Despite the splitting headache that had suddenly come upon him, Dave remembered his duty. He hurried back to the ancient compressor, and opened the control valve to its deadly maximum – fifty parts per million of carbon monoxide.
The last he saw of Bobby was that confidently descending, sunlight-dappled figure passing forever beyond his reach. The wax statue in the funeral parlour was a total stranger, who had nothing to do with Robert Bowman.
33
Betty
Why had he come here, returning like an unquiet ghost to the scene of ancient anguish? He had no idea; indeed, he had not been conscious of his destination, until the round eye of Crystal Spring had gazed up at him from the forest below.
He was master of the world, yet he was paralysed by a sense of devastating grief he had not known for years. Time had healed the wound, as it always does; yet it seemed only yesterday that he had stood weeping beside the emerald mirror, seeing only the reflections of the surrounding cypresses with their burden of Spanish moss. What was happening to him?
And now, still without deliberate volition, but as if swept by some gentle current, he was drifting northward, toward the state capital. He was looking for something; what it was, he would not know until he found it.
No one, and no instrument, detected his passage. He was no longer radiating wastefully, but had almost mastered his control of energy, as once he had mastered lost though not forgotten limbs. He sank like a mist into the earthquakeproof vaults, until he found himself among billions of stored memories, and dazzling, flickering networks of electronic thoughts.
This task was more complex than the triggering of a crude nuclear bomb, and took him a little longer. Before he found the information he was seeking, he made one trivial slip, but did not bother to correct it. No one ever understood why, the next month, three hundred Florida taxpayers, all of whose names began with F, received cheques for precisely one dollar. It cost many times the overpayment to straighten matters out, and the baffled computer engineers finally put the blame on a cosmic-ray shower. Which, on the whole, was not so very far from the truth.
In a few milliseconds, he had moved from Tallahassee to 634 South Magnolia Street, Tampa. It was still the same address; he need not have wasted time looking it up.
But then, he had never intended to look it up, until the very moment when he had done so.
After three births and two abortions, Betty Fernandez (n�e Schultz) was still a beautiful woman. At the moment she was also a very thoughtful one; she was watching a TV programme that brought back memories, bitter and sweet.
It was a News Special, triggered by the mysterious events of the preceding twelve hours, beginning with the warning that Leonov had beamed back from the moons of Jupiter. Something was heading for Earth; something had – harmlessly – detonated an orbiting nuclear bomb which no one had come forward to claim. That was all, but it was quite enough.
The news commentators had dredged up all the old videotapes – and some of them really were tapes – going back to the once top-secret records showing the discovery of TMA-l on the Moon. For the fiftieth time, at least, she heard that eerie radio shriek as the monolith greeted the lunar dawn and hurled its message toward Jupiter. And once again she watched the familiar scenes and listened to the old interviews aboard Discovery.
Why was she watching? It was all stored somewhere in the home archives (though she never played it back when Jos� was around). Perhaps she was expecting some newsflash; she did not like to admit, even to herself, how much power the past still held over her emotions.
And there was Dave, as she had expected. It was an old BBC interview, of which she knew almost every word. He was talking about Hal, trying to decide whether the computer was self-conscious or not.
How young he looked – how different from those last blurred images from the doomed Discovery! And how much like Bobby as she remembered him.
The image wavered as her eyes filled with tears. No – something was wrong with the set, or the channel. Both sound and image were behaving erratically.
Dave’s lips were moving, but she could hear nothing. Then his face seemed to dissolve, to melt into blocks of colour. It reformed, blurred again, and then was steady once more. But there was still no sound.
Where had they got this picture! This was not Dave as a man, but as a boy – as she had known him first. He was looking out of the screen almost as if he could see her across the gulf of years.
He smiled; his lips moved.
‘Hello, Betty,’ he said.
It was not hard to form the words, and to impose them on the currents pulsing in the audio circuits. The real difficulty was to slow down his thoughts to the glacial tempo of the human brain. And then to have to wait an eternity for the answer.
Betty Fernandez was tough; she was also intelligent, and though she had been a housewife for a dozen years, she had not forgotten her training as an electronics serviceperson. This was just another of the medium’s countless miracles of simulation; she would accept it now, and worry about the details later.
‘Dave,’ she answered. ‘Dave – is that really you?’
‘I am not sure,’ replied the image on the screen, in a curiously toneless voice. ‘But I remember Dave Bowman, and everything about him.’
‘Is he dead?’
Now that was another difficult question.
‘His body – yes. But that is no longer important. All that Dave Bowman really was, is still part of me.’
Betty crossed herself – that was a gesture she had learned from Jos� – and whispered:
‘You mean – you’re a spirit?’
‘I do not know a better word.’
‘Why have you returned?’
‘Ah! Betty – why indeed! I wish you could tell me.’
Yet he knew one answer, for it was appearing on the TV screen. The divorce between body and mind was still far from complete, and not even the most complaisant of the cable networks would have transmitted the blatantly sexual images that were forming there now.
Betty watched for a little while, sometimes smiling, sometimes shocked. Then she turned away, not through shame but sadness – regret for lost delights.
‘So it’s not true,’ she said, ‘what they always told us about angels.’
Am I an angel? he wondered. But at least he understood what he was doing there, swept back by the tides of sorrow and desire to a rendezvous with his past. The most powerful emotion he had ever known had been his passion for Betty; the elements of grief and guilt it contained only made it stronger.
She had never told him if he was a better lover than Bobby; that was one question he had never asked, for that would have broken the spell. They had clung to the same illusion, sought in each other’s arms (and how young he had been – still only seventeen when it had started, barely two years after the funeral!) a balm for the same wound.
Of course, it could not last, but the experience had left him irrevocably changed. For more than a decade, all his autoerotic fantasies had centred upon Betty; he had never found another woman to compare with her, and long ago had realized that he never would. No one else was haunted by the same beloved ghost.
The images of desire faded from the screen; for a moment, the regular programme broke through, with an incongruous shot of Leonov hanging above Io. Then Dave Bowman’s face reappeared. He seemed to be losing control, for its lineaments were wildly unstable. Sometimes he would seem only ten years old – then twenty or thirty -then, incredibly, a wizened mummy whose wrinkled features were a parody of the man she had once known.
‘I have one more question before I go. Carlos – you always said he was Jose’s son, and I always wondered. What was the truth?’
Betty Fernandez stared for one long, last time into the eyes of the boy she had once loved (he was eighteen again, and for a moment she wished she could see his entire body, not merely his face).
‘He was your son, David,’ she whispered.
The image faded; the normal service resumed. When, almost an hour later, Jos� Fernandez came quietly into the room, Betty was still staring at the screen.
She did not turn around as he kissed her on the back of the neck.
‘You’ll never believe this, Jos�.’
‘Try me.’
‘I’ve just lied to a ghost.’
34
Valediction
When the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics published its controversial summary Fifty Years of UFOs in 1997, many critics pointed out that unidentified flying objects had been observed for centuries, and that Kenneth Arnold’s ‘Flying Saucer’ sighting of 1947 had countless precedents. People had been seeing strange things in the sky since the dawn of history; but until the mid-twentieth century, UFOs were a random phenomenon of no general interest. After that date, they became a matter of public and scientific concern, and the basis for what could only be called religious beliefs.