He looked thoughtfully into his glass. "It's funny, how many sense the truth. They won't walk or drive in the fog if they can help it. At the bottom of their minds, they know that they might return home to find a Romish camp, or a Druidic dancing ground, or the center of a city, or a sand dune. You knew it yourself. The top of your mind thinks I'm an entertaining liar. The deepest part of you knew it all before I spoke."
"I just don't like fog," I said. I looked out the window, toward my hotel, which was just across the street. I saw only wet gray chaos and a swirling motion.
"Wait until it clears."
"Maybe I will. Refill?"
"Thanks."
Somehow, I found myself doing most of the talking. The brown-haired man listened, nodded occasionally, asked questions from time to time.
We did not mention fog.
"I need an ordered universe," I said at one point. "Why else would I have studied math? There's never an ambiguity in mathematics."
"Whereas in interpersonal relationships..."
"Yes! Exactly!"
"But mathematics is a game. Abstract mathematics doesn't connect with the real universe except by coincidence or convenience. Like the imaginary number system: it's used in circuit design, but it certainly wasn't intended for that."
"No, of course not."
"So that's why you never got married?"
"Right," I said sadly. "Ordered universe. Hey, I never knew that. Did I?"
The fog cleared about one o'clock. My brown-haired friend accompanied me out.
"Mathematics doesn't fit reality," he was saying. "No more than a game of bridge. The real universe is chaotic."
"Like in-ter-personal re-lationships."
"Maybe you'll find them easier now."
"Like fog. Well, maybe I will. I know some new things about myself Where's my hotel?"
There was no hotel across the street.
Suddenly I was cold sober, and cold scared.
"So," said my drinking partner. "You must have lost it earlier. Was it foggy when you crossed?"
"Thick as paste. Oh, brother. Now what do I do?"
"I think the fog's starting to roll in again. Why not wait? The bar won't close until four."
"They close at two in my world." In my world. When I admitted that, I made it real.
"Then maybe you should stay in this one. At least the bartender took your money. Which reminds me. Here." He handed me my wallet.
He must have picked my pocket earlier. "For services rendered," he said. "But it looks like you'll need the money."
I was too worried to be angry. "My money passes, but my checks won't. I've got half a term of teaching to finish at Berkeley... Tenure, dammit! I've got to get back."
"I'm going to run for it," said the brown-haired man. "Try the fog if you like. You might find your way home." And off he went, running to beat the fog. It was drifting in in gray tendrils as I went back into the bar.
An hour later the fog was a cubic mile of cotton, as they say. I walked into it.
I intended to circle the block where I had left my hotel. But there was no way to get my bearings, and the outlines of the block would not hold still. Sight was gone, sound was strangely altered and muffled. I walked blind and half-deaf, with my arms outstretched to protect my face, treading lightly for fear of being tripped.
One thing, at least, the brown-haired man had failed to warn me about.
I walked up to a pedestrian-sized gray blur to ask directions, and when I reached it it wasn't human. It watched me dispassionately as I sidled off.
I might have drifted away from the area. The hotel varied from an ancient barrow to a hot springs (I smelled warm pungent steam) to a glass-sided skyscraper to a vertical slab of black basalt to an enormous pit with red-glowing rock at the bottom. It never became a hotel.
The mist was turning white with dawn. I heard something coming near: the putt-putt-putt of a motor scooter, but distorted. Distorted to the clop-clop-clop of a horse's hooves... and still approaching. It became a pad-pad-pad-pad, the sound of something heavy and catlike. I stood frozen...
The fog blew clear, and the sound was two sets of footsteps, two oddly dressed men walking toward me. It was dawn, and the fog was gone, and I was stranded.
In eerie silence the men took me by the elbows, turned me about and walked me into the building which had been my hotel. It had become a kind of hospital.
At first it was very bad. The attendants spoke an artificial language, very simple and unambiguous, like deaf-mute sign language. Until I learned it, I thought I had been booked into a mental hospital.
It was a retraining center for people who can't read minds.
I was inside for a month, and then an outpatient for another six. Quick progress, they say; but then, I hadn't suffered organic brain damage. Most patients are there because of damage to the right parietal lobe.
It was no trouble to pay the hospital fees. I hold patents on the pressure spray can and the butane lighter. Now I'm trying to design a stapler.
And when the fog is a cubic mile of cotton, as we say, I stay put until it goes away.
WAIT IT OUT
Night on Pluto. Sharp and distinct, the horizon line cuts across my field of vision. Below that broken line is the dim gray-white of snow seen by starlight. Above, space-blackness and space-bright stars. From behind a jagged row of frozen mountains the stars pour up in singletons and clusters and streamers of cold white dots. Slowly they move, but visibly, just fast enough for a steady eye to capture their motion.
Something wrong there. Pluto's rotation period is long: 6.39 days. Time must have slowed for me.
It should have stopped.
I wonder if I may have made a mistake.
The planet's small size brings the horizon close. It seems even closer without a haze of atmosphere to fog the distances. Two sharp peaks protrude into the star swarm like the filed front teeth of a cannibal warrior. In the cleft between those peaks shines a sudden bright point.
I recognize the Sun, though it shows no more disk than any other, dimmer star. The Sun shines as a cold point between the frozen peaks; it pulls free of the rocks and shines in my eyes...
The Sun is gone, the starfield has shifted. I must have passed out.
It figures.
Have I made a mistake? It won't kill me if I have. It could drive me mad, though...
I don't feel mad. I don't feel anything, not pain, not loss, not regret, not fear. Not even pity. Just: what a situation.
Gray-white against gray-white: the landing craft, short and wide and conical, stands half-submerged in an icy plain below the level of my eyes. Here I stand, looking east, waiting.
Take a lesson: this is what comes of not wanting to die.
Pluto was not the most distant planet. It had stopped being that in 1979, ten years ago. Now Pluto was at perihelion, as close to the Sun-and to Earth-as it would ever get. To ignore such an opportunity would have been sheer waste.
And so we came, Jerome and Sammy and 1, in an inflated plastic bubble poised on an ion jet. We'd spent a year and a half in that bubble. After so long together, with so little privacy, perhaps we should have hated each other. We didn't. The UN psycho team must have chosen well.
But-just to be out of sight of the others, even for a few minutes. Just to have something to do, something that was not predictable. A new world could hold infinite surprises. As a matter of fact, so could our laboratory-tested hardware. I don't think any of us really trusted the Nerva-K under our landing craft.