Nineteen

I woke up in the little alcove that was my bedroom in the first stage, lying on my pad with Michele bending over me. I thought I saw Mike over by the hatch to the space craft, and heard him say, "Then I'll go below." My first thought was, "Damn it! If Mike were here and I was there, that'd be one problem solved!" I asked, "Was that Mike?"

"Thank God!" she said. "We've been worried sick over you. What made you come back so late?"

"Oh, I got lost, that's all. Is Mike all right?"

"Yes, he's okay. He got back an hour ago, about ten minutes after it got light again. Where was St. Peter that you got yourself lost?"

"I asked him to let me alone just before it got dark, and I wandered around, and then when it began to happen, I didn't know where I was, and suddenly there was no one around. I don't think I've ever been so scared in my life. Where is everybody? Do you know?"

"Everything's all right," she said. "I know where they were. But we'll talk about it later; this is your sleep period, and you need it."

She was right. All of the nervous tension had completely exhausted me, and I had in addition a terrific headache, probably because the adrenaline in my veins had gone down, and because I'd had a few minutes of not enough oxygen. I asked Michele for a headache pill, and was practically asleep in spite of the pain by the time she brought it. Then she left, and after a few minutes of lying on my back staring at the orange stain on the ceiling of the first stage, I fell asleep.

It is peculiar that you never seem to dream about the important things that just happened to you. I dreamed a great deal during that sleep period; I remember waking several times in the middle of a terrifying feeling of helplessness, and realizing that it was really the headache that kept waking me up. But the dreams I remember weren't about darkness or emptiness; they all revolved about that stain on the ceiling that I had half-noticed as I dropped off to sleep. It became a problem I had to solve, or turned itself into an equation I couldn't get into integrable form which meant I wouldn't pass the exam for my Doctorate, or it was a message to be decoded before Mike could see me so he could marry Janice, or a theme that Wordsworth had to turn into a symphony, leaving me to finish so he could return with us; and so on.

I woke, anything but refreshed, but now incapable of more sleep, because I was now curious about the darkness and why the city had been deserted. "Michele . . . " I called, rather feebly.

"I think maybe you'd better stay inside today," she said as she appeared through the hatch. "I told St. Peter, and I'll stay to keep watch."

"You don't need . . . " I said as I tried to rise, and immediately felt the way Humpty Dumpty must have. "I guess maybe it'd be a good idea," I said, and lay back down.

"Mike already left," she said. "Cleopatra was out there too, and he understands."

"I think all I need is rest and some food."

"Good, I was wondering if you could eat. I'll be right back." She returned with something light--literally. We had whipped as much air as we could into everything that would take to being whipped, because it made it somewhat less unpleasant to eat. "Go easy on this," she said. "Remember, you're on Jupiter, and you don't want to put your body to a strain right now."

"I'll be okay," I answered. Getting the food down wasn't too bad, but I needed to drink, and there was no way to make whipped water. But I managed, though when it was all over, the headache came back for an hour or so with a vengeance.

Apparently I slept a little more, because the food was gone suddenly when I looked up at Michele and asked, "Now, what is it that happened? It's got me so curious I can't sleep."

She laughed. "You're in a fine state, you are. Well, I was in Cleopatra's house. We'd just come back from a trip over to the big forest for something that are like our mushrooms--you know, that don't photosynthesize, but never mind--and things began to look funny, and then I noticed that it was getting dark. I asked Cleopatra, and he said, 'Dark? Yes, you are right. It is the call.'

"I asked him what call, and he said that it was nothing that concerned me; and then he got all nervous about maybe having insulted me by telling me to mind my own business, and he started in apologizing the way he does, and I couldn't get anything coherent out of him, he was so anxious to get away and yet not to hurt my feelings.

"By piecing things together, I learned that it was some kind of call by the Awesome Friend, you know, and they were supposed to all meet in the church."

"So that's where they were all going in such a hurry! I should have thought of that and followed them!"

