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.
“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, goldtoothed 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.
“While she was en route to Mars so many years ago, Malachi Constant forced his attention on her, and she bore him this son. Before then, she was my wife and the mistress of this estate. Her true name is Beatrice Rumfoord.”
A groan went up from the crowd. Was it any wonder that the dusty puppets of other religions had been put away for want of audiences, that all eyes were turned to Newport? Not only was the head of the Church of God the Utterly Indifferent capable of telling the future and fighting the cruelest inequalities of all, inequalities in luck – but his supply of dumfounding new sensations was inexhaustible.
He was so well supplied with great material that he could actually let his voice trail off as he announced that the one-eyed, goldtoothed woman was his wife, and that he had been cuckolded by Malachi Constant.
“I now invite you to despise the example of her life as you have so long despised the example of the life of Malachi Constant,” he said up in his treetop mildly. “Hang her alongside Malachi Constant from your window blinds and light fixtures, if you will.
“The excesses of Beatrice were excesses of reluctance,” said Rumfoord. “As a younger woman, she felt so exquisitely bred as to do nothing and to allow nothing to be done to her, for fear of contamination. Life, for Beatrice as a younger woman, was too full of germs and vulgarity to be anything but intolerable.
“We of the Church of God the Utterly Indifferent damn her as roundly for refusing to risk her imagined purity in living as we damn Malachi Constant for wallowing in filth.