“You’re sweet, Pat! You know I’d trade my very soul for that, but—No. I can’t do it! And don’t Honey, torture me by suggesting it again.”
“But I will, Nick!” She was speaking softly, earnestly. “You’re worth anything to me! If he should kill me, you’d still be worth it!” She gazed tenderly at him. “I’d want to die anyway without you!”
“No more than I without you,” he muttered brokenly. “But I won’t do it, Pat! I won’t do that to you!”
“I love you, Nick!” she said in a low voice. “I don’t want to live without you. Do you understand me, dear? I don’t want to live without you!”
He stared at her somberly. “I’ve thought of that too,” he said. “Pat—if I only believed that we’d be together after, together anywhere, I’d say yes. If only I believed there were an afterwards!”
“Doesn’t he prove that by his very existence?”
“Your Doctor would deny that.”
“Doctor Carl never saw him, Nick. And anyway, even oblivion together would be better than being separated, and far better than this!”
He gazed at her silently. She spoke again. “That doesn’t frighten me, Nick. It’s only losing you that frightens me, especially the fear of losing you to him.”
He continued his silent gaze. Suddenly he drew her close to him, held her in a tight, tender embrace.
XXVIII
Lunar Omen
After a considerable interval, during which Nick held the girl tightly and silently in his arms, he released her, sat with his head resting on his cupped palms in an attitude of deep study. Pat, beside him, fell mechanically to repinning the throat of her frock, which had opened during the moments of the embrace. He rose to his feet, pacing nervously before her.
“It isn’t a thing to do on the impulse of a moment, Pat,” he muttered, pausing at her side. “You must see that.”
“It isn’t the impulse of a moment.”
“But one doesn’t abandon everything, the whole world, so easily, Honey. One doesn’t cast away a last hope, however forlorn a hope it may be!”
“Is there a hope, Nick?” she asked gently. “Is there a chance left to us?”
“I don’t know!” His voice held an increasing tenseness. “Before God—I—don’t know!”
“If there’s a chance, the very slightest shadow of the specter of a chance, we’ll take it, won’t we? Because the other way is always open to us, Nick.”
“Yes. It’s always open.”
“But we won’t take that chance,” she continued defiantly, “if it involves my losing you, Honey. I meant what I said, Nick: I don’t want to live without you!”
“What chance have we?” he queried somberly. “Those are our alternatives—life apart, death together.”
“Then you know my choice!” she cried desperately. “Nick, Honey—don’t let’s draw it out in futile talking! I can’t stand it!”
He moved his hand in a gesture of bewilderment and frustration, and turned away, striding nervously toward the window whose blind she had raised. He leaned his hands on the table, peering dejectedly out upon the street below.
“What time,” he asked irrelevantly in a queer voice, “did the Doctor say the moon rose? Do you remember?”
“No,” she said tensely. “Oh, Honey! Please—don’t stand there with your back to me now, when I’m half crazy!”
“I’m thinking,” he responded. “It rises a little earlier each night—or is it later? No matter; come here, Pat.”
She rose wearily and joined him; he slipped his arm about her, and drew her against him.
“Look there,” he said, indicating the night-dark vista beyond the window.
She looked out upon a dim-lit street or court, at the blind end of which the house was apparently situated. Far off at the open end, across a distant highway where even at this hour passed a constant stream of traffic, flashed a narrow strip of lake; and above it, rising gigantic from the coruscating moon-path, lifted the satellite. She watched the remote flickering of the waves as they tossed back the broken bits of the light strewn along the path. Then she turned puzzled eyes on her companion.
“That’s Heaven,” he said pointing a finger at the great flowing lunar disk. “There’s a world that never caught the planet-cancer called Life, or if it ever suffered, it’s cured. It’s clean—burned clean by the sun and scoured clean by the airless zero of space. A dead world, and therefore not an unhappy one.”
The girl stared at him without comprehension. She murmured, “I don’t understand, Nick.”
“Don’t you, Pat?” He pointed again at the moon. “That’s Heaven, the dead world, and this is Hell, the living one. Heaven and Hell swinging forever about their common center!” He gestured toward the sparkling moon-path on the water. “Look, Pat! The dead world strews flowers on the grave of the living one!”
Some of his bitter ecstasy caught the girl; she felt his somber mood of exaltation.
“I love you, Nick!” she whispered, pressing closely to him.
“What difference does it make—our actions?” he queried. “There’s the omen, that lifeless globe in the sky. Where we go, all humanity now living will follow before a century, and in a million years, the human race as well! What if we go a year or a million years before the rest? Will it make any difference in the end?” He looked down at her. “All we’ve been valuing here is hope. To the devil with hope! Let’s have peace instead!”
“I’m not afraid, Nick.”
“Nor I. And if we go, he goes, and he’s mortally afraid of death!”
“Can he—prevent you?”
“Not now! I’m the stronger now. For this time, I’m master.”
He turned again to stare at the glowing satellite as it rose imperceptibly from the horizon. “There’s nothing to regret,” he murmured, “except one thing—the loss of beauty. Beauty like that—and like you, Pat. That’s bitterly hard to foreswear!” He leaned forward toward the remote disk of the moon; he spoke as if addressing it, in tones so low that the girl, pressed close to him, had to quiet the sound of her own
