He had missed that first shot he had fired at the charging wolf-thing
with the old man’s face, and back there somewhere, in that dimension of
unreality, it and its companion were snarling over the tangled, torn mass of
ribboned flesh and broken bone that had been Enoch Wallace.
30
He went back through the gallery, with its gifts stacked there as other
gifts, in regular human establishments, might be stacked away in dry and
dusty attics.
The tape nagged at him, the little piece of tape which said that while
he had made all his other shots, he had missed that first one back there on
the hillock. It was not often that he missed. And his training had been for
that very type of shooting-the you-never-know-what-will-happen-next, the
totally unexpected, the kill-or-be-killed kind of shooting that thousands of
expeditions into the target area had taught him. Perhaps, he consoled
himself, he had not been as faithful in his practice lately as he should
have been. Although there actually was no reason that he should be faithful,
for the shooting was for recreation only and his carrying of the rifle on
his daily walks was from force of habit only and for no other reason. He
carried the rifle as another man might take along a cane or walking stick.
At the time he had first done it, of course, it had been a different kind of
rifle and a different day. It then was no unusual thing for a man to carry a
gun while out on a walk. But today was different and he wondered, with an
inner grin, how much talk his carrying a gun might have furnished the people
who had seen him with it.
Near the end of the gallery he saw the black bulk of a trunk projecting
from beneath the lower shelf, too big to fit comfortably beneath it, jammed
against the wall, but with a foot or two of it still projecting out beyond
the shelf.
He went on walking past it, then supenly turned around. That trunk, he
thought-that was the trunk which had belonged to the Hazer who had died
upstairs. It was his legacy from that being whose stolen body would be
brought back to its grave this evening.
He walked over to the shelving and leaned his rifle against the wall.
Stooping he pulled the trunk clear of its resting place.
Once before, prior to carrying it down the stairs and storing it here
beneath the shelves, he had gone through its contents, but at the time, he
recalled, he’d not been too interested. Now, supenly, he felt an absorbing
interest in it.
He lifted the lid carefully and tilted it back against the shelves.
Crouching above the open trunk, and without touching anything to start
with, he tried to catalogue the upper layer of its contents.
There was a shimmering cloak, neatly folded, perhaps some sort of
ceremonial cloak, although he could not know. And atop the cloak lay a tiny
bottle that was a blaze of reflected light, as if someone had taken a
large-sized diamond and hollowed it out to make a bottle of it. Beside the
cloak lay a nest of balls, deep violet and dull, with no shine at all,
looking for all the world like a bunch of table-tennis balls that someone
had cemented together to make a globe. But that was not the way it was,
Enoch remembered, for that other time he had been entranced by them and had
picked them up, to find that they were not cemented, but could be freely
moved about, although never outside the context of their shape. One ball
could not be broken from the mass, no matter how hard one might try, but
would move about, as if buoyed in a fluid, among all the other balls. One
could move any, or all, of the balls, but the mass remained the same. A
calculator of some sort, Enoch wondered, but that seemed only barely
possible, for one ball was entirely like another, there was no way in which
they could be identified. Or at least, no way to identify them by the human
eye. Was it possible, he wondered, that identification might be possible to
a Hazer’s eye? And if a calculator, what kind of a calculator? Mathematical?
Or ethical? Or philosophical? Although that was slightly foolish, for who
had ever heard of a calculator for ethics or philosophy? Or, rather, what
human had ever heard? More than likely it was not a calculator, but
something else entirely. Perhaps a sort of game-a game of solitaire?
Given time, a man might finally get it figured out. But there was no
time and no incentive at the moment to spend upon one particular item any
great amount of time when there were hundreds of other items equally
fantastic and incomprehensible. For while one puzzled over a single item,
the edges of his mind would always wonder if he might not be spending time
on the most insignificant of the entire lot.
He was a victim of museum fatigue, Enoch told himself, overwhelmed by
the many pieces of the unknown scattered all about him.
He reached out a hand, not for the globe of balls, but for the shining
bottle that lay atop the cloak. As he picked it up and brought it closer, he
saw that there was a line of writing engraved upon the glass (or diamond?)
of the bottle. Slowly he studied out the writing. There had been a time,
long ago, when he had been able to read the Hazer language, if not fluently,
at least well enough to get along. But he had not read it for some years now
and he had lost a good deal of it and he stumbled haltingly from one symbol
to another. Translated very freely, the inscription on the bottle read: To
be taken when the first symptoms occur.
A bottle of medicine! To be taken when the first symptoms occur. The
symptoms, perhaps, that had come so quickly and built up so rapidly that the
owner of this bottle could make no move to reach it and so had died, falling
from the sofa.
Almost reverently, he put the bottle back in its place atop the cloak,
fitting it back into the faint impression it had made from lying there.
So different from us in so many ways, thought Enoch, and then in other
little ways so like us that it is frightening. For that bottle and the
inscription on its face was an exact parallel of the prescription bottle
that could be compounded by any corner drugstore.
Beside the globe of balls was a box, and he reached out and lifted it.
It was made of wood and had a rather simple clasp to hold it shut. He
flipped back the lid and inside he saw the metallic sheen of the material
the Hazers used as paper.
Carefully he lifted out the first sheet and saw that it was not a
sheet, but a long strip of the material folded in accordion fashion.
Underneath it were more strips, apparently of the same material.
There was writing on it, faint and faded, and Enoch held it close to
read it.
To my -,– friend: (although it was not “friend.” “Blood brother,”
perhaps, or “colleague.” And the adjectives which preceded it were such as
to escape his sense entirely.)
The writing was hard to read. It bore some resemblance to the
formalized version of the language, but apparently bore the imprint of the
writer’s personality, expressed in curlicues and flourishes which obscured
the form. Enoch worked his way slowly down the paper, missing much of what
was there, but picking up the sense of much that had been written.
The writer had been on a visit to some other planet, or possibly just
some other place. The name of the place or planet was one that Enoch did not
recognize. While he had been there he had performed some sort of function
(although exactly what it was was not entirely clear) which had to do with
his approaching death.
Enoch, startled, went back over the phrase again. And while much of the
rest of what was written was not clear, that part of it was. My approaching
death, he had written, and there was no room for mistranslation. All three
of the words were clear.
He urged that his good (friend?) do likewise. He said it was a comfort
and made clear the road.
There was no further explanation, no further reference. Just the calm
declaration that he had done something which he felt must be arranged about
his death. As if he knew death was near and was not only unafraid, but
almost unconcerned.
The next passage (for there were no paragraphs) told about someone he
had met and how they’d talked about a certain matter which made no sense at
all to Enoch, who found himself lost in a terminology he did not recognize.