it was cudyk's birthday. he had never told anyone in the quarter the date, and had all but forgotten it himself. this morning, feeling an idle desire to know what the season was on earth, he had hunted up a calendar he had last used twenty years ago; it translated the niori system into gregorian years, months and days. the result, when he had worked it out with some little trouble, was february 18th. he was fifty-six.
now he was constrained to wonder whether the action had been as random as it seemed. was it possible that subconsciously he had no need of the calendar—that he had kept track, all these years, and had known when his birthday came? if so, why had he felt it necessary to remind himself in this oblique way?
a return to the womb? a hunger for the comforts of the family circle, the birthday cake, candles, the solace of yearly repetition?
cudyk was fifty-six. when he had been fifty-five, he had thought of himself as a man in his middle years, still strong, still able. now he was old. the same thing had happened to seu: he had recovered from his first shock when the news had come about rack, and for more than three weeks now he had moved about the quarter, as quiet and as competent as before; but there was a difference. his swift, furtive humor was gone except for rare flashes; his voice and his step were heavy.
it was the same with all of them, all the old settlers. cudyk had met burgess on the street the day before, for the first time in several weeks, and had been genuinely shocked. the man's hair was white, his skin papery, his gait stumbling.
even exarkos showed the change. more and more of his grey, woolly hair was vanishing. the umber crescents under his eyes were a deeper shade, almost black.
the quarter's graveyard was five acres of ground, surrounded by trees, on the outskirts of the city; there the dead reclined in a more ample space than the living enjoyed. the niori had allotted the ground, though the outline of the city was thereby disfigured, and had contributed slabs of a synthetic stone which carved easily when it was fresh, later hardening until it would resist any edged tool. the plot was ill tended, but the standing stones, translucent pearl or rose, had a certain beauty. to the niori, the purpose of the graveyard was only that; they were not equipped to understand mankind's morbid clinging to its own carrion.
cudyk had gone to chong's funeral, presided over by lee yuk, the asthmatic little buddhist priest; and the image of those ranked headstones, neatly separated into the orthodox, the protestants, the buddhists, the taoists and the unbelievers, had returned to him many times since. it was another sign of the change that was taking place in him: the images which formerly had dominated his mind had been pictographs of abstractions—the great globe of infinity, the tiny spark that was creative intellect. now they were the pale headstone and the dark curtain of death.
he had felt nothing, standing over chong's grave and watching the sod fall. what is there to say about a man when he is dead? the priest's words were false, as all such words are false; they had no relevance; the man was dead. nothing was left of him now but the dissolving molecules of his flesh, and the fragmentary, ego-distorted memories he had planted in the minds of others. he was a name written in water.
it was not chong who obsessed cudyk, nor the many other half-remembered men and women whose names were clumsily carved on those stones. it was the cemetery as a symbol: the fascination of the yawning void.
cudyk had one other preoccupation: he thought often of earth, a dark globe turning, black continents dim against the grey ocean, pricked by a few faint gleams that were cities. or, if he thought of the cities, he saw them too drowned in shadow: the shapes of tower and arch melting into night-patterns; moonlight falling faintly, dissolving what it touched, so that shadows became as solid stone, stone as insubstantial mist.
for earth, also, was a symbol of death.
there had been no more suicides since chong had died, and no riots. it seemed to cudyk that the whole quarter moved, like himself, through a fluid heavier than air. all motion had slowed, and sounds came muted and without resonance. people spoke to him, and he answered, but without attention, as if they were not really there.
even the recent news about rack's defeat had stirred him only momentarily, and he had seen in seu's face that the chinese felt himself somehow inadequate to the tale even as he told it. the galactic fleet, vastly expanded, had met rack's activist forces with a new weapon—one, indeed, which did not kill, but which was shameful enough to a citizen of the galaxy. the weapon projected a field which scrambled the synapse patterns in the brain, leaving its victim incapable of any of the processes of coherent thought: incapable of adding two figures, of lighting a cigarette, or of aiming a torpedo. eleven new earth ships had been captured, and it was thought that these were all the activists' armed vessels; there had been no further attacks since then.
cudyk sat with his teacup raised halfway between the table and his lips. after a long moment, he saw that his hand was trembling violently. he set the cup down. he said, "where?"
"the little bear. half the town has gone there already. do you want to go?"
cudyk stood up slowly. "yes," he said, "i suppose so." but he felt the tension that pulled his body together, the tautened muscles in back and shoulders and arms.
as they reached the corner of ceskoslovensko and washington, they saw scattered groups of men moving ahead of them, all hurrying, some frankly running. the crowd was thick around the doorway of the little bear when they reached it, and they had difficulty forcing a passage. men moved aside for seu willingly enough, but there was little space to move.
inside, it was worse. the stairway was solidly packed; it was obviously impossible to get through.
