“You have something you would like to say, Mr. Constant, before you go up the ladder?” said Rumfoord up in his treetop.
A microphone on the end of a boom was again dangled before Constant. Constant licked his lips.
“You’re about to say something, Mr. Constant?” said Rumfoord.
“If you’re going to talk,” the technician in charge of the microphone said to Constant, “speak in a perfectly normal tone, and keep your lips about six inches away from the microphone.”
“You’re going to speak to us, Mr. Constant?” said Rumfoord.
“It — it’s probably not worth saying,” said Constant quietly, “but I’d still like to say that I haven’t understood a single thing that’s happened to me since I reached Earth.”
“You haven’t got that feeling of participation?” said Rumfoord up in his treetop. “Is that it?”
“It doesn’t matter,” said Constant. “I’m still going up the ladder.”
“Well,” said Rumfoord up in his treetop, “if you feel we are doing you some sort of injustice here, suppose you tell us something really good you’ve done at some point in your life, and let us decide whether that piece of goodness might excuse you from this thing we have planned for you.”
“Goodness?” said Constant.
“Yes,” said Rumfoord expansively. “Tell me one good thing you ever did in your life — what you can remember of it.”
Constant thought hard. His principal memories were of scuttling through endless corridors in the caves. There had been a few opportunities for what might pass for goodness with Boaz and the harmoniums. But Constant could not say honestly that he had availed himself of these opportunities to be good.
So he thought about Mars, about all the things that had been contained in his letter to himself. Surely, among all those items, there was something about his own goodness.
And then he remembered Stony Stevenson — his friend. He had had a friend, which was certainly a good thing. “I had a friend,” said Malachi Constant into the microphone.
“What was his name?” said Rumfoord.
“Stony Stevenson,” said Constant.
“Just one friend?” said Rumfoord up in his treetop. “Just one,” said Constant. His poor soul was flooded with pleasure as he realized that one friend was all that a man needed in order to be well-supplied with friendship.
“So your claim of goodness would stand or fall, really,” said Rumfoord up in his treetop, “depending on how good a friend you really were of this Stony Stevenson.”
“Yes,” said Constant.
“Do you recall an execution on Mars, Mr. Constant,” said Rumfoord up in his treetop, “wherein you were the executioner? You strangled a man at the’ stake before three regiments of the Army of Mars.”
This was one memory that Constant had done his best to eradicate. He had been successful to a large extent — and the rummaging he did through his mind now was sincere. He couldn’t be sure that the execution bad taken place. “I — I think I remember,” said Constant.
“Well — that man you strangled was your great and good friend Stony Stevenson,” said Winston Niles Rumfoord.
Malachi Constant wept as he climbed the gilded ladder. He paused halfway up, and Rumfoord called to him again through the loudspeakers.
“Feel more like a vitally-interested participant now, Mr. Constant?” called Rumfoord.
Mr. Constant did. He had a thorough understanding now of his own worthlessness, and a bitter sympathy for anyone who might find it good to handle him roughly.
And when he got to the top, he was told by Rumfoord not to close the airlock yet, because his mate and child would be up shortly.
Constant sat on the threshold of his space ship at the top of the ladder, and listened to Rumfoord’s brief sermon about Constant’s dark mate, about the one. eyed, gold-toothed woman called Bee. Constant did not listen closely to the sermon. His eyes saw a larger, more comforting sermon in the panorama of town, bay, and islands so far below.
The sermon of the panorama was that even a man without a friend in the Universe could still find his home planet mysteriously, heartbreakingly beautiful.
“I shall tell you now,” said Winston Niles Rumfoord in his treetop so far below Malachi Constant, “about Bee, the woman who sells Malachis outside the gate, the dark woman who, with her son, now glowers at us all.