[Footfalls, a heavy wooden groaning, and then the unechoing silence of the night as Chaney emerges into the Wild.]
V. CHANEY [exhilarated]: God, look at them go off! I’m unloading my backpack. I’m lobbing them toward old Sol, wherever the debbil he at. Another Independence Day! My second one. [Four or five successive whooshing sounds.] I’m coming home, I’m coming home. To you, Ben. To you, Eisen. To Morrell, Yoshiba, and Jonathan. You won’t be able to say I didn’t perform my duties with a flair. [Laughter.] God, look at them stain the sky, look at ’em smoke, look at ’em burn away the reek of Asadi self-delusion and the stench of huri arrogance!
No, by God, we don’t destroy every race we come across. Maybe the pygmies, maybe we did it to the pygmies – but the Asadi, bless ’em, they’re doing it to themselves, they’ve been doing it to themselves for aeons. With help, perhaps. With assistance from their weird, imported familiars from beyond this solar system. It’s not ourselves at fault, though. No one can say it’s us.
But, God, look at that clean phosphorescent sky! I only wish I knew which direction Sol was in; I’d like to see it. Eisen, you said we could see it. Where? Tell me where. I’d like to see it like a shard of ice glittering in the center of those brilliant, beautiful, flaming cobwebs . . .
LAST THINGS
Thomas Benedict speaking: We saw the flares and picked Chaney up. Moses Eisen was with me in the copter. We had come out extremely early on the morning of Day 140 in order to complete Chaney’s customary supply drop and then to circle the Asadi clearing with the thought of making a naked-eye sighting of our colleague. Captain Eisen had ordered this course of action when it became apparent that Chaney wasn’t going to communicate with us of his own accord. Eisen wished to apprise himself of Chaney’s condition, perhaps by landing and talking to the man. He wanted Chaney to return to base camp. If it had not been for these unusual circumstances, then, Chaney’s flares might have gone off for no audience but an empty sky. As it was, we saw only the last two or three flares he set off and had to reverse the direction of our copter to make the rendezvous.
By the time we reached him, Chaney was no longer the exhilarated adventurer that the last section of his monologue paints him. He was a tired and sick man who did not seem to recognize us when we set down and who came aboard the copter bleary-eyed and unshaven, his arms draped across our shoulders.
By removing his backpack we came into possession of the recorder that he had used for the last two days and the eyebooks he had supposedly picked up in the Asadi temple. And that night I went back to the Asadi clearing alone to retrieve the remainder of his personal effects.
Back at base camp, however, we committed Chaney at once to the care of Doctors Williams and Tsyuki and saw to it that he had a private room in the infirmary. During this time, as I’ve already mentioned, he wrote ‘The Ritual of Death and Designation.’ He claimed, in more than one of our conversations, that we had picked him up not more than four or five hundred meters from the pagoda which he describes in this brief paper. He made this claim even though we were unable on several trips over a large area of the Wild to discover a clearing large enough to accommodate such a structure. Not once in all of our talks, however, did he ever claim that he had been inside the pagoda. Only in the confiscated tape does one encounter this bizarre notion; you have just read the edited transcript of the tape and can decide for yourself how much credence to give its various reports. One thing is certain: The eyebooks that Chaney brought out of the Calyptran Wild with him do exist. And they had to come from somewhere.
The eyebooks are a complete puzzle. They look exactly as Chaney describes them in the tape, and they all work. The cassettes are seamless plastic, and the only really efficient way we’ve been able to get inside one is to break the bulb – the glass eyelet – and probe through the opening with an old-fashioned watch tool. We’ve found nothing inside the cassettes on which their dizzying spectral patterns could have been programmed and no readily apparent energy source to power such a rapid presentation of spectral patterns. Morrell has suggested that the programs exist in the molecular structure of the hard plastic casing themselves, but even this intriguing hypothesis resists confirmation. To date, computer analysis of the eyebooks’ color displays have established no basis for ‘translation’ out of the visual realm and into the auditory. We lack a Rosetta stone, and because we do, the eyebooks remain an enigma.
As for Chaney, he apparently recovered. He would not discuss the tape that I once – only once – confronted him with, but he did talk about putting together a book-length account of his findings.
‘The Asadi have to be described,’ Chaney once told me. ‘They have to be described in detail. It’s essential
