The Last Starship From Earth (10 page)

“Thank you, sir.”

“Ordinarily, I open conversation with my students by inquiring about their grades, but your record is pleasantly known to me.”

“Thank you, sir.”

He spoke gropingly to Haldane. “Sometimes my duties are unpleasant… I… er… listen, boy, there’s absolutely nothing I can say to make this pleasant. Last night, your well-beloved and talented father passed away.”

“How?”

“Brain hemorrhage. He died in his sleep.”

“Where is he? Where did they take him?”

“His body is being prepared at the Sutro mortuary. He’ll be given a state funeral tomorrow, at the Cathedral of Saint Gauss. Of course, you’re excused from your studies for the remainder of the week.”

Compassion was in the silence that the dean let fall. Finally, he suggested, “If you need the consolation of our faith, the chapel is open.”

Haldane did not desire the consolation of faith, but the dean’s suggestion acted on his mind as a command as he left the office in a daze and walked across the campus toward the chapel.

Inside the chapel was cool and dark. He genuflected and knelt in a pew near the altar above which loomed the Crossbow.

He tried to think of the agony of Christ in His final assault against Rome, but Christ had died at the height of His final victory, a meaningful death at the hands of the enemies of the Church. The arrow had not been driven into His chest by His son.

Yet, when he left the chapel, he felt more at peace. It had given him a dark place into which he could crawl and lick his wounds.

Back in his room, he lay down and let the long day rasp through him.

Later, Malcolm came and offered condolences. As the telecasts spread the news of the death, other students entered to pay their respects. As long as they were talking to him, he was not alone with his thoughts. He dreaded the coming night with its solitude.

Malcolm offered to drive him to the funeral, and he accepted.

When he and Malcolm arrived at the Stockton Street cathedral, it was crowded and oppressive with the odor of flowers. Most of the audience was of the professional class which had known his father, but there was a sprinkling of proletarians come to see a corpse which would be buried.

Haldane was oblivious to them all as he and Malcolm were ushered in to wait. Shortly after he was seated, he felt the pressure of a hand on his own and turned to find that Helix had seated herself beside him. She was not weeping, but her eyes were sad.

Helix awakened his awareness, and he noticed other females in the audience, some openly dabbing their eyes with handkerchiefs. In strange juxtaposition to his grief came the thought that his father had moved, perhaps, in areas that his son was not aware of.

Though the idea bemused him, it brought no consolation, no more than the flowers, the friends, and the eventual intonations of the priest sounding the sacraments men had used for ages to cheat despair.

He noticed, as he led the procession to view the remains of the departed, that there was a trace of a smile on the face of the corpse. It was the beginning of the smile, slightly sardonic and wholly amused, he had seen a thousand times on his father’s face as he raised his face from the chessboard after a move which had trapped his son.

Once in the open sunlight, in the clean, bright air, Haldane stiffened and his grief became encased in formality. “Helix, may I present Malcolm III, my roommate?” Turning to Malcolm, he said, “Helix knew Father.”

“Always glad to meet a poet,” Malcolm said, noticing the A-7 stitched on her tunic. “Can’t help turning a page, now and then. I know a trochee from an anapest. So you knew his father. I never met him.”

“He was an adorable man,” Helix said, using functional language to fill the silence. “His death was a loss to society.”

“Let’s all go have a cup of coffee,” Haldane suggested.

“Can’t.” Malcolm demurred. “Got a quiz this afternoon and I’m crammed for it. I’ve got to get back before I slosh over. Glad to have met you. Helix.”

With a wave of his hand, Malcolm was gone.

“Wasn’t he driving you back?” Helix asked.

“I have the week off.”

“He’s the boy whose parents own the apartment, isn’t he?”

“Yes.”

“Did he know about us?”

“Of course not… I mentioned you when I met you at Point Sur, but he’s forgotten Look, Helix. Dad knew about us.”

—“How could he?”

“He reasoned his way to the knowledge.”

Sudden fear crossed her features. “I’ll go back to classes. You go and pack your belongings. Don’t spend the night in your dad’s apartment; it’ll depress you. Take a hotel.”

