“Yes,” Joe said, aloud, and was surprised to hear his own voice; it rang harshly in the midst of the moans rising from the injured Glimmung. Several others in the group echoed his word; it was as if he had pronounced a ban, as if it was his decision to make, whether Glimmung would live or not live. “But we can’t be really sure until we get out there,” he said. He set down his torch and descended the wooden ladder to the parked boat. “I’m going to go and find out,” he said; he reached for his torch and then, squatting and shivering in the chill night wind, started the engine of the boat.
“Don’t go,” Mali said.
Joe grated, “I’ll see you in a little while.” He guided the boat from its dock, out into the furiously lapping waves created by the thrashing bulk of Glimmung’s body.
An enormity of injury, he thought as the boat rose and fell, put-putting its way anxiously forward. Injury on a scale which we really can’t understand. Damn it, he thought with bitterness. Why does it have to end this way? Why couldn’t it have been otherwise? He felt numb, as if death were assailing him, too. As if he and Glimmung–.
The huge shape wallowed in the water, and, as it lay, blood poured from it; like Christ on the cross it bled eternally, as if its blood supply was infinite. As if, Joe thought, this moment is going to last forever: me in the boat, trying to get close, and him floundering and bleeding and dying. God, he thought; this is awful, truly awful. And yet he guided the boat on, closer and closer.
From the depths of himself Glimmung said, “I—need you. All of you.”
“What can we do?” He continued on, closer and closer; now the periphery of the body strained and twisted only a yard from the prow of the boat. Water and blood swamped its way into the boat; Joe felt it sink below him. He gripped the sides, tried to shift his weight. But blood and water continued to pour in. I will be drowned, he thought, in another few seconds.
Reluctantly, he reversed direction; he backed away from Glimmung. The boat ceased taking liquid. And yet he felt no better. His fear and agony remained the same, his empathic identification with his dying employer.
Glimmung sputtered, “I—I—“ He slobbered, now, rolling on his side, unable to control the thrashing of his maimed body.
“Whatever it is,” Joe said, “we’ll do it.”
“That’s—inordinately receptive—of you,” Glimmung managed to whisper, and then he revolved entirely; he sank below the surface, so that speech, for him, became impossible.
The end, Joe thought, has come.
Wretchedly, he turned the boat about and, misery weighing him down, steered for the wharf once more. It was over.
As he tied up the boat, Mali and Harper Baldwin and several nonhumanoids reached to help him.
“Thanks,” he said, and clumsily ascended the wooden ladder. “He’s dead,” Joe said. “Or almost dead. Virtually dead.” He let Miss Reiss and Mali sweep a blanket over him, a warm cloak which settled into place over his foam- and blood-drenched body. My god, he realized. I’m soaking wet. He had no memory of it; at the time he had been concerned with what he saw only. With Glimmung. Now he turned his attention on himself . . . and found that he was wet, freezing, and filled with despair.
“Here’s a local cigarette,” Mali said; she placed it between his trembling lips. “Get inside. Don’t watch. There’s nothing you can do. You tried.”
Joe said, shakily, “He asked for our help.”
“I know,” Mali said. “We heard him.” The others of the group nodded silently, their faces bleached with unyielding pain.
“But I don’t know what it is,” Joe said. “The help we can do. I don’t see anything we can do, but he was trying to say. Maybe if he could have said it we could have done it. The last thing he said, did, was to thank me.” He let Mali lead him under the hermetically sealed dome and into the radiant heat of the staging center.
“We’ll leave this planet tonight,” Mali said presently, as the two of them stood together.
“Okay,” he said. He nodded.
“Come to my planet with me,” Mali said. “Don’t go back to Earth; you’d be so unhappy there.”
“Yeah,” he agreed. It was true. Beyond any doubt, any possible doubt whatever. As W. S. Gilbert would have put it. “Where’s Willis?” he asked, looking around. “I want to trade quotes with him.”
