had no human feeling.”
“Mary, please,” he said. “Mary, please forgive me.” She leaned toward
him and her face was lighted by deep tenderness. “There is nothing to
forgive,” she said. “Rather, I suppose, we should thank you for it. You
created us out of a love of us and a need of us and it is wonderful to know
that you are loved and needed.”
“But I don’t create you any more,” Enoch pleaded. “There was a time,
long ago, I had to. But not any longer. Now you come to visit me of your own
free will.”
How many years? he wondered. It must be all of fifty. And Mary had been
the first, and David had been second. Of all the others of them, they had
been the first and were the closest and the dearest.
And before that, before he’d even tried, he’d spent other years in
studying that nameless science stemming from the thaumaturgists of Alphard
XXII.
There had been a day and a state of mind when it would have been black
magic, but it was not black magic. Rather, it was the orderly manipulation
of certain natural aspects of the universe as yet quite unsuspected by the
human race. Perhaps aspects that Man never would discover. For there was
not, at least at the present moment, the necessary orientation of the
scientific mind to initiate the research that must precede discovery.
“David felt,” said Mary, “that we could not go on forever, playing out
our little sedate visits. There had to be a time when we faced up to what we
really are.”
“And the rest of them?”
“I am sorry, Enoch. The rest of them as well.”
“But you? How about you, Mary?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “It is different with me. I love you very
much.”
“And I …”
“No, that’s not what I mean. Don’t you understand! I’m in love with
you.”
He sat stricken, staring at her, and there was a great roaring in the
world, as if he were standing still and the world and time were rushing
swiftly past him.
“If it only could have stayed,” she said, “the way it was at first.
Then we were glad of our existence and our emotions were so shallow and we
seemed to be so happy. Like little happy children, running in the sun. But
then we all grew up. And I think I the most of all.”
She smiled at him and tears were in her eyes.
“Don’t take it so hard, Enoch. We can …”
“My dear,” he said, “I’ve been in love with you since the first day
that I saw you. I think maybe even before that.”
He reached out a hand to her, then pulled it back, remembering.
“I did not know,” she said. “I should not have told you. You could live
with it until you knew I loved you, too.”
He noped dumbly.
She bowed her head. “Dear God, we don’t deserve this. We have done
nothing to deserve it.”
She raised her head and looked at him. “If I could only touch you.”
“We can go on,” he said, “as we have always done. You can come to see
me any time you want. We can…”
She shook her bead. “It wouldn’t work,” she said. “There could neither
of us stand it.”
He knew that she was right. He knew that it was done. For fifty years
she and the others had been dropping in to visit. And they’d come no more.
For the fairyland was shattered and the magic spell was broken. He’d be left
alone-more alone than ever, more alone than before he’d ever known her.
She would not come again and he could never bring himself to call her
up again, even if he could, and his shadow world and his shadow love, the
only love he’d ever really had, would be gone forever.
“Good bye, my dear,” he said.
But it was too late. She was already gone.
And from far off, it seemed, he heard the moaning whistle that said a
message had come in.
13
She had said that they must face up to the kind of things they were.
And what were they? Not, what did he think they were, but what were
they, actually? What did they think themselves to be? For perhaps they knew
much better than did he.
Where had Mary gone? When she left this room, into what kind of limbo
did she disappear? Did she still exist? And if so, what kind of an existence
would it be? Would she be stored away somewhere as a little girl would store
away her doll in a box pushed back into the closet with all the other dolls?
He tried to imagine limbo and it was a nothingness, and if that were
true, a being pushed into limbo would be an existence within a
non-existence. There would be nothing-not space nor time, nor light, nor
air, no color, and no vision, just a never ending nothing that of necessity
must lie at some point outside the universe.
Mary! he cried inside himself. Mary, what have I done to you?
And the answer lay there, hard and naked.
He had dabbled in a thing which he had not understood. And had,
furthermore, committed that greater sin of thinking that he did understand.
And the fact of the matter was that he had just barely understood enough to
make the concept work, but had not understood enough to be aware of its
consequences.
With creation went responsibility and he was not equipped to assume
more than the moral responsibility for the wrong that he had done, and moral
responsibility, unless it might be coupled with the ability to bring about
some mitigation, was an entirely useless thing.
They hated him and resented him and he did not blame them, for he’d led
them out and shown them the promised land of humanity and then had led them
back. He had given them everything that a human being had with the one
exception of that most important thing of all-the ability to exist within
the human world.
They all hated him but Mary, and for Mary it was worse than hate. For
she was condemned, by the very virtue of the humanity he had given her, to
love the monster who had created her.
Hate me, Mary, he pleaded. Hate me like the others! He had thought of
them as shadow people, but that had been just a name he’d thought up for
himself, for his own convenience, a handy label that he had tagged them with
so that he would have some way of identifying them when he thought of them.
But the label had been wrong, for they were not shadowy or ghostlike.
To the eyes they were solid and substantial, as real as any people. It was
only when you tried to touch them that they were not real-for when you tried
to touch them, there was nothing there.
A figment of his mind, he’d thought at first, but now he was not sure.
At first they’d come only when he’d called them up, using the knowledge and
the techniques that he had acquired in his study of the work done by the
thaumaturgists of Alphard XXII. But in recent years he had not called them
up. There had been no occasion to. They had anticipated him and come before
he could call them up. They sensed his need of them before he knew the need
himself. And they were there, waiting for him, to spend an hour or evening.
Figments of his mind in one sense, of course, for he had shaped them,
perhaps at the time unconsciously, not knowing why he shaped them so, but in
recent years he’d known, although he had tried not to know, would have been
the better satisfied if he had not known. For it was a knowledge that he had
not admitted, but kept pushed back, far within his mind. But now, when all
was gone, when it no longer mattered, he finally did admit it.
David Ransome was himself, as he had dreamed himself to be, as he had
wished himself to be-but, of course, as he had never been. He was the
dashing Union officer, of not so high a rank as to be stiff and stodgy, but
a fair cut above the man of ordinary standing. He was trim and debonair and
definitely dare-devilish, loved by all the women, admired by all the men. He
was a born leader and a good fellow all at once, at home alike in the field
or drawing room.
And Mary? Funny, he thought, he had never called her anything but Mary.
There had never been a surname. She had been simply Mary.
And she was at least two women, if not more than that. She was Sally
Brown, who had lived just down the road-and how long had it been, he