But she didn’t give up. The life-support rig had a full complement of emergency devices, and she put them all into use. A chest compressor carried on artificial respiration; she injected refrigerants into his bloodstream to prevent brain decay; the electrodes rhythmically assaulted the valves of his heart. Kolff was nearly concealed by the assortment of first-aid equipment covering him.
Vornan knelt and peered intently into Kolff’s staring eyes. He observed the slackness of the features. He put a tentative hand forth to touch Kolff’s mottled cheek. He noted the mechanisms that pumped and squeezed and throbbed on top of the fallen man. Then he rose and said quietly to me, “What are they trying to do to him, please?”
“Bring him back to life.”
“This is death, then?”
“Death, yes.”
“What happened to him?”
“His heart stopped working, Vornan. Do you know what the heart is?”
“Yes, yes.”
“Kolff’s heart was tired. It stopped. Aster’s trying to start it again. She won’t succeed.”
“Does this happen often, this thing of death?”
“Once at least in everybody’s lifetime,” I said bitterly. A doctor had been summoned now. He pulled more apparatus from the life-support rig and began making an incision in Kolff’s chest. I said to Vornan, “How does death come in your time?”
“Never suddenly. Never like this. I know very little about it.”
He seemed more fascinated with the presence of death even than he had been with the creation of life in this same room. The doctor toiled; but Kolff did not respond, and the rest of us stood in a ring like statues. Only Aster moved, picking up the creatures that Kolff in his last convulsion had spilled. Some of them too were dead, a few from exposure to air, the others from being crushed by heedless feet. But some survived. She put them back in a tank.
At length the doctor rose, shaking his head.
I looked at Kralick. He was weeping.
FIFTEEN
Kolff was buried in New York with high academic honors. Out of respect we halted our tour for a few days. Vornan attended the funeral; he was vastly curious about our customs of interment. His presence at the ceremony nearly caused a crisis, for the gowned academics pressed close to get a glimpse of him, and at one point I thought the coffin itself would be overturned in the confusion. Three books went into Kolff’s grave with him. Two were works of his own; the third was the Hebrew translation of The New Revelation. I was enraged by that, but Kralick told me it had been Kolff’s own idea. Three or four days before the end he had given Helen McIlwain a sealed tape that turned out to contain burial instructions.
After the period of mourning we headed west again to continue Vornan’s tour. It was surprising how fast the death of Kolff ceased to matter to us; we were five now instead of six, but the shock of his collapse dwindled and shortly we were back to routine. As the season warmed, though, certain quiet changes in mood became apparent. Distribution of The New Revelation seemed complete, since virtually everyone in the country had a copy, and the crowds that attended Vornan’s movements were larger every day. Subsidiary prophets were springing up, interpreters of Vornan’s message to humanity. The focus for much of this activity was in California, as usual, and Kralick took good care to keep Vornan out of that state. He was perturbed by this gathering cult, as was I, as were all of us. Vornan alone seemed to enjoy the presence of his flock. Even he sometimes seemed a bit apprehensive, as when he landed at an airport to find a sea of red-covered volumes gleaming in the sunlight. At least it was my impression that the really huge mobs made him ill at ease; but most of the time he seemed to revel in the attention he gained. One California newspaper had suggested quite seriously that Vornan be nominated to run for the Senate in the next election. I found Kralick gagging over the facsim of that one when it came in. “If Vornan ever sees this,” he said, “we could be in a mess.”
There was to be no Senator Vornan, luckily. In a calmer moment we persuaded ourselves that he could not meet the residence requirements; and, too, we doubted that the courts would accept a member of the Centrality as a citizen of the United States, unless Vornan had some way of demonstrating the Centrality to be the legally constituted successor-in-fact to the sovereignty of the United States.
The schedule called for Vornan to be taken to the Moon at the end of May to see the recently developed resort there. I begged off from this; I had no real wish to visit the pleasure palaces of Copernicus, and it seemed to me that I could use the extra time to get my personal affairs in order at Irvine as the semester ended. Kralick wanted me to go, especially since I had already had one leave of absence; but he had no practical way of compelling me, and in the end he let me have another leave. A committee of four could manage Vornan as well as a committee of five, he decided.
But it was a committee of three by the time they actually did depart for the lunar base.
Fields resigned on the eve of the departure. Kralick should have seen it coming, since Fields had been grumbling and muttering for weeks, and was in obvious rebellion against the entire assignment. As a psychologist, Fields had been studying Vornan’s responses to the environment as we moved about, and had come up with two or three contradictory and mutually exclusive evaluations. Depending on his own emotional weather, Fields concluded that Vornan was or was not an impostor, and filed reports covering almost every possibility. My private evaluation of Fields’ evaluations was that they were worthless. His cosmic interpretations of Vornan’s actions were in themselves empty and vapid, but I could have forgiven that if only Fields had managed to sustain the same opinion for more than two consecutive weeks.
His resignation from the committee, though, did not come on ideological grounds. It was provoked by nothing more profound than petty jealousy. And I must admit, little as I liked Fields, that I sympathized with him in this instance.
The trouble arose over Aster. Fields was still pursuing her in a kind of hopeless romantic quest which was as repugnant to the rest of us as it was depressing for him. She did not want him; that was quite clear, even to Fields. But proximity does strange things to a man’s ego, and Fields kept trying. He bribed hotel clerks to put his room next to Aster’s and searched for ways to slip into her bedroom at night. Aster was annoyed, though not as much as if she’d been a real flesh-and-blood woman; in many ways she was as artificial as her own coelenterates, and she minimized the Byronic heavings and pantings of her too-ardent swain.
As Helen McIlwain told me, Fields grew more and more visibly worked up over this treatment. Finally one night when everyone was gathered together, he asked Aster point-blank to spend the night with him. She said no. Fields then delivered himself of some blistering commentary on the defects in Aster’s libido. Loudly and angrily he accused her of frigidity, perversity, malevolence, and several other varieties of bitchiness. In a way, everything he said about Aster was probably true, with one limiting factor: she was an unintentional bitch. I don’t think she had been trying to tease or provoke him at all. She had simply failed to understand what sort of response was expected of her.
This time, though, she remembered that she was a woman, and disemboweled Fields in a notably feminine way. In front of Fields, in front of everyone, she invited Vornan to share her bed with her that night. She made it quite clear that she was offering herself to Vornan without reservations. I wish I had seen that. As Helen put it, Aster looked female for the first time: eyes aglow, lips drawn back, face flushed, claws unsheathed. Naturally Vornan obliged her. Away they went together, Aster as radiant as a bride on her wedding night. For all I know, she thought of it that way.