THE VOICE OF BELIEF is a low growl, and the word it says is No. This was an insight which felt as if it belonged to drowning, but surely nature wouldn’t waste it on then? Linhouse knew better. He’d been brought up to know that nature’s waste was prodigal, so much so that it was almost the other side of perfection, serving almost as well as the notion of a clockwork universe to make us think that she must have something in mind. What he had really meant was: “Surely she doesn’t mean to waste me.”
But his no was drowned in the congregation of no’s that rolled toward the stage—for in the large object toward which this swell had been directed, the last, smallest lily-pad disc on the bottom had spoken its speech, and with a huge sigh, as if a wind teasing a volume had at last contented it by closing it, the discs riffled backward upon themselves so rapidly that the eye saw only blur, and there it was again, tall, shaggy-thick, conic and almost familiar, like the daily almanac of some queer neighbor, not necessarily a giant, which one had got used to listening to, its story over for the day, its work done.
It was all so quick, so quick, so almost instantaneous, yet he had time to observe the round mouths of all those he had been watching intermittently: Lila, Meyer, Anders, there the three were, plus all the others who had spoken, Björnson the mathematician, and his friend Charles the biologist, and Herr Doktor Winckler, and the Indian too. He even had time to see the cruder meanings of their lives as they unwittingly every minute spoke them, at least to him—and these as if encircled above their heads in the vapid balloons of the comic strips, or at their feet in one or two astringent lines of print. There was Lila the anxious, the almost certainly adulterous, whom nobody could take seriously in either of these qualities, but it was all right because Meyer, heir of rabbis, would take all the rest of her seriously, and the children, heirs of them both, would too. There was Björnson who had known a zoologist in his childhood, and the admiring Charles who had known him, and Anders who had had such an odd childhood, and was having it still. And even Herr Winckler, always at somebody’s elbow, but probably never much farther, and Miss Apple Pie who wanted to know everything—he even had a twinge that she would never know the name he had awarded her. Always this empathy. Perhaps because the place was now dimming like a church, he felt as he always did nowadays when in one, that his heart was full of noble truths it wished to spit out immediately—and that all these good people were cardboard personages; only he was human, bad and real. Oh believe in the unknown, it will ennoble—he looked for Sir Harry, and at first couldn’t find him. Yes, there he was, yes, there, and his mouth was open too. Sir Harry looked to him like the only man there who knew he was saying Yea.
He, Linhouse, even had time to look down upon himself and know he was a man. In the course of his life he had done this before of course in many ways, some that had seemed to him singular and some traditional, but never had he felt less embarrassed by it—gizzard, balls, tongue, cuticle and all. All of his earlier anticipated humiliation had come to pass, but he couldn’t care less if the whole audience here or of man, turned to look at Jack. Possibly he didn’t care because they weren’t even looking at him, and they weren’t because, with the growl which had only started a half-minute ago, they were too busy believing, and they were believing because they couldn’t help it—along with him. The universe, he said, looking down at himself. It has water in a liquid state; life is there. It has the blood, the sweat and the tears that old men have a habit of mentioning in old wars, and the piss they don’t bother to, and that other ichor which must be somewhere but nobody mentions much, or so shyly—the stuff that the brain makes in moving—no, that’s light. He looked down at himself, at his universe. I won’t apologize for you, he said, but for the first time he wasn’t embarrassed either. I can stand you, he said, but you have to do something. And suddenly he leaped from his chair, and shouted, “No!” though he meant Yea.
He crept forward, then straightened. It was only a yard from him; why should he creep? The secretary, rapt, paid him no mind. In front of it … dare he think more than it … he paused. What he wanted most to say to it was one of those ejaculations from his own core, one of those eeows or ahs it had honored him for. If he could, he would wish somehow, in its own sub-eighteenth-century language—if to speak of centuries was not an absurdity altogether—to honor it. He stood before it, it unquivering, not so he. O celebratizzical, he said to it silently. O amazingular. Finally he opened his mouth and spoke. Whose language had he spoken in? He had said, “O.”
