He carried current funds in a checking account. He examined the balance, then made out nine checks to the nine oldest employees, grading them in order of years of service. He made out a larger check to Miss Hood, attached a note asking her to see that the employees received any portion she thought proper.
After that, he sealed the envelopes. There was a half hour remaining in which to write notes to a few good friends, friends who had outlasted the years.
At five Miss Hood opened the door and asked, “Are you ready, Mr. Larkin?”
He nodded and they came in, one at a time. He stood in front of his desk and shook hands with each of them. They mumbled the proper phrases, memorized a few moments before they had entered his office. He thanked each one of them for their work and their loyalty.
After the last one had gone he sat behind his desk once more. He sat without moving, and the lowering sun cast his gigantic shadow on the far wall. The shadow faded and the office was filled with the gray-pink glow of dusk. The glow faded and the office furniture turned to dark shadows in the room. He sat with his hands knotted on the desk top and thought of the good years. He reviewed the decision he had made when he received the first form letter from the Future Bureau. It was still a good decision. To have stepped out at that time would have meant work undone, work that related directly to the happiness of thousands. At that time Farnum wasn’t well enough trained to take over. If he had made an error, it had been that. He had made himself too indispensible to the operations.
But knowing the decision was just did nothing to eliminate the fear that seemed to crouch like a patient beast in the deeper shadows in the corners of the big office.
The lights of the city were on and a distant display sign made a dim pulsing of blue against the office ceiling, like the slow beat of an eternal heart.
The door opened and he blinked against the light, seeing the silhouette of Miss Hood in the doorway. He had almost forgotten her. It was as though, in the fresh knowledge of what had happened to him, he was moving further away from every human contact.
“Mr. Larkin, you shouldn’t sit here in the dark.”
“Come and sit with me, Martha.” he said.
She shut the door against the light and came over to the desk. She sat in the chair beside the desk, in the place where, for seven years, she had taken his dictation, cool and efficient.
He was glad that she knew the value of silence. And suddenly she was dearer to him than any of those to whom he had written the notes. As dear as his son.
Her hand was a moving paleness in the gloom. She reached out and placed her hand over his. She squeezed hard.
He laughed then. A small laugh, hoarse and embarrassed. He said, “This is almost completely ridiculous, Martha. You’ve been here every day, and yet I never knew. You’re so much younger than I. Now it’s as if I’m meeting you for the first time. And finding suddenly that I love you.”
“I hoped you’d say that, Sam,” she said. “It’s been one-sided for so long.”
“But I’m so much older than—”
“I don’t feel that way. I never have. Not from the first day.”
He leaned toward her, found her mouth in the darkness, and kissed her. It was not a kiss of promise, for he had no future. It was, in a sense, a dedication and an acknowledgment. He could smell the fragrance of her hair.
“So much wasted time,” he said heavily.
Her fingers touched his lips. “Don’t say that, Sam. Don’t say it. It has been good. Every minute of it. You see, I knew, even if you didn’t.”
He sat in the darkness and held her smooth hand and felt once again as he had when he was small, when the darkness was peopled with things of horror and fear came with the night.
They sat together and heard the distant small sounds of the city. They sat with a heightened consciousness of each other.
He left her without quite daring to go through the formality of saying good-by. He left her inside the office and he shut the door, leaned weakly against it, knowing that not only was the closed office door a symbol of twenty years of his work, but that the girl beyond the closed door was a symbol of wasted years, of tenderness that could have been his.
Hearing the small, resigned sound of her weeping, he straightened his heavy shoulders, walked with determined tread through the outer office, down the corridor.
The city was alive with those who tasted the night, alive with the laughter of women, the brittle sound of ice in tall glasses, the raw molten brass of the trumpet note, held long beyond belief. The tires made soft whispers on the silken asphalt and, on a corner, a boy held a girl in the crook of his arm and laughed down into her upraised face.
Samuel Larkin walked heavily down through the city, and though he looked neither to right nor left, he absorbed the sounds of the city, the life of the city, and it was an acid taste in his heart. He felt jealousy, and often it was necessary to think back over the years, the good years, deriving from those thoughts a certain stolid satisfaction. He remembered the look on Thomason’s face when Thomason heard from the Future Bureau what fate held in store for Thomason’s twin daughters. Yes, he had led a full life and a good life, here on Earth.
He walked down to the area where he was born. The tenements were gone, of course, and where they stood, tall apartment towers held their white shoulders against the silhouette of the distant stars. He stood alone, his big hands shoved deep in his pockets. He thought of the distant years, of the dreams and the hopes.
Walking the night streets of the city, he forgot time. The after-theater crowd swarmed the streets, vanished quickly away. The bars had the sultry brazen sound of late hours. On one street a piano chord was endlessly repeated, drumming into the blood like the beat of ancient drums of war. Or death.
It was his last night on Earth.
He walked without haste, his heels striking the pavement in heavy stolid rhythm, a tall man, heavy through the shoulders, head slightly bent, walking deep in thought, deep in memory.
At the first promise of dawn, the first gray of the east, he stood at the river bank. The running lights of the tugs looked watery and pale in the new promise of day. The river ran sure and swift and deep. He lit a cigarette and sat on an iron bench and watched the deepening color in the east.
When it was time, he walked back out to the boulevard, hailed a cruising cab, settled back in the seat and said, “Space Three.”
The cabby gave him a quick look, half shrugged, spun the cab in a wide U turn and went back out the boulevard. The canyons of the streets were still cloaked in night, waiting for the red touch of dawn. A milk horse clopped slowly across the boulevard, unexcited by the wide sweep of the cab around it.
“Farz I can go, Doc,” the driver said as he pulled up to the gates.
From habit, Larkin glanced at the meter. Then he smiled wryly, gave the driver all the money he had.
The driver said, “Look, Doc, I don’t—” He paused. “I get it. Thanks, Doc. Uh… best of luck.”
Larkin walked from the gate to the administration building. The waiting room was clotted with frightened people. When his turn came he went to the desk.
The clerk leafed the register. “Larkin. Samuel B. Right here. Area Eight, Ship CV22, Room Thirty-eight. Got that?”
Larkin nodded.
At Area Eight he walked along the line until he found CV22. The weary attendant at the top of the portable ramp checked the list, made a mark opposite his name. The attendant was a young freckled man with buck teeth and a faint odor of acid perspiration.
He yawned and said, “Lot of suckers still out there in town pretending they can hide.”