Boaz suddenly grabbed Unk, rattled poor Unk’s dry bones. “I’d appreciate it, Unk,” said Boaz tautly, “if you’d just let me think whatever I’m going to think about that message about how they love me. I mean — ” he said, “you know — ” he said, “it don’t necessarily have to make sense to you. I mean — ” he said, “you know — ” he said, “there ain’t really any call for you to say anything about it, one way or the other. I mean,” he said, “you know — ” he said, “these animals ain’t necessarily your dish. You don’t necessarily have to like ’em, or understand ’em, or say anything about ’em. I mean — ” said Boaz, “you know — ” said Boaz, “the message wasn’t addressed to you. It’s me they said they loved. That lets you out.”
He let Unk go, turned attention to the comic book again. His broad, brown, slab-muscled back amazed Unk. Living apart from Boaz, Unk had flattered himself into thinking he was a physical match for Boaz. He saw now what a pathetic delusion this had been.
The muscles in Boaz’s back slid over one another in slow patterns that were counterpoint to the quick movements of his page-turning fingers. “You know so much about traps and things,” said Boaz. “How you know there ain’t some worse trap waiting for us if we go flying out of here?”
Before Unk could answer him, Boaz remembered that he had left the tape recorder playing and unguarded.
“Ain’t nobody watching out for ’em at all!” he cried. He left Unk, ran to rescue the harmoniums.
While Boaz was gone, Unk made plans for turning the space ship upside. down. That was the solution to the puzzle of how to get out. That was what the harmoniums on the ceiling had said:
UNK, TURN SHIP UPSIDE DOWN.
The theory of turning the space ship over was sound, of course. The ship’s sensing equipment was on its bottom. When turned over, the ship would be able to apply the same easy grace and intelligence to getting out of the caves that it had used in getting into- them.
Thanks to a power winch and the feeble tug of gravity in the caves of Mercury, Unk had the ship turned over by the time Boaz got back. All that remained to be done for the trip out was to press the on button. The upside-down ship would then blunder against the cave floor, give up, retreat from the floor under the impression that the floor was a ceiling.
It would go up the system of chimneys under the impression that it was going down. And it would inevitably find the way out, under the impression that it was seeking the deepest possible hole.
The hole it would eventually find itself in would be the bottomless, sideless pit of space eternal.
Boaz came into the upside-down ship, his arms loaded with dead harmoniums. He was carrying four quarts or more of the seeming dried apricots. Inevitably he dropped some. And, in stooping to pick them up reverently, he dropped more.
Tears were streaming down his face.
“You see?” said Boaz. He was raging heartbrokenly against himself. “You see, Unk?” he said. “See what happens when somebody just runs off and forgets?”
Boaz shook his head. “This ain’t all of ’em,” he said. “This ain’t near all of ’em.” He found an empty carton that had once contained candy bars. He put the harmonium corpses into that.
He straightened up, his hands on his hips. Just as Unk had been amazed by Boaz’s physical condition, so was Unk now amazed by Boaz’s dignity.
Boaz, when he straightened up, was a wise, decent, weeping, brown Hercules.
Unk, by comparison, felt scrawny, rootless, and soreheaded.
“You want to do the dividing, Unk?” said Boaz.
“Dividing?” said Unk.
“Goofballs, food, soda pop, candy,” said Boaz.
“Divide it all?” said Unk. “My God — there’s enough of everything for five hundred years.” There had never been any talk of dividing things before. There had been no shortage, and no threat of a shortage of anything.
“Half for you to take with you, and half to leave here with me,” said Boaz.