And when he made that last stop which put the whole thing clear before him, a demonstrated truth, he must have sat there thinking about it. Certainly then she knew what he was doing, even though she was not in the room with him. I remembered how she had read my mind so often in the past, in unobtrusive ways that I had overlooked because I did not see their implications. How much more easily could she have known what LeNormand had found, what intense and mathematical symbols were forming in his brain as he worked and thought! She sat there, in his house, and understood what he had found. To her it seemed so clear, so true, so irrefutable, that she decided he had to die.
Dr. Lister cleared his throat. “Why should LeNormand have been a menace to her because he’d made some sort of mathematical discovery?” His tone suggested that the question ought to reveal my own folly to me.
“I can’t tell you that. But remember what Jerry said about its importance? ‘The biggest thing in the world, by God!’ All I can guess is that somehow LeNormand’s discovery was connected with Selena.”
“His mathematics, you mean?” “Yes,” I answered him slowly, “his proof of what Jerry called the serial nature of time. It had something to do with her.”
“But what?” he said impatiently. “Do you think she was jealous of it, or what?”
“No. I think LeNormand believed he’d found a way to test his theory.”
“The only way he could do that would be to travel through time, physically, or at least mentally.”
“Yes,” I admitted.
“But that’s absurd.”
“Selena didn’t think so. She killed him to keep him from trying it.”
“This is all mad,” he asserted. “Why should she care?”
I looked at him and tried to make him feel the conviction that was in me. “Because she didn’t want him to find out where she came from.”
“So,” he said, and his tone was pure amazement. “You think she—or her mind—came through time.”
“Yes.”
“From the past or the future?”
“I don’t know. Maybe there isn’t any difference.”
Dr. Lister looked at me with pity openly in his eyes. “This is all delusion, Bark. Your mind is playing tricks on you. There’s no sense to this notion of yours, and no evidence for it.”
“Yes, there is,” I told him. “There’s one piece of evidence. That is what she said to Jerry in Bermuda, lying beside him in the moonlight. She said, ‘This is what my people do not know.’ You see, she was beginning to find out what she had missed with LeNormand. Her mind was learning from her body. It takes mind and body both to make a soul. Living with Jerry taught her something of what it means to be a human being.”
“Then why should she have let him kill himself?”
“You must see that now. Jerry never stopped wondering about LeNormand’s death. His love for Selena made him all the more anxious to find the solution to it. He believed that those equations were the important clue. He had tremendous mathematical ability, and he studied them until he understood what they meant. After that, when he saw the fire that Selena had lighted, he thought of the fire that killed LeNormand. And then he knew why LeNormand died, and how.”
“Selena was responsible for both the fires, then?”
“Yes.”
“How did she create them?”
I was very tired, and I could see that he did not believe me. I had not convinced him. The dark thought that obsessed me, the fear that was almost overwhelming me had no existence for him. There was no use going on. “It doesn’t matter how she created them. I don’t know. You’re just asking the question to humor me. I haven’t convinced you.”
He spread his hands in a gesture of apology. “You’re tired to the point of collapse, Bark. People’s brains get queer kinks in them when they’re as exhausted as you are.” He was quiet for a while. “In a way, I wish I could believe you. Any explanation would be better than none at all.”
“Not this explanation,” I told him. “I’ve never been so afraid in my life as I am this minute.”
He tried to smile. “You’ll feel differently after a good sleep. I’ll give you something that will relax you.”
“I hope so,” I replied. “I hope you have the chance to do that.”
“Of course, I will.”
“Yes,” I said, “you will if I’m wrong. But not if I’m right.”
“Why not?”
“Think back,” I told him. “Remember what happened to the other two people that found out.”
“And if you’re right, you think the same thing will happen to us?”
I steadied my voice as much as I could. “She will know that we have found out. And she will come here. After all, it’s been almost a week since Jerry . . . She could have been here days ago.” The very certainty in my voice alarmed me. “She’ll come, all right. Whether she’ll kill us or not, I can’t tell you.”
“No,” he said, “you mustn’t let thoughts like that get the upper hand. Selena is just a woman. A strange woman. This nightmare you’ve built up in your mind will pass in a few days. You’ve had a shock, and you are tired. That’s all there is to it. We’ll go upstairs now and have some sleep.”
“All right,” I said. “I don’t want to argue with you. I want you to be right. I’ll take your sleeping powder, or whatever it is, and wake up sane again. But, first, I’m going to sit here for five or ten minutes. That’ll be time enough to demonstrate to me that she isn’t coming. It was quick, the two times before.”
We sat waiting. The dawn was absolutely still around us. Nothing moved. Dr. Lister looked at my face quietly with his hands folded. I think he was planning the details of his treatment to restore me to myself. I hoped that the first thing he would do would be to exorcise the cold, irrepressible fear that went through me in steady, pulsing waves with every beat of my heart.