Behind him, he heard his O echoed, not in a cadenza, but in continual asseveration, O, O, O, a trill somewhere far in the treble, that neither sank nor rose. He turned. The audience were all on their feet now faces aloft toward those encircling doors behind which, as from a phalanx of pipes, this super-octave was sounding. From there being so many women, and their posture, the effect was of the women rising in a body, or having so arisen. And from their number also, the effect was now as in any prospectus for the good life, that every man in the audience had a good woman at his side—in fact two. The sole man on his own was Sir Harry. His face still said Yea, but as he caught Linhouse’s eye, it stretched to a prompter’s smile. Say it, Jack it said, or seemed to. You say it, Linhouse signaled back, but Sir Harry, with a headshake, passed the ball back to him, and it was as if, in so doing, he had managed all sorts of comments on the generations. He did it by the simplest of gestures, his wedding ring gleaming for a trice on his long, competent fingers. Smiling, he turned up, down again, the palms of his hands.
So Linhouse veered round again to the object behind him. Send Jack, he thought, but almost proudly now, and thought too of his father, that foolish, proud and feckless, stupidly-bright man whose zest for division had been such that even after his death one thought of him as looking across to where life was still a winy fruit somewhere, a man who would have enjoyed this occasion even from the grave—if such bionauts had been possible—and would have written it up afterwards, too. As for Linhouse’s mother, for the moment he agreed with his father: she was best off where the latter had left her. If, as a woman of some enlightenment, she was still there. In the case of either parent, he could still take a pride—mixed, it was true—in the generation behind him, for the humanities they had shared with him, and had imparted to their lares and penates too.
He could even share a pride with this … this … being … he was now facing. And in good time perhaps, the lares and penates of the world too of course, from the horse on a sunny field with its hindparts cocked perky, to the farmhouse clock on his ma’s mantel in Chelsea, even someday to the. teacups in a cupboard not of his childhood, not in Wiltshire, but in a cupboard somewhere—and always and everlasting, a chair. Yes, a being—he could say that now, An adumbration that it was one must have been there in his mind, his tingling fingertips, from the beginning, ever since it had helped him silently, fraternally and a wee bit giddily, to carry it out of the cottage, and along the intervening streets and fields. It hadn’t been weightless entirely. But all along, perhaps even now, it had given him, and the others too, only such weight as they could bear. He stared at it. When it had been subjected to moving, it had passed for mechanism very nicely. But now, inanimate as it was for the moment, he had the strongest impression that it was giving him back his stare. If it had been a machine, he’d have had to summon all his strength not to give up, not to kneel to it with the insidiously growing humility of his kind. As it was, he could square his shoulders, raise his chin, and stand straight, sharing what he was with the consciousness opposite him, and inwardly give thanks. Thank God, he muttered to himself—and then shouted it. “It’s not a machine. Thank God.” And then stood back.
The book rose upon itself, began to spin, or was it really melting in upon itself, all its leaves combining—from those of shaggy integument, to a linenskin nearest to human, down the thinnest, porcelain blood-veil. To some in the room the vision was similar to those swimming giants they were accustomed to observe perpetrating themselves under the microscope; to others—as the long, central shape hardened to focus in the dimming ribands of its own shadow planes, of which it meanwhile remained the long core—it seemed only one of those astral television images one saw while tuning one’s way to a better one—and easily slain by the flick of a hand. Then as it rose finally on its tip, anybody could see that it was not many-leaved at all, perhaps had never been but was now One—a long presence of perfect curves subtiliating in continuous, restful outline, of modest less than seven-foot size, and in tint like the most limpid China tea or the clearest Havana leaf—yet nothing like. For even in its stillness, of a poise and quiet beyond that induced by any man-made tranquilizer or freezer, a stillness beyond any of earth’s inanimate objects, indeed of another dimension altogether—even then, any dolt, of which there were none here, could recognize that nameless quality, neither a palpitation nor a glow, perhaps only a dance of the molecules which we see without realizing it—which signified that they were in the presence of a being. It began to lean then, toward the stenographer. The voice of it rose to the most reasonable facsimile yet, all but human, and the words it breathed gathered strength, even echo. The echo, in that almost circular hall, bounced back first: “Mouth.” And then the cry that had been its source, “I want a mouth.” Then slowly, in the utmost delicacy, moving without moving across the gap between it and the young stenographer in her wimpled collar, it leaned.