"Well," she went on, "he didn't invite me, and since it had something to do with their religion, I didn't want to butt in; so I told him I'd be perfectly all right and would go back to the ship, and he was off like a shot, after he'd assured me three or four times that the darkness wouldn't last long, and it was nothing to be concerned about. It was fairly dim by that time already, and I hoped he'd make it while he could still see; but of course he lives right next to the big square.

"Well then it got completely dark, and I began to get a little scared--but of course you know about all that."

"What scared me most was the way the animals were behaving. They didn't know what to make of it."

"That's right, now that you mention it. They were all swimming for shelter. It must have been horrible for you."

"I panicked completely for a couple of minutes."

"I can imagine. I looked down, and it was really spooky; the light was just dimming out. I couldn't tell if the fire was going out down there, or if there was some kind of darkening of the stuff between us and it."

"I know. Talk about the end of the world! I was sure it was the end of me, anyway. The LED's in my watch clicked on, and all I could see was the numbers staring at me, telling me how much longer I had to live."

She put her hand on my shoulder--I was lying half on my side--and didn't say anything for a while, and I finally said, "Then what did you do?"

"Well, of course, it was only dark for about ten minutes or so, I guess--maybe less, I wasn't timing it the way you must have been--and then the light began to come back. I was still in Cleopatra's house, because it was dark enough by the time he left that I thought it would be wise not to try to leave. I looked out as soon as you could see anything, and there was nobody around, so I decided I'd just go over to the church and look in. And there they all were, all jammed together, and way up top there was a purple one in the bright light from the top giving a sermon, I suppose. But then it was beyond time to get back, so I came home, and Mike was already here, but you weren't. We both got really worried as the time got closer to you running out of oxygen. Then Mike made some stupid remark about it's being a shame it was you instead of him, so we could have spared ourselves palpitations of the heart. I wish he wouldn't say things like that!"

I didn't know what to answer, so I said nothing. Poor Mike! I lay back as though tired.

"I've been getting you all tired out," she said. "I should know better. Anyway, everything's all right now."

Oh, yes indeed. All right.

"By the way, Michi," I said. "How did that stain get there?" As I lay back, I noticed it again.

"What stain?"

"That orange spot up there on the ceiling."

"Well, what do you know?" she said. "I never saw it before. Looks like Mike's been throwing plants around. I wonder what he could have been doing."

"It got stuck in my head when I fell asleep, and has been rattling around; but I suppose it's nothing."

"He probably got some plants off the surface for some reason and they slipped out of his hands when he got inside. But I never knew they'd stain things. Maybe he was experimenting with their food. Well, you get some sleep. I'll be down in the cabin if you need me."

I didn't, as it happened. The headache had more or less disappeared because of the food and water, and I slept through the whole ten hours until the next "day"; and it was glorious. I had forgotten what it was like to sleep more than five hours at a stretch; and now that I was reminded, I had a reason that would temper my regret at going back to earth in another week.

St. Peter greeted me the next day with great concern, and said, "I ought at least to have warned you. Michele told me that you were quite frightened, as indeed you must have been; even we were impressed by the darkness."

"My only real problem was that I didn't know how long it would last, and whether I'd have enough air to get through it."

"I blame myself greatly. When something has not happened within the memory of anyone, one does not, of course, expect it. But I ought to have realized that unlikely events are apt to generate unlikely events, and have anticipated that it might occur. And to think that I actually did tell you of the call, but not of the form it would take! It was inexcusable of me."

"Good heavens, don't even think of it!" I exclaimed. "In any ordinary circumstance, you would have been with me; and I was the one who asked you to leave me alone, after all. Nothing happened to me beyond the first good night's sleep I've had in over a month--and a scare. And on the whole, the way I feel now, the sleep was worth the scare. I hadn't realized how much I needed it."

"You are too kind. The irony of it all was that you were responsible for it."

"I was!"

