His progress was knobby and ramshackle. Poor Unk had lost a lot of weight, and a lot of hair, too. He was aging fast. His eyes felt hot and his skeleton felt rickety.
Unk never shaved on Mercury. When his hair and beard got so long as to be a bother, he would hack away wads of thatch with a butcherknife.
Boaz shaved every day. Boaz gave himself a haircut twice an Earthling week with a barber kit from the space ship.
Boaz, twelve years younger than Unk, had never felt better in his life. He had gained weight in the caves of Mercury – and serenity, too.
Boaz’s home vault was furnished with a cot, a table, two chairs, a punching bag, a mirror, dumbbells, a tape recorder, and a library of recorded music on tape consisting of eleven hundred compositions.
Boaz’s home vault had a door on it, a round boulder with which he could plug the vault’s mouth. The door was necessary, since Boaz was God Almighty to the harmoniums. They could locate him by his heartbeat.
Had he slept with his door open, he would have awakened to find himself pinned down by hundreds of thousands of his admirers. They would have let him up only when his heart stopped beating.
Boaz, like Unk, was naked. But he still had shoes.
His genuine leather shoes had held up gorgeously.
True – Unk had walked fifty miles to every mile walked by Boaz, but Boaz’s shoes had not merely held up.
They looked as good as new.
Boaz wiped, waxed, and shined them regularly. He was shining them now, The door of his vault was blocked by the boulder.
Only four favored harmoniums were inside with him. Two were wrapped about his upper arms. One was stuck to his thigh. The fourth, an immature harmonium only three inches long, clung to the inside of his left wrist, feeding on Boaz’s pulse. –
When Boaz found a harmonium he loved more than all the rest, that was what he did – let the creature feed on his pulse.
“You like that?” he said in his thoughts to the lucky harmonium. “Ain’t that nice?”
He had never felt better physically, had never felt better mentally, had never felt better spiritually. He was glad he and Unk had separated, because Unk liked to twist things around to where it seemed that anybody who was happy was dumb or crazy.
“What makes a man be like that?” Boaz asked the little harmonium in his thoughts. “What’s he think he’s gaining compared to what he’s throwing away? No wonder he looks sick.”
Boaz shook his head. “I kept trying to interest him in you fellers, and he just got madder. Never helps to get mad. –
“I don’t know what’s going on,” said Boaz in his thoughts, “and I’m probably not smart enough to understand if somebody was to explain it to me. All I know is we’re being tested somehow, by somebody or some thing a whole lot smarter than us, and all I can do is be friendly and keep calm and try and have a nice time till it’s over.”
Boaz nodded. “That’s my philosophy, friends,” he said to the harmoniums stuck to him. “And if I’m not mistaken, that’s yours, too. I reckon that’s how come we hit it off so good.”
The genuine leather toe of the shoe that Boaz was shining glowed like a ruby.
“Men – awww now, men, men, men,” said Boaz to himself, staring into the ruby. When he shined his shoes, he imagined that he could see many things in the rubies of the toes.
Right now, Boaz was looking into a ruby and seeing Unk strangling poor old Stony Stevenson at the stone stake on the iron parade ground back on Mars. The horrible image wasn’t a random recollection. It was dead center in Boaz’s relationship with Unk.
“Don’t truth me,” said Boaz in his thoughts, “and I won’t truth you.” It was a plea he had made several times to Unk.
Boaz had invented the plea, and its meaning was this: Unk was to stop telling Boaz truths about the harmoniums, because Boaz loved the harmoniums, and because Boaz was nice enough not to bring up truths that would make Unk unhappy.
Unk didn’t know that he had strangled his friend Stony Stevenson. Unk thought Stony was still marvelously alive somewhere in the Universe. Unk was living on dreams of a reunion with Stony.
Boaz was nice enough to withhold the truth from Unk, no matter how great the provocation had been to club Unk between the eyes with it.
The horrible image in the ruby dissolved.
“Yes, Lord,” said Boaz in his thoughts.
The adult harmonium on Boaz’s upper left arm stirred.
“You asking old Boaz for a concert?” Boaz asked the creature in his thoughts. “That what you trying to say? You trying to say, ‘Ol’ Boaz, I don’t want to sound ungrateful, on account of I know it’s a great honor to get to be right here close to your heart. Only I keep thinking about all my friends outside, and I keep wishing they could have something good, too.’ That what you trying to say?” said Boaz in his thoughts. “You trying to say, ‘Please, Papa Boaz – put on a concert for all the poor friends outside’? That what you trying to say?”
Boaz smiled. “You don’t have to flatter me,” be said to the harmonium.
The small harmonium on his wrist doubled up, extended itself again. “What you trying to tell me?” he asked it. “You trying to say ‘Uncle Boaz – your pulse is just too rich for a little tad like me. Uncle Boaz – please just play some nice, sweet, easy music to eat’? That what you trying to say?”
Boaz turned his attention to the harmonium on his right arm. The creature had not moved. “Ain’t you the quiet one, though?” Boaz asked the creature in his thoughts. “Don’t say much, but thinking all the time. I guess you’re thinking old Boaz is pretty mean not just letting the music play all the time, huh?”
The harmonium on his left arm stirred again. “What’s that you say?” said Boaz in his thoughts. He cocked his head, pretended to listen, though no sounds could travel through the vacuum in which he lived. “You say, ‘Please, King Boaz, play us the 1812 Overture’?” Boaz looked shocked, then stern. “Just because something feels better than anything else,” he said in his thoughts, “that don’t mean it’s good for you.”
Scholars whose field is the Martian War often exclaim over the queer unevenness of Rumfoord’s war preparations. In some areas, his plans were horribly flimsy. The shoes he issued his ordinary troops, for instance, were almost a satire on the temporariness of the Jerry-built society of Mars – on a society whose whole purpose was to destroy itself in uniting the peoples of Earth.
In the music libraries Rumfoord personally selected for the company mother ships, however, one sees a great cultural nest egg – a nest egg prepared as though for a monumental civilization that was going to endure for a thousand Earthling years. It is said that Rumfoord spent more time on the useless music libraries than he did on artillery and field sanitation combined, As an anonymous wit has it: “The Army of Mars arrived with three hundred hours of continuous music, and didn’t last long enough to hear The Minute Waltz to the end.”
The explanation of the bizarre emphasis on the music carried by the Martian mother ships is simple: Rumfoord was crazy about good music – a craze, incidentally, that struck him only after be had been spread through time and space by the chrono-synclastic infundibulum.
The harmoniums in the caves of Mercury were crazy about good music, too. They had been feeding on one sustained note in the song of Mercury for centuries. When Boaz gave them their first taste of music, which happened to be Le Sacr� du Printemps, some of the creatures actually died in ecstasy.
A dead harmonium is shriveled and orange in the yellow light of the Mercurial caves. A dead harmonium looks like a dried apricot.
On that first occasion, which hadn’t been planned as a concert for the harmoniums, the tape recorder had been on the floor of the space ship. The creatures who had actually died in ecstasy had been in direct contact with the metal hull of the ship.
Now, two and a half years later, Boaz demonstrated the proper way to stage a concert for the creatures so as not to kill them.
Boaz left his home vault, carrying the tape recorder and the musical selections for the concert with him, In the corridor outside were two aluminum ironing boards. These had fiber pads on their feet. The ironing boards were six feet apart, and spanning them was a stretcher made of aluminum poles and lichen-fiber canvas.