A Handful of Time (11 page)

“Why are they doing that?” I asked.

“It is for the children,” Grecthchra said.

Each day we went to watch them bringing in the sand. Each day the cold winds became more frequent.

In the mornings, now, we stayed in our tent after breakfast, and I clung to Grecthchra as though the end of the world waited outside the little summer of our tent.

By afternoon the sun reflected hot off the sands and we watched the workmen bringing the green sand into the Temple.

One morning Grecthchra said, “It is time.” She picked up the silver egg
and held it carefully in the folds of her garment.

I followed her to the Temple. The wind blew up a green dust and rattled the tents on their poles. It blew through the pores of my skin and made my bones feel brittle.

There was no joy in the world.

Grecthchra went into the Temple and I watched her bury the silver egg deep in the green sand.

Then we watched others do the same thing.

“It is well,” Grecthchra said.

But I did not think so.

When all were finished and we stood outside the Temple, several of the men grasped one smooth panel of the entrance and began to tug on it. A wall of rock slid out‌—‌it must have been exquisitely balanced. They closed the entrance.

The sun, I saw, was now high in the sky. It must be long past the time for the second meal.

But it was cold even now, even with the sun hot on the sands. The wind was like currents of ice water.

“What does it say?” I asked, for there was writing on the door. Grecthchra looked at me. She drew me up to the door and the others drew back politely to let us through. They were reading disinterestedly, as though it were something they knew by heart.

Grecthchra took my hand. “It says, ‘We have known a great science, we have changed the face of our planet many times. And yet, our own nature does not change. In the end, what is life? To be content, to live, to procreate, to die before life becomes a burden. Ours, then, is the best of all possible worlds. Go in contentment. It is well.’
 
”

But the others were already starting.

“Where are they going?” I asked.

“To the sea,” Grecthchra answered. “Do you not hear the waves?”

I had heard them since I came. But did not know what it meant.

I followed after her. My breath trailed behind me in frosty plumes. When I breathed, the cold air came into my whole body.

Evening came early. The sky disappeared in a grey, looming mist. Grecthchra no longer glittered silver.

The grey evening congealed into a darkness so heavy I could almost feel it. There was no moonlight through the clouds.

I took Grecthchra’s hand, for everyone walked on through the night. I do not know how they knew the way, but none faltered.

Grecthchra’s hand was cold and without recognition. “The sea does not call to you,” she said. “Go back.”

But I could not leave her, though I could tell she had already left me. I clung to her hand and followed her on through the cold washes of the night.

Finally, I heard the waves. They became louder and more violent, and drowned out the sea sound of the breathing around me.

A white, bright dawn came up and I could see, far out, the dancing sea beyond a cliff. It was green, as the sands had been, and seethed under the yellow sun.

We drew closer, and there was no sound but the crashing sea as one by one the people of Algol II stepped over the cliff.

I tried to tug Grecthchra away.

“Don’t!” I cried. “There is a whole life before us, Grecthchra.”

“There is a whole life behind us,” she replied, as though the matter had no interest for her.

I clung to her smooth hand until it slipped away from me and she fell into the sea. I stood there watching the bodies fade into black specks and finally fall into the heaving sea below.

I could not believe it. I sat hunched over, watching the blown foam for hours, not believing it.

I even tried to throw myself over the cliff. But I found I could not. I wished there were someone to push me. But there was no one.

I was alone in the world.

I do not know how I lived through the night.

I found my way, the next day, back to the village. I was so frozen I felt I must be dead and dreaming a nightmare of life.

All the way back there was the sea sound in my ears. So that for me the air was full of ghosts. And even after I returned to the village I still imagined I could hear it.

I looked through all the tents, running and shouting.

In our tent I looked for something of Grecthchra I could hold and remember. But there was nothing. She had had no possessions.

My windowless monad was still there‌—‌round, silent and closed in on itself. How long? Days? Weeks? Maybe a year or more? I had taken no account of time.

Time was now a gross, ponderous, living thing for me. I hated it. The days and the nights.

I tore up a tent to make clothes and still I was cold. I harvested the last shreds of grain in the dying field. I sought out the desert animals and found them hibernating in the sand. I pulled them out and killed them in their sleep.