The pause seemed never-ending. Gradually I saw resolution begin to shape his mouth. He was on the point of saying something. At that very instant there was a stir at my feet. It was Boojum. He walked out from under the table, stiffly, and turned to look down the terrace toward the corner of the house behind Dr. Lister. He did not growl, nor wag his tail. He simply looked. After a few seconds his ears went up stiffly into two triangles. Both of us were watching him; out of the corner of my eye I saw something like hesitation come into Dr. Lister’s face.
There was a sound of footsteps beyond the corner of the building. The color went out of his face, then, in one swift wash of gray that left him looking old and broken, but not afraid. The lines around his mouth tightened; he lifted his head and half turned in his chair.
She came toward us walking with that same long, swinging stride. Even when I knew, as I did then, that she was not a person, not human, not of my own sort at all, there was something so magnificent about her that no fright or revulsion could cancel the effect of it. The fear inside me was swallowed up by a passive expectation. This was the inevitable end of the story, and whatever was to happen, it was out of my power to influence it in any fashion.
She came to the table and stood beside it, with the tips of her fingers resting on its top, looking down quietly at both of us.
“So,” she said, after a while, “you found out.” Her eyes rested on me with no expression in them that I could read.
“Yes.” My voice sounded perfectly calm.
She gave me a half smile. “You are a strange person, Bark. I should never understand you. I suppose you hate me.”
“I am afraid of you,” I told her.
“There is no need for that,” she said, and her voice was cool and impersonal. “Nothing will happen to you or to Dr. Lister. I do not intend to kill you. What little knowledge you have is of no danger to me. You cannot prove any of it, and the rest of the world will not pay any attention to your story if you tell it.”
Her calm, complete assumption of superiority stung me, even in the lethargy of will that possessed my mind. “That isn’t what I mean.�
��
She studied me thoughtfully. “You are afraid of me for some other reason, then.”
“Yes,” I said. “For what you are.”
It seemed to me that a look of pain came into her eyes. “Oh. To you that makes a difference. And yet you do not know what you are yourself. You do not know what any other human being is. You know as much about me as about anyone. More, perhaps. We have seen each other often. Once, I even saved your life. But you are afraid of me because I am not like you.”
“Yes,” I said again. “Go back where you came from.” She moved her hand, almost irresolutely, across the top of the table. “That is not so easy . . . Living here has changed me. Why should you hate me when you do not know, all of you, where you came from yourselves?”
“Leave us,” I told her. “Even if you know the answers to all our questions, leave us. You don’t belong here.”
Her voice was quiet. “I have found that out. I shall go back.”
Dr. Lister turned his chair and stared at her. “Before you go,” he said, and his voice was hard and bitter, “I want to ask you something.”
She lifted her hand in assent.
The expression on his face as he spoke was a mingling of loathing and incomprehension. “You seem to know what Bark has said about you. Is he right?”
She met his look squarely, and in the way she stood and answered it in silence for a moment I could feel the power of her anger. “Did you suppose,” she said finally, “that you were alone in the enormous spaces of the universe? Do you believe that you are the ultimate product of creation? There is nothing unique about you.” Her tone was so level, so coldly insistent that even Dr. Lister averted his head and seemed to shrink in upon himself. “Is there any reason why I must leave you alone? You do not own me and you have no power over me. Why,” she said, and there was an edge of bitter amusement in her tone, “when the earth has traveled around the sun a few more times, you will be dead.”
He lifted his head and there was defiance on his face. “Yes,” he said, “and you do not seem much concerned with death. You have lived here two years and in that time you have brought about the deaths of two men. You talk as if that were nothing.”
She dropped her eyes. “I know how important that seems to you. Believe me, I did not mean to kill either of them.”
Dr. Lister said coldly, “I don’t believe you.”
“Walter LeNormand’s death was sheer accident. I had no intention of killing him. I wanted nothing but to stop him from thinking, prevent him from going on with his work. I knew what he had discovered, what more he would find if he went on thinking. I was determined to stop him. There aren’t any words to tell you what I did; there is a way of using the force of the mind, and I used it. I turned it on him, I willed him to stop thinking, to lose consciousness. My plan was to go, then, to the observatory, and destroy his work. But I forgot one thing.”
“What was that?” said Dr. Lister, as if he were humoring her.
“The football game. Thousands of people sitting at it, excited, emotional, pouring out a force a thousand times more powerful than a bolt of lightning. It was that force that killed him. It magnified, if you like, the force of the impulses I was sending until they were so powerful they consumed him.”
“I see.” There was nothing in his voice to give me a hint of what was in his mind, but when he spoke next there was a level deadliness in his tone that I had never heard in it before. “You also killed my son,” he said.
She turned toward him so that I could no longer see her face. “Jerry,” she said, as though the sound of his name hurt her intolerably, “yes. Jerry had to die too, and because of me. But what else could have happened? He realized the truth. Do you think he could have lived with it?” There was no answer, and she turned to me. “Do you, Bark?”
“No,” I said.
She turned back to Dr. Lister. “Bark’s answer is the only one. I tried to stop him. I didn’t want him to find out. But he did. And he was too intelligent for the rest of you. In time he would have found a way to make people listen to him. I could not let that happen.”
