Big Book of Science Fiction (26 page)

“What year is this?”

“The year of the rocket. Look
here.” And the old man touched some flowers that bloomed at his touch. The
blossoms were like blue and white fire. They burned and sparkled their cold,
long petals. The blooms were two feet wide, and they were the color of an
autumn moon. “Moon-flowers,” said the old man. “From the other side of the
moon.” He brushed them and they dripped away into a silver rain, a shower of
white sparks, on the air. “The year of the rocket. That’s a title for you, Tom.
That’s why we brought you here, we’ve need of you. You’re the only man could
handle the sun without being burnt to a ridiculous cinder. We want you to
juggle the sun, Tom, and the stars, and whatever else you see on your trip to
Mars.”

“Mars?” Thomas Wolfe turned to
seize the old man’s arm, bending down to him, searching his face in unbelief.

“Tonight. You leave at six o’clock.”

The old man held a fluttering
pink ticket on the air, waiting for Tom to think to take it.

~ * ~

It
was five in the afternoon. “Of course, of course I appreciate what you’ve done,”
cried Thomas Wolfe.

“Sit down, Tom. Stop walking
around.”

“Let me finish, Mr. Field, let me
get through with this, I’ve got to say it.”

“We’ve been arguing for hours,”
pleaded Mr. Field, exhaustedly.

They had talked from breakfast
until lunch until tea, they had wandered through a dozen rooms and ten dozen
arguments, they had perspired and grown cold and perspired again.

“It all comes down to this,” said
Thomas Wolfe, at last. “I can’t stay here, Mr. Field. I’ve got to go back. This
isn’t my time. You’ve no right to interfere—”

“But, I—”

“I was amidst my work, my best
was yet to come, and now you hurry me off three centuries. Mr. Field, I want
you to call Mr. Bolton back. I want you to have him put me in his machine,
whatever it is, and return me to 1938, my rightful place and year. That’s all I
ask of you.”

“But, don’t you
want
to
see Mars?”

“With all my heart. But I know it
isn’t for me. It would throw my writing off. I’d have a huge handful of experience
that I couldn’t fit into my other writing when I went home.”

“You don’t understand, Tom, you
don’t understand at all.”

“I understand that you’re
selfish.”

“Selfish? Yes,” said the old man.
“For myself, and for others, very selfish.”

“I want to go home.”

“Listen to me, Tom.”

“Call Mr. Bolton.”

“Tom, I don’t want to have to
tell you this. I thought I wouldn’t have to, that it wouldn’t be necessary.
Now, you leave me only this alternative.” The old man’s right hand fetched hold
of a curtained wall, swept back the drapes revealing a large white screen, and
dialed a number, a series of numbers, the screen flickered into vivid color,
the lights of the room darkened, darkened, and a graveyard took line before
their eyes.

“What are you doing?” demanded Wolfe,
striding forward, staring at the screen.

“I don’t like this at all,” said
the old man. “Look there.”

The graveyard lay in
mid-afternoon light, the light of summer. From the screen drifted the smell of
summer earth, granite, and the odor of a nearby creek. From the trees, a bird
called. Red and yellow flowers nodded among the stones, and the screen moved,
the sky rotated, the old man twisted a dial for emphasis, and in the center of
the screen, growing large, coming closer, yet larger, and now filling their
senses was a dark granite mass and Thomas Wolfe, looking up in the dim room,
ran his eyes over the chiseled words, once, twice, three times, gasped, and
read again, for there was his name:

thomas
wolfe.

And the date of his birth and the
date of his death, and the flowers and green ferns smelling sweetly on the air
of the cold room.

“Turn it off,” he said.

“I’m sorry, Tom.”

“Turn it off, turn it off! I don’t
believe it.”

“It’s there.”

The screen went black and now the
entire room was a midnight vault, a tomb, with the last faint odor of flowers.

“I didn’t wake up again,” said
Thomas Wolfe.

“No. You died that September of
1938.”

“I never finished my book.”

“It was edited for you, by others
who went over it, carefully.”

“I didn’t finish my work, I didn’t
finish my work.”

“Don’t take it so badly, Tom.”

“How else can I take it?”

The old man didn’t turn on the
lights. He didn’t want to see Tom there. “Sit down, boy.” No reply. “Tom?” No
answer. “Sit down, son; will you have something to drink?” For answer there was
only a sigh and a kind of brutal moaning. “Good Lord,” said Tom, “it’s not
fair. I had so much left to do, it’s not fair.” He began to weep quietly.

“Don’t do that,” said the old
man. “Listen. Listen to me. You’re still alive, aren’t you? Here? Now? You
still
feel,
don’t
you?”

Thomas Wolfe waited for a minute
and then he said, “Yes.”