“I can’t worry about safety,” he said. “I must talk to you. Meet me at the apartment.”

Almost whispering, she said, “If you need me, I have no choice. I’ll be there.”

Watching her go, he felt primitively alone among the press of mourners emerging from the cathedral, acknowledging the occasional pat on the back, the pressure of a hand on his arm, or a murmured, “I’m sorry.”

Helix was waiting when he arrived at the apartment. She took him by the hand and led him to the sofa where he blurted out, “Helix, I killed my father.”

“Nonsense. The newscasts said he died of a brain stroke.”

“I caused it.”

“Oh, no,” she said.

Haltingly at first, and then rapidly, Haldane poured out the story of his argument with his father. She listened in silence as he spoke, piling detail onto detail, sparing her nothing. “When I hit him with that blow about Mother’s death, that killed him.”

“You were both angry. You were no more to blame than he.”

“It was up to me to keep the conversation calm. I was the supplicant, the son. He might have had a change of heart, helped us. Not once did he issue an edict forbidding our meetings. And you had aroused his primitivism, so he knew its power.

“If he had thrown Mother out the window, he would have been no more reprehensible than I, because I poured his hemlock.”

“You’ve got to quit saying that, and you’ve got to quit believing it.” Her voice rang with certainty. “It isn’t true. You had a family argument, in anger but not in hatred. You told him, by implication, that you intended to commit a crime against the state. Did you expect him to shout with glee? Of course not, silly! He was shocked, and the shock contributed to his already weakened condition. Your scorn didn’t kill him. His love for you killed him, and it was an accident.”

“I’m tired,” he said. “Bone tired.”

Somehow, her words dulled the edge of his guilt, and he felt, suddenly, as if he had gone an eternity without sleep.

“Stretch out, Haldane. Here, pillow your head on my lap.”

As she stroked his hair, he said, “I did love him. And I love you. Yet, if one love must cancel the other, I prefer his canceled, because without you… They said he died in his sleep. I don’t accept that. That stroke must have plowed through his brain like a sledge hammer… But it was a gentle tap compared to the blow I struck…”

She let him ramble on, talking not as a man but as a stricken child with all defenses down.

His confessional eased him, and he was drifting into sleep when the memory of his father’s face floated into his mind. He saw it contorted with pain, and his body stiffened as he moaned, “I should have died.”

She took his handkerchief and wiped his forehead, crooning to him, “Dear boy, dear boy…” The tension in her voice fought against the resurgent wave of guilt that was threatening his mind, and she cuddled his head as if to shelter it from the internal storm.

He felt it when she ceased to stroke his hair, but his eyes were closed and he did not see the deft movement of her free hand as she unbuttoned her tunic. He sensed her bending lower, coming closer, and felt the gentle wedging apart of his lips as she crooned, “Here, my infant, my nursling, feed on life!”

So it was that he came to know her in primitive simplicity and beauty, and the knowledge of her was like nothing he had ever known or ever imagined that he could know.

Next day he resumed his classes.

Grief stayed with him for a long while, but the remorse had been replaced by regret. It was as if the actions of Helix explained and justified the death of his father.

There were four months left to them before the Malcolms returned, and he and Helix accepted the time remaining as they had taken that dark-bright Tuesday. For him there was no satiety, and they revived and relived the old endearments of romance. They were sweethearts, and they used the term.

Even when all passion was cleanly spent, he still delighted in talking to her, touching her, and watching the secret lights of her being flash into view.

There could be an acid to her flavor.

Once, as he complimented her on purely technical matters, she said, “Someone has to take the initiative, my darling. If I hadn’t taken advantage of your grief and seduced you, we’d still be sitting on the sofa holding hands.”

He questioned her dislike of John Milton. “I don’t care for the tone of moral indignation that he uses. Now and then, a sin justifies itself, and there’s always an argument for the devil. That man was a statist before there was a state. He’s no more than an apologist for the sociologists.”

Time seemed to rush toward their last Saturday together.