Her answering cry went unnoticed. Like hares, deer, any animal transfixed in a new breeze, the entire audience looked upward. As they did so, there appeared on the rim of the room, first at what would have been its four corners if the circular room could have had these, then closing in on that circle, a series of long cores sublunary within their own ribands, shadows. As each clarified itself in the manner of the being on the dais, it could be seen that these in comparison were giants, but all of even size according to their obvious norm, and all less sensitively tinted than their small kinsman, to a pallid spongecake that made them seem for a moment like monstrous ladyfingers and the room itself a giant charlotte russe. From the ring of these, when completed, such a stillness radiated, a monster seriousness, that thoughts like these were frivolous. In this other-dimensional stillness it was not possible to see that each of these beings was moving on its tip, only the conclusion of it—that each had aligned itself with one of the audience. Each went to him or her, as it might be, without hesitation. Yet there was no difference to be seen between those who had chosen to align themselves with the men, and those who loomed at the sides of the women. Yet … was there?
In the utter marvel of that stillness, there was at first no change. In its cosmic breath (to the auditors, of a new cosmos) all rested, beings both human and—what should one say?—extrahuman. All rested in it without change; one could not tell the exact minute when the breath became a sigh. Impossible to unweave its orchestrations, whether it came from the tiny, revolutionary glow of some small, vestigial furnace within those beings of utter curve, or whether it was the grave Vedantic murmur of those ready to lapse their hot heart-claps forever in the ellipse. Only, when it was over, the air in the room was changed; though none might see it yet or a hundred years not bring its mutation into being, the air was charged with the aspiration to difference. And when it was over, the postures of all were changed forever. All were still again in their new dimension. Couple by couple, they leaned.
How they were leaning went almost without saying; Lila was anxious but leaning forward, and ready to worry at the slightest encouragement; Meyer was eager to share his views and happy to do so with any one who would incline; Sir Harry’s majestic head, sculptured by age, passion and endowment, was bent as if still listening, and surrounded by a bevy of forms among which there was indeed one of—in profile—perhaps the faintest aquiline. They were all, if not classicists, humans of a classic evolutionary kind. And if they leaned separately, humanly, each on the note of himself, then there was yet another note unheard perhaps because higher, on which they leaned in unison as it dropped down to them through volumes of air: death is sure, but the longing for the unknown is the lyric reason that holds us in life. Anders was the only one who looked frightened.
And what of me?
He was partially answered, or so he at first thought, by a sudden diffusion of light behind him. On the large screen which a while before had extended them a ragged thank-you, a picture now subtly widened—this time as if from the hands of experts—until it filled the entire wall behind the dais. Large as a backdrop, it presented them with a magnified and almost adequate picture of themselves, so that all might see the larger canvas of the occasion, just as was so often done at banquets, political or sales conventions, and the best charity balls. This picture showed a rotunda crowded with couples matched like these here, also a dais, on it two figures, between them a chair. One of them, though his back was turned, was clearly a man; the other, as clearly, was not. The man was looking at a large screen behind him, on which … And so it must go on and on, in the infinite trickery of optics, electronics or eternity—or of the girl on the box of raisins, who holds ad infinitum a box of raisins on which there is a girl, who—Or did it? For on second glance, though the mise en scène of crowd, dais, and the two figures had changed not a whit, it seemed to him that the hall itself had—what did it remind him of? Those sub-Corinthian columns, plaster pilasters, here smudged with distance, but in the pics of new-old Moscow a friend in the foreign service had sent him, as if dirtied with a nineteenth-century snow—would such a building house the Sternberg Astronomical?
He looked round him, at the hall; no, no columns here anywhere—the picture on the screen—it was not of Hobbs. But when he glanced again at the screen, though its central details remained the same as previously, surely the hall had changed again, though he could not precisely say how—except that if he had been in it instead of viewing it, he had the idea it would have had the smell and ambience, unmistakable to him, of a British public building. Yet he had never been to Harwell, and had no idea whether its architecture was Lever House, Festival, or Dolphin Square. To say nothing of those other inner facilities which, though worldwide they might be the same as here at Hobbs, were all “no admittance” to the likes of him.
