“This is what Al saw,” he said.
“Well, Joe,” Pat said, “the only other way up to your room is the stairs. And you aren’t going to be able to climb stairs, not in your condition.”
“I’ll go up by the stairs.” He started away, seeking to locate the stairs. I can’t see! he said to himself. I can’t find them! The weight on him crushed his lungs, making it difficult and painful to breathe; he had to halt, concentrating on getting air into him – that alone. Maybe it is a heart attack, he thought. I can’t go up the stairs if it is. But the longing within him had grown even greater, the overpowering need to be alone. Locked in an empty room, entirely unwitnessed, silent and supine. Stretched out, not needing to speak, not needing to move. Not required to cope with anyone or any problem. And no one will even know where I am, he told himself. That seemed, unaccountably, very important; he wanted to be unknown and invisible, to live unseen. Pat especially, he thought; not her; she can’t be near me.
“There we are,” Pat said. She guided him, turning him slightly to the left. “Right in front of you. Just take hold of the railing and go bump-de-bump upstairs to bed. See?” She ascended skillfully, dancing and twinkling, poising herself, then scrambling weightlessly to the next step. “Can you make it?”
Joe said, “I – don’t want you. To come with me.”
“Oh, dear.” She clucked-clucked with mock dolefulness; her black eyes shone. “Are you afraid I’ll take advantage of your condition? Do something to you, something harmful?”
“No.” He shook his head. “I – just want. To be. Alone.” Gripping the rail, he managed to pull himself up onto the first step. Halting there, he gazed up, trying to make out the top of the flight. Trying to determine how far away it was, how many steps he had left.
“Mr. Denny asked me to stay with you. I can read to you or get you things. I can wait on you.”
He climbed another step. “Alone,” he gasped.
Pat said, “May I watch you climb? I’d like to see how long it takes you. Assuming you make it at all.”
“I’ll make it.” He placed his foot on the next step, gripped the railing and hoisted himself up. His swollen heart choked off his throat; he shut his eyes and wheezed in strangled air.
“I wonder,” Pat said, “if this is what Wendy did. She was the first; right?”
Joe gasped, “I was. In love with. Her.”
“Oh, I know. G. G. Ashwood told me. He read your mind. G. G. and I got to be very good friends; we spent a lot of time together. You might say we had an affair. Yes, you could say that.”
“Our theory,” Joe said, “was right.” He took a deeper breath. “One,” he succeeded in saying; he ascended another step and then, with tremendous effort, another. “That you and G. G. Worked it out with Ray Hollis. To infiltrate.”
“Quite right,” Pat agreed.
“Our best inertials. And Runciter. Wipe us all out.” He made his way up one more step. “We’re not in half-life. We’re not-”
“Oh, you can die,” Pat said. “You’re not dead; not you, in particular, I mean. But you are dying off one by one. But why talk about it? Why bring it up again? You said it all a little while ago, and frankly, you bore me, going over it again and again. You’re really a very dull, pedantic person, Joe. Almost as dull as Wendy Wright. You two would have made a good pair.”
“That’s why Wendy died first,” he said. “Not because she had separated. From the group. But because-” He cringed as the pain in his heart throbbed up violently; he had tried for another step, but this time he had missed. He stumbled, then found himself seated, huddled like – yes, he thought. Wendy in the closet: huddled like this. Reaching out his hand, he took hold of the sleeve of his coat. He tugged.
The fabric tore. Dried and starved, the material parted like cheap gray paper; it had no strength… like something fashioned by wasps. So there was no doubt about it. He would soon be leaving a trail behind him, bits of crumbled cloth. A trail of debris leading to a hotel room and yearned-for isolation. His last labored actions governed by a tropism. An orientation urging him toward death, decay and non-being. A dismal alchemy controlled him: culminating in the grave.
He ascended another step.
I’m going to make it, he realized. The force goading me on is feasting on my body; that’s why Wendy and Al and Edie – and undoubtedly Zafsky by now – deteriorated physically as they died, leaving only a discarded husklike weightless shell, containing nothing, no essence, no juices, no substantial density. The force thrust itself against the weight of many gravities, and this is the cost, this using up of the waning body. But the body, as a source supply, will be enough to get me up there; a biological necessity is at work, and probably at this point not even Pat, who set it into motion, can abort it. He wondered how she felt now as she watched him climb. Did she admire him? Did she feel contempt? He raised his head, searched for her; he made her out, her vital face with its several hues. Only interest there. No malevolence. A neutral expression. He did not feel surprise. Pat had made no move to hinder him and no move to help him. It seemed right, even to him.
“Feel any better?” Pat asked.
“No,” he said. And, getting halfway up, lunged onto the next step.
“You look different. Not so upset.”
Joe said, “Because I can make it. I know that.”
“It’s not much further,” Pat agreed.
“Farther,” he corrected.
“You’re incredible. So trivial, so small. Even in your own death spasms you-” She corrected herself, catlike and clever. “Or what probably seem subjectively to you as death spasms. I shouldn’t have used that term, ‘death spasms.’ It might depress you. Try to be optimistic. Okay?”
“Just tell me,” he said. “How many steps. Left.”
“Six.” She slid away from him, gliding upward noiselessly, effortlessly. “No; sorry. Ten. Or is it nine? I think it’s nine.”
Again he climbed a step, Then the next. And the next. He did not talk; he did not even try to see. Going by the hardness of the surface against which he rested, he crept snail-like from step to step, feeling a kind of skill develop in him, an ability to tell exactly how to exert himself, how to use his nearly bankrupt power.
“Almost there,” Pat said cheerily from above him. “What do you have to say, Joe? Any comments on your great climb? The greatest climb in the history of man. No, that’s not true. Wendy and Al and Edie and Fred Zafsky did it before you. But this is the only one I’ve actually watched.”
Joe said, “Why me?”
“I want to watch you, Joe, because of your low-class little scheme back in Zurich. Of having Wendy Wright spend the night with you in your hotel room. Now, tonight, this will be different. You’ll be alone.”
“That night, too,” Joe said, “I was. Alone.” Another step. He coughed convulsively, and out of him, in drops hurled from his streaked face, his remaining capacity expelled itself uselessly.
“She was there; not in your bed but in the room somewhere. You slept through it, though.” Pat laughed.
“I’m trying,” Joe said. “Not to cough.” He made it up two more steps and knew that he had almost reached the top. How long had he been on the stairs? he wondered. No way for him to tell.
He discovered then, with a shock, that he had become cold as well as exhausted. When had this happened? he asked himself. Sometime in the past; it had infiltrated so gradually that before now he had not noticed it. Oh, god, he said to himself and shivered frantically. His bones seemed almost to quake. Worse than on Luna, far worse. Worse, too, than the chill which had hung over his hotel room in Zurich. Those had been harbingers.
Metabolism, he reflected, is a burning process, an active furnace. When it ceases to function, life is over. They must be wrong about hell, he said to himself. Hell is cold; everything there is cold. The body means weight and heat; now weight is a force which I am succumbing to, and heat, my heat, is slipping away. And, unless I become reborn, it will never return. This is the destiny of the universe, So at least I won’t be alone.
But he felt alone. It’s overtaking me too soon, he realized. The proper time hasn’t come; something has hurried this up – some conniving thing has accelerated it, out of malice and curiosity: a polymorphic, perverse agency which likes to watch. An infantile, retarded entity which enjoys what’s happening. It has crushed me like a bent-legged insect, he said to himself. A simple bug which does nothing but hug the earth. Which can never fly or escape. Can only descend step by step into what is deranged and foul. Into the world of the tomb which a perverse entity surrounded by its own filth inhabits. The thing we call Pat.