On the first Saturday in April, with three more to go, he arrived at the apartment to find her there before him. Usually, he arrived first to dust, check for microphones, and bring the flowers which had become so important to the spirit they had recreated.

Outside it was misting rain from intermittent squalls, and she stood moodily by the window and let him arrange the flowers alone.

He could understand the moodiness. He shared it. They had taken down a calendar visible from the living room on the kitchen wall, and agreed not to mention time.

Finished with the flowers, he walked up behind her, put his arms around her, and said, “Now I know what that silly little ditty meant by ‘the rack of time’s compressing.’ ”

There were tears in her eyes. She put her arm around him and almost wearily walked with him back to the sofa.

“Granted, dear, that we have only three more days left, we can’t spend it sitting like two old people, huddling together against the storms of mortality.”

Instead of turning to him with her old ardor, she merely took his hand in hers and continued to gaze at the window.

Suddenly she spoke, and there was infinite sadness in her voice: “ ‘Now that you’re tortured on the rack of time’s compressing, I’ll murder you, beloved, as my final blessing.’ Haldane, I’m pregnant.”

“My god!” The arm he was placing around her went suddenly limp and fell to his side.

He felt the physical presence of the state.

It was one thing to joust with dragons on some far-off tilting day when his lance was honed and he was mounted and mailed. It was another, lanceless and without armor, to find the dragon coiled within this room and breathing flames.

She was trapped. This girl of tender flesh and fragile bones carried with her the evidence of a conspiracy that would destroy them both.

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure.”

He got up and paced the floor. “There are drugs.”

“Ask for them at the pharmacy and you’ll be arrested on the spot.”

“Who was that Frenchman, Thoreau, who had the idea that running around on all fours would make a miscarriage come about?”

“It was Rousseau,” she said, “and it was to make childbirth easier.”

“If we could get you into a centrifuge…”

“Not unless you’re going to another planet.”

He sat down on the sofa, breathing heavily. “Maybe a trampoline…”

“What would a professional be doing acting like a circus prol?”

He thought for a moment. She could take a trip out to Sea Lion Park and ride the roller-coaster. She could tilt her body back to get the true perpendicular to the uterus “I think,” he said, noticing for the first time that if the brocaded tiger were to lunge forward, it would not strike the nose of the elongated roebuck head that formed the base of the end lamp. It would claw the roebuck’s eye.

“What do you think?”

“I think anything we say or do is academic.” He got up and walked over to the end lamp, lifting it. Beneath the hollow base of the end lamp, lying on the table, was a small metallic object no larger than a tarantula but far more deadly. All the sounds they had made had been picked up and broadcast to a distant amplifier.

Where were the listeners? A block away? Half a block away? In this very building?

Whoever listened heard the end lamp lifted. They heard his hand wrap itself around the microphone as he carried it to a side window, and they heard the crunch as it landed on the pavement eight stories below.

“You shouldn’t have destroyed it,” she said. “Now you’ll be charged with destroying state property. They’ll make you regret and repent.”

Shaken by waves of anger and fear that canceled each other, he stood before her, outwardly unshaken, preparing his last will and testament for the only being he loved.

He sensed that in her present turmoil she would little note nor long remember what he said here unless he could associate his words with phrases she knew already and would never forget. So, to preserve for her, forever, a reminder of his love, his genius of desperate inspiration leaped to his side, and he said, “Regret a microphone? No! Not for that, nor what the pimps of Soc and Psych may else inflict do I repent or change, but will always feel a high disdain for those unthinking shepherds who overwhelm us with their stench of lanolin.”

“But, what can we do, Haldane?”

“Beloved, I know not what course you may take but as for me, I’ll fight. I’ll fight them here, I’ll fight them in the slimes of Venus, I’ll fight them, if need be, from the frozen corners of Hell. I’ll never surrender!

“I’m not the master of my fate, but I’m the captain of my mind, and I shall not cease from mental strife, nor shall my thoughts sleep in my brain, till we have built anew upon this earth an edifice of liberty…”—his voice sank—“… or death,”

He sat down beside her, his face white with anger, breathing in short gasps, catching in an open palm the vicious punches of his fist.