“Quotations,” Mali corrected.
He nodded in agreement. “Yes,” he said. “I meant to say quotations.”
“You’re really tired.”
“Hell,” he said, “I don’t know why I should be; all I did was paddle out there in a boat to try to talk with him.”
“The responsibility,” Mali said.
“What responsibility? I couldn’t even hear him.”
“But the promise you made. Regarding us all.”
Joe said, “Anyhow I failed.”
“_He_ failed. It’s not your fault. You were listening—we all were listening. He never managed to say it.”
“Is he still on the surface?” Joe asked; he peered past her, across the wharf, at the water beyond.
“He’s on the surface, slowly drifting this way.”
Joe tossed down the cigarette, ground it out with his heel, and started for the wharf.
“Stay in here,” Mali said, trying to stop him. “It’s sealed against the cold. You’re still wet; you’ll die.”
“Do you know how Gilbert died?” he asked her. “William Schwenck Gilbert? He had a heart attack trying to rescue a girl who was drowning.” He pushed past her, through the thermal barrier, and outdoors onto the wharf once more. “I won’t die,” he said to her as she followed after him. “Which in a sense is too bad.” Maybe it would be more useful, he thought, to die with Glimmung. That way, at least, we could show how we felt. But who would notice? Who is left to notice? Spiddles and werjes, he thought. And robots. He continued on, pushing his way through the group, until he reached the edge of the wharf.
Four torches illuminated the expiring hulk which had once been Glimmung; in their light Joe watched, as the others watched, silently. He could think of no comment, and no comment seemed to be needed. Look at him, he said to himself. And I brought it about. So the Book of the Kalends was right after all; by going down below I caused his death.
“You did it,” Harper Baldwin said to him.
“Yep,” Joe said stoically.
“Any reason?” the multilegged gastropod lisped.
“No,” Joe said. “Unless you want to count stupidity.”
“I’m ready to count it,” Harper Baldwin rasped.
“Okay,” Joe said. “You do that.” He looked; he looked; he looked; Glimmung came closer; closer; closer. And then, at the edge of the wharf, almost against it, the body reared up.
“Watch out!” Mali screamed from behind him; the group broke, scattered, hurried toward the security of the hermetically sealed dome.
Too late. Glimmung’s bulk descended on the wharf; the wood splintered and sank. Joe, gazing up, saw from outside into the immense body. And then, a moment later, saw from inside the body out.
Glimmung had enclosed them. All. No one had escaped, not even the robot Willis, who had stood far off to one side. Caught up, trapped. Included in that which was Glimmung.
He heard Glimmung speak—heard not through his ears but in his brain. And, at the same time, heard the babble of the others, of the remainder of the group; their voices, the unceasing din, muttered beyond Glimmung’s own voice, like crosstalk. “Help me? Where am I? Get me out of here!” They babbled against one another, like disturbed, frightened ants. And Glimmung’s voice boomed, overpowering but not quenching them. “I have asked you here today,” Glimmung declared, bombarding Joe’s brain, “because I need your help. Only you can give it to me.”
We’re a part of him, Joe realized. A part! He tried to see, but his eyes registered only a swirling, jellolike image, a film which obliterated rather than revealed the reality around him. I’m not on the edge, he thought; I’m at the center. So I have no vision. Those at the edge can see, but–.
“Please listen to me,” Glimmung interrupted, fragmenting his batlike flittering thoughts. “Concentrate. If you do not, you will be absorbed and finally vanish, and hence be of no use to me or to anyone else. I need you to live, as separate entities combined within my one somatic presence.”
“Will we ever get out?” Harper Baldwin yammered. “Are we going to have to remain in here forever?”
“I want out!” Miss Reiss cried in panic. “Let me loose!”
“Please,” the immense dragonfly implored. “I want to fly and sing; I am held down in here, pushed and compressed and made not alone. Sanction my flight, Glimmung!”