.”
It was night in Jon Arthur’s soul, a night of blackest indifference. Not even despair, which implies a certain desperate striving; but a callous inability to sense the importance of anything now that the Great Importance had collapsed.
Weeks passed and the election was held on Terra and the Academy won and Dr. Weddergren became President and 720,000 people were killed on both sides (and on neither) in the Populist riots which the Academy’s military technicians (the Academy did not believe in soldiers) finally quelled and Dr. Weddergren announced again that the system is Man’s laboratory and as a token thereof canceled the municipal elections about to be held in Greater Hollywood and Jon Arthur did not give a damn.
More weeks passed and the spacegrams kept coming and the last one said it was the last one because music critic and correspondent Arthur was no longer employed and Jon Arthur did not give a damn.
He had a few hundred credits left and the abandoned hut on the beach cost nothing and the hangovers were relatively shorter when you timed the bouts more carefully and there was much to be said for simply watching the waves to pass the time while staying sober.
So many people had come and gone in the hut on one night or another—Parva, Steele Morrison (with both legs), Kleinbach (reading a volume of Browning), Ivor Harden, even Marchesi once—that Arthur felt little surprise to see Irita Storm standing before him.
“You placed the quotation of course?” he remarked, as though they had just been discussing that scene in the little room.
“Of course,” she said. “Ah, but a mans reach should exceed his grasp—”
“—Or what’s a heaven fori Good question, that. Andrea del Sarto. ”
“Very good question. Question that leads me, young man, to ask you to come to see me.”
Jon Arthur decided that was permissible to leer at imaginary elderly coquettes. He did not feel it fair of imaginary elderly coquettes to deal him an almost convincingly unimaginary slap.
“When you’re sober.” There was no coquetry in the voice. “If ever. For one thing, I want you to hear Parva. I’d really value your opinion—when you think I can get it.”
It took almost