"there is a back stair," seu said. he worked his way toward the rear of the room, cudyk following, until he caught sight of the bartender. the press was not so thick here, and he was able to reach the man and lead him into a corner away from the others. "can you get us up the back way?"
the russian nodded, scowled, and put his finger to his lips. following him, they went through the swinging doors at the back of the room, through the dark kitchen and up the narrow service stairs at the rear. the bartender unlocked the door and helped them force it open against the pressure of the packed bodies inside.
the long room was heavy with the odors of sweat, tobacco smoke and stale air. faces shone greasily under the glare of the ceiling lights. the only clear space was the table-top against the wall to cudyk's right, where rack stood.
cudyk could see him clearly over the heads of those in front of him. he stood with legs planted firmly, hands at his sides. as always, the leather jacket was draped over his shoulders like a cloak.
he was alone. spider was not there, nor monk, nor tom de grasse.
rack was talking in a low, clear voice. cudyk listened to the end of a sentence which conveyed nothing to him, and then heard: "after that, we got it. they gave it to us." rack's hands clenched once, and then opened again.
"they intercepted us three minutes after we came out of overdrive in the orbit of new earth. twelve fighting ships, the whole fleet. we were in a line, just closing in after we broke c on the way down—the thermopolae, the tours, the waterloo, the chateau thierry, the dunkirk, the leningrad, the acre, the valley forge, the hiroshima, the san francisco, the seoul, and the flagship last, the armageddon.
"we didn't know they were there—they were out of our detector range. they had us like sitting ducks. the first thing we knew about it was when a teletype report from the leading ship, the thermopolae, broke off in the middle of a word. five seconds later the same thing happened to a report coming in from the next ship. three seconds more, and the waterloo was gone.
"i gave the order to reverse acceleration and scatter. but the field—whatever it was—came after us. it would have taken us at least two minutes to build up the overdrive potential again, and we all knew we wouldn't make it. they were getting us one ship every six or eight seconds.
"the men were looking to me for orders. i didn't have any to give them. suddenly de grasse turned around and looked at monk and spider, and they all nodded. they jumped me. i don't know what happened. i struck my head against the deck when i went down, or one of them hit me with a gun-butt."
his fists clenched and opened once more. "when i came to, i was strapped into a one-man lifeboat, on overdrive, doing ten c's. they must have emptied the ship's accumulators into that lifeboat, charged it up to c potential and got me off just before the field hit them.
"i took my bearings, reversed, and went back. eventually i found the fleet again. the galactics had matched course and velocity with them and they were just beginning to tow them off, one ship to one with plenty of theirs left over, in the general direction of altair.
"they hadn't got into overdrive yet. i slipped in—there were a hundred of their little scouts nosing around, about the same mass as my lifeboat—and berthed in the same port i'd come out of. i got out and walked into the control room.
"the crew was still there, still alive. but not men. they were lying on the deck, looking at nothing. their mouths were open, and they were drooling."
rack's head moved stiffly, and his sharp profile turned from one side of the crowd to the other. "mindless idiots," he said. "they couldn't feed themselves, or stand up, or sit. but they had saved me.
"i built up the charge and took my time about it. when the galactics went into overdrive, i took off in another direction. i was a good seventy light years away before they knew i was gone.
"i had a ship, an undamaged ship. but i had no crew to man her. i can astrogate, and when i have to, i can man the engines on top of that. but i can't fight her as well.
"i came here, put the armageddon into a one-day orbit and came down in a lifeboat. i want to go back and find out what those slime-eaters did to us, and give them a taste of the same. i want twenty men."
there was a silence.
rack said, in the same even, low voice, "will you fight for the human race?"
someone called, "what did you do with your other crew?"
rack said, "i gave them military burial, in space."
for the first time, the crowd as a whole broke its silence. a low murmur rose. rack said sharply, "i would have given my life for those men, as they did for me, gladly. but they were already dead. if there's a way to restore a man's mind after that has been done to it, only the vermin know how. i would rather be buried in space, and so would they."
a deep voice called, "are you god, rack?"
"i'm not god," he said promptly. "are you a man?"
he did not believe that anything which could now possibly happen could rouse him from his apathy. but he had forgotten one possibility. seu came to him in chong yin's, where yin's eldest son fu now moved in his father's place, and said, "rack wasn't taken. he's here."
