And Rumfoord up in his treetop said nothing to discourage their compassion. “You have had the singular accident, Mr. Constant,” he said sympathetically, “of becoming a central symbol of wrong-headedness for a perfectly enormous religious sect.
“You would not be attractive to us as a symbol, Mr. Constant,” he said, “if our hearts did not go out to you to a certain extent. Our hearts have to go out to you, since all your flamboyant errors are errors that human beings have made since the beginning of time.
“In a few minutes, Mr. Constant,” said Rumfoord up in his treetop, “you are going to walk down the catwalks and ramps to that long golden ladder, and you are going to climb that ladder, and you are going to get into that space ship, and you are going to fly away to Titan, a warm and fecund moon of Saturn. You will live there in safety and comfort, but in exile from your native Earth.
“You are going to do this voluntarily, Mr. Constant, so that the Church of God the Utterly Indifferent can have a drama of dignified self-sacrifice to remember and ponder through all time.
“We will imagine, to our spiritual satisfaction,” said Rumfoord up in his treetop, “that you are taking all mistaken ideas about the meaning of luck, all misused wealth and power, and all disgusting pastimes with you.”
The man who had been Malachi Constant, who had been Unk, who had been the Space Wanderer, the man who was Malachi Constant again — that man felt very little upon being declared Malachi Constant again. He might, possibly, have felt some interesting things, had Rumfoord’s timing been different. But Rumfoord told him what his ordeal was to be only seconds after telling him he was Malachi Constant — and the ordeal was sufficiently ghastly to command Constant’s full attention.
The ordeal had been promised not in years or months or days — but in minutes. And, like any condemned criminal, Malachi Constant became a student, to the exclusion of all else, of the apparatus on which he was about to perform.
Curiously, his first worry was that he would stumble, that he would think too hard about the simple matter of walking, and that his feet would cease to work naturally, and that be would stumble on those wooden feet.
“You won’t stumble, Mr. Constant,” said Rumfoord up in his treetop, reading Constant’s mind. “There is nowhere else for you to go, nothing else for you to do. By putting one foot in front of the other, while we watch in silence, you will make of yourself the most memorable, magnificent, and meaningful human being of modern times.”
Constant turned to look at his dusky mate and child. Their gazes were direct. Constant learned from their gazes that Rumfoord had spoken the truth, that no course save the course to the space ship was open to him. Beatrice and young Chrono were supremely cynical about the festivities — but not about courageous behavior in the midst of them.
They dared Malachi Constant to behave well.
Constant rubbed his left thumb and index finger together in a careful rotary motion. He watched this. pointless enterprise for perhaps ten seconds.
And then he dropped his hands to his sides, raised his eyes, and stepped off firmly toward the space ship. As his left foot struck the ramp, his head was filled with a sound he had not heard for three Earthling years. The sound was coming from the antenna under the crown of his skull. Rumfoord, up in his treetop, was sending signals to Constant’s antenna by means of a small box in his pocket.
He was making Constant’s long and lonely walk more bearable by filling Constant’s head with the sound of a snare drum.
The snare drum had this to say to him:
Rented a tent, a tent, a tent;
Rented a tent, a tent.
Rented a tent!
Rented a tent!
Rented a, rented a tent!
The snare drum fell silent as Malachi Constant’s hand closed for the first time on a gilded rung of the world’s tallest free-standing ladder. He looked up, and perspective made the ladder’s summit seem as tiny as a needle. Constant rested his brow for a moment against the rung to which his hand clung.