Дэймон Найт - Orbit 9

“There is a log of the voyage?”

For answer the Count glanced at the heaped black ashes in the Carrara fireplace. A groan escaped Magniac. The Count continued, “My lodge was landed in a comparatively inaccessible valley near Belgrade. Our young people established a cordial relationship with the villagers over a period of a month. By judicious use of the gold with which you supplied them, they secured the animals you may have noticed, as well as a variety of new plants and seeds. This rose, for example, comes originally from America and is named the Chrysler Imperial. Of what empire, I have no notion.” He delicately sniffed the fragrance.

“When may we return?”

“Abandon hope,” said the Count. “Science and circumstance have made old Earth uninhabitable for us.”

Magniac kicked his chair back and stood taut with fury.

The Count sipped his wine. “The crew was subject to a series of increasingly violent respiratory ailments from which they never fully recovered. Compounding their afflictions was the presence of a stowaway, a spy of the Muscovites, who accompanied them on their journey home.”

“A human! Alive?” Magniac’s eyeteeth glistened.

“Until—let me see—four days ago. He must have been a brave and foolhardy man. His name was not mentioned in the log, but it may well have been Mithridates. He had ingested the subtle poisons of Earth in many countries—new wonders of chemistry—nothing so simple and healthy as arsenic—”

Magniac sucked air through his teeth.

“—and in the mental and physical perturbation of the crew,” the Count continued languidly, “in their justifiable fear of my reaction, the old truth became resurgent. They drank his blood. Knowledge may be power, Magniac, but a revelation of the truth to the philosophically indigent can kill. Our emotional muddleheads were morally overthrown by their action. They became desperately ill as well, from the virulent poisons carried in his bloodstream. In what I must regard as a deplorable excess of idiocy, they agreed to a suicide pact and killed themselves upon landing.”

“Good riddance!”

“Agreed,” said the Count soberly.

“As for the rest of your fantasy,” snarled Magniac, fumbling with the buttons of his ruffled shirt, “you have burned the evidence and truth has never been—”

There was a dreadful crashing noise from the vaults. “The resonating chambers,” murmured the Count. “No one will leave Neuland now.” He stood and said, “Your banishment is still in force. Depart, you atavistic madman.” De Juilly, Weissech, and Welby stood in the doorway, wrecking bars in their hands. A rose petal fell to the tabletop.

Magniac slumped, hope destroyed, revenge forgotten. He walked out of the lodge with dragging feet. He plodded across the fields, a figure from another age in his tall silk hat, long frock coat, and red silk-lined black cape.

The sun set and he welcomed the dark. At his tower he lifted the trapdoor, descended into the crypt, lay in his coffin bed and put a silver bullet through his old heart with the Parabellum Luger.

Anybody want to get away from it all? To make a total change? You had better want to do it: you will do it anyhow. Now is the time. Today is the day.

Three learned men were in the academic center of a learned metropolis, talking about a thing that hadn’t happened for thousands of years, which perhaps had never happened. You will already know of these men, by reputation at least, if there is anything academic about you at all.

“It wasn’t understood the first time it happened, or any of the other times,” Professor George Ruil offered. “In spite of a few studies, it has been understood even less since those times. The accounts of the happenings have been rationalized, falsified, belittled, and that makes it all wrong: it was never rational, it was never false, and it certainly was not little.”

“It is interesting, George, in the way that so many secondary footprints in the clay of time are interesting,” Dr. Ralph Amerce told his friend, “but it is of no more present importance than are bear burrows or gravels of the third ice age. And it can’t come back.”

“I’m not sure that George here won’t be able to connect it with bear burrows and gravels of the third ice age,” Nobelist Professor Wilburton Romer jibed. (These were three very learned men: would we tune in on them otherwise?) “But you can’t find any real traces of it, George, only traces of traces. It hasn’t any form we can grasp, it hasn’t any handle we can take hold of, it hasn’t any name we can call it by.”

“Oh, I’ll call it Jubilee,” George Ruil said.

“A thing named Jubilee back when the world was young, when men were not quite men yet?” Romer questioned.

“The world was older then,” Ruil offered. “It grows younger all the time, as any geologist can tell you; it sluffs off its old incrustations. And men were always men.”

“Let us not get into your prejudices on that , George,” Ralph Amerce begged. “But you really don’t give us anything to look at or handle. What was Jubilee?”

“It was as strong an urge as that to propagate, as strong as that to survive,” Ruil offered. “It was and is a cyclic necessity. Can we be true people without it?”

“We were animals when we had it, if we had it,” Amerce said. “Yes, we can be, and we are now, true people without it. It’s only one of your odd little theories, George. If such things once happened, why then they happened. But they had no real purpose.”

“Only to renew the world and everything that moves upon it,” George Ruil maintained, “only to provide impregnation and contrast and culture and moment. How will we be renewed now? What will provide these things for the world today?”

“We do quite well now, George,” Romer said, “better, I believe, than when we lived in trees and swamps and caves. I wouldn’t change anything of it now, George, even if I could.”

“I’d change a lot of things of it now, if I could,” Amerce smiled. “But it was no more than a curious cyclic thing, George, and it is finished forever.”

“A man would be foolish to say that about the years, Ralph, especially to say in the twelfth month of the year that the cycle of the years was finished forever. I believe that this cycle also begins to come around now.”

“What’s the worry, George?” Romer asked. “It will be the matter of some thousands of years. If we do see the signs of it, we will not be here to see the thing itself.”

“No, it is not the matter of some thousands of years,” Ruil contradicted. “The effects and the readjustments may take several thousand years, but the Jubilee itself is one day. One day only, friends. The nervousness before it may be of some hundred or two hundred years, the early skirmishing may be of a month or so, but the Jubilee itself is in one day. Today (I have just learned it myself) is the day.”

“Have you anything at all to go on, George?” Wilburton Romer asked him.

“Only a timetable of my own construction, contradictory in many places, full of gaps everywhere. An old prophecy That no creature on earth will sleep tonight where he slept last night.’ The fact of a certain uneasiness in the world for the last two hundred years. Has anyone else noticed that? And a hunch; a hunch, men, almost as strong, I believe, as the thing itself was, will be.”

“And what will you do with your little hunch, George?” Ralph Amerce asked him out of that pleasantly ironic face.

“I guess I should take it to the president. He should be advised of a thing like this.”

—Three learned men in the academic center of a learned metropolis, talking about a thing that hadn’t happened in the last three thousand years, maybe not in the last thirty thousand years, that perhaps had never happened at all, that had left none but very dim and confused footprints if it did happen.