She was through. He slacks and blouse were torn, her skin was scraped in a dozen places. Pierre and Goubu would not let her have a moment to pant and recover herself. With an arm on either side of her, they half carried her down the uncertain surface of the slope to the foot of the rope ladder.
"Up with you!" Pierre whispered. "It's not so far to the top as it was before, anyway!"
This was true. The rock fall, covering the floor of the cavern some ten meters deep at that spot, had radically shortened the climb to the top.
Denise nodded. She saw that Pierre had buttoned the book inside his shirt; it was probably safer there than within her own badly torn blouse. She put her hands on the sides of the ladder and began to climb.
Since the bottom of the ladder was firmly held by the rock fall, it was considerably more stable than it had been. But Denise heard from time to time a rock rolling from its place, and then an ominous settling noise. She climbed. She did not dare to pause to rest or get her breath. She climbed.
The top at last. There was no support for her arms, and she was too spent to trust her sense of balance. She reached forward, clutched at a low shrub, and dragged herself on to solid ground. Goubu—it was like Pierre to have made him precede him—was close behind. Still on her knees, Denise held out her hand to him.
Then came Pierre. Just as his head emerged the rim of the pit quivered and began to sag downward. Goubu grabbed the hand Pierre held out to him and, Denise still holding Goubu, the two of them hauled him up over the slowly descending edge. Then all three ran.
"This way!" Pierre panted. "The whole cavern's falling in!"
At what seemed a safe distance, they paused to watch. The sight of itself was not particularly impressive, but the noise that accompanied it certainly was. There was a grating sound, oddly high-pitched, and then a series of thunderous rumbles. And finally, lasting for several seconds, there came a long, long deafening roar.
"Whew," said Pierre when the noise had finally ceased, "that was a close shave. Two seconds more, and—Goubu, mon vieux, you're a hero. If you hadn't helped us, we'd be under all that."
Goubu smiled and looked down modestly. Pierre went on, "What happened, anyhow? Who threw the bomb?"
"One of the Viets, M'sieu."
"Dinh?"
"No, the thin one they call Ho. He came up behind me. We had a fight on the edge of the hole. He got one arm loose and threw the bomb. Then I knocked him out."
"Where is he now?"
"I tied him up and put him in the back of the truck before I came down to M'sieu and Madame."
"Let's go take a look at him."
The thin young Viet was lying in the bed of the truck in an uncomfortable position. Goubu had tied his hands behind him, and further immobilized him with a tie from his feet to an eye-bolt in the truck. It was a hurried but effective job.
The Viet had been lying with his eyes closed, but he opened them when he heard the noise of footsteps. He said nothing, but his face grew angry and afraid.
Pierre chewed his lip. "I ought to turn you over to the flics," he said. "You're a miner yourself. You know it's not exactly pleasant to be buried alive."
Ho swallowed, but still said nothing.
"You've had some provocation," Pierre continued. "I'll skip it. But if there's any more trouble, I'll see that you get the maximum."
Ho's face relaxed. "Merci," he said with a faint smile.
"What did you mean about 'provocation', M'sieu?" Goubu asked as the three of them got in the cab of the truck. "You've never done any harm to Ho."
"No, but the Viets have had a rough time," Pierre replied. "They were brought here as indentured laborers, and they worked under wretched conditions for years. They were French nationals, but there was no nonsense about 'traditional French democracy' where they were concerned.
"Now their lot has improved a bit, and the resentment of years of mistreatment is coming out. It was rough on Denise and me. But I don't blame the Viets too much."
He started to back the truck around. Denise touched his elbow. "The book, please, Pierre."
"Oh." He got it out of his shirt and gave it to her. "Do you think you'll be able to open the case? I don't see any sign of an opening."
"I think so. When I'm not so tired. Tharg—the person it used to belong to—will try to help me open it."
"Bien. I'd like to find what the damned book is all about, and why he wants it so much."
