Damon Knight - Orbit 17

“Then let there be disaster!” Melchisedech thundered in not very convincing tones. “A disaster is surely better than what this day is turning into. Let the laughter of the Pelican People be the salvation of the world.”

“No, no, never,” Salvation Sally protested. “The only salvation here is myself. Salvation is in time, and we are beyond that. And laughter is simply not allowed. How lacking in faith would one have to be to laugh ever! Oh, take your clothes off, Duff, and at least one layer of skin. Join the thing. You invented the Day; and will you be the only one in the world too rigid to live in it?”

“Laughter was useful only in the transition period,” Mary Virginia said. “Now that the Great Day is here, laughter would surely be a handicap, a blasphemy.”

Melchisedech decided that things were going badly. The green oasis in the world of dusty insanity now proved to be of a very peculiar, almost sickly green.

“Are you printing The Bark today?” he asked. Could he somehow slip another article into it and undo the frightful good that he had done?

Whoosh! Margaret Stone pushed down another section of the outside wall, killing a little kid on the sidewalk. “Freedom, freedom!” she cried. And the Great-Day Freedom rushed in on them, and rushed out from them, and mingled.

“What do you mean, are we printing The Bark today?” Mary Virginia demanded. “You’re not making sense, Duff—I mean you’re not making sense, temporary and contingent person. There isn’t any today. You wrote yourself that the Great Day can never be referred to as ‘today,’ since ‘today’ implies a sequence and—”

“Shut your Great Mouth this Great Day!” Melchisedech shouted with pinkish anger. It is hard to take serious a man who turns pink instead of purple with anger, but all things must be taken serious on the Great Day. The situation had certainly become serious with Melchisedech.

“Great Day to you, you filthy Irishman,” Absalom Stein bellowed with a flourishing entrance. He could make a flourishing entrance even when there were no longer doors or walls to enter past.

“Small day to you, you filthy Jew,” Melchisedech gave it back to him. Ah, this was one relationship as beautiful as it had ever been. Here, surely, was one friend remaining as an integral person, one acquaintance of kindred (if not quite equal) intelligence, one—

But Absalom was clothed only in billowing smoke and a reeking cigar. (He had left written orders that he be finally buried in a plain pine box and with a lighted cigar in his mouth. “How will you keep it lit, Absie?” Margaret Stone had asked him. “Never mind, I’ll keep it lit,” Stein had said, “I’ll never be too dead for that.”) And the cigar, though lacking its outer wrapper leaf, held together and fumed prodigiously.

“Freedom, Faith, Great Day,” Absalom said, and there was something uncontained about his eyes and manner. Melchisedech made one of Stein’s own contempt-carrying gestures back at him, the one that said, without words, “Above the ears, nothing!” And Stein understood it not at all.

Why, Stein’s brains were shot, gone completely! Stein had always had a lot of brains, but they had been of a volatile nature, quite near the surface, and now they had evaporated.

“I wonder whether you’ll miss them, Absalom,” Melchisedech said. “Your brains, I mean.”

“No, I don’t think so. Brains were useful only during the transition period. Now that the Great Day is here, they would probably prove a handicap. I’ve divested myself of mine, yes. I’ve divested myself of everything except the stogie. It will become my token and it will take the place of my name. Do you notice anything special about it?”

“That the longer you smoke it the longer it gets? Yes. You are all full of tricks this morning.”

“Faith and Freedom, those are the things,” Stein said. “This is the cigar made from faith-tobacco, not from physical tobacco. It is of the celestial tobacco foretold in scripture.”

Stein had, in these latter years, become an obese man. When uncovered and uncontained, he became very much so. And he had always been a straight-faced kidder. But was he now? Could he be trusted? What is more noxious than a kidder gone serious? But he remained the distant possibility of hope.

“I suppose that we won’t print any of the papers or magazines anymore,” Mary Virginia was saying. (Of all of them she was the only one formly enough to go divested.) “Papers and magazines were useful only for the transition period. Now that the Great Day is here we should be doing Great-Day stuff instead.”

“What would that be?” Melchisedech asked.

“Oh, sing songs without words, I guess. Finger-paint with faith-paint, not with physical paint. Be very close to each other. These are all forms of Great Day communication.”

Zabotski, well known in that neighborhood, probably stuck his head into the building. Probably, for it was hard to say just when a head was stuck into a building now that there were no walls or doors left.

“There’s a fellow over on O’Dwyer Street who’s already shed his skin completely,” he said. “Duff, why aren’t you in the buff?”

“Clothed and in my right mind I’ll remain,” Melchisedech said. “Now, what were you jabbering, Zabotski?”

“A Great Day first: a fellow over on O’Dwyer Street has already shed his skin completely. That makes him the most emancipated man in town, possibly in the world.”

“Oh, we’ll all be doing it before the day is over with,” Mary Virginia said.

“Except me,” Melchisedech challenged.

“Oh, I forgot, this Day isn’t ever over with,” Mary Virginia corrected herself. “It is now Great Day forever, and yet we’ll all be doing it soon. And when we are all skin-shed, then we’ll be well on the way to true liberation. We’ll be able to get so close to each other after we’re skinless. Rubbing eyeballs with each other isn’t in it for closeness anymore.”

“Some of the fellows are making their diaphragms disappear,” Stein said, “for greater visceral freedom.”

“That’s nice,” Salvation Sally said.

This Zabotski, though bluff, was a good man. He had put up a big pot and a lot of money to keep the soup kitchen going through the years. And, providentially, he still had a big pot and a lot of money left. His appearance brought a question out of Melchisedech’s gorge:

“The soup kitchen, is it still operating today? Is the big pot still boiling, the pot that never ceases to boil?” The soup kitchen and the flophouse for the poor were adjacent to the Pelican Press.

“The big pot is still boiling,” Margaret Stone said. “It is boiling with faith-soup now. There’s no need to put anything physical into it.”

“Is this thing worldwide?” Melchisedech asked them. He had invented the Day, and he knew less about it than any of them.

“Of course it is worldwide,” Stein said. “From the East even unto the West and all that. And, of course, we have no old-style communication with the rest of the world on the subject. Electronic and mechanical communications aren’t being used. Why should they be? Faith and Freedom and Sense of Community have arrived, and nothing else is needed.”

“Ah me,” Melchisedech said. “I had always regarded the Pelican as a refuge, as an anchor to hold fast in the great storms of the world.”

“Both the sea ships and the river boats are cutting loose their anchors and letting them sink forever,” Zabotski said. “With faith, who needs anchors?”

“You have failed me, all of you,” Melchisedech said. “You are the lump and not the leaven. You are as the world, worldly, but with none of the redeeming quality of solid black earth. But I know a greener oasis and a more unfailing fountain. I leave you.”