Дэймон Найт - Orbit 4

“McSkee, you’ve hinted several times that you had a secret for getting the most out of life,” said Sour John, “but you haven’t told me what it is.”

“Man, I haven’t hinted; I’ve spoken plainly,” McSkee swore.

“Then what in hog heaven is the secret?” John howled.

“Live your life one day at a time, John. That’s all.”

Then McSkee was singing an old hobo song, too old a song for a forty-year-old man, not a specialist, to have known.

“When did you learn that?” John asked him.

“Learned it yesterday. But I learned a bunch of new ones today.”

“I noticed, a few hours back, that there was something curiously dated about your speech,” John said. “But it doesn’t seem to be the case now.”

“John, I get contemporary real fast. I’ve a good ear, and I talk a lot and listen a lot, and I’m the perfect mimic. I can get up on a lingo in a day. They don’t change as fast as you’d imagine.”

They went down to the beach to put the cap on the night. If you’re going to die, it’s nice to die within the sound of the surf, McSkee had said. They went down beyond the end of the sea wall and into the stretches where the beach was dark. Aye, McSkee had guessed it rightly, there was excitement waiting for them, or actually it had been following them. It was the opportunity for a last glorious fight.

A tight dark group of men had been following them—fellows who had somehow been insulted during the day and night of carousing. The intrepid pair turned and faced the men from a distance. McSkee finished the last bottle and threw it into the midst of the group. The men were bad-natured; they flamed up instantly, and the man who was struck by the flying bottle swore.

So they joined battle.

For a while it seemed that the forces of righteousness would prevail. McSkee was a glorious fighter, and Sour John was competent. They spread those angry men out on the sand like a bunch of beached flounder fish. It was one of those great battles—always to be remembered.

But there were too many of those men, as McSkee had known there would be; he had made an outlandish number of enemies in a day and a night.

The wild fight climaxed, crested, and shattered, like a high wave thunderously breaking under. And McSkee, having touched top glory and pleasure, suddenly ceased to battle.

He gave one wild whoop of joy that echoed the length of the island. Then he drew a grand breath and held it. He closed his eyes and stood like a grinning rigid statue.

The angry men toppled him and swarmed him; they stomped him into the sand and kicked the very life out of the McSkee.

Sour John had battled as long as there was a battle. He understood now that McSkee had withdrawn for reasons that were not clear. He did likewise. He broke and ran, not from cowardice, but from private inclination.

An hour later, just at the first touch of dawn, Sour John returned. He found that McSkee was dead—with no breath, no pulse, no heat. And there was something else. McSkee had said, in one of his rambling tales, that he got a pretty high shine on him. John knew what he meant now. That man got ripe real fast. By the test of the nose, McSkee was dead.

With a child’s shovel that he found there, Sour John dug a hole in the side of one of the sand cliffs. He buried his friend McSkee there. He knew that McSkee still had the twenty-dollar bill in his pants. He left it with him. It isn’t so bad to be one or the other, but to be both dead and broke at the same time is an ignominy almost past enduring.

Then Sour John walked into town to get some breakfast, and quickly forgot about the whole thing.

He followed his avocation of knocking around the world and meeting interesting people. The chances are that he met you, if there’s anything interesting about you at all; he doesn’t miss any of them.

Twelve years went by, and some weeks. Sour John was back in one of the interesting port cities, but with a difference. There had come the day as it comes, to many (and pray it may not come to you!) when Sour John was not flush. He was as broke as a man can be, with nothing in his pockets or in his stomach, and with very little on his back. He was on the beach in every sense.

Then he bethought himself of the previous times he had been in this city. There had been benders here; there had been antics and enjoyments. They came back to him in a rush—a dozen happy times, and then one in particular.

“He was an Odd One, a real juicy cove,” Sour John grinned as he remembered. “He knew a trick, how to die just when he wanted to. He said that it took a lot of practice, but I don’t see the point in practicing a thing that you do but once.”

Then Sour John remembered a twenty-dollar bill that he had buried with that juicy cove. The memory of the incandescent McSkee came back to Sour John as he walked down the empty beach.

“He said that you could jam a lot of living into a day and a night,” John said. “You can. I do. He said something else that I forget.”

Sour John found the old sand cliff. In half an hour he had dug out the body of McSkee. It still had a high old shine on it, but it was better preserved than the clothes.

The twenty-dollar bill was still there, disreputable but spendable.

“I’ll take it now, when I have the need,” Sour John said softly. “And later, when I am flush again, I will bring it back here.”

“Yes. You do that,” said McSkee.

There are men in the world who would be startled if a thing like that happened to them. Some of them would have gasped and staggered back. The meaner ones would have cried out. John Sourwine, of course, was not a man like that. But he was human, and he did a human thing:

He blinked.

“I had no idea that you were in such a state,” he said to McSkee. “So that’s the way you do it?”

“That’s the way, John. One day at a time! And I space them far enough apart that they don’t pall on me.”

“Are you ready to get up again, McSkee?”

“I sure am not, John. I had just barely died. It’ll be another fifty years before I have a really good appetite worked up.”

“Don’t you think it’s cheating?”

“Nobody’s told me that it’s disallowed. And only the days that I live count. I stretch them out a long while this way, and every one of them is memorable. I tell you that I have no dull days in my life.”

“I’m still not sure how you do it, McSkee. Is it suspended animation?”

“No, no! More men have run afoul on that phrase than on any other. You think of it like that and you’ve already missed it. You die, John, or else you’re just kidding yourself. Watch me this time and you’ll see. Then bury me again and leave me in peace. Nobody likes to be resurrected before he’s had time to get comfortable in his grave.”

So McSkee put himself carefully to death once more, and Sour John buried him again in the side of the sand cliff.

McSkee—which in hedge Irish is Son of Slumber—the master of suspended animation (no, no, if you think of it that way you’ve already missed it, it’s death, it’s death), who lived his life one day at a time, and those days separated by decades.

The title of this story might seem to suggest Longfellow's Elizabeth: So on the ocean of life we pass and speak one another, / Only a look and a voice; then darkness again and a silence. And indeed this is part of its meaning; the other part, which is less pleasant, I leave you to discover.

There are only fragments of me left now. Chunks of memory have broken free and drifted away like calved glaciers. It is always like that when a Passenger leaves us. We can never be sure of all the things our borrowed bodies did. We have only the lingering traces, the imprints.