I do not know whether it was days or weeks or months before the alarm brought me to my space ship.

I still wake at night with the sea sound in my ears. I think, now, that the sea was calling to me, too.

D
O YOU WANT YOUR GARDEN TO BE THE ENVY OF ALL YOUR NEIGHBORS? GO AHEAD.
Y
OU CAN BUY SEEDS LIKE THAT ANYWHERE BUT THINK ABOUT IT A MINUTE.
M
AYBE THEY
’
LL ENVY YOU.
B
UT WILL THEY LIKE YOU?
W
HAT KIND OF GUY DO YOU WANT TO BE, ANYWAY?

Y
OU KNOW THE ANSWER TO THAT ONE! BUT DO YOU KNOW WHERE YOU CAN BUY THE SEEDS THAT DO NOT SUCCEED?
T
HE SEEDS THAT MAKE YOUR
NEIGHBORS
FEEL GOOD?

W
ELL, WE CAN ANSWER THAT ONE.
T
RY
D
ABNEY
’
S
D
EFECTIVE
S
EEDS,
P
.
O
.
B
OX 80,
R
OUTE 34
L
ITTLE
C
REEK,
M
O.
R
EMEMBER
SCRAGGLY
, BUT NOT
TOO
SCRAGGLY.

“Well?” asked LLon looking over at his wife. She had been peeling off her Terran head mask and was massaging the kinks out of her capital pseudopod.

“Oof!” she telepathed. “That feels better. I don’t think I can stand
one
more sewing circle. The hands are the worst of all. I simply can’t manage them. And, dear, I almost can’t hear little Mrs. Schmidt. Her mind keeps dying out. She literally doesn’t think.”

“That’s fine!” said LLon. “I mean fine that she doesn’t think. But darling, what do you think of my new Depth Motivation?”

“Now the trunk corset,” Llona said. “Peel
it slowly.
My rigid cartilages have been scraping together all evening.”

“Llona, you weren’t listening to me! I’ve spent weeks working on this. It may be the final step. Don’t you
care?”

“Care? Of course I care. I care about you, LLon. And you’ve spent practically our whole honeymoon doing nothing but talk shop while I
suffer
in these skin tights and feed those wretched chickens and listen to that horrid mammal go moo-moo-moo all the time.” Llona began to shake. “You don’t l-l-l…”

“Stop
it!” LLon cried, clasping the midsection where his brain was located “You know I can’t
stand
over thirty c/s.”

Bradley put down the magazine and laughed. And when he had finished laughing he thought about it a little.

“Say, Mona!” he called.

“59, 60,” Mona said. “61, just-a-minute, 62.”

“I want to show you something. It gives me an idea.”

“75, 76, 77,” Mona said.

“For God’s
sake!”
Bradley cried. He slapped the magazine down on the coffee table and strode into the bedroom. “Can’t you stop brushing your hair just
once
when I have something important to say?”

“100,” Mona said. “All right, what is it?” She took out her bobby pins and began to wind her pin curls, every other one counterclockwise, for a Froth Set.

“Well, look, Mona, I just read this crazy advertisement for crummy seeds so your neighbors won’t envy your garden. Now, most people read that advertisement and they just laugh or if they’re real stupid maybe they take it literally and send for the seeds. They raise these scraggly looking plants so their neighbors feel a little bit superior to them and like them instead of envying them. Now, listen to my idea, Mona.”

“Clockwise,” Mona said.

“Are you listening?”

“
Counter
clockwise. Of course, Honey.” Bradley sat down on the side of the bed and began running his hands through his hair, because he could think better that way.

“Look at my career this way, Mona. I’ve come up through the ranks like twenty other men twenty-eight years at Brandt Sheet Metal. Five of us are going to be vice-presidents. One of us is going to get to be president.”

Mona held a pin curl down firmly with her left forefinger and turned to give her husband a look of absolute faith.
“You
are going to get to be president.”

Even after five years of marriage and two children, Bradley never failed to be shaken by that look. It made him feel like he wore a Santa Claus suit. And like all uniforms, it had to be lived up to.