The picture faded and quivered again, with the built-in anonymity, no matter what the details or the angles, of a screen. Was that what they were showing us, he thought (I mean are showing, for on a screen the tenses cloud too), the end of our world as we know it, as it would be being seeded from observatory to observatory, by them? Or was it merely the end-of-the-world as to be seen now and then on a screen at the end of any living room. The possibilities were endless, yet, like perhaps everybody else here in this hall, he inclined toward one of them. For if They were inclined to satire, these connoisseurs of non-living, these experts in shadows—as it certainly seemed to him they were—how would they bring us, who have ourselves not so inexpertly made a hearsay of misery, to their gently styled day of judgment? Answer: The whole world as we know it is ending for us, by hearsay. What is happening here is doing so country to country all over the scattered “facilities” of the world, and we are joined to it, picture to picture, with substantially the same cast of characters, so that we may muse on it simultaneously and without the strain of feelings—from screen to screen to screen.
He crouched forward, in this peculiarly anesthetic agony, to look at himself—at that picture, fixed now for the moment again, which was surely Hobbs, at that man who was surely he. It was like looking at his own death; or like the way a movie star, nervous in his lounge chair in the viewing room, might watch his own false rendering of that as yet unknown lyric which all, before THE END, must learn. It was himself all right, and now he began to doubt his own diagnosis of what was going on here. He even began to wonder whether those other flashed changes had really existed—doing so with that canny, thrilling, schizoid doubt of oneself which is the viewer’s supreme of vicarious sensation. Then his throat froze. The picture had changed again. Again a hall and a dais, again a man and that other, and those. The man was not he; he was sure of it. It made no matter, because of the hall, that hall. So it was true then, if only by hearsay. For he had been on Palomar.
Or did he dare to—? His throat melted again, but thank God only as yet to what it had always been, though his own language seemed mangled to chicken feathers forevermore. But he did dare, to think that it might be not an end but a beginning, if not the one, and even if the beginning of what wasn’t his to say. He wasn’t thinking in terms of resurrection, however. But, in a vast diffusion of lighted welcome, deeper than any picture, he had just remembered all the streets of all the cities, all the fieldlands and waters beyond and outside all the observatories: still outside. Let them seal them up, all the halls of science, and inside each one a few of us specimens, random or select. Outside, on bourses and gallerias, with the odd punchinello noses and long chins of Breughel, in penny arcades and thronging from bathhouses, with Ethiop limb or waxy, a-Rowlandson with flannel lip or staring from the single broody-eye of Picasso, or on the desert tented or in the single sheepfold—there are still the people outside. Why did he always forget that people, with the animals, are the other half of physical creation; that they too are nature who always has the last word. And history—which we have tells us nothing if not that the people, humbly the same, humbly elusive, and never to be trusted except in this one quality—ever rest, ever are. Unless they were all to be atomized, and somehow he didn’t think so. That sort of invasion, he thought, is more our style.
How sweet, how delicate instead, would be mutation! Especially, he thought, as humble as any, if they like us. Or must we—? He realized that his newest picture—and history’s too perhaps—was on the side of yellow journalism or dream, for what he had in mind was a sort of New Year’s Eve on Times Square, with the crowds beneath the irradiated heavens jostling brow to brow, liquored-up to sober neo-Christian, pale to ape, and perhaps a few wan children of the poor to cry, “Daddy, what does it mean?” (the rich being presealed in their own tunnels), while above the milling heads, to the sound of cornets and kazoos, the electric message ringed round and round the flatiron-sides of the old Times Building: IN YOUR END IS OUR BEGINNING, and then, just as everybody grew thoughtful, a jolly reversal, IN OURS IS YOURS, and with top luck perhaps, IN OURS IS OURS—though one would never again be sure of the pronouns. If he could dream that, would he?
He looked out front, feeling a peculiar pain—at the scope of the world compounded with its very nearness—which he hadn’t had since adolescence. He looked at those new ones there, as a boy looked at the adults he both wanted and wanted not to be.
It’s a cold world, Linhouse thought. Poor Tom’s a-cold. He shivered with what he and perhaps others too had come to think of as the interstellar fear. A-cold. And was he to be the last Tom in it? He thought he was. He couldn’t lean as the others were—it was not his style of difference. At last—out of delicacy or prudery, before a blending of outlines which seemed ever more intimate, he cast down his eyes.
