Tahir’s thought must have been similar, for he said as he let his arm drop, “That lies with God. But thank you, young man, thank you. Now I, too, dare hope —” A fleeting wistfulness: “I did hope I’d live to see the ship set forth.”
His achievement, his obsession for the past half century, for which he used all the power he had been gathering: wherefore they called him mad. But he got the mission started, he got it started!
“You will watch from Paradise, sir,” Zeyd said.
“Maybe. God is compassionate. Otherwise, what do we know?” Tahir’s eyes, sunken and dim, sought the visitor’s. “You, however, you can go.”
Tahir stood mute.
“You want to go, don’t you?” Tahir asked anxiously. “Already you’ve sacrificed so much.”
Strange, the lure that caught me. A spectrogram taken by an orbiting network of instruments — oxygen at a planet of Epsilon Indi, a sign of life — and I divorced Narriman, that she be free to find another man, a stepfather for our children — and here I am back, my reputation made but in a world grown more alien than I had imagined. . . .
It would be wrong, a sin, to make a promise to this man that might never be kept. And yet — “Any who go must needs be … somewhat peculiar,” Zeyd said.
“Everybody realized that from the beginning. I’d like to believe I’ve met one of them.”
“What happens lies with God, sir.”
Tahir tried to sit up. He fell back. His voice, though, took on force. “This is to His glory. And, ten thousand years from now, when everything around us today is gone with Nineveh, you will remember, Zeyd, you will tell — But it’s not for that, it’s for mankind. Mankind, and the glory of God.”
“Yes —”
A nurse entered. “I’m sorry, Dr. Zeyd, but you will have to leave,” she said in English.
Tahir did not roar her down as once he would have done. He lay quietly, drained.
Zeyd bowed again, deeply. “In God’s name, farewell, sir, and peace be upon you.” His eyes stung.
He could barely hear the answer. “Fare you well. Well and far.”
He is not mad, Zeyd thought as he departed. He never was. It is only that his sanity went beyond most men’s understanding.