Ballroom of the Skies

Four

Kelly licked his thumb again, winked at Dake, and continued to count. “Twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty. Thirty thousand happy rupees. The page is yours. Got it with you?”

“I want to borrow an office and a typewriter, Kelly. I’ll work the rest of the day and have it for you sometime tomorrow afternoon.”

“It will be in Thursday’s edition, then.”

“I want a proof drawn on it, and a chance to check it before you lock it up.”

“At the moment you are my favorite man in all the world. Anything you say.”

“And I want a receipt, Kelly.”

The man scrubbed his red chin with a big knuckle. “My boy, you bring up a fascinating point. Indeed you do. Now we’re both men of the world. How would it be if I give you a receipt for fifteen thousand? It would ease my tax picture considerable.”

“Thirty thousand.”

“Let’s split the difference. I’ll give you back... say, two thousand, and a receipt for twenty. We both gain that way.”

“Suit yourself,” Dake said wearily. “Just show me where I can work.”

“I knew you were a sensible man when I laid eyes on you. Let me see. I can’t give you Carter’s place. The murals would keep your mind off your work. Come on. I know where I can put you.”

The office was small, and it hadn’t been dusted in a long time. The typewriter looked adequate. Dake tried it, using his gunfire four-finger technique. Kelly walked out, whistling. Dake shucked his coat, tossed it on the couch. He poked his hat back onto the back of his head, laid his cigarettes beside the machine, and pondered a lead. He tried a few and tore them up. Finally he found one he was satisfied with:

“This week humanity booted the ball again. It was an infield error. The shadows stretch long across the diamond. The long game is drawing to a close. Death is on the mount. He threw one that President Enfield got a piece of. Enfield’s hit put Darwin Branson on third. He had a chance to come home. He ran nicely most of the way to the plate, and then faltered. They put the tag on him. ‘Yerrout!’ yelled the celestial umpire.

“Now we’re waiting for another decision. We’re waiting to find out whether that was the third and last out, retiring the side. We stand in the long shadows, in the hopelessness of an emptying park, waiting to find out if our long game is over. To find out if, maybe, it is being called on account of darkness.”

He looked at the lines. He had a sense of destiny in him. Once in every age, man and moment meet. And the man brings to that moment some ability that sets the world afire, that brings it lurching back from that last brink of destruction. The typewriter clattered in the dusty office. He worked on at white heat, working with the sure and certain knowledge that what he was writing would lift up the hearts and hopes of men everywhere. The year of leave seemed to have heightened his facility. There was no rustiness, no groping for words, or for effect. He had it, and he was using it with the pride and assurance of a man at the peak of his abilities.

He ripped a sheet out, rolled a fresh one into the machine. He hit the tab set and... came to a shocked standstill on the shoulder of a dusty country road. He could see the countryside clearly, hear the faraway bawling of cattle. And shimmering through it, directly in front of him, he could see the keyboard of the typewriter. It was as though he co-existed in two realities, one superimposed over the other. Standing in one, sitting in the other, visions overlapping. He managed to stand up blindly and move away from the typewriter. The countryside faded and was gone.

He stood at the window of the small office for a time. The experience had made him feel faint and dizzy. He grunted with disgust. This would be a hell of a time to have the strain of the past year pile up on him and destroy his ability to work. This was, perhaps, the ultimate gamble. Lay it on the line for them. Get it all down. Dates, names, people, the delicate machinery of deals and counter deals. Show all the men of good will how close they had come to the political and economic equivalent of the Kingdom of Heaven. Raise the old war cry of “throw the bastards out!” — but this time on a global scale. Pray that copies of the article would be pirated, smuggled through the fine mesh nets of censorship. Patrice, with her “me for me” philosophy could never understand how a man could stake his life on one turn of the card, if he believed in the card. A man could have a sense of destiny — believe in his heart that he could manufacture a pivot-point for the world to turn on. Let us have no more double vision. No time to go mad.

He went back and sat down at the typewriter again, reread his lead, and found it good. He raised his hands a bit above the keys and stopped, shut his eyes hard. Each key had turned into a tiny reproduction of Patrice’s face. With his eyes still shut he put his fingers on the keys, felt the softness of tiny faces under the pads of his fingers. He opened his eyes and looked at the paper in the machine. He began to type and stopped, as horror welled up to the point of nausea. His fingers were bloodied and the little faces were smashed, and he had heard the tiny cries, the rending of tissue. Sweating, he wiped his hands on his thighs as he stood up, knocking the chair over.

