Рэй Брэдбери - G.B.S. - Mark V

«Charlie! Where you going?»

Members of the rocket crew, passing, called.

Charles Willis did not answer.

He took the vacuum tube down through the friendly humming bowels of the spaceship. He fell, thinking: This is the grand hour.

«Chuck! Where travelling?» someone called.

To meet someone dead but alive, cold but warm, forever untouchable but reaching out somehow to touch.

«Idiot! Fool!»

The voice echoed. He smiled.

Then he saw Clive, his best friend, drifting up in the opposite chute. He averted his gaze, but Clive sang out through his seashell ear-pack radio:

«I want to see you!»

«Later!» Willis said.

«I know where you're going. Stupid!»

And Clive was gone up away while Willis fell softly down, his hands trembling.

His boots touched surface. On the instant he suffered renewed delight.

He walked down through the hidden machineries of the rocket. Lord, he thought, crazy. Here we are one hundred days gone away from the Earth in Space, and, this very hour, most of the crew, in fever, dialing their aphrodisiac animatronic devices that touched and hummed to them in their shut clamshell beds. While, what do I do? he thought. This.

He moved to peer into a small storage pit.

There, in an eternal dusk, sat the old man.

«Sir,» he said, and waited.

«Shaw,» he whispered. «Oh, Mr.George Bernard Shaw.»

The old man's eyes sprang wide as if he had swallowed an Idea.

He seized his bony knees and gave a sharp cry of laughter.

«By God, I do accept it all!»

«Accept what, Mr.Shaw?»

Mr.Shaw flashed his bright blue gaze upon Charles Willis.

«The Universe! It thinks, therefore I am! So I had best accept, eh? Sit.»

Willis sat in the shadowed areaway, clasping his knees and his own warm delight with being here again.

«Shall I read your mind, young Willis, and tell you what you've been up to since last we conversed?»

«Can you read minds, Mr.Shaw?»

«No, thank God. Wouldn't it be awful if I were not only the cuneiform-tablet robot of George Bernard Shaw, but could also scan your head-bumps and spell your dreams? Unbearable.»

«You already are, Mr.Shaw.»

«Touche. Well, now.» The old man raked his reddish beard with his thin fingers, then poked Willis gently in the ribs. «How is it you are the only one aboard this starship who ever visits me?»

«Well, sir, you see ―»

The young man's cheeks burnt themselves to full blossom.

«Ah, yes, I do see,» said Shaw. «Up through the honeycomb of the ship, all the happy male bees in their hives with their syrupy wind-up soft-singing nimble-nibbling toys, their bright female puppets.»

«Mostly dumb.»

«Ah, well. It was not always thus. On my last trip the Captain wished to play Scrabble using only names of characters, concepts and ideas from my plays. Now, strange boy, why do you squat here with this hideous old ego? Have you no need for that soft and gentle company abovestairs?»

«It's a long journey, Mr.Shaw, two years out beyond

Pluto and back. Plenty of time for abovestairs company. Never enough for this. I have the dreams of a goat but the

genetics of a saint.»

«Well said!» The old man sprang lightly to his feet and paced about, pointing his beard now toward Alpha Centauri, now toward the nebula in Orion.

«How runs our menu today, Willis? Shall I preface Saint Joan for you? Or…?»

«Chuck…?»

Willis's head jerked. His seashell radio whispered in his ear. «Willis! Clive calling. You're late for dinner. I know where you are. I'm coming down. Chuck ―»

Willis thumped his ear. The voice cut off.

«Quick, Mr.Shaw! Can you-well-run?»

«Can Icarus fall from the sun? Jump! I shall pace you with these spindly cricket legs!»

They ran.

Taking the corkscrew staircase instead of the air-tube, they looked back from the top platform in time to see dive's shadow dart into that tomb where Shaw had died but to wake again.

«Willis!» cried his voice.

«To hell with him,» said Willis.

Shaw beamed. «Hell? I know it well. Come. I'll show I you around!»

Laughing, they jumped into the feather-tube and fell up.

This was the place of stars.

Which is to say the one place in all the ship where, if one wished, one could come and truly look at the Universe and the billion billion stars which poured across it and ' never stopped pouring, cream from the mad dairies of the gods. Delicious frights or outcrops, on the other hand, if you thought it so, from the sickness of Lord God Jehovah turned in his sleep, upset with Creation, and birthing dino-saur worlds spun about Satanic suns.

«It's all in the thinking,» observed Mr.Shaw, sidling his eyes at his young consort.

«Mr.Shaw! You can read minds?»

«Poppycock. I merely read faces. Yours is clear glass. I glanced just now and saw Job afflicted, Moses and the Burning Bush. Come. Let us look at the Deeps and see what God has been up to in the ten billion years since He collided with Himself and procreated Vastness.»

They stood now, surveying the Universe, counting the stars to a billion and beyond.

«Oh,» moaned the young man, suddenly, and tears fell from his eyes. «How I wish I had been alive when you were alive, sir. How I wish I had truly known you.»

«This Shaw is best,» retorted the old man, «all of the mincemeat and none of the tin. The coattails are better than the man. Hang to them and survive.»

Space lay all about, as vast as God's first thought, as deep as His primal breathing.

They stood, one of them tall, one short, by the scanning window, with a fine view of the great Andromeda Nebula whenever they wished to focus it near with a touch of the button which made the Eye magnify and suck things close.

After a long moment of drinking stars, the young man let out his breath.

«Mr.Shaw…?.Say it. You know what I like to hear.»

«Do I, my boy?» Mr.Shaw's eyes twinkled.

All of Space was around them, all of the Universe, all of the night of the celestial Being, all the stars and all the places between the stars, and the ship moving on its silent course, and the crew of the ship busy at work or games or touching their amorous toys, so these two were alone with their talk, these two stood viewing the Mystery and say-ing what must be said.

«Say it, Mr.Shaw.»

«Well, now…»

Mr.Shaw fixed his eyes on a star some twenty light-years away.

«What ore we?» he asked. «Why, we are the miracle of force and matter making itself over into imagination and will. Incredible. The Life Force experimenting with forms. You for one. Me for another. The Universe has shouted itself alive. We are one of the shouts. Creation turns in its abyss. We have bothered it, dreaming ourselves to shapes. The void is filled with slumbers; ten billion on a billion on a billion bombardments of light and material that know not themselves, that sleep moving and move but finally to make an eye and waken on themselves. Among so much that is flight and ignorance, we are the blind force that gropes like Lazarus from a billion-light-year tomb. We summon ourselves. We say, O Lazarus Life Force, truly come ye forth. So the Universe, a motion of deaths, fumbles to reach across Time to feel its own flesh and know it to be ours. We touch both ways and find each other miraculous because we are One.»

Mr.Shaw turned to glance at his young friend.

«There you have it. Satisfied?»

«Oh, yes! I―»

The young man stopped.

Behind them, in the viewing-cabin door, stood Clive. Beyond him, they could hear music pulsing from the far cubicles where crewmen and their huge toys played at amorous games.