Then, at the base of his shoe, near his ankle, he saw a rosiness. For one ghastly bright-pink moment, he thought it his own—a transformation managed willy-nilly and across realms, by some jokester specialist looking down on the excelled. But it was one of them here. It was one of them, rather small for her—species, and of median coloring. The curve of her form was the same as all the others, no dent there. Yet there was something, perhaps only the dream of a dent regressive there—across light-years of regression, the dream of a waistline. It didn’t speak, perhaps now it couldn’t. Unless he was to saw it in half, perhaps he would never be able to tell whether or not it once had. Nor even then, for did they not all look alike there? A sob escaped him for that metamorphosis, for whose regression, if ever again it arrived down the eons, his own too complex flesh couldn’t wait. It edged nearer. Very daintily, it—she?—leaned. He stood stiff as a ramrod; he could not. He was as simple as he cared to be at the moment, or ever. I am the last, he thought, and those like me. And I am a-cold.
Then he heard a soft voice from behind, and turning, found himself face to … face? … with the tall form who for so long had been speaking. Runt it might be, among its own, but it loomed over him higher than Sir Harry, moving ever so slightly with a tituppy motion only self-delusion (did they have it too?) would call a glide—though of course he hadn’t yet seen it move up stairways or along ramparts in its presumably grander style. When it stood quiet, its nether end about four inches from the floor, though perfectly shaped, seemed unfinished, wanting pedestal—or feet, of course, the truth being that ballet slippers came to mind. Otherwise, in glow and shape it was a beautiful luminary, and altogether had the timid yet elegant forbearance of very large animals who are made pets of by small masters. At its side, the young secretary, still hypnotically adoring and perhaps to her regret not eaten, lent a royal touch of retinue.
So, must he and it mutually stare? Was there a face to it, in the proper region for a face, or was it all in the eye of the beholder? If so—dare he, must he—address it? How does a lowly crab speak when, snorkeling the seas it was born to—it meets a man. He breathed heavily; the air in the hall seemed inestimably fresher; was this “carbonation”? He knew what it felt like to watch, as the war masks had once done—the downward flight of a Great Bird. He felt like—a native.
Do I speak first? Do I name it? Eli. Must I worship this god descended?
But he was spoken to. Initiative lost. Status clear.
“Person,” the ellipse said.
For a moment he did feel it, the dignity of his possessions. And over there of course—of want.
All this time he had been looking only out of the corner of his eye, and now he could not even do that; blushing for his own madness, he could look nowhere but down. Across from him, he heard an intake, a sigh.
“Friend.” A command. Yet … tentative?
And again he felt that irradiation of being—his—and in the center of it, in the center of what was to some an enormous landscape, beating steady on, beating out both question and answer, Tom Thrum, Tom Thrum, the heart.
And then, without warning, there came the revulsion—as if he had met with a shark while swimming and all his membranes floated backwards—as if the heart itself reversed, stroking backwards along the path of old heartbeats already suffered, and in so doing bore him raggedly but steadily away. When it came to details—the almost human details—he couldn’t. He could still believe in gods—of course he could, or some could—or he could meet with animals strangely cast up by nature’s ever-sportive sea. Or in planets swinging in their own carillons above it, or even on those—as long as far away—life’s familiar spores. But to believe in this other being here; no, his duty was to go mad first. He might believe it some day, or if he ever got out of here, but not now, and not that near. Not quite.
Again he heard the sigh.
He was dumbfounded to see, high up above the last tier of seats, one after the other of the encircling doors opening, open, opening, open—all along the line. Light flooded in as from clerestories, a light still violet or fluorescent, still with the tincture of Hobbs on it, and leading still to all the abracadabra of its facilities, but surely somewhere on, no matter how lost one got on the way, to the air—fetid or humid, soiled or fresh—of the unartificial day. No, it would be night now. He could already smell it coming in here; if thought was to be smelled, he hadn’t a thought but this. Night was here, bringing all the invasion he would ever wish for. He could see it out there ahead of him, in rain or sleet or calm, in cloud or blessedly uninterpreted stars—a real, down-to-earth night.
“Well then—”
From behind him, he heard a last comment.
And at this last—in spite of everything—he was not surprised.