He stood with his back to the machine and tightened his muscles until his shoulders ached. He looked cautiously at his fingertips. The blood was gone. Hallucination, then. A minor madness. He thought it out objectively. Self-preservation, probably. Trying to save the organism from disaster. A glandular revolt against dissolution. He looked cautiously over his shoulder. The typewriter was sane, normal, familiar.

He sat down and began to type. His thoughts were fluent. His fingers could hardly keep up. He tore the second sheet out of the machine and read it.

“And so it is a baseball game and game and never the over of the now and the then and given. Tender and mathew and meatloaf the underside twisteth of the die and the perish now. All ye who enter can frenzied the window savior...”

The whole page was like that. Gibberish. Insanity. The stream of consciousness of an idiot who remembers words but has lost their meaning.

He tried again, writing more slowly. It was no good. He found a pencil in the table drawer. He took one of the copy sheets and tried to write. The pencil became too hot to hold. He examined blisters on his hand which faded even as he looked at them. The paper curled into flame, and he slapped it out. A moment later it was unscorched. He could no longer repress a primitive panic. He ran from the office and down the corridor, heart pumping, hands sweaty.

He did not quiet down until he was on the street. And suddenly he felt like an utter damn fool. Take a break and then go back and get it written. He walked to a small restaurant and sat at the counter and ordered coffee. The waitress was gray and surly with a prono hangover. A tiny radio yipped like a terrier. He listened with half his mind.

“... and late last night Darwin Branson, retired statesman and political philosopher was committed to Bronx Psychiatric Hos—” The waitress had flipped the dial as she walked by.

“Would you mind getting that station back, miss?”

“Yes, I’d mind. He already gave all the news.”

She stood braced, ready to blow up completely if he insisted. You couldn’t argue with a prono hangover. He paid for his coffee, left the cup untouched and spent ten minutes on the corner before he could find a cab willing to take the long trip.

He reached the hospital at noon. He was suspected of being a reporter and the desk tried to bar him. He produced the confidential credentials Darwin had given him. The desk reluctantly put him in contact with the resident doctor assigned to the case.

The doctor was young, unimaginative, and delighted with the case.

“Lorin you said? Worked for him, eh? Well, I suppose you can take a look. We’ve been checking him most of the morning. Come on.”

They had Branson in a private room. A nurse was in attendance. She stood up as they came in. “Respiration is ten now, Doctor. Heart forty-four. Temperature eight-six point six.”

“Damndest thing I ever saw,” the doctor said in a pleased tone. “Cops brought him in last night. Found him sitting in the middle of the sidewalk. Thought it was a pronie first. We checked him. He was apparently conscious. But no reaction to anything. Couldn’t make the pupil contract. Couldn’t find a single damn reflex.”

Dake stared at the silent waxy face on the pillow.

The doctor said, holding out a clipboard, “Just take a look at this chart. This is one that’s going to be written up. Pulse, respiration, temperature — every one heading down in a line so straight it could have been drawn by a ruler. This man is just like a machine running down.”

“Heart forty-two, Doctor,” the nurse said softly, releasing the slack wrist.

“Tried every stimulant in the books, Mr. Lorin. No dice.”

“What’s your prognosis?”

“He just doesn’t react to anything. Thought of encephaloma at first. Doesn’t check out. It looks like he’s just going to keep slowing down until he... stops. And there’s no key in the back to wind him up. Damn unprofessional opinion, I guess, but that’s the best I can do. Everybody in the place has seen him and suggested things. None of them work.”

“Do you mind if I stay with him?”

“How about family? We’ve been unable to locate any.”

“There isn’t any.”

“You can stay around if you want. I’ll send an orderly in with another chair. From the way it looks, I don’t think you’ll have a long wait.”

“You’ve never seen anything like it before, or heard of it?”

The young doctor frowned. “I’ve never seen one before. But I’ve heard rumors of others. Usually important people, come to think of it. They just seem to get... tired.”

