My head spun with the old scenes. The wall before me flashed between them. My lungs ached, and breath was a stone in my chest. My fingers slipped, and I clutched, balancing on my toes.
Shukon’s arm struck my side. I howled in pain. “What is it?” he croaked.
“Nothing.” I caught the rock, shoved upward.
“You are hurt.”
“A rib. Nothing—”
My fingers scraped across rock, tore suit and flesh. Pain stabbed up my arms, but I clutched and held on.
A third of the way up, I pulled onto a ledge that gave step to a shelf slashing seventy feet into the rubble. I stretched Shukon out, sat rubbing muscles and sucking in air. “We’ll rest here. We’re going to make it easily.” It was someone else talking, or—perhaps—some liberated fragment of myself.
“You’ll make it,” he said. “Not . . . me.”
I turned. The gun was pointed right between my eyes. “Put that down, for chrissakes!”
“You won’t make it with me. Well both die anyway. My people need you.”
“Don’t be silly. Give me that.”
The rubble whined, settled. I took a step toward him. He shot me.
I stumbled back, clutching my side. It was the barest possible of wounds, a sear, really. The bullet had done no damage. What little pain it had caused was directly over my broken rib. I had not suspected he was an expert shot.
“I am happy,” he said. “Death can be viewed as a blessing. You should think more—you Westerners—like we Orientals. Acceptance, Dr. Bronson. Acceptance is the key to existence. You have, I know, not learned that yet. It will take you some time. But you must, Dr. Bronson, learn that.”
Then he did something I shall never forget, something that has hung with me burning starlike forever. He turned the barrel of the gun on his own chest and blew his heart out. Blood fountained up. Flesh tore and flung itself free from his body. Acceptance . . .
“Father!” I shouted, clenching his lifeless shoulders. Horses blended together on the carousel . . . He was ashen, his face very white behind the faceplate.
“You can’t leave me. It isn’t far. It was so close! Father, damn you, father!”
My mind merry-go-rounded madly, madly. My mind gave key to my heart, brimmed my eyes. I smashed my hands on the rocks, smashed and smashed to change what could not be changed. I stuffed my hands (white-white) into the gaping wound (white-white) in his chest, as if the blood could restore me, could reverse my life and take me back in time and make me whole again. I wanted to cure, father. Really. I’m in the military, but the individual still matters! Really, father! I didn’t want to be late, father! Really (white-white)!
But much later, when the blood had coagulated and dried upon my hands, I started climbing again—for Time—rigid Time—is but a one-way street.
TO BEHOLD THE SUN
I am probably the only living writer who can say he collaborated with the justly famed Isaac Asimov on the second story I ever sold. Admittedly, I am stretching things a bit, but it was this way: I sent “To Behold the Sun” to Ed Ferman at F&SF, and received it back with a note saying the story needed some scientific rationalization for the trip to the sun which is the center of the plot. This is the only time Mr. Ferman ever asked me to rewrite, and even then he enclosed two paragraphs of scientific rationalization which he had garnered from Isaac who was giving them to me to use in the story. The rationalization amounted to perhaps a hundred words, and I slipped it all in without disrupting more than two pages of the original draft. Ed bought the story and published it. When I met Isaac at the Philcon (a science fiction fan convention in Philadelphia) this past November, I reminded him of the fact we had collaborated and, jokingly, offered him a quarter for his share of the work. He smiled that Slavic yet somehow gnomish smile and said, “If you don’t mind, I’d rather just kiss your wife.” Whereupon he took Gerda in the famous Asimov arms and kissed her with the famous Asimov lips. Isaac, that is the last time I will ever collaborate with you—and you can forget the quarter, because I have already spent it!