"Well, your arrival here. But you were responsible, I understand, for your ability to arrive here. Michele has already told me that she explained that it was a call to the church for a revelation from the Awesome Friend. As I say, we had had no experience of what to expect, since the tradition is very vague on exactly how the revelation was to be given, or even if there was to be one at all; all we knew was that if it should begin to darken, we were all to gather in the church and wait, even after the darkness passed."

He was obviously enjoying his little story; such novelties as the arrival of beings from another planet and revelations from the Awesome Friend didn't happen every day there; nothing at all unforeseen had probably happened in Acosmia for hundreds or thousands of years. He was like a man from a little town, all excited about the crash-landing of a plane in his cornfield.

"I looked for you, actually, to warn you of what was happening, but could not find you; and no one I met had noticed you. They were all preoccupied with getting to the church promptly; and I assumed that the Awesome Friend had you in his care as well as me, and would have arranged this separation for His own purposes, and it was my duty to obey. So I put both of us in His hands, and sped off to the church, arriving among the last stragglers.

"It was by now completely dark outside, and whether by contrast or for some other reason, the light in the dome of the church seemed to grow brighter and brighter. I disposed my mind to be as receptive as possible, thinking that the Awesome Friend would infuse into each of us the knowledge that we were to have; but nothing happened.

"As it began to grow lighter outside, (he made a series of shapes, which was evidently someone's name) swam to the doorway of the Holy Room--where the light is--and began to speak. He is one of our priests, and one known to have a special relationship with the Awesome Friend, something like your Teresa of Avila seems to have had, or your Moses.

"He began by saying that the Friend was aware of the new arrivals in our midst, referring of course to you three, which caused great surprise among those who had not yet heard that there were visitors from another world, or even that there was another world. I expect that Washington is going to have many calls upon him for copies of the literature and lore of earth.

"Then he said that the Friend was pleased with the way we had treated you, and that we should continue to be gentle with you--which caused me some qualms of conscience--and then he added that there was to be a new injunction laid upon us. We were not to attempt to leave our world."

"I see," I said. We were both silent for a few minutes. "Yes, I can understand why you said we were responsible for this. I must remember to ask Wordsworth to pray for us before I leave. He seems to--how shall I say it--get dramatic results."

He laughed.

"In a way, it's a shame," I said. "You people are so brilliant and so kind, and you notice so much. I was kind of hoping that it would be all right for some of you to come to earth; I'm sure that you could do a lot of good there."

"It would seem that way, would it not? I myself was rather toying with the idea, and waiting to see how Wordsworth resolved the problem. I respect his intellect greatly, and if he had decided that there was nothing against his going, I would probably have made overtures myself." My heart leaped a little at the thought. In the few weeks we had been here, he had become a better friend than anyone I had known back home; he was a living refutation of Plato's dictum that friendship exists only among equals. But it was out of the question now.

"Of course," he went on, "my specialization up to now would not of itself have solved any of your problems; and it must be the case that our presence on earth would do more harm than good--to both of us."

"By the way, what is your specialization, St. Peter? You never told me."

"Now, of course, it is you people. I would have mentioned earlier what it had been, had I not inferred from reading about you that those of you on earth--at least men--seem to have an inordinate interest in what my avocation was. Hoping that you shared that interest, I decided to save it until late in your stay, as a treat. Can you guess what it is?"

"I haven't the faintest idea," I said. "It can't be science; we already know scientists. And it can't be art. Architecture?"

"Come now. Are the healthy young males among you preoccupied with architecture?"

"Mostly, they're preoccupied with women."

"Well, of course apart from that."

"You mean sports? Don't tell me you're a sportsman!"

He laughed. "I, sir, was a 'pro.'" I looked at him with something like awe, and he laughed again. "I thought as much."

"Somehow, I can't picture you people playing sports."

"But why not?"

"I don't know. You seem so . . . serious."

"But what can be more serious than having fun?"

"I mean, intellectual." I was trying to imagine all these bubble people spread around a baseball diamond, and the thought struck me funny. "I'm sorry," I said as St. Peter caught me laughing.

