“But the dragons,” someone said.
“They won’t be out yet, and it will be another half hour before they gain access to the upper floors.”
Twain was strapping on a radio set, fastening a blaster to his belt. He crossed to Dante and handed him a sheaf of eight papers. He smiled and was gone.
At the head of the stairs, there was a sucking of a door unsealing, then a second whine as it sealed again—behind Holden Twain.
Mare Dante had nothing to do. He could have sat and worried, but the commander had been right. Dragons would not break into the upper corridors for a while yet. Until things really started getting bad above, there was no reason to worry.
He sat down and opened the folded sheets of yellow papers.
Hath a man not eyes?
Can he feel not pain?
Does the grass grow greener?
Is Gods blood rain?
And so it goes,
And so it is.
Is there a soul?
And if there is,
Where is it?
M.A. Dante was jealous. Jealousy? When he translated that and deducted the source, he realized that Twain’s poetry had taken a change for the better. It was no longer what Dante called “tree and flower poetry.” There was something of a philosophical note in those last three lines. At least, there was pessimism.
Pessimism, he strongly believed, was merely realism.
Suddenly, he was very worried about the boy—the man —upstairs.
He stood and approached Marshall. “Commander, I—”
Marshall turned, his eyes gleaming, immediately on the defensive. Between clenched teeth: “Dante. What is it now? Would you like to take over command of the operation? Would you like to—”
“Oh, shut up!” He turned up the volume on the receiver that would carry Twain’s words back to them. “I am not an enemy of yours. I disagree with your methods and procedure. I do not lower myself to personal vendetta.”
“Listen—”
The radio crackled, interrupting the building rage within Marshall. “Twain here. Menchen is in his room. Ill. I’m going to trundle him back.”
“What about the dragons?” Marshall snapped into the mike.
“I can hear them bumping softly against the window shields, trying to get in. Like big moths. Creepy.”
“None in the halls?”
“No, Starting back. Out.”
The dragons that killed with their eyes. Beautiful dragons so the automatic cameras showed. But dragons that no man could look upon.
Somehow, men must be able to see, he thought. The photos—Dante’s mind seemed dangling on the ravine of inspiration.
When Twain returned, he was quite relieved, forgot about Marshall, and lived the moments of good poetry the younger man had composed, commenting and discussing.
“Why do you write?”
Twain thought a moment. “To detail Truth.”
“With a capital T?”
“Yes.”
“There isn’t such a thing. Don’t interrupt. There is no such thing as Truth, no purity with a tag. It is a shade of gray somewhere between black and white. It is one thing to a slave, another to a monarch, and yet another to the monk who kneels alone in cloistered walls of towering granite, fingering beads. It is for no man to delineate, and for no man to criticize another’s understanding of it. Truth, old son, is relative. And more than relative, it is nonexistent as a pure entity.”
“But in the literature classes in college, they said we were to search for the truth. The textbooks on poetry say we should write to discover truth.”
The sixty plus men muttered among themselves. Marshall followed his scopes, his dials, his unfailing measuring devices that justified the way of things to man.
“That’s what they tell you, Mr. Twain. That is also what I will tell you. Write to delineate truth. Yet I warn you there is no such thing. Yet I tell you never to stop looking, never to forsake the search. Yet do I tell ye that ye shall never end the quest. Do you have guts enough to keep looking, Holden Twain?”
Twain looked at him, and silently without needing to explain, he walked off and sat in a corner, staring intently at the wall where it joined the ceiling.
The rest of the day he spent tramping in and out of Abner’s clinic, checking on Menchen’s progress.