The doctor went out. An orderly brought another chair. Dake sat on the other side of the high bed from the nurse. He was on Darwin Branson’s left side. He looked at the slack hand resting on the white sheet. Time now to forget the quarrel, and remember the better things — the good talks, the flexibility and dexterity of that wise brain.

“In my gullible years, Dake, back when I used to believe in statistics, I made a personal survey of the quality of major decisions and charted them. Of course, on the quality angle, I was being a Monday morning quarterback. I came up with a neat graph which alarmed me. Men of influence all over the world, men in high places, make wise decisions and the world improves. Then, all at once, their quality of judgment becomes impaired and the world suffers for it. They move in a vast confused flock, like sack-suited lemmings. Horrors, I was face to face with a cycle. Sun spots, addling the brains of men. Some alien virus in the air. Or God, perhaps, assuring his children of their suffering on earth.”

“Did you find an answer?”

“Only in myself, where perhaps each man must find his answers. I resolved to so codify my beliefs that should I ever find myself tempted to betray my own philosophy, I would merely have to refer to my mental outline and make the decision which I would have made were I not subject to the cycle. I decided to risk Emerson’s indictment of small minds.”

And yet, thought Dake, you turned your back on your own beliefs only yesterday. You destroyed the labor of a full year. Horrid timing. You became ill a day too late, Darwin.

No more of those long good talks, no more of the knowledge of working for the greatest good of mankind.

“Dake, we seem to supply ourselves with destructive dreams. Chief among these is the Space Dream. It goes like this: We have made such a mess of our world that it is of no use to attempt to bring order out of our chaos. So save our best efforts for the next green world. Tomorrow the moon, next week the planets, next year the galaxy. We’ll spread through the heavens, and our seed will be the bronzed, steel-eyed pioneers, and their fertile women, making green wonderlands for us in the sky. That dream, Dake, eases the conscience of those who are doing less than their best. Thus it saps our energies. ‘This is man’s world. We must live here. We will never reach the stars.’ I would like to see every man believe that. And then if, in a thousand years, we break free, it will be pure profit — and we will have something besides hate and conflict to take along with us on the gleaming ships.”

Dake thought how incredible it was that Darwin Branson should, on the last day of his life, make his first venture into opportunism.

He looked at the left hand, and then looked more closely, his breath catching in his throat. He remembered the scene just before he had left to meet Smith. Branson, being left-handed, had been trying awkwardly to snip off a hangnail on the middle finger of his left hand. Dake had volunteered help, which was gratefully received. The nail had been split a bit, and so he had pared it down carefully. That was the day before yesterday. Yet right now the nail was fully as long as the others. It could not possibly grow that fast. Dake knew he had not imagined the incident. It had been the left hand. He reached out and took the cool slack hand.

“Please don’t touch the patient,” the nurse said sharply.

He released the hand, stood up and bent over to stare more closely. He looked at the slack face, comatose, dying.

“What’s the matter?” the nurse demanded.

Dake glanced at her. He knew at once how far he’d get if he tried to tell her this was not Darwin Branson. They’d have him in the next room down the hall. He sat down slowly, hoping that his emotions did not show on his face.

“Dake, I believe a fiddle-playing gentleman once commented that after you have ruled out all the impossibilities, that which remains is the solution. By the same token, if after all of the impossibilities have been ruled out, you have nothing left, then you have made a mistake in classification. You have overlooked a possibility by labeling it impossible. Like a man with a pocket lighter captured by aborigines. The wise man of the tribe says that it is impossible that there is lightning captured in that silver box. He says it is impossible that there is a tiny man in there, rubbing sticks together. He says it is impossible that fire can be made by any other than those two methods. So he falls down and worships, because he finds himself in the presence of the impossible. It was his third supposition that needed reclassification.”

“Darwin, how about wrongly classifying the impossible as possible?”

“Men have tried to trisect the angle because that is an impossibility that looks possible. Conversely, man has never tried teleportation seriously. How do we know that may not merely be a possibility which happens to seem impossible, and would yield to sustained attack?”

“Pulse thirty-eight,” the nurse said softly.

Dake looked at the yellow-gray face. “God help me to think this out as you would have, Darwin,” he said to himself.

