Only the President still stood rooted in dignity. He had one hand cautiously in his trousers pocket, for he had felt a sly robotic touch, and had reason to suspect that his suspenders had been cut.
As a tomato grazed his nose, and the MiniDiet writhed and choked in the grip of his remorseless feeders, balanced nutrients running from his ears, the President closed his eyes.
Jester was, after all, only a self-taught amateur working without a visible audience to play to. He was unable to calculate a climax for the show. So when he ran out of jokes he simply called his minions to his side, waved good-bye to the tridi cameras, and exited.
Outside the Halls, he was much encouraged by the cheers and laughter he received from the crowds fast-gathering in the streets. He had his machines entertain them with an improvised chase-sequence back to the launch parked on the edge of Capital City.
He was about to board the launch, return to the berserker and await developments, when a small group of men hurried out of the crowd, calling to him.
“Mr. Jester!”
The performer could now afford to relax and laugh a little himself. “I like the sound of that name! What can I do for you gentlemen?”
They hurried up to him, smiling. The one who seemed to be their leader said: ”Provided you get rid of this berserker or whatever it is, harmlessly—you can join the Liberal party ticket. As Vice-President!”
He had to listen for some minutes before he could believe they were serious. He protested: “But I only wanted to have some fun with them, to shake them up a bit.”
“You’re a catalyst, Mr. Jester. You’ve formed a rallying point. You’ve shaken up a whole planet and made it think.”
Jester at last accepted the Liberals’ offer. They were still sitting around in front of the launch, talking and planning, when the light of Planet A’s moon fell full and sudden upon them.
Looking up, they saw the vast bulk of the berserker dwindling into the heavens, vanishing toward the stars in eerie silence. Cloud streamers went aurora in the upper atmosphere to honor its departure.
“I don’t know,” Jester said over and over, responding to a dozen excited questions. “I don’t know.” He looked at the sky, puzzled as anyone else. The edge of fear came back. The robotic Committee and heralds, which had been controlled from the berserker, began to collapse one by one, like dying men.
Suddenly the heavens were briefly alight with a gigantic splashing flare that passed like lightning across the sky, not breaking the silence of the stars. Ten minutes later came the first news bulletin: The berserker had been destroyed.
Then the President came on tridi, close to the brink of showing emotion. He announced that under the heroic personal leadership of the Minister of Defense, the few gallant warships of Planet A had met and defeated, utterly annihilated, the menace. Not a man had been lost, though the MiniDef’s flagship was thought to be heavily damaged.
When he heard that his mighty machine-ally had been destroyed, Jester felt a pang of something like sorrow. But the pang was quickly obliterated in a greater joy. No one had been hurt, after all. Overcome with relief, Jester looked away from the tridi for a moment.
He missed the climactic moment of the speech, which came when the President forgetfully removed both hands from his pockets.
The Minister of Defense—today the new Presidential candidate of a Conservative party stirred to grim enthusiasm by his exploit of the night before—was puzzled by the reactions of some people, who seemed to think he had merely spoiled a jest instead of saving the planet. As if spoiling a jest was not a good thing in itself! But his testimony that the berserker had been a genuine menace after all rallied most people back to the Conservative side again.
On this busiest of days the MiniDef allowed himself time to visit Liberal headquarters to do a bit of gloating. Graciously he delivered to the opposition leaders what was already becoming his standard speech.
“When it answered my challenge and came up to fight, we went in with a standard englobement pattern—like hummingbirds round a vulture, I suppose you might say. And did you really think it was jesting? Let me tell you, that berserker peeled away the defensive fields from my ship like they were nothing. And then it launched this ghastly thing at me, a kind of huge disk. My gunners were a little rusty, maybe, anyway they couldn’t stop it and it hit us.
“I don’t mind saying, I thought I’d bought the farm right then. My ship’s still handing in orbit for decontamination, I’m afraid I’ll get word any minute that the metal’s melting or something—anyway, we sailed right through and hit the bandit with everything we had. I can’t say too much for my crew. One thing I don’t quite understand; when our missiles struck that berserker just went poof, as if it had no defense up at all. Yes?”
“Call for you, Minister,” said an aide, who had been standing by with a radiophone, waiting for a chance to break in.
“Thank you.” The MiniDef listened to the phone, and his smile left him. His form went rigid. “Analysis of the weapon shows what? Synthetic proteins and water?”
He jumped to his feet glaring upward as if to pierce the ceiling and see his ship in orbit. “What do you mean—no more than a giant custard pie?”
A jester by his efforts may give laughter to others, but by no labor can he seize it for himself.
I have touched minds that worked hard at revelry. Men and women who poured time and wealth and genius into costumes and music and smiling masks, seeking escape from the terror of the world . . . but who found no laughter.
And no escape.
MASQUE OF THE RED SHIFT
Finding himself alone and unoccupied, Felipe Nogara chose to spend a free moment in looking at the thing that had brought him out here beyond the last fringe of the galaxy. From the luxury of his quarters he stepped up into his private observation bubble. There, in a raised dome of invisible glass, he seemed to be standing outside the hull of his flagship Nirvana.
Under that hull, “below” the Nirvana’s artificial gravity, there slanted the bright disk of the galaxy, including in one of its arms all the star systems the Earth-descended man had yet explored. But in whatever direction Nogara looked, bright spots and points of light were plentiful. They were other galaxies, marching away at their recessional velocities of tens of thousands of miles per second, marching on out to the optical horizon of the universe.
Nogara had not come here to look at galaxies, however; he had come to look at something new, at a phenomenon never before seen by men at such close range.
It was made visible to him by the apparent pinching-together of the galaxies beyond it, and by the clouds and streamers of dust cascading into it. The star that formed the center of the phenomenon was itself held beyond human sight by the strength of its own gravity. Its mass, perhaps a billion times that of Sol, so bent spacetime around itself that not a photon of light could escape it with a visible wavelength.
The dusty debris of deep space tumbled and churned, falling into the grip of the hypermass. The falling dust built up static charges until lightning turned it into luminescent thunderclouds, and the flicker of the vast lightning shifted into the red before it vanished, near the bottom of the gravitational hill. Probably not even a neutrino could escape this sun. And no ship would dare approach much closer than Nirvana now rode.