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fellowship and in the expression of that grand hope . . . to rededicate
ourselves to its fulfillment . . . and to pay our respects and give of our
love to the man who first showed us what dream to have!"
While the AVC registered the power of Dan Fleury's oratory, Marchand smiled
out on the foggy sea of faces. It was, he thought, almost cruel of
Fleury to put it like that. The threshold of success indeed! How many years
now had they waited on it patiently?-and the door still locked in their faces.
Of course, he thought wryly, they must have calculated that the testimonial
dinner would have to be held soon unless they wanted a cadaver for a guest.
But still . . . He turned painfully and looked at Fleury, half perplexed.
There was something in his tone. Was there-Could there be- There could not, he
told himself firmly.
There was no news, no breakthrough, no report from one of the wandering ships,
no dream come true at
last. He would have been the first to know. Not for anything would they have
kept a thing like that from him. And he did not know that thing.
"-and now," Fleury was saying, "I won't keep you from your dinners.
There will be many a long, strong speech to help your digestions afterward, I
promise you! But now let's eat!"
Laughter. Applause. A buzz and clash of forks.
The injunction to eat did not, of course, include Norman Marchand. He sat with
his hands in his lap, watching them dig in, smiling and feeling just a touch
deprived, with the wry regret of the very old. He didn't envy the young people
anything really, he told himself. Not their health, their youth, or their life
expectancy. But he envied them the bowls of ice.
He tried to pretend he enjoyed his wine and the huge pink shrimp in crackers
and milk. According to Asa Czerny, who ought to know since he had kept
Marchand alive this long, he had a clear choice. He could eat whatever he
chose, or he could stay alive. For a while. And ever since Czerny had been
good enough, or despairing enough, to give him a maximum date for his life
expectancy, Marchand had in idle moments tried to calculate just how much of
those remaining months he was willing to give up for one really good meal. He
rather believed that when Czerny looked up at him after the weekly medical
checkup and said that only days were left, that he would take those last days
and trade them in for a sauerbraten with potato pancakes and sweet-sour red
cabbage on the side. But that time was not yet. With any kind of luck he still
had a month. Perhaps as much as two.
"I beg your-pardon," he said, half-turning to the chimpanzee. Even smithed,
the animal spoke so poorly that Marchand had not at first known that he was
being addressed.
He should not have turned.
His wrist had lost its suppleness; the spoon in his hand tilted; the soggy
crackers fell. He made the mistake of trying to move his knee out of the
way-it was bad enough to be old; he did not want to be sloppy-and he moved too
quickly.
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The chair was at the very edge of the little platform. He felt himself going
over.
Ninety-six is too old to be falling on your head, he thought; if I
was going to do this sort of thing, I might just as well have eaten some of
those shrimp. . . . But he did not kill himself.
He only knocked himself unconscious. And not for very long at that, because he
began to wake up while they were still carrying him back to his dressing room
behind the stage.
Once upon a time, Norman Marchand had given his life to a hope.
Rich, intelligent, married to a girl of beauty and tenderness, he had taken
everything he owned and given it to the Institute for Colonizing Extra-
Solar Planets. He had, to begin with, given away several million dollars.
That was the whole of the personal fortune his father had left him, and it was
nowhere near enough to do the job. It was only a catalyst. He had used it to
hire publicity men, fund raisers, investment counselors, foundation managers.
He had spent it on documentary ifims and on TV commercials. With it he had
financed cocktail parties for United States Senators, and prize contests for
the nation's sixth grades, and he had done what he set out to do.
He had raised money. A very great deal of money.
He had taken all the money he had begged and teased out of the pockets of the
world and used it to finance the building of twenty-six great ships, each the
size of a dozen ocean liners, and he had cast them into space like a farmer
sowing wheat upon the wind.
I tried, he whispered to himself, returning from the darkest place he had ever
seen. I wanted to see Man reach out and touch a new home. . . and I
wanted to be the one to guide him there. . .
And someone was saying: "-he knew about it, did he? But we were trying to keep
it quiet-" Someone else told the first person to shut his mouth.
Marchand opened his eyes.
Czerny was there, unsmiling. He saw that Marchand was conscious. "You're all
right," he said, and Marchand knew that it was true, since Czerny was scowling
angrily at him. If the news had been bad, he would have smiled- "No, you
don't!" cried Czerny, catching him by the shoulder. "You stay right there.
You're going home to bed."
"But you said I was all right."
"I meant you were still breathing. Don't push it, Norm."
Marchand protested, "But the dinner-I ought to be there-"
Asa Czerny had cared for Marchand for thirty years. They had gone fishing
together, and once or twice they had gotten drunk. Czerny would not have
refused for nothing. He only shook his head.
Marchand slumped back. Behind Czemy the chimpanzee was squatting silently on
the edge of a chair, watching. He's worried, Marchand thought. Worried because
he feels it's his fault, what happened to me. The thought gave him enough
strength to say: "Stupid of me to fall like that, Mr.- I'm sorry."
Czerny supplied the introduction. "This is Duane Ferguson, Norman. He was
supernumerary on the Copernicus. Smithed. He's attending the dinner in
costume, as it were." The chimpanzee nodded but did not speak. He was watching
that silver-tongued orator, Dan Fleury, who seemed upset. "Where is that
ambulance?" demanded Czerny, with a doctor's impatience with interns, and the
fullback in bellhop's uniform hurried silently away to find out.
The chimpanzee made a barking sound, clearing his throat. "Ghwadd"-he
said-more or less: the German ich sound followed by the word "what." "Ghwadd
did jou mee-an aboud evdial, Midda Vleury?"
Dan Fleury turned and looked at the chimp blankly. But not, Marchand thought
suddenly, as though he didn't know what the chimp was talking about.
Only as if he didn't intend to answer.
Marchand rasped, "What's this 'evdial,' Dan?"
"Search me. Look, Mr. Ferguson, perhaps we'd better go outside."
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"Ghwadd?" The harsh barking voice struggled against the simian body it
occupied, and came closer to the sounds it meant to emit. "What did you bean-
did you mean?"
He was a rude young man, Marchand thought irritably. The fellow was tiring
him.
Although there was something about that insistent question- Marchand winced
and felt for a moment as though he were going to throw up. It passed, leaving
him wobbly. It wasn't possible he had broken anything, he told himself. Czerny
would not lie about that. But he felt as if he had.
He lost interest in the chimp-man, did not even turn his head as Fleury
hurried him out of the room, whispering to him in an agitated and low-pitched
chirrup like the scratching of a cricket's legs.
If a man wanted to abandon his God-given human body and put his mind,
thoughts, and-yes-soul into the corpus of an anthropoid, there was nothing in
that to entitle him to any special consideration from Norman Marchand.
Of course not! Marchand rehearsed the familiar argument as he waited for the [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]