The trouble with Marshall, Dante reflected, was that he lacked imagination. He accepted everything at face value-tempered only by what his instruments told him. Being truthful with himself, he understood that he saw the old Mario Dante in the commander, and that this was why he disliked the man. The old Mario Dante, before the car crash that took Ellen and broke her body and tossed it into the ocean, before he lay in a hospital piecing together his shattered mind for seven months, the old Mario Dante had been lacking in sensitivity, in imagination. In unlocking his mental block so that he could accept the death of Ellen, the psychiatrist removed other things in passing, and opened a whole new portion of his mind.
But still, he disliked Marshall. And he was certain that the commander’s Achilles’ heel would be struck by an arrow from the quiver of the dragons. The dragons that came daily with the tidal winds.
The dragons of emerald and vermilion and yellow and white of virgin bridal gown and devil black and jack-of-lantern orange.
The butterfly dragons that were twenty yards wide and seventy yards long—but weighed only two or three hundred pounds. The flimsy, gossamer dragons.
The dragons of beauty.
The dragons that killed with their eyes.
He sighed, turned from the windowside, and sat down in one of the black leather easy chairs, snapping on the small, high-intensity reading lamp in the arm. Lighting a cigarette, he looked over his newer poems.
The first three he tossed in the wastebasket without reviewing. The fourth he read, reread, then read aloud for full effect.
“Discovery Upon Death”
“dear mankind:
am writing you from purgatory
to say that i
have made a discovery
that i wish you
would spread around up there,
god, now listen mankind,
god is a computer
and someone misprogrammed him . . .”
“Not bad,” said a voice from the darkness. Abner stepped into the small circle of light around the chair. “But don’t tell me the Pioneer Poet has doubts about life?”
“Please, the name is Mare.”
Pioneer Poet. It was a name Life had coined when his first volume had been published and had won critical acclaim. He admitted it all seemed romantic: a space force surveyor drafted for three years, writing poetry on some alien world in some alien star system. But, Pioneer Poet?
“Heard about your fight with Marshall.”
“It wasn’t a fight.”
“It was the way I heard it. What bothers you about him, Mare?”
“He doesn’t understand things.”
“Neither do any of us.”
“Suffice it to say he might be a mirror in which I can see myself. And the reflection isn’t a nice one.”
They sat in silence a moment.
“You plan to sit up all night?” Abner asked.
“No, Pioneer Physician, I do not.”
Abner grinned. “Dragon warnings should go up in six hours. You’ll need your rest.”
He folded his poems and rose, flicked off the light, and said: “Fine, but let us just look at the ocean a minute, huh?”
The snakes growing from her scalp hissed and bared fangs.
His hand burned with the dribbling of his own blood where their sharp teeth raked him.
Slowly, she turned, and the beauty was there in the face— and the horror was there.
In the eyes.
And his muscles, slowly but doubtlessly and without pause, began turning to granite.
“No!” he screamed. “I think I’m just beginning to see—”
His hair became individual strands of rock. Each cell of his face froze into eternity and became a part of something that could never die—that could only be eroded by wind and rain.
And finally his eyes, staring into hers, slipped into cataract, then to stone.
And he woke to the sound of screams in his ears.
Before opening his eyes, he could see her, pinned behind the wheel, mouth twisted in agony.
The flames licking at her face as he was tossed free, the tumbling, burning car, plunging over the cliff and away.
But when the waking dream was over, he still heard the screams. He fumbled for his bed light, and the flood of yellow fire made him squint. He looked at the clock. Five o’clock in the morning Translated Earth Time.