“They were wrong! If they were once right, no more!”
Burton prowled on and on, looking for he knew not what. He passed down a dim corridor and paused by a door. Within should be Loghu, unless she was dancing in the grand salon, and Frigate. They were together again, having gone through two or three lovers in fourteen years. She had not been able to tolerate him for a long time, but then he’d won her over— though it might be the other Frigate whom she still loved— and now they shared the same quarters. Once more.
He went on, seeing a shadowy figure faintly outlined in the light over the exit. X? Another sufferer from insomnia? Himself?
He stood outside the texas and watched the guards pacing back and forth. Watchman, what of the night? Well, what of it?
On he walked. Where have you been? From walking to and fro, not over this giant world but on this pygmy cosmos of a riverboat.
Alice was in his cabin again, having left him a little less than fourteen years ago and having returned twice. This time, they would be together forever. Perhaps. But he was glad that she was back.
He emerged on the landing deck and looked up at the dim light emanating from the control room. Its big clock boomed fourteen strokes. Two A.M.
Time for Burton to go back to bed and try to storm the citadel of sleep again.
He looked up at the stars, and, while doing so, a cold wind swept down from the north and cleared the upper deck of the mists—momentarily. Somewhere northward was the tower in the cold and gray mists. In it were, or had been, the Ethicals, the entities who thought they had a right to raise the dead without their permission.
Did they hold the keys to the mysteries? Not all mysteries, of course. The mystery of being itself, of creation, of space and infinity, time and eternity would never be solved.
Or would they?
Was there somewhere, in the tower or deep underground, machine which convered the metaphysical into the physical? Man could handle the physical, and if he didn’t know the true nature of the beyond-matter, what of it? He didn’t know the true nature of electricity, either, but he had enslaved.it for his own purposes.
He shook his fist at the north, and he went to bed.
SECTION 6
On the Not For Hire: The Thread of Reason
16
AT FIRST, SAMUEL CLEMENS HAD TENDED TO AVOID CYRANO De Bergerac as much as possible. The very perceptive Frenchman quickly detected that but seemed not to resent it. If he did, he was successfully hiding his reaction. He was always smiling and laughing, always polite but not cold. He acted as if Clemens liked him and had no reason not to.
After a while—several years—Sam began to warm up to the man who’d been Sam’s Terrestrial wife’s lover. They had much in common: a keen interest in people and in mechanical devices, a taste for literature, an abiding devotion to the study of history, a hatred for hypocrisy and self-righteousness, a loathing for the malevolent aspects of religions, and a deep agnosticism. Though Cyrano was not, like Sam, from Missouri, he shared with him a “show me” attitude.
Moreover, Cyrano was an adornment at any party but did not try to dominate the conversation.
So it was that one day Sam talked to his other self, Mark Twain, about his feelings for de Bergerac in the privacy of his suite. The result was that Sam now saw—though he’d always known deep within him—that he’d been very unfair to Cyrano. It wasn’t the fellow’s fault that Livy had fallen in love with him and had -refused to leave him for her ex-husband after she’d found him. Nor, really, was it Livy’s fault. She could only do what her inborn temperament and predetermined circumstances forced her to do. And Sam had been acting as his inborn character, his “watermark,” and circumstances forced him to do. Now, as a result of another aspect of his character rising from the depths, plus the inevitable push of events, he had changed his attitude toward Cyrano. After all, he was a good fellow, and he’d learned to shower regularly, to keep his fingernails clean, and to quit urinating in corners at the end of corridors.