“All right, then.” The old man
pressed forward on the dark air. “I’ve brought you here, I’ve given you another
chance, Tom. An extra month or so. Do you think I haven’t grieved for you? When
I read your books and saw your gravestone there, three centuries worn by rains
and wind, boy, don’t you imagine how it killed me to think of your talent gone
away? Well, it did! It killed me, Tom. And I spent my money to find a way to
you. You’ve got a respite, not long, not long at all. Professor Bolton says
that, with luck, he can hold the channels open through time for eight weeks. He
can keep you here that long, and only that long. In that interval, Tom, you must
write the book you’ve wanted to write—no, not the book you were working on for
them, son, no, for they’re dead and gone and it can’t be changed. No, this time
it’s a book for us, Tom, for us the living, that’s the book we want. A book you
can leave with us, for you, a book bigger and better in every way than anything
you ever wrote; say you’ll
do
it, Tom, say you’ll forget about that
stone and that hospital for eight weeks and start to work for us, will you,
Tom, will you?”

The lights came slowly on. Tom
Wolfe stood tall at the window, looking out, his face huge and tired and pale.
He watched the rockets on the sky of early evening. “I imagine I don’t realize
what you’ve done for me,” he said. “You’ve given me a little more time, and
time is the thing I love most and need, the thing I always hated and fought
against, and the only way I can show my appreciation is by doing as you say.”
He hesitated. “And when I’m finished, then what?”

“Back to your hospital in 1938,
Tom.”

“Must I?”

“We can’t change time. We
borrowed you for five minutes. We’ll return you to your hospital cot five
minutes after you left it. That way, we upset nothing. It’s all been written.
You can’t hurt us in the future by living here now with us, but, if you refused
to go back, you could hurt the past, and resultantly, the future, make it into
some sort of chaos.”

“Eight weeks,” said Thomas Wolfe.

“Eight weeks.”

“And the Mars rocket leaves in an
hour?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll need pencils and paper.”

“Here they are.”

“I’d better go get ready.
Goodbye, Mr. Field.”

“Good luck, Tom.”

Six o’clock. The sun setting. The
sky turning to wine. The big house quiet. The old man shivering in the heat
until Professor Bolton entered. “Bolton, how is he getting on, how was he at
the port; tell me?”

Bolton smiled. “What a monster he
is, so big, they had to make a special uniform for him! You should’ve seen him,
walking around, lifting up everything, sniffing like a great hound, talking,
his eyes looking at everything, excited as a ten-year-old!”

“God bless him, oh, God bless
him! Bolton, can you keep him here as long as you say?”

Bolton frowned. “He doesn’t
belong here, you know. If our power should falter, he’d be snapped back to his
own time, like a puppet on a rubber band. We’ll try and keep him, I assure you.”

“You’ve got to, you understand,
you can’t let him go back until he’s finished with his book. You’ve—”

“Look,” said Bolton. He pointed
to the sky. On it was a silver rocket.

“Is that him?” asked the old man.

“That’s Tom Wolfe,” replied
Bolton. “Going to Mars.”

“Give ‘em blazes, Tom!” shouted
the old man, lifting both fists.

They watched the rocket fire into
space.

By midnight, the story was coming
through.

Henry William Field sat in his
library. On his desk was a machine that hummed. It repeated words that were
being written out beyond the Moon. It scrawled them in black pencil, in
facsimile of Tom Wolfe’s fevered hand a million miles away. The old man waited
for a pile of them to collect and then he seized them and read them aloud to
the room where Bolton and the servants stood listening. He read the words about
space and time and travel, about a large man and a large journey and how it was
in the long midnight and coldness of space, and how a man could be hungry
enough to take all of it and ask for more. He read the words that were full of
fire and thunder and mystery.

Space was like October, wrote
Thomas Wolfe. He said things about its darkness and its loneliness and man so
small in it. The eternal and timeless October, was one of the things he said.
And then he told of the rocket itself, the smell and the feel of the metal of
the rocket, and the sense of destiny and wild exultancy to at last leave Earth
behind, all problems and all sadnesses, and go seeking a bigger problem and a
bigger sadness. Oh, it was fine writing, and it said what had to be said about
space and man and his small rockets out there alone.

The old man read until he was
hoarse, and then Bolton read, and then the others, far into the night, when the
machine stopped transcribing words and they knew that Tom Wolfe was in bed,
then, on the rocket, flying to Mars, probably not asleep, no, he wouldn’t sleep
for hours yet, no, lying awake, like a body the night before a circus, not
believing the big jewelled black tent is up and the circus is on, with ten
billion blazing performers on the high wires and the invisible trapezes of
space.

“There,” breathed the old man,
gentling aside the last pages of the first chapter. “What do you think of that,
Bolton?”

“It’s good.”

“Good, hell!” shouted Field. “It’s
wonderful! Read it again, sit down, read it again, damn you!”

It kept coming through, one day
following another, for ten hours at a time. The stack of yellow papers on the
floor, scribbled on, grew immense in a week, unbelievable in two weeks,
absolutely impossible in a month.

“Listen to this!” cried the old
man, and read.

“And this!” he said.

“And this chapter here, and this
little novel here, it just came through, Bolton, titled
The Space War,
a
complete novel on how it feels to fight a space war. Tom’s been talking to
people, soldiers, officers, men, veterans of space. He’s got it all here. And
here’s a chapter called The Long Midnight, and here’s one on the Negro
colonization of Mars, and here’s a character sketch of a Martian, absolutely
priceless!”