"It's a sort of guidebook," Denise answered faintly, leaning her head against the back of the seat. "He wants it so he can ... change. Not be what he is."
"You can explain this to me later," Pierre said with a frown. "Are you all right, cherie? You look awfully pale."
"I'm just tired. It seems a long time since morning. I can hardly believe all this happened in the same day."
The truck began to lurch down the caricature of a road. Most of the time at least one of its wheels was in the air. "Ho must be getting rather bruised," Pierre said, between jolts. "Well, I'm afraid I don't feel very sorry for him."
The truck bumped around a bend. Momentarily the road improved. Pierre speeded up a bit. Denise said, "Pierre, there's an ambush ahead."
"What?" He threw on the brakes. "An ambush? Are you sure?"
"Yes. It's the Viets. They've been waiting for Ho. They've heard the noise of our truck, and they're frightened. They know he wouldn't be coming back in the truck."
Pierre got out and went around to the back of the truck. "Ho," Denise heard him say, "I'm going to untie you. Some of your friends are waiting on down the road for us. I want you to tell them that they can't possibly get away with murdering three people. All of them, including you, will get the guillotine.
"Tell them to drive on back to the mine, like good boys. I will see to it that the worst that happens to them is that they get docked half a day's pay. They can hardly expect to be paid union wages for conspiring to murder us."
Denise heard the sound of Ho clambering out of the truck. "Bien," he said. "I will tell them. M'sieu is a highly intelligent and amiable man." He started off down the track.
Pierre got back in the cab. They waited. Denise was too tired to be nervous. She sat with her eyes closed, the smooth ellipsoid of the book lying on her lap. Goubu kept clearing his throat.
At last Ho came trudging back. "They say they are sorry, M'sieu," he reported. "They will take his advice and drive on back to the mine."
"Bien. You're a good ambassador, Ho. Get back in the truck."
Ho grinned and obeyed. They heard a car somewhere ahead of them being started, and then the noise of its passage on down the sketchy road. Pierre waited ten or twelve seconds, and then started after it. It was getting dark. He turned on the truck's headlights.
Finally they were off the mountain, and on a legitimate, though narrow, road. Goubu said, "If M'sieu will stop at the village for Mandoué ... She can sit on my lap."
"You still anticipate trouble?"
"Yes, M'sieu, as long as things are not normal in the mine."
Mandoué must have been watching for them, for she came running out of one of the thatched beehive huts before Pierre had come to a full stop. She opened the cab door, sat down on Goubu's lap, and began to talk rapidly to him.
Goubu looked disturbed. "She thinks you had better not go to your house, M'sieu Pierre," he said. "She thinks there will be trouble tonight."
"Mon Dieu! I'm getting tired of menaces. What if I call the police?"
Goubu shook his head disapprovingly. "A bad idea, M'sieu. People would be sure to be hurt. I assure M'sieu that as soon as things are normal again in the mine, there will be no more danger. But there is danger now."
"Oh, all right. Where shall we go?"
Denise spoke up. "Drive to the mine, Pierre. There are guards there and a high fence. I can rest on the couch in your office a little while, and then try to get the book out of the case."
"All right."
The guard at the gate knew them. "Bon soir, M'sieu Houda
n," he said. "Your men checked in with the other truck just a little while ago."
"Good. How's our infestation?"
The guard made a face. He was a Frenchman, a descendant of one of the political prisoners who had been exiled to New Caledonia several generations ago. "Worse than ever, M'sieu. M. Miron has been sending reporters and photographers away all day. He doesn't want any stories about our little trouble to get into the Paris papers. He's afraid it would depress the price of our stock on the Paris Bourse."
"It probably would," Pierre agreed. "Is the commissary closed?"
"Yes, M'sieu Houdan, but I think I could get you some sandwiches."
"That would be a good idea. Ham, if you can. And a bottle of that Anjou rosé they used to have. Mme. Houdan likes that."
Pierre opened the door of the cab, and the four of them got out. Ho jumped out of the back and joined them.