Mona unwound the curl carefully, because she had forgotten whether she had stopped on clockwise or counterclockwise.

“I hope I am,” Bradley said. “Anyway, as I was going to say, what do those other nineteen men have that I don’t have? Nothing. What do I have that they don’t have. Nothing. By this time, Mona, the duds and the misfits have been weeded out. The eggheads are gone. The morons are gone. And just us jolly good fellows are left.”

“Clockwise!”
Mona said. “Darling, why do you sound cynical?”

“Because‌—‌well, because I went to Brandt Sheet Metal prepared to work my ears off and race my brain twenty-four hours a day and bust through hell itself, if necessary, to get ahead. That’s the way I am. When I want something, I go after it whole hog.”

“I know,” Mona said, sliding in the last bobby pin. She didn’t set her fringe of bangs and when Bradley came over to look at her in the mirror, her reflected eyes smiled up at him through the light curls.

Bradley grasped the sides of her chair, as though he were holding on to his thoughts. “But I’ve been realizing‌—‌I guess even for years I’ve been realizing this slowly‌—‌there are some things work and sweat and brains and will power won’t get you.”

“Such as what?” Mona asked, smiling softly at some secret thought as she got out her cold cream.

“Such as upper echelon promotion at Brandt Sheet Metal.” Bradley, sure of his thought now, let go of the chair to walk up and down. “The men they watch,” he said, “are the men that can
cooperate.
The men that don’t jar up the group thinking. And it really boils down to this, honey. The men they watch are the men everybody likes.”

“Then all you have to do is Win Friends and Influence People.”

“It’s more subtle than that. It takes more than a likable moron to get where I’ve got at Brandt Sheet Metal. We’re
all
smart. We’re all likable. We all try to be just a little bit better than the other fellow. But not so much as to be offensive. A slightly better-cut suit. A slightly better-worded letter. A slightly more eager expression.”

Mona was massaging the pink cream with slower and slower strokes, watching her husband in the mirror. “It’s hard for me
to
forgive any woman,” she said, “who has naturally curly hair.”

“That’s it!” he said, pushing her chin back to look into her face and then holding his sticky fingers out helplessly, like a child in the aftermath of a chocolate bar. “There’s no way to be slightly better without being offensive. We all know what each other is doing and why we’re doing it and‌—‌look, honey, I don’t hate these guys. They’re good guys. What I mean is… I want to be different in some
really
inoffensive way. I want to sneak up behind management and hit them in the head before anybody knows what’s going on.”

“Is this the idea you started out on while I was brushing my hair?”

“It is. Mona, I’m going to stop trying to be a little better than everybody else. I’m going to be a little
worse.”

Mona wiped off her cold cream and began methodically taking the bobby pins out of her hair.

“You just spent half an hour putting those things in!” Bradley said.

“I’m having lunch with Geraldine Baldwin tomorrow.”

“Well?”

“I don’t want her to think I have naturally curly hair.”

Link Creston threw the report across the polished desk and it flapped to the floor. This irritated Victor Grant to the point where he bit the fever blister on his thin lips and hoped he’d get blood poisoning.

Victor walked over and picked up the report, because it was only three feet from where he stood, whereas Link would have had to hoist his bulk out of his chair and walk all the way around the desk and this would make Victor seem sensitive and picayunish about his status.

Whereas they were all supposed to be pulling together on this thing and For God’s sake I’m not the
boss.
I just make more money than you.

“Downgrading!”
Link said. “Oh, that’s just swell! Use Glimmer Tooth Paste and you’ll find out where the yellow went.”

“Obviously that’s not what it means, Link.” That wasn’t I right. A little joke would have been in order. But he’d been sweating over this thing and working out copy late last night and all morning and suddenly he didn’t have the energy to care about it.

“Then you tell me what it does mean and how we can use it.”

“See here,” Victor said, wishing vaguely he could stop himself, “
I
didn’t come up with this idea. This is the latest trend, according to those psychology boys you hired. I don’t have any opinions about depth psychology. If you don’t want any, O.K. I’ll go work on something else.”