“Take it easy, Roscoe,” I counseled. “Don’t try too hard. You are doing fine. Just take it easy now.”
But he wasn’t about to take it easy. He was full of what he had had to say. It had been bottled up inside of him for a long time and it was bubbling to get out.
“Captain Ross,” he said, “I was fearful for a time. Fearful I would never work it out. For there are two things on this planet and they both struggled for expression and I could not get them sorted, sported, forted, courted …”
I moved forward quickly and grabbed him by the arm. “For the love of God,” I pleaded, “take it easy. You have all the time there is. There isn’t any hurry. I’ll wait to hear you out. Don’t try to talk too fast.”
“Thank you, captain,” he said with an effort at great dignity, “for your forebearance and your great consideration.”
“We’ve traveled a long road,” I told him. “We can take a little time. If you have any answers, I can wait for them. Myself, I’m fresh out of anything like answers.”
“There is the structure,” he said. “The white structure of which the city is made and the spaceport floored and the spaceships sealed.”
He stopped and waited for so long that I was afraid something might have happened to him. But after a time he spoke again.
“In ordinary matter,” he said, “the bonding between the atoms involves only the outer shells. Do you understand?’
“I think I do,” I said. “Rather foggily.”
“In the white material,” he said, “bonding extends deeper than the outer orbits of the electrons, down deep into the shell. You grasp the implication?”
I gasped as I understood at least a little of what he had just told me.
“All hell,” I said, “couldn’t break the bond.”
“Precisely,” he declared. “That is what was thought. Now you will come with me, captain, if you please.”
“But just a minute,” I protested. “You haven’t told it all. You said there were two things.”
He looked at me for a long moment, as if he might be debating if he should tell me further, then he asked a question, “What do you know, captain, of reality?”
I shrugged. It was a foolish question. “At one time,” I told him, doubtfully, “I would have told you I could recognize reality. Now I’m not so sure.”
“This planet,” he said, “is layered in realities. There are at least two realities. There may be many more.”
He was almost fluent now, although there still were times he stuttered and had to force his words out and his delivery of them was spaced imperfectly.
“But how,” I asked, “do you know all this? About the bonding and reality?”
“I do not know,” he said. “I only know I know it. And now, please, can we go?”
He turned and went down the ramp and I followed him. What had I to lose? I had nothing going for me and maybe he had nothing going for him, either, maybe all he said were just empty words born of an enlarged imagination, but I was at a point where I was ready to make a grab at any straw.
The idea of more tightly bonded atoms made a feeble sort of sense, although as I ran it through my mind I couldn’t figure out how it might be done. But this business of a many-layered reality was outright gibberish. It made no sense at all.
We reached the street and Roscoe headed for the spaceport. He was no longer mumbling to himself and he was walking rapidly, as if he might have a purpose-so rapidly that I had to hurry to keep up with him. He was changed- there was no doubt of that-but I had a hard time making up my mind whether it was an actual change or just a new phase of his madness.
When we emerged from the street onto the spaceport, I saw that it was morning. The sun was about halfway up the eastern sky. The spaceport, with its milky-white floor, surrounded by the whiteness of the city, was a place of glare and in that glare the whiteness of the ships stood up like daytime ghosts.
We headed out into the immensity of the port. Roscoe seemed to be moving just a little faster than he had before. Falling behind, I had to trot every now and then to keep up with him. I would have liked to ask him what it was all about, but I had no breath to waste in asking and, in any case, I wasn’t sure he would tell me.
It was a long hike. For a long time it seemed we had scarcely moved and then, rather suddenly, we were a long way from the city walls and closer to the ships.
We were fairly close to Sara’s ship before I saw the contraption at its base. It was a crazy-looking thing, with a mirror of some sort and what I took to be a battery (or at least a power source) and a maze of wires and tubing. It wasn’t very big, three feet or so in height and maybe ten feet square and from a distance it looked like an artistic junk heap. Closer up it looked less like a junk heap; it looked like something a couple of vacation-bored kids would rig up from assorted odds and ends they had managed to accumulate, pretending that they were building some sort of wondrous machine.
I stopped and stared at it, unable to say a word. Of all the goddamned foolishness I had ever seen, this was the worst. During all the time I had been sweating out my heart, running through the worlds, this silly robot had been hunting through the city to pick up all kinds of forgotten and discarded junk and had been lugging it out here and setting up this thing.
He had squatted down before what I imagine he imagined to be a control panel and was reaching out his hands to the knobs and switches on it.
“Now, captain,” he said, “if the mathematics should be right.”
He did something to the panel and here and there tubes flickered briefly and there was a sound like the sound of breaking glass and a shower of glasslike fragments were peeling off the ship and crashing to the ground and the ship stood free of the milk-white glaze the buglike machine had squirted over it.
I stood frozen. I couldn’t move. The fool machine had worked and the ship stood free and ready and I couldn’t move. It was incomprehensive. I could not believe it. Roscoe couldn’t do this. Not the fumbling, mumbling Roscoe I had known. I was only dreaming it.
Roscoe stood up and came over to me. He put out both his hands and gripped me by the shoulders, standing facing me.
“It is done,” he said. “Both for it and I. When I freed the ship, I freed myself as well. I am whole and well again. I am my olden self.”
And indeed he seemed so, although I’d not known his olden self. He had no difficulty talking and he stood and moved more naturally, more like a man, less like a clanking robot.
“I was confused,” he said, “by all that happened to me, by the changes in my brain, changes that I could not comprehend and did not know how to use. But now, having used them and proved that they are useful, I am quite myself once more.”
I found that the paralysis which had gripped me now was gone and I tried to turn so that I could run toward the ship, but he clung tightly to my shoulders and would not let me go.
“Hoot talked to you of destiny,” he said. “This is my destiny. This and more. The movers of the universe, whatever they may be, work in many ways to achieve each individual destiny. How other can one explain why the hammering of crude mallets on my brain could have so changed and short-circuited and altered the pattern of my brain as to have brought about an understanding I did not have before.”
I shook myself free of him.
“Captain,” he said.
“Yes.”
“You do not believe it even yet. You still think I am an oaf. And I may have been an oaf. But I am no longer.”
“No,” I said, “I guess you’re not. There is no way to thank you.”
“We are friends,” he said. “There is no need of thanks. You freed me of the centaurs. I free you of this planet. That should make us friends. We have sat by many campfires. That should make us friends…”
“Shut up!” I yelled at him. “Cut out the goddamned sentiment. You are worse than Hoot.”
I went around his ridiculous contraption and climbed the ladder of the ship, Roscoe climbing close behind me.