“Chinese eggs,” Joe said. “Thousand-year-old eggs that they bury in the ground.”
“And it’s not just us,” Al said. “That old woman in Baltimore; it’s affecting what she bought too: her azalea.” Is the whole world going to starve because of a bomb blast on Luna? he asked himself. Why is everyone involved instead of just us?
Joe said, “Here comes -”
“Be quiet a second,” Al said. “I have to think something out, Maybe Baltimore is only there when one of us goes there. And the Lucky People Supermarket; as soon as we left, it passed out of existence. It could still be that only we who were on Luna are really experiencing this.”
“A philosophical problem of no importance or meaning,” Joe said. “And incapable of being proved one way or the other.”
Al said caustically, “It would be important to that old lady in the blueberry-colored cloth coat. And to all the rest of them.”
“Here’s the shop foreman,” Joe said.
“I’ve just been looking at the instruction manual,” the shop foreman said, “that came with your tape recorder.” He held the booklet out to Al, a complicated expression on his face. “Take a look.” All at once he grabbed it back. “I’ll save you the trouble of reading; look here on the last page, where it tells who made the damn thing and where to send it for factory repairs.”
“‘Made by Runciter of Zurich,'” Al read aloud. “And a maintenance station in the North American Confederation – in Des Moines. The same as on the matchfolder.” He passed the booklet to Joe and said, “We’re going to Des Moines. This booklet is the first manifestation that links the two locations.” I wonder why Des Moines, he said to himself. “Can you recall,” he said to Joe, “any connection that Runciter ever had, during his lifetime, with Des Moines?”
Joe said, “Runciter was born there. He spent his first fifteen years there. Every once in a while he used to mention it.”
“So now, after his death, he’s gone back there. In some manner or other.” Runciter is in Zurich, he thought, and also in Des Moines. In Zurich he has measurable brain metabolism; his physical, half-life body is suspended in cold-pac in the Beloved Brethren Moratorium, and yet he can’t be reached. In Des Moines he has no physical existence and yet, evidently, there contact can be established – in fact, by such extensions as this instruction booklet, has been established, at least in one direction, from him to us. And meanwhile, he thought, our world declines, turns back onto itself, bringing to the surface past phases of reality. By the end of the week we may wake up and find ancient clanging streetcars moving down Fifth Avenue. Trolley Dodgers, he thought, and wondered what that meant. An abandoned verbal term, rising from the past; a hazy, distant emanation, in his mind, canceling out current reality. Even this indistinct perception, still only subjective, made him uneasy; it had already become too real, an entity which he had never known about before this moment. “Trolley Dodgers,” he said aloud. A hundred years ago at least. Obsessively, the term remained lodged within awareness; he could not forget it.
“How come you know that?” the shop foreman asked.
“Nobody knows that any more; that’s the old name for the Brooklyn Dodgers.” He eyed Al suspiciously.
Joe said, “We better go upstairs. And make sure they’re all right. Before we take off for Des Moines.”
“If we don’t get to Des Moines soon,” Al said, “it may turn out to be an all-day trip or even a two-day trip.” As methods of transportation devolve, he thought. From rocket propulsion to jet, from jet to piston-driven aircraft, then surface travel as the coal-fed steam train, horse-drawn cart – but it couldn’t regress that far, he said to himself. And yet we’ve already got on our hands a forty-year-old tape recorder, run by rubber drive-tire and belts. Maybe it could really be.
He and Joe walked rapidly to the elevator; Joe pressed the button and they waited, both of them on edge, saying nothing; both withdrew into their own thoughts.
The elevator arrived clatteringly; the racket awoke Al from his introspection. Reflexively he pushed aside the iron-grill safety door.
And found himself facing an open cage with polished brass fittings, suspended from a cable. A dull-eyed uniformed operator sat on a stool, working the handle; he gazed at them with indifference. It was not indifference, however, that Al felt. “Don’t get in,” he said to Joe, holding him back. “Look at it and think; try to remember the elevator we rode in earlier today, the hydraulic-powered, closed, self-operated, absolutely silent-”
He ceased talking. Because the elderly clanking contraption had dimmed, and, in its place, the familiar elevator resumed its existence. And yet he sensed the presence of the other, older elevator; it lurked at the periphery of his vision, as if ready to ebb forward as soon as he and Joe turned their attention away. It wants to come back, he realized. It intends to come back. We can delay it temporarily: a few hours, probably, at the most. The momentum of the retrograde force is increasing; archaic forms are moving toward domination more rapidly than we thought. It’s now a question of a hundred years at one swing. The elevator we just now saw must have been a century old.
And yet, he thought, we seem able to exert some control over it. We did force the actual contemporary elevator back into being. If all of us stay together, if we function as an entity of – not two – but twelve minds –
“What did you see?” Joe was saying to him. “That made you tell me not to get in the elevator?”
Al said, “Didn’t you see the old elevator? Open cage, brass, from around 1910? With the operator sitting on his stool?”
“No,” Joe said.
“Did you see anything?”
“This.” Joe gestured. “The normal elevator I see every day when I come to work. I saw what I always see, what I see now.” He entered the elevator, turned and stood facing Al.
Then our perceptions are beginning to differ, Al realized. He wondered what that meant.
It seemed ominous; he did not like it at all. In its dire, obscure way it seemed to him potentially the most deadly change since Runciter’s death. They were no longer regressing at the same rate, and he had an acute, intuitive intimation that Wendy Wright had experienced exactly this before her death.
He wondered how much time he himself had left.
Now he became aware of an insidious, seeping, cooling-off which at some earlier and unremembered time had begun to explore him – investigating him as well as the world around him. It reminded him of their final minutes on Luna. The chill debased the surfaces of objects; it warped, expanded, showed itself as bulblike swellings that sighed audibly and popped. Into the manifold open wounds the cold drifted, all the way down into the heart of things, the core which made them live. What he saw now seemed to be a desert of ice from which stark boulders jutted. A wind spewed across the plain which reality had become; the wind congealed into deeper ice, and the boulders disappeared for the most part. And darkness presented itself off at the edges of his vision; he caught only a meager glimpse of it.
But, he thought, this is projection on my part. It isn’t the universe which is being entombed by layers of wind, cold, darkness and ice; all this is going on within me, and yet I seem to see it outside. Strange, he thought. Is the whole world inside me? Engulfed by my body? When did that happen? It must be a manifestation of dying, he said to himself. The uncertainty which I feel, the slowing down into entropy – that’s the process, and the ice which I see is the result of the success of the process. When I blink out, he thought, the whole universe will disappear. But what about the various lights which I should see, the entrances to new wombs? Where in particular is the red smoky light of fornicating couples? And the dull dark light signifying animal greed? All I can make out, he thought, is encroaching darkness and utter loss of heat, a plain which is cooling off, abandoned by its sun.
This can’t be normal death, he said to himself. This is unnatural; the regular momentum of dissolution has been replaced by another factor imposed upon it, a pressure arbitrary and forced.
Maybe I can understand it, he thought, if I can just lie down and rest, if I can get enough energy to think.
“What’s the matter?” Joe asked, as, together, they ascended in the elevator.
“Nothing,” Al said curtly. They may make it, he thought, but I’m not going to.