"Shall I stay with you, M'sieu Houdan?" he asked.
Pierre looked at him calculatingly. "No, you can go on home. But remember what I told you—I won't be lenient next time."
Ho grinned. "I'll remember. Bon soir M'sieu et Madame."
Pierre led the way to his office, Goubu and Mandoué following. Mandoué looked about herself uncertainly. It was obvious she had never been inside the mine gate before.
Denise sat down on the couch, and the two Melanesians, after a little hesitation, squatted down on the floor. "Shall we stay, Madame?" Goubu asked her.
"Yes, please. I'd like you to be here when I get the book out of the case."
The guard brought a plate of sandwiches and a bottle of wine. Pierre passed the sandwiches around and poured the wine into four paper cups. Everyone was hungry; they ate with good appetite. The ellipsoid, meanwhile, lay quietly on the polished top of Pierre's desk.
Pierre kept pouring wine into Denise's paper cup. "Now, Denise," he said when the sandwiches were gone and the bottle was empty, "do you want to—Yes, what is it?" There had been a knock at the door.
"M. Miron would like to speak to you, M. Houdan," the messenger at the door said.
"All right—Don't open it until I get back, cherie! I don't want to miss the great moment. I'll try to get back quickly." He went out.
Denise yawned. "Madame should lie down on the couch and sleep a little," Goubu suggested. "My wife and I will not disturb her rest."
Denise lay back obediently. She was tired, and she had drunk a good deal of wine. She soon drifted into a calm and agreeable sleep.
She woke about half an hour later. Pierre was looking down at her. "What's the matter?" she asked. "A noise woke me up."
"There are ... a few people outside. Don't worry, cherie. The guards and the mine police can take care of any trouble there might be."
"Oh." She sat up on the couch and listened. "It sounds like a mob," she said after a moment. "But there won't be any trouble. I know how to open the case of the book."
She got up, walked over to the desk, and picked up the ellipsoid. While the others clustered around her, she began to run her hands thoughtfully over it.
At last she paused and pressed down hard. There was no sound, but the brown shell split down its long axis and folded back like the valves of a door.
For a moment they all four saw the book. It was a handsome thing—glowing rosy purple, with a title running diagonally across the cover in characters of metallic tyrian purple. Then the cover began to buckle and turn black. It burst abruptly into a hot, brilliant flame.
The hot white flame lasted only a moment. Denise had jerked her head back to avoid singeing her eyebrows. "What happened?" she asked dazedly. She looked into the case. "It's gone. There aren't even any ashes left. What made it flare up like that?"
Denise had hardly ceased speaking when the office door opened and one of the guards came hurrying in. "M'sieu Houdan! M'sieu Houdan! The shapes are gone! They went all at once, like a candle being blown out!"
Pierre let out his breath. "You're positive?" he asked the guard.
"Yes, sir. They've gone."
"Good. Make an announcement to the crowd. Tell them the mine will resume regular operations tomorrow, beginning at the usual time for the day shift." And then, to Denise, "You were right, ma belle. The shapes came because he wanted the book."
Denise was not listening. She had sunk down in the chair by Pierre's desk and was holding the empty ellipsoid disconsolately in her hands. "Poor Tharg!" she said. "Oh, poor Tharg! This will break his heart!"
-
Chapter Twelve
Our galaxy turns on a hub in the constellation Sagittarius. The great wheel of light—shaped like a grindstone, as Herschel put it—turns slowly in an awesome circuit that takes some two hundred million years. Toward the center the stars thicken, the gaseous nebulae abound.
Sagittarius is the center of our galaxy, too, in another and somewhat less obvious way.
It would be a mistake to think there is somebody there. If in the center the lofty architecture of vision, the grandeur perennially seen by the mystic or the drugged, is made actual and functional, it is not because those who shaped it are present. It was made as it is to serve its purpose better.