Everybody ran for the doors with him. Or almost; a few, gazing markedly sidewise, walked. How would they speak of these phantasms—or in their so various ways not speak—outside? How would the newspapers speak of all this, when it got to them, as it would—used as they were to dreaming the heavens afloat only with satellites and missiles? How would the legend start—or stop? For as each couple reached a door and passed through it, one of the two pressed onward toward the familiar darks of its planetary persuasion, and the other form, as intangibly as it had come—vanished. But he himself, unaccompanied though he was, wasn’t one to speak too quickly of fantasy—never, or not yet. For it was fitting that, having been the abettor of this vision if not the begetter—he had been the last one to look back.
And so he had caught the last installment of the vision—and has it yet. In the center of the darkened stage, the chair he had sat on all evening, no picture before it now, still faced inward toward one, its solid old leather back toward a vanished audience, its worn bucket seat facing a screen that now, unanimated, had the faded flush-brown of an after-image on an old retina. It was a comfortable chair, borrowed at some time or other from one of the offices or cubicles, hollowed out, once upon a time, by somebody’s heavy thinking—or bum. It still was.
He was at liberty not to believe what he saw, if he wished, if he had the heart not to. Was this vision granted him, or imposed? For he could believe, if he so wished, that the small glow which had nimbused the chair as if from its center—and indeed had been the light by which he saw—had come from a solitary footlight which mechanical failure had left burning. Mechanism was so fallible. Center back of the chair, a high, pale-to-pink oval had protruded, as of a bald pate of indeterminate age, but certainly a gentleman’s. He was free to believe that this was the gloss, on leather, of a spotlight from the wings. Left of the chair, a tape recorder unquestionably had been revolving, but there was no need to disbelieve, in this night and age, the reality of its faintly hissing but persuasive voice. Mechanism was so trustworthy. The trouble was, had it been playing a voice, or recording it?
He didn’t wait to believe, but ran onward, along corridors he was almost eager to get lost in, so that when with the last exertion of his strength he forced himself, by old Air Force training, to track his own maze, and at last heard his own steps ringing along the marble of the deserted lobby, and at last fronted with his forehead a Ramapo night as calm as any a man ever parachuted, he could almost have said to it, “It was all a nightmare. Not like this, you stars, you heavens of Prussian blue. An inner nightmare.” Almost. He hadn’t waited to believe, because he hadn’t had to.
It was a voice that might have been anybody’s. On tape, or coming toward it from a chair, it was any a body’s voice, busy at the creation of its own legend, saying, “—And so—” It was the beginning of the legend that he hadn’t wanted to hear; to be present at a nativity was enough. And he had left his own print there. Like any savage, he felt it to be a piece of himself. If, at times afterwards, he often felt it to have been the better part of himself, this was no doubt the result of having been civilized, and in any case was an observation he made to himself only very quietly, on those nights of the soul which however dark, were real. But it wouldn’t have been humanly possible to go on with that sort of speculation, tolerantly divided man though he still was—if not as comfortably as of yore. For, as a human being, he still had certain expectations, exclusive of his larger social obligations. Certain of the latter, such as marriage and children, he hadn’t yet taken up, though still of the intention to, as soon as certain things measurably faded. For, he still expected to itch, to weep, hopefully to love, and regretfully to die. Dark evenings, when he despaired of humans, or wild, sweet ones, when the Ramapo breeze blew as if water had truly followed it, were merely (he grew to reassure himself) like those first times after the war, when he had first had to admit to himself that though young, trim, not even thirty, he had grown too heavy, too old and un-nimble—for the parachute.
And he still meant to marry, as soon as—like any shell-shocked man—he got better used to certain tricks of shadow, noise and language which made him nervy, certain hopes of them which kept him continually waiting, even on the dullest social evenings, to see what came round a corner, a door. Though there was one common remark, one polite bit, which he would never get used to whether it came from a grizzled matron or curly damsel, or old codger—from anyone else in the world, instead of out. Faintly, someday he still expected to hear it at his side, in a voice he knew.
For it might have been anybody’s voice, sitting by the tape recorder, busy at its legends—but it hadn’t been. He’d been amazingly moved when that voice had addressed him as a person, and rather overwhelmed—for the fallible moment—when it had hoped to count him as a friend. And very much surprised when (though he hadn’t actually heard it give it) a command had come, after all these shenanigans, to open the doors. But the voice’s last comment fitted so well with all he knew of it. And so, deep in his heart of hearts he hadn’t been at all surprised to hear it say—after that precociously heavy sigh for all that they both were still in for: “Well then—mind if I sit in your chair?”