Dhalgren

He could try the bar. But if she had a house now, what was the chance she'd be at Teddy's tonight?

He looked back, ready to yell to Denny to get the fuck on down here.

The door was closed.

And I still don't know her name!

He took a breath between his teeth. Maybe he'd find Lanya at the bar.

At the corner of the hill; surprised at how many street lamps — perhaps one out of five — worked in this neighborhood. The one diagonally across the street gave enough light to make out the charred walls of the big house. (The stronger burned smell had made him stop.) The columns supporting the balcony over the door had charred through, so that the platform, with its rail of lions, hung askew. Even so it took Kid a whole minute to be sure what house it was. Only houses he could see around confirmed it.

Four, five, six hours since they had screamed and laughed and yelled inside it?

Chilled to gooseflesh in the neutral air, he hurried away.

4

'…definitely saw it?'

'Oh, yes.'

'You were already in the city?'

'That's right.'

'You said earlier you didn't see the whole thing though.'

'I caught, I guess, now it must have been, the last ten or fifteen minutes. Roger came and woke me up to see.'

'You saw it from inside the house then?'

'Well, first out my window. Then we went down to the gardens. I tell you, now, it was pretty strange.'

The others laughed. 'Hey,' Paul Fenster said, half standing to look at the others seated. 'We've just about got the Captain boxed in here. Why doesn't somebody move back, there?'

'That's all right. If I want to get out, I'll just bust on through.'

'I imagine—' Madame Brown reached down to play with Muriel's muzzle—'you aren't any closer to an explanation than we are.'

'I think that was about the strangest thing I ever saw, I'll be honest now.'

'As strange as anything you ever saw in space?' from the man in purple angora.

'Well, I tell you, this afternoon was pretty… I guess you'd say, spaced out.'

They laughed again.

The heavy blond Mexican with the blanket shirt rose from beside Tak and walked to the door, passing within a foot of Kid, and left. Tak saw Kid. With tilting head, he beckoned.

Kid, curious, went to sit in the vacated seat.

Tak leaned to whisper, 'Captain Kamp…' A dozen others had pulled chairs up to listen to the crew-cut man in the green, short-sleeved shirt who sat in the corner booth.

Tak sat and folded his hands across the bottom of his leather jacket so that the top pushed out from his blond chest.

'What I want to know,' purple angora announced, '…down, sweetheart, down—' Muriel had momentarily switched allegiances—'I want to know is, if it could possibly have been some kind of trick. I mean, is there any way somebody could have made that seem to happen? I mean… well, you know: in a man-made way.'

'Well…' The Captain looked among his listeners. 'He's your engineer, isn't he?' His look settled on Tak — who reared back with a high laugh.

That must be as self-conscious as I've ever seen him, Kid thought He'd never heard Tak make that sound before.

'No,' Tak said. 'No, I'm afraid that doesn't have anything to do with any engineering I'd know anything about.'

'What I want to know — now what I want to know,' Fenster said. 'You've been in space. You've been on the moon…' He paused, then added in a different voice: 'You're one of the ones that was actually on the moon.'

Captain Kamp was only attentive.

'We've had here some sort of… astrological happening, and it's got us all pretty shook. I want to know if you… well, from being up on the moon, or like that, you might know something more about it.'

Kamp's face ghosted a smile. Kid searched for the names of the astronauts from the four moonshots he'd followed closely, tried to recall what he could about the fifth. Captain Kamp crossed his arms on the booth-table. He wasn't very tall.

'Now it's certainly possible—' Kamp punctuated his southwestern speech with small nods—'that there's an astronomical, or better, cosmological explanation. But I'll be frank: I don't know what it is.'

'Do you think we should worry?' Madame Brown asked in a voice with no worry in it at all.

Kamp, whose crew mixed grey and gold, nodded. 'Worry? Well, we're all here. And alive. That's certainly no reason not to worry. But worry isn't going to do us much good, now, is it? Now yesterday — about this time yesterday — I was in Dallas. And if that thing was as big as it looked and really some sort of body in the sky, a comet or a sun, I suspect it would have been seen a long way off coming, with telescopes. And nobody told me about it.'

'It sounds, Captain, as though you don't believe it's serious.'

Kamp's smile said as much. Kamp said, 'I saw it — some of it, anyway.'

'Then,' Kid said, and others turned, 'you don't know how big it really was.'

'Now that,' the Captain answered, 'I'm afraid, is it.' His jaw was wider than his forehead. 'Now you all, Roger too, described something which practically filled up half the sky. So obviously what I saw was only a little bit. And then there was the story about — George, was it?'

Tak looked around the room, frowned, and again whispered to Kid: 'George was here a few minutes ago. He must have gone out just before you came—'

'Now I'm afraid nobody outside… of Bellona, saw that one. And Roger tells me he didn't either.'

'I certainly did,' Tak whispered.

'I certainly did!' someone cried.

'Well.' Kamp smiled. 'Not too many other people did, and certainly nobody outside Bellona.'

'You saw what happened today.' Teddy, arms folded, leaned against the back of the next booth.

'Yes, I guess I did.'

'You mean,' Fenster jovially announced, 'you went from here to the moon and back, and you didn't see anything on the way that would tell us something about all this thing this afternoon?'

Kamp said, 'Nope.'

'Then what use was it, I ask you?' Fenster looked around for somebody's back to slap. 'I mean now what was the use of it?'

Someone said, 'You haven't been with the space program a while…?'

'Now you don't really leave it. Just last week I was down for medical testing for long-range results. That I don't ever expect to stop. But I'm much less involved with it now than some of the others.'

'Why did you leave?' the purple angora asked. 'Was it your idea or theirs — if you can answer a question like that?'

'Well.' This, a considered sentence. 'I suspect they thought it was a touchier question than I did at the time. But I doubt they wanted me that much if I didn't want them. My interest in the space program just about ended with splashdown. The tests, the research work afterward, that was important. The parades, the celebrations, the panels, the publicity — I think the fun in that was exhausted a month after I came out of the isolation chamber. The rest — probably more so for me than for the others, because that's the kind of person I am — was just a nuisance.