The kind of consciousness that is found there does not have the limitations of flesh, nor its opportunity to transcend its limitations. If man is a thinking reed, the center in Sagittarius is a star that thinks. But it is immortal only in the way that something which has once existed may be said to go on existing forever. So it serves a more genuine immortality than its own.
Some of the machines in the center are actuated by thought, no matter how distant. They pass no moral judgments. They are as passionless as mythical Rhadamanthus. They do not condemn those who knowingly keep on doing what they know to be wrong. They have no punitive function. But they weigh accurately what is professed against what is achieved.
This is not the first universe that has ever existed. If time must have a stop, it must also have a beginning. And now and then, in the center in Sagittarius, a decision is reached.
-
He could withdraw himself. He could go back to being indifferent and unmoved, while the eons passed and mountains rose from the plain and were ground again into dust. Tharg had no heart to be broken, at least in the sense that Denise had meant, but he was poignantly aware that he had failed. His former glacial ataraxia presented itself to him like an obliterating black wave into which he could plunge at will. Why did he not so will?
To bring the guidebook back to the light of day had taken a series of miracles. At any point Tharg might have failed: he might have been unable to produce the "mobile geometry" of the mine, he might not have been able to establish communication with Denise, he might have been unable to coerce Pierre into the excavation on Mt. Dore. He had succeeded; and when he had seen the brownish capsule of the guidebook open under Denise's fingers, he had felt an extraordinary triumph, like a man who wars victoriously with a star.
But the book, which had been shut away for hundreds of millions of years in a reducing atmosphere, rich in hydrogen and with almost no free oxygen, had acquired in its imprisonment an extreme readiness to oxidize itself. When oxygen had been available, it had burst into flame at once.
Incredulously he had seen it consume itself, remove itself from him forever, be lost irretrievably. His loss had dazed him at first, and then made him wild. Yes, the temptation to withdraw into his cold remoteness was a strong one. And yet—it seemed odd to him—he resisted it.
It took him a while to realize what had happened. He had no particular illusions about human beings. In some respects they were baser than Tharg's own people could ever have been. They were more capable of treachery, and more constantly physically cruel.
But if they were capable of more baseness, they were also capable of more nobility. Tharg was not a human being; he would never understand them very well. (What, for example, was he to make of a human personality that could throw a rock in a fit of partisan rage at a little child, and then write a line like, "the love
that moves the sun and the other stars"?) But they kept on trying, and they were capable of insight into their weaknesses and mistakes. No, he would never understand them very well. But somehow he had got interested in them.
With Tharg's new interest came a certain compunction about the way he had behaved. In his attempts to communicate he had driven the wretched Proctors nearly mad, and Pierre had characterized the shadowy invasion of the mine as "blackmail". Both the Proctors and the Houdans might have benefited if Tharg had been successful? Yes, they might. But Tharg had not been thinking of others' benefit; he had been thinking of himself.
It was natural enough. A human being would probably have done the same in his place. But it was hardly admirable.
The guidebook was gone. Tharg supposed he must resign himself to being a dimensionless thought throughout all eternity. He might go back to his ataraxic uninvolvement later. Currently he felt a slight but definite wish to help the human beings in whom he had grown interested. Wasn't there something beneficial he could do for them?
No, it wasn't very likely that there was. Unquestionably, thinking of himself as a sort of super-human savior would be good for his self-esteem, and an attempt to benefit these remarkable human beings would serve to pass a lot of time. But there were two reasons why he thought he'd better not try it.
In the first place, he really didn't have much power. He had been able, with a considerable assist from the Proctors, to flood the house at Willington Mills with poltergeist phenomena, and he had been able to fill the mine at Noumea with the sliding interpenetrating flat shapes that had so upset everybody. Both these phenomena had been purely subjective, affections of the senses for which he had drawn the energy from the human beings whose senses were affected. Given proper conditions, and a lot of effort on his part, he could cause mass hallucinations; but he couldn't move the pointer on a dial a tenth of a division from zero, or affect the drift of a dandelion seed. In short, he had no physical power at all. An ordinary "ghost" had much more power than he.
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