"You needn't apologize," he said with his smile-exclamation mark. "I realize that with you, who are half unfortunate, sports seems a rather frivolous pastime. But you see, we have no dichotomy between our bodies and our minds; and we do not look on sports as you do, as something merely physical.

"And of course, even among you, sports is more mental than physical. You train your bodies so that they will become the perfect servants of your minds; so that they will be able to perform instantly extremely difficult feats of dexterity, simply when you will it. Sports are a supreme illustration of the extent to which one's mind can have control over one's body. It is the same with us, except that we seem to be somewhat more aware of the implications of what we are doing."

That hadn't occurred to me, because of our prejudice of looking on football players and basketball stars as near-idiots; but they did insist that the difference between a great player--or even a great day with one player--was mental preparation, not physical strength or even native skill. Perhaps they looked stupid to intellectuals like me because they were diverting the channels of their thoughts to making their bodies obedient slaves rather than to how to perform triple integration. Judging by my own singular lack of success in sports endeavors, this probably took a lot more mental effort than I was willing to devote to it.

"We consider sports a special form of art also," said St. Peter, and that sent me off on a new train of thought. Wasn't it really the case that what gave us the pleasure of watching games was that we knew how hard it was to do the things we saw these people doing with grace and ease?

"I imagine your sports are quite a bit different from ours, though," I said.

"Yes," he said. "Would you like to see a match?"

"You couldn't keep me away!"

He then took me to a part of the city where I had never been before, and on the way began explaining the principle of the game I was about to witness. Like everything else on Acosmia except their government, it was complicated in the extreme, and I won't even try to reproduce his explanation of it, which was completely bewildering. I will simply give you my own impression of it, leaving out all the niceties and subtleties of strategy and so on, which he stressed as "of course" the real point.

We entered a building which was the closest approach to a cube of any that I had seen in Acosmia, with a little niche in three of the walls for spectators. All six walls had a grid of twelve squares drawn on them, which if they were colored in would have made the inside of the room look as if it were lined with chessboards. The squares were close to two meters on a side, so that whole was twenty-four meters or so square. There were perhaps three or four meters of wall left on all sides around these chessboards. Imaginary lines drawn from the boards on one wall to the wall opposite defined little cubical cells in the center of the room. These imaginary cells were the playing area.

Each team had twelve players--of course, without uniforms, since no one wore clothes in Acosmia. You simply had to know which people were on your team and who made up the opposition.

In the beginning, the twelve players on each team were lined up opposite each other against the cells that were the "home" cells, as in a kind of three-dimensional checker game. Apparently, the object of the game was rather like chess, to remove all the members of the opposing team from their cells, with only one person remaining, who represented the winning team.

The game was also like chess in that each position on the team had certain moves that were permitted and certain ones forbidden. Some players could move diagonally but only in a horizontal plane, some in a straight line but only horizontally or only vertically, and so on. It was the permissible moves that got really complicated. And, of course, you had to simply remember which player started out in which position and what moves were associated with that position; because once he was out of his home cell, there was nothing in his appearance (like the shape of a knight or a bishop) that told you what he did--or, as I mentioned, even what team he was on. The captain was like the queen in chess (there was nothing corresponding to the king); he could move anywhere in any direction.

One of the captains had a kind of a ball, about the size of a soccer ball; and the game began when he threw it (by cupping himself into a kind of jai-alai scoop) to the other team.

At this toss, everyone on both teams was allowed to assume a strategic position, and immediately, for me, the game became total confusion as far as playing strategy went. Once this was done, however, only the person with the ball could move. He had the option of either moving, carrying the ball with him--according to his permitted moves, of course--or throwing it to another member of his team, who could then move.

They could pass the ball with enormous speed, so that you almost couldn't see it, and usually tossed it back and forth for a while, the way the infield does in baseball sometimes; and then someone without warning would grab it and zip across the playing area. During this passing period, the members of the opposite team would try to intercept the ball; but they were not allowed to move out of their imaginary cubes. At one point, very early on, the game was stopped and one of the players removed by one of the six referees, who kept swimming up and down in the area behind the playing cells along each wall. The player had stepped out of bounds, and was out for the remainder of the game. St. Peter said that it was inexcusable at this stage. "Later, when the field is tighter, perhaps; but he just wasn't paying attention."