He had classified as “possible” Branson’s sellout. But, knowing the man, it could more correctly be classified as impossible. Branson had been the man who said good-bye to him when he went to collect Smith. So the man to whom he brought Smith back was not Branson. And, if the charts were right, not even human. A doll. A toy. A clever thing wound up and set in motion at a critical juncture in history for the purpose of substituting — or more correctly, sustaining — chaos in the place of possible peace and order.

Next step: Was any world power capable of creating this man-thing?

No. Reasoning: If so, the technique would have been used for greater selfish gain, and were this the first trial attempt it would have been highly unlikely that Branson would be selected.

If the pseudo-physiology of this man-thing is beyond human abilities, then the only place of origin is extra-terrestrial.

But, to assume that means also to assume that there is some valid reason for the maintenance of world disorder. He caught the error in his own logic. He was trying to judge the validity of extra-terrestrial motivations on a human basis. He could almost imagine his skull swelling with the pressure of new concepts, new modes of thought.

Okay then. Assume that interference isn’t in the form of a mile-high spaceship that sits down in the front yard. Assume it is something that comes delicately, insidiously. Unnoticed. What about duration? New, or has it been always with us?

He had an answer to that which was more instinctive than logical. More Fortian than objective. Because it solved, with one swift answer, the great dismal riddle of how man — basically a creature capable of love — had been unable to live in peace in his world.

Dake could hear the soft, even voice. “Evil is not within man, Dake. Evil is man’s response to outward things — to hunger, disease, pain, fear, envy, hate. Maybe it is man’s answer to insecurity. Take the common denominators that are not evil. Songbirds, flowers, motherhood. All times, all nations, all men have held them in esteem. We seem to have lost our way. Yet I cannot believe that we have turned our back on God, Buddha, Mohammed, Vishnu. Rather we have been denied them in some curious way.”

The answer to the riddle of the world — lying here on this hospital bed. If it could only be proven. Prove it and then you could cry to the skies, “We have been led! We have been tortured and twisted and set against each other! We have been a culture dish into which some agency has continually dropped acid — not enough to sterilize, but just enough to make us writhe.”

How would you go about it. Autopsy? He looked at the grain of the skin, the ridged nails, the gray beard stubble. Clever, clever. They could cut the body and never find a soul. But, then, they had never found one and so could not recognize the absence.

As he became more certain, he slowly became aware of his great and dangerous knowledge. Any agency powerful enough and clever enough to effect this substitution would have a quick answer ready for any human who became suspicious, who tried to broadcast his knowledge.

Where was the real Darwin Branson?

“Pulse thirty-two,” the nurse said.

The young doctor entered the room again, checked the chart, talked softly with the nurse. He thumbed an eyelid back, focused a light on the pupil. Another nurse brought in a tray. The doctor pulled the sheet back, swabbed a place over the heart, injected a needle deeply, pushed the plunger, emptying the hypodermic. He took the limp wrist and counted the pulse.

“Can’t kick it up one beat a minute,” he said, his voice too loud for the room.

Dake barely heard him. He sat, slowly compounding his own dilemma. There was an alternative he had overlooked. The reactions in the office Kelly had loaned him had been irrational. A sign of collapse. This whole new and startling train of thought could be another sign of collapse. No hangnail. No substitution. No extra-terrestrials.

Before you could even think of proving something to the world, you had first to prove it to yourself. Either the aberrations in the office were evidences of “interference,” as was the substitution, or both factors were indicative of imminent mental collapse — a collapse due to strain, overwork, tension.

He massaged the back of his neck. Funny feeling of tension there. Had it for a week. Almost a feeling of being watched. It would come and go. A feeling of a great eye focused on you. A big lens, and you were a bug on a slide.

Either one of two things happened at five minutes past three. Either Darwin Branson died, or the man-thing ran down and stopped, its function finished. Dake left the hospital. The death watch of reporters in the main lounge converged on him. He shouldered his way through, savage and silent. They cursed him as he left. He had no heart to go back to Kelly’s place. The significance of the article he had wanted to write had dwindled. Either there was a vastly bigger article — or no article at all. He thought vaguely of trying to get back the thirty thousand and decided there would be time enough the next day. He walked for blocks and caught a bus over to the island. A girl with brown hair and curiously pale gray eyes took the seat beside him.