He dropped his eyes from her face and looked at the table. “Damn you,” he said.
“Before I go,” she went on without paying any attention to his words, “I want to tell you one thing more. If I could stay, if there were anything here left to stay for, I should do so.” She turned and looked full at me. “The little mermaid had to go too, because there was no longer any possibility of love.” I saw that there were tears in her eyes. “Good-by, Bark. I loved your friend.” Turning to Dr. Lister, she half lifted her hand as if to touch him, in the same gesture I remembered from Cloud Mesa, and then withdrew it. “And I loved your son,” she said. “Remember that.”
With a single quick motion she stripped her finger of the two rings, the one with the great square emerald in it, and the narrow band of gold with which Jerry had married her, and put them on the table between us. They lay there, bright and beautiful, on the painted iron, and we looked at them. I did not see her go, but the sound of her feet died along the terrace and around the corner of the house.
When I picked up the emerald ring, it was still warm from her finger.
“Whoever she is,” said Dr. Lister after a long time, “she knows how to make an exit.” He said nothing more for a full minute. “There is no proof. It is all fantastic. She talked like a madwoman, and yet . . . The only real fact is that Jerry is dead.”
He stood up, and we went into the house together.
There are two things to add to this story.
When the place at Cloud Mesa was closed and its contents shipped east to us, I went through Jerry’s papers with care. The notebooks for his thesis alone were missing. What became of them I have never found out, but the inference is obvious.
Luella Jamison has been found. I heard about that from Parsons. It appears that her father, getting up early one morning to go to town, found her standing at the front gate. She was holding on to the pickets of the fence beside it. He led her into the house and she slipped at once into the routine by which she had always lived. According to Parsons, the Jamisons are happy because she is home again.
THE EDGE OF RUNNING WATER
1.
THE MAN for whom this story is told may or may not be alive. If he is, I do not know his name, where he lives, or anything at all about him, except that there is something which it is vital for me to tell him. It is a strange, clumsy method of communication, this expedient of writing an entire book without even the certainty that it will come into his hands, and yet I can see no other way of warning him. There is, I think, a good chance that it will succeed. Someday, perhaps in a bookstore, perhaps in a library, he may come on a copy of this narrative. Or someone he knows will innocently mention it in his hearing, and he will be impelled to seek the book out and read it. People somehow manage to learn of the things that are supremely important to their lives or their work. What troubles me is not so much the possibility that he will never come on this message as that it may already be too late.
A great deal of what happened to Julian Blair, Mrs. Walters, Anne, and the rest of us there in the house on Setauket Point is purely personal. I suspect that the man whose attention I must catch will be impatient with all that; he will wonder why I have wasted so much of his time with irrelevancies of thought and feeling. Julian himself would disapprove of my presenting the facts in the form of a narrative. And yet, that is the only way I can see to bring home the actual meaning of his project, the significance it will hold for living men and women and the human effect it must inevitably have.
It would be comfortable to believe that there is no danger. That Julian’s research was an isolated, aberrant thing that could not conceivably be repeated. But that is not the history of discovery. It is a curious fact that men who know nothing of each other tend to work in the same direction at the same time. Darwin and Wallace, Mendel and de Vries. Blair and . . .? It is that unknown name that I have got someh
ow to reach.
If this man for whom I am writing exists, if he has already begun to ravel out the same thread that Julian Blair followed—I think to the very end—the chances are that no one else will know what he is doing. He will go quietly about his business, taking nobody into his confidence until his apparatus is complete. At least that is the way Julian did it. Then, unless what I have to say here deters him, he will test the thing he has created. The moment he does so he will learn something that even I do not know. He will find out where Julian Blair is now.
That question must never be answered. A year ago it would have seemed to me ridiculous to assume that there are some facts it is better not to know, and even today I do not believe in the bliss of ignorance or the folly of knowledge. But this one thing is best left untouched. It rips the fabric of human existence from throat to hem and leaves us naked to a wind as cold as the space between the stars.
The fringe of that cold touched me once. I know what I am talking about.
2.
THE PORTER woke me at six that morning. My mind came back from wherever it goes during sleep and reluctantly took up the business of apprehending the outside world. It began to listen to the roaring clamor of wheels on rails and observe through a gray-green Pullman twilight the steel curve of the car roof, close over my head. But beyond being aware of these things I had no part in them. As always when I wake, this was that interval of physical paralysis when bodily motion is out of the question, and this time it was evidently going to be harder than usual to emerge from it. The muscles of my legs and back were stiff from offsetting the irregular lurching drive of the train’s northward flight. Consciousness and body lay together in my berth, not yet articulated with each other and accepting their particular discomforts passively. Then they flowed together in one sharp synthesis and I remembered who and where I was.
There is something stupefying about the noise and motion of a running train; I felt drugged, reluctant to face the prospect of a new day, and more tired than when I had finally managed to fall asleep in the small hours of the night before. But the porter’s hand was thumping insistently against the green curtain:
The Rim of Morning Page 24
