‘What are those?’
‘Haven’t you heard? Kaldren’s collection of final statements about homo sapiens. The complete works of Freud, Beethoven’s blind quartets, transcripts of the Nuremberg trials, an automatic novel, and so on.’ She broke off. ‘What’s that you’re drawing?’
‘Where?’
She pointed to the desk blotter, and Powers looked down and realized he had been unconsciously sketching an elaborate doodle, Whitby’s four-armed sun. ‘It’s nothing,’ he said. Somehow, though, it had a strangely compelling force.
Coma stood up to leave. ‘You must come and see us, doctor. Kaidren has so much he wants to show you. He’s just got hold of an old copy of the last signals sent back by the Mercury Seven twenty years ago when they reached the moon, and can’t think about anything else. You remember the strange messages they recorded before they died, full of poetic ramblings about the white gardens. Now that I think about it they behaved rather like the plants in your zoo here.’
She put her hands in her pockets, then pulled something out. ‘By the way, Kaidren asked me to give you this.’
It was an old index card from the observatory library. In the centre had been typed the number: 96,688,365,498,720 ‘It’s going to take a long time to reach zero at this rate,’ Powers remarked dryly. ‘I’ll have quite a collection when we’re finished.’
After she had left he chucked the card into the waste bin and sat down at the desk, staring for an hour at the ideogram on the blotter.
Halfway back to his beach house the lake road forked to the left through a narrow saddle that ran between the hills to an abandoned Air Force weapons range on one of the remoter salt lakes. At the nearer end were a number of small bunkers and camera towers, one or two metal shacks and a low-roofed storage hangar. The white hills encircled the whole area, shutting it off from the world outside, and Powers liked to wander on foot down the gunnery aisles that had been marked down the two-mile length of the lake towards the concrete sight-screens at the far end. The abstract patterns made him feel like an ant on a bone-white chess-board, the rectangular screens at one end and the towers and bunkers at the other like opposing pieces.
His session with Coma had made Powers feel suddenly dissatisfied with the way he was spending his last months. Goodbye, Eniwetok, he had written, but in fact systematically forgetting everything was exactly the same as remembering it, a cataloguing in reverse, sorting out all the books in the mental library and putting them back in their right places upside down.
Powers climbed one of the camera towers, leaned on the rail and looked out along the aisles towards the sightscreens. Ricocheting shells and rockets had chipped away large pieces of the circular concrete bands that ringed the target bulls, but the outlines of the huge 100-yard-wide discs, alternately painted blue and red, were still visible.
For half an hour he stared quietly at them, formless ideas shifting through his mind. Then, without thinking, he abruptly left the rail and climbed down the companionway. The storage hangar was fifty yards away. He walked quickly across to it, stepped into the cool shadows and peered around the rusting electric trolleys and empty flare drums. At the far end, behind a pile of lumber and bales of wire, were a stack of unopened cement bags, a mound of dirty sand and an old mixer.
Half an hour later he had backed the Buick into the hangar and hooked the cement mixer, charged with sand, cement and water scavenged from the drums lying around outside, on to the rear bumper, then loaded a dozen more bags into the car’s trunk and rear seat. Finally he selected a few straight lengths of timber, jammed them through the window and set off across the lake towards the central target bull.
For the next two hours he worked away steadily in the centre of the great blue disc, mixing up the cement by hand, carrying it across to the crude wooden forms he had lashed together from the timber, smoothing it down so that it formed a six-inch high wall around the perimeter of the bull. He worked without pause, stirring the cement with a tyre lever, scooping it out with a hub-cap prised off one of the wheels.
By the time he finished and drove off, leaving his equipment where it stood, he had completed a thirty-foot-long section of wall.
Four
June 7: Conscious, for the first time, of the brevity of each day. As long as I was awake for over twelve hours I still orientated my time around the meridian, morning and afternoon set their old rhythms. Now, with just over eleven hours of consciousness left, they form a continuous interval, like a length of tape-measure. I can see exactly how much is left on the spool and can do — little to affect the rate at which it unwinds. Spend the time slowly packing away the library; the crates are too heavy to move and lie where they are filled.
Cell count down to 400,000.
Woke 8-10. To sleep 7-15. (Appear to have lost my watch without realizing it, had to drive into town to buy another.)
June 14: 9/2 hours. Time races, flashing past like an expressway. However, the last week of a holiday always goes faster than the first. At the present rate there should be about 4-5 weeks left. This morning I tried to visualize what the last week or so — the final, 3, 2, 1, out — would be like, had a sudden chilling attack of pure fear, unlike anything I’ve ever felt before. Took me half an hour to steady myself for an intravenous.
Kaldren pursues me like my luminescent shadow, chalked up on the gateway ‘96,688,365,498,702’. Should confuse the mail man.
Woke 9-05. To sleep 6-36.
June 19: 8/4 hours. Anderson rang up this morning. I nearly put the phone down on him, but managed to go through the pretence of making the final arrangements. He congratulated me on my stoicism, even used the word ‘heroic’. Don’t feel it. Despair erodes everything — courage, hope, self-discipline, all the better qualities. It’s so damned difficult to sustain that impersonal attitude of passive acceptance implicit in the scientific tradition. I try to think of Galileo before the Inquisition, Freud surmounting the endless pain of his jaw cancer surgery.
Met Kaldren down town, had a long discussion about the Mercury Seven. He’s convinced that they refused to leave the moon deliberately, after the ‘reception party’ waiting for them had put them in the cosmic picture. They were told by the mysterious emissaries from Orion that the exploration of deep space was pointless, that they were too late as the life of the universe is now virtually over!!! According to K. there are Air Force generals who take this nonsense seriously, but I suspect it’s simply an obscure attempt on K. ‘s part to console me.
Must have the phone disconnected. Some contractor keeps calling me up about payment for 50 bags of cement he claims I collected ten days ago. Says he helped me load them on to a truck himself. I did drive Whitby’s pick-up into town but only to get some lead screening. What does he think I’d do with all that cement? Just the ort of irritating thing you don’t expect to hang over your final exit. (Moral: don’t try too hard to forget Eniwetok.)
Woke 9-40. To sleep 4-15.
June 25: 7/2 hours. Kaldren was snooping around the lab again today. Phoned me there, when I answered a recorded voice he’d rigged up rambled out a long string of numbers, like an insane super-Tim. These practical jokes of his get rather wearing. Fairly soon I’ll have to go over and come to terms with him, much as I hate the prospect. Anyway, Miss Mars is a pleasure to look at.
One meal is enough now, topped up with a glucose shot. Sleep is still ‘black’, completely unrefreshing. Last night I took a 16 mm. film of the first three hours, screened it this morning at the lab. The first true horror movie, I looked like a half-animated corpse. Woke 10-25. To sleep 345.