Lodge sat at the table’s head and looked down the table at them and for a moment saw Sue Lawrence looking back at him and wondered if she were scowling or if the seeming scowl was no more than the play of candlelight upon her face.
They talked as they always talked at dinner—the inconsequential social chatter of people without worry and with little purpose. For this was the moment of forgetting and escape. This was the hour to wash away the guilt and to ignore the stain.
But tonight, he noticed, they could not pull themselves away entirely from the happenings of the day—for there was talk of Henry Griffith and of his sudden dying and they spoke of him in soft tones and with strained and sober faces. Henry had been too intense and too strange a man for anyone to know him well, but they held him in high regard, and although the robots had been careful to arrange the seating so his absence left no gap, there was a real and present sense that one of them was missing.
Chester Sifford said to Lodge: «We’ll be sending Henry back?»
Lodge nodded. «We’ll call in one of the patrol and it’ll take him back to Earth. We’ll have a short service for him here.»
«But who…»
«Craven more than likely. He was closer to Henry than any of the rest. I spoke to him about it. He agreed to say a word or two.»
«Is there anyone on Earth? Henry never talked a lot.»
«Some nephews and nieces. Maybe a brother or a sister. That would be all, I think.»
Hugh Maitland said, «I understand we’ll continue with the Play.»
«That’s right,» Lodge told him. «Kent recommended it and I agreed. Kent knows what’s best for us.»
Sifford agreed. «That’s his job. He’s a good man at it.»
«I think so, too,» said Maitland. «Most psych-men stand outside the group. Posing as your conscience. But Kent doesn’t work that way.»
«He’s a chaplain,» Sifford said. «Just a God damn chaplain.»
Helen Gray sat to the left, and Lodge saw that she was not talking with anyone, but only staring at the bowl of roses which this night served as a centerpiece.
Tough on her, he thought. For she had been the one who had found Henry dead and, thinking that he was merely sleeping, had taken him by the shoulder and shaken him to wake him.
Down at the other end of the table, sitting next to Forester, Alice Page was talking far too much, much more than she had ever talked before, for she was a strangely reserved woman, with a quiet beauty that had a touch of darkness in it. Now she leaned toward Forester, talking tensely, as if she might be arguing in a low tone so the others would not hear her, with Forester listening, his face masked with patience against a feeling of alarm.
They are upset, thought Lodge—far more than I had suspected. Upset and edgy, ready to explode.
Henry’s death had hit them harder than he knew.
Not a lovable man, Henry still had been one of them. One of them, he thought. Why not one of us? But that was the way it always was—unlike Forester, who did his best work by being one of them, he must stand to one side, must keep intact that slight, cold margin of reserve which was all that preserved against an incident of crisis the authority which was essential to his job.
Sifford said, «Henry was close to something.»
«So Sue told me.»
«He was writing up his notes when he died,» said Sifford. «It may be…»
«We’ll have a look at them,» Lodge promised. «All of us together. In a day or two.»
Maitland shook his head. «We’ll never find it, Bayard. Not the way we’re working. Not in the direction we are working. We have to take a new approach…»
Sifford bristled. «What kind of approach?»
«I don’t know,» said Maitland. «If I knew…»
«Gentlemen,» said Lodge.
«Sorry,» Sifford said. «I’m a little jumpy.»
Lodge remembered Dr. Susan Lawrence, standing with him, looking out the window at the bleakness of the trembling hunk of rock on which they lived, and saying, «He didn’t want to live. He was afraid to live…»
What had she been trying to tell him? That Henry Griffith had died of intellectual fear? That he had died because he was afraid to live?
Would it actually be possible for a psychosomatic syndrome to kill a man?
You could feel the tension in the room when they went to the theater, although they did their best to mask the tension. They chatted and pretended to be light-hearted, and Maitland tried a joke which fell flat upon its face and died, squirming beneath the insincerity of the laughter that its telling had called forth.
Kent was wrong, Lodge told himself, feeling a wave of terror washing over him. This business was loaded with deadly psychological dynamite. It would not take much to trigger it and it would set off a chain reaction that could wash up the team.
And if the team were wrecked the work of years was gone—the long years of education, the necessary months to get them working together, the constant, never-ending battle to keep them happy and from one another’s throats. Gone would be the team confidence, which over many months had replaced individual confidence and doubt, gone would be the smooth cooperation and coordination which worked like meshing gears, gone would be a vast percentage of the actual work they’d done, for no other team, no matter how capable it might be, could take up where another team left off, even with the notes of the first team to guide them on their way.
The curving screen covered one end of the room, sunken into the wall, with the flare of the narrow stage in front of it.
Back of that, thought Lodge, the tubes and generators, the sonics and computers—mechanical magic which turned human thought and will into the moving images that would parade across the screen. Puppets, he thought—puppets of the human mind, but with a strange and startling humanity about them that could not be achieved by carven hunks of wood.
And the difference, of course, was the difference between the mind and hand, for no knife, no matter how sharp, guided by no matter how talented and artistic a hand, could carve a dummy with half the precision or fidelity with which the mind could shape a human creature.
First, Man had created with hands alone, chipping the flint, carving out the bow and dish; then he achieved machines which were extensions of his hands and they turned out artifacts which the hands alone were incapable of making; and now, Man created not with his hands, nor with extensions of his hands, but with his mind and extensions of his mind, although he still must use machinery to translate and project the labor of his brain.
Someday, he thought, it will be mind alone, without the aid of machines, without the help of hands.
The screen flickered and there was a tree upon it, then another tree, a bench, a duck pond, grass, a distant statue, and behind it all the dim, tree-broken outlines of city towers.
That was where they had left it the night before, with the cast of characters embarked upon a picnic in a city park—a picnic that was almost certain to remain a picnic for mere moments only before someone should turn it into something else.
Tonight, he hoped, they’d let it stay a picnic, let it run its course, take it easy for a change, not try any fancy stuff—for tonight, of all nights, there must be no sudden jolts, no terrifying turns. A mind forced to guide its character through the intricacies of a suddenly changed plot or some outlandish situation might crack beneath the effort.
As it was, there’d be one missing character and much would depend upon which one it was.
The scene stood empty, like a delicate painting of a park in springtime with each thing fixed in place.
Why were they waiting? What were they waiting for?
They had set the stage. What were they waiting for?