“The cat got the steak,” Barney said.
“Did it? The guests are called in; they argue about it. The steak is gone, all five pounds of it; there sits the cat, looking well-fed and cheerful. ‘Weigh the cat,’ someone says. They’ve had a few drinks; it looks like a good idea. So they go into the bathroom and weigh the cat on the scales. It reads exactly five pounds. They all perceive this reading and one guest says, ‘Okay, that’s it. There’s the steak.’ They’re satisfied that they know what happened, now; they’ve got empirical proof. Then a qualm comes to one of them and he says, puzzled, ‘But where’s the cat?’”
“I heard that joke before,” Barney said. “And anyhow I don’t see its application.”
Anne said, “That joke poses the finest distillation of the problem of ontology ever invented. If you ponder it long enough–”
“Hell,” he said angrily, “it’s five pounds of cat; it’s nonsense–there’s no steak if the scale shows five pounds.”
“Remember the wine and the wafer,” Anne said quietly.
He stared at her. The idea, for a moment, seemed to come through.
“Yes,” she said. “The cat was not the steak. But–the cat might be a manifestation which the steak was taking at that moment. The key word happens to be is. Don’t tell us, Barney, that whatever entered Palmer Eldritch is God, because you don’t know that much about Him; no one can. But that living entity from intersystem space may, like us, be shaped in His image. A way He selected of showing Himself to us. If the map is not the territory, the pot is not the potter. So don’t talk ontology, Barney; don’t say is.” She smiled at him hopefully, to see if he understood.
“Someday,” Barney said, “we may worship at that monument.” Not the deed by Leo Bulero, he thought; as admirable as it was–will be, more accurately–that won’t be our object. No, we’ll all of us, as a culture, do as I already am tending toward: we’ll invest it wanly, pitifully, with our conception of infinite powers. And we’ll be right in a sense because those powers are there. But as Anne says, as to its actual nature–
“I can see you want to be alone with your garden,” Anne said. “I think I’ll start back to my hovel. Good luck. And, Barney–” She reached out, took him by the hand, and held onto him earnestly. “Never grovel. God, or whatever superior being it is we’ve encountered–it wouldn’t want that and even if it did you shouldn’t do it.” She leaned forward, kissed him, and then started off.
“You think I’m right?” Barney called after her. “Is there any point in trying to start a garden here?” Or will we go the familiar way, too…
“Don’t ask me. I’m no authority.”
“You just care about your spiritual salvation,” he said savagely.
“I don’t even care about that any more,” Anne said. “I’m terribly, terribly confused and everything upsets me, here. Listen.” She walked back to him, her eyes dark and shaded, without light. “When you grabbed me, to take that bindle of Chew-Z; you know what I saw? I mean actually saw, not just believed.”
“An artificial hand. And a distortion of my jaw. And my eyes–”
“Yes,” she said tightly. “The mechanical, slitted eyes. What did it mean?”
Barney said, “It meant that you were seeing into absolute reality. The essence beyond the mere appearance.” In your terminology, he thought, what you saw is called–stigmata.
For an interval she regarded him. “That’s the way you really are?” she said, then, and drew away from him, with aversion manifest on her face. “Why aren’t you what you seem? You’re not like that now. I don’t understand.” She added, tremulously, “I wish I hadn’t told that cat joke.”
He said, “I saw the same thing in you, dear. At that instant. You fought me off with fingers decidedly not those you were born with.” And it could so easily slip into place again. The Presence abides with us, potentially if not actually.
“Is it a curse?” Anne asked. “I mean, we have the account of an original curse of God; is it like that all over again?”
“You ought to be the one who knows; you remember what you saw. All three stigmata–the dead, artificial hand, the Jensen eyes, and the radically deranged jaw.” Symbols of its inhabitation, he thought. In our midst. But not asked for. Not intentionally summoned. And–we have no mediating sacraments through which to protect ourselves; we can’t compel it, by our careful, time-honored, clever, painstaking rituals, to confine itself to specific elements such as bread and water or bread and wine. It is out in the open, ranging in every direction. It looks into our eyes; and it looks out of our eyes.
“It’s a price,” Anne decided. “That we must pay. For our desire to undergo that drug experience with that Chew-Z. Like the apple originally.” Her tone was shockingly bitter.
“Yes,” he agreed, “but I think I already paid it.” Or came within a hair of paying it, he decided. That thing, which we know only in its Terran body, wanted to substitute me at the instant of its destruction; instead of God dying for man, as we once had, we faced–for a moment– a superior–the superior power asking us to perish for it.
Does that make it evil? he wondered. Do I believe the argument I gave Norm Schein? Well, it certainly makes it inferior to what came two thousand years before. It seems to be nothing more or less than the desire of, as Anne puts it, an out-of-dust created organism to perpetuate itself; we all have it, we all would like to see a goat or a lamb cut to pieces and incinerated instead of ourselves. Oblations have to be made. And we don’t care to be them. In fact our entire lives are dedicated to that one principle. And so is its.
“Goodbye,” Anne said. “I’ll leave you alone; you can sit in the cab of that dredge and dig away to your heart’s content. Maybe when I next see you, there’ll be a completed water-system installed here.” She smiled once more at him, briefly, and then hiked off in the direction of her own hovel.
After a time he climbed the steps to the cab of the dredge which he had been using and started the creaky, sand-impregnated mechanism. It howled mournfully in protest. Happier, he decided, to remain asleep; this, for the machine, was the ear-splitting summons of the last trumpet, and the dredge was not yet ready.
He had scooped perhaps a half mile of irregular ditch, as yet void of water, when he discovered that an indigenous life form, a Martian something, was stalking him. At once he halted the dredge and peered into the glare of the cold Martian sun to make it out.
It looked a little like a lean, famished old grandmother on all fours and he realized that this was probably the jackal-creature which he had been warned repeatedly about. In any case, whatever it was, it obviously hadn’t fed in days; it eyed him ravenously, while keeping its distance–and then, projected telepathically, its thoughts reached him. So he was right. This was it.
“May I eat you?” it asked. And panted, avidly slackjawed.
“Christ no,” Barney said. He fumbled about in the cab of the dredge for something to use as a weapon; his hands closed over a heavy wrench and he displayed it to the Martian predator, letting it speak for him; there lay a great message in the wrench and the way he gripped it.
“Get down off that contraption,” the Martian predator thought, in a mixture of hope and need. “I can’t reach you up there.” The last was intended, certainly, to be a private thought, retained in camera, but somehow it had gotten projected, too. The creature had no finesse. “I’ll wait,” it decided. “He has to get down eventually.”
Barney swung the dredge around and started it back in the direction of Chicken Pox Prospects. Groaning, it clanked at a maddeningly slow rate; it appeared to be failing with each yard. He had the intuition that it was not going to make it. Maybe the creature’s right, he said to himself; it is possible I’ll have to step down and face it.
Spared, he thought bitterly, by the enormously higher life form that entered Palmer Eldritch that showed up in our system from out there–and then eaten by this stunted beast. The termination of a long flight, he thought. A final arrival that even five minutes ago, despite my precog talent, I didn’t anticipate. Maybe I didn’t want to… as Dr. Smile, if he were here, would triumphantly bleat.
The dredge wheezed, bucked violently, and then, painfully contracting itself, curled up; its life flickered a moment and then it died to a stop.
For a time Barney sat in silence. Placed directly ahead of him the old-grandmother jackal Martian flesh-eater watched, never taking its eyes from him.