“What should I do?” whispered Constant.
“Sh!” said Beatrice sharply.
Salo beached his gilded craft. He made it fast with a clumsy landlubber’s knot to the wrist of a statue by the water. The statue was of a nude woman playing a slide trombone. It was entitled, enigmatically, Evelyn and Her Magic Violin.
Salo was too jangled by sorrow to care for his own safety — to understand, even, that he might be frightening to someone. He stood for a moment on a block of seasoned Titanic peat near his landing. His grieving feet sucked at the damp stone. He pried loose his feet with a tremendous effort.
On he came, the flashes from Chrono’s knife dazzling him.
“Please — ” he said.
A rock flew out of the knife’s dazzle.
Salo ducked.
A hand siezed his bony throat, threw him down.
Young Chrono now stood astride Old Salo, his knife point pricking Salo’s chest. Beatrice knelt by Salo’s head, a rock poised to smash his head to bits.
“Go on — kill me,” said Salo raspingly. “You’d be doing me a favor. I wish I were dead. I wish to God I’d never been assembled and started up in the first place. Kill me, put me out of my misery, and then go see him. He’s asking for you.”
“Who is?” said Beatrice.
“Your poor husband — my former friend, Winston Niles Rumfoord,” said Salo.
“Where is he?” said Beatrice.
“In that palace on the island,” said Salo. “He’s dying — all alone, except for his faithful dog. He’s asking for you — ” said Salo, “asking for all of you. And he says he never wants to lay his eyes on me again.”
Malachi Constant watched the lead-colored lips kiss thin air soundlessly. The tongue behind the lips clicked infinitesimally. The lips suddenly drew back, baring the perfect teeth of Winston Niles Rumfoord.
Constant was himself showing his teeth, preparing to gnash them appropriately at the sight of this man who had done him so much harm. He did not gnash them. For one thing, no one was looking — no one would see him do it and understand. For another thing, Constant found himself destitute of hate.
His preparations for gnashing his teeth decayed into a yokel gape — the gape of a yokel in the presence of a spectacularly mortal disease.
Winston Niles Rumfoord was lying, fully materialized, on his back on his lavender contour chair by the pool. His eyes were directed at the sky, unblinkingly and seemingly sightless. One fine hand dangled over the side of the chair, its limp fingers laced in the choke chain of Kazak, the hound of space.
The chain was empty.
An explosion on the Sun had separated man and dog. A Universe schemed in mercy would have kept man and dog together.
The Universe inhabited by Winston Niles Rumfoord and his dog was not schemed in mercy. Kazak had been sent ahead of his master on the great mission to nowhere and nothing.
Kazak had left howling in a puff of ozone and sick light, in a hum like swarming bees.
Rumfoord let the empty choke chain slip from his fingers. The chain expressed deadness, made a formless sound and a formless heap, was a soulless slave of gravity, born with a broken spine.
Rumfoord’s lead-colored lips moved. “Hello, Beatrice — wife,” he said sepulchrally.
“Hello, Space Wanderer,” he said. He made his voice affectionate this time. “Gallant of you to come, Space Wanderer — to take one more chance with me.
“Hello, illustrious young bearer of the illustrious name of Chrono,” said Rumfoord. “Hail, oh German batball star — hail, him of the good-luck piece.”
The three to whom he spoke stood just inside the wall. The pool was between them and Rumfoord.
Old Salo, who had not been granted his wish to die, grieved in the stern of the gilded rowboat that was beached outside the wail.
“I am not dying,” said Rumfoord. “I am merely taking my leave of the Solar System. And I am not even doing that. In the grand, in the timeless, in the chrono-synclastic infundibulated way of looking at things, I shall always be here. I shall always be wherever I’ve been.