Considering that the cells were like the strike zone, imaginary, and that they had to keep track of where they were as well as where everyone else was, it was a good thing that Acosmians had a couple hundred eyes; they needed all of them.

At any rate, when the person who had the ball moved with it, what he tried to do was move into the cell of some unsuspecting member of the opposite team and knock him out of it, at which point, the other member would be "out" and the field would be narrowed down by that much. No two players could remain in one cell. Most often, the attacked player was aware of what was coming, and deflected the attacker by making the smallest of rushes back at him at the last instant; and the cell that the attacker landed in was then "his," and he threw the ball to someone else. He was often knocked out of the playing field, in which case, he took up his original position, and the ball went to the captain of his team--and there were other complicated arrangements.

It often happened, however, that the defender of the cell was not alert enough to repel the attack, or the attacker simply had too much momentum, and the defender lost his cell, and was "out." The attacker had to be careful that he didn't overshoot when he knocked out the defender, or he would lose possession of the ball, which then went to the captain of the other team--though the attacker retained the cell of the ousted defender.

Sometimes, neither one was knocked anywhere, and both began struggling fiercely for possession of the cell. In this, the game was much like a wrestling match, whose object was to grab the other person somehow and fling him away. This they did with enormous force.

If I have given the impression that the game was rather violent, the impression is nothing to what it appeared to me as I watched it. First of all, it was so fast that I couldn't follow it at all. The ball would be flying from one to another with the speed of a racquetball, and the people all seemed to be moving at once, even though the only one who could move was the one with the ball. And when they crashed into each other! Acosmians went flying all over the place, and splattered into the walls like so many lumps of jelly--after which they peeled themselves off and retired to one of the niches to watch the rest of the game. It was the best evidence I saw that they couldn't be harmed against their wills; any earthling that played a game like that would have been hospitalized for months afterwards, and the whole field would have been a sea of blood within minutes. Even the spectators had to have their wits about them, because one had frequently to dodge some body headed toward the seats. St. Peter once acted as a shield for me, and deflected a player who would have knocked my head off; in fact, St. Peter's block was so good that the fellow was knocked right out through one of the openings (the walls of the cube, of course, did not meet) and only came back about three minutes later to take his place in the stands beside St. Peter and ask him when he was going to return to the team.

Finally, after all the carnage, only the captains were left. I never discovered whether the game was to get rid of the opposing captain or all the members of the team. Whatever the reason for their being left to the end, the captains were not captains for nothing, since they had been under constant attack, and had inflicted more mayhem by far than anyone else. In any case, as soon as the last player except the two captains was hurled from the field, the one with the ball rushed head-on into the other, who had all his eyes trained on him, and met a brick wall. There was a struggle that must have lasted five minutes, with the ball occasionally escaping and being grabbed by one or the other; and finally, the blue-green captain managed to get some special grip on the purple one (a grip St. Peter described to me with admiration at its finesse) and was hurled to the wall opposite us with such force that he remained against it for a full twenty or thirty seconds before recovering his shape.

Then all the members of both teams rushed into the field and bumped against each other, which I gather was the equivalent of a "high-five" or something, and the spectators began to disperse, discussing the fine points of what they had seen.

"Did you enjoy it?" said St. Peter. "I used to be on the team that won."

"I don't know what to say!" I said. "And you, such a gentle, peace-loving people!"

"Yes. Well, it was all in fun, of course. We have other games that are not quite so violent; but I like this one best."

"It's certainly quite a game," I said. "Look! There's Mike. I didn't know this was where Newton lived." We were by this time out in the street.

"I see," said St. Peter. "I suspected as much. Paul, I am afraid that you have a problem I do not know how to handle. That person with Michael is not Newton; Newton does not live around here. That is (and he made some shapes); and he is one of the unfortunate people."