He walked down the stairs to the laboratories, his heels ringing on the metal treads, with the sound of his walking echoing from the hidden corners of the fear and guilt.
If Henry hadn’t died right now, he thought, it might have been all right.
We might have muddled through.
But he knew that probably was wrong. For if it had not been Henry’s death, it would have been something else. They were ready for it—more than ready for it. It would not have taken much at any time in the last few weeks to have lit the fuse.
He found the die and ink pad and tramped back upstairs again.
The ballots lay upon the table and someone had found a shoe box and cut a slit out of its lid to make a ballot box.
«We’ll all sit over on this side of the room,» said Forester, «and we’ll go up, one by one, and vote.»
And if anyone saw the ridiculous side of speaking of what they were about to do as voting, they pointedly ignored it.
Lodge put the die and ink pad down on the table top and walked across the room to take his seat.
«Who wants to start it off?» asked Forester.
No one said a word.
Even afraid of this, thought Lodge.
Then Maitland said he would.
They sat in utter silence as each walked forward to mark a ballot, to fold it and to drop it in the box. Each of them waited for the one to return before another walked out to the table.
Then it finally was done, and Forester went to the table, took up the box and shook it, turning it this way and that to change the order of the ballots, so that no one might guess by their position whom they might belong to.
«I’ll need two monitors,» he said.
His eyes looked them over. «Craven,» he said. «Sue.»
They stood up and went forward.
Forester opened the box.
He took out a ballot, unfolded it and read it, passed it on to Dr. Lawrence and she passed it on to Craven.
«The Defenseless Orphan.»
«The Rustic Slicker.»
«The Alien Monster.»
«The Beautiful Bitch.»
«The Sweet Young Thing.»
Wrong on that one, Lodge told himself. But who else could it be? She had been the last one on. She had been the ninth.
Forester went on, unfolding the ballots and reading them.
«The Extra-Terrestrial Ally.»
«The Proper Young Man.»
Only two left now. Only two. The Out-At-Elbows Philosopher and the Mustached Villain.
I’ll make a guess, Lodge said to himself. I’ll make a bet. I’ll bet on which one was Henry.
He was the Mustached Villain.
Forester unfolded the last ballot and read aloud the name.
«The Mustached Villain.»
So I lose the bet, thought Lodge.
He heard the rippling hiss of indrawn breath from those around him, the swift, stark terror of what the balloting had meant.
For Henry’s character had been the most self-assertive and dominant in last night’s Play: the Philosopher.
The script in Henry’s notebook was close and crabbed, with a curtness to it, much like the man himself. His symbols and his equations were a triumph of clarity, but the written words had a curious backward, petulant slant and the phrases that he used were laconic to the point of rudeness—although whom he was being rude to, unless it were himself, was left a matter of conjecture.
Maitland closed the book with a snap and shoved it away from him, out into the center of the table.
«So that was it,» he said.
They sat in quietness, their faces pale and drawn, as if in bitter fact they might have seen the ghost of Craven’s hinting.
«That’s the end of it,» snapped Sifford. «I won’t…»
«You won’t what?» asked Lodge.
Sifford did not answer, just sitting there with his hands before him on the table, opening and closing them, making great tight fists of them, then straightening out his fingers, stretching them as if he meant by sheer power of will to bend them back farther than they were meant to go.
«Henry was crazy,» said Susan Lawrence curtly. «A man would have to be to dream up that sort of evidence.»
«As a medical person,» Maitland said, «we could expect that reaction from you.»
«I work with life,» said Susan Lawrence. «I respect it and it is my job to preserve it as long as it can be kept within the body. I have a great compassion for the things possessing it.»
«Meaning we haven’t?»
«Meaning you have to live with it and come to know it for its power and greatness, for the fine thing that it is, before you can appreciate or understand its wondrous qualities.»
«But, Susan…»
«And I know,» she said, rushing on to head him off, «I know that it is more than decay and breakdown, more than the senility of matter. It is something greater than disease. To argue that life is the final step to which matter is reduced, the final degradation of the nobility of soil and ore and water is to argue that a static, unintelligent, purposeless existence is the norm of the universe.»
«We’re getting all tangled up semantically,» suggested Forester. «As living things the terms we use have no comparative values with the terms that might be used for universal purpose, even if we knew those universal terms.»
«Which we don’t,» said Helen Gray. «What you say would be true especially if what Henry had thought he had found was right.»
«We’ll check Henry’s notes,» Lodge told them grimly. «We’ll follow him step by step. I think he’s wrong, but on the chance he isn’t, we can’t pass up an angle…»
Sifford bristled. «You mean even if he were right you would go ahead? That you would use even so humanly degrading a piece of evidence to achieve our purpose?»
«Of course I would,» said Lodge. «If life is a disease and a senility, all right, then, it is disease and senility. As Kent and Helen pointed out, the terms are not comparative when used in a universal sense. What is poison for the universe is—well, is life for us. If Henry was right, his discovery is no more than the uncovering of a fact that has existed since time untold…»
«You don’t know what you’re saying,» Sifford said.
«But I do,» Lodge told him bluntly. «You have grown neurotic. You and some of the others. Maybe I, myself. Maybe all of us. We are ruled by fear—you by the fear of your job, I by the fear that the job will not be done. We’ve been penned up, we’ve been beating out our brains against the stone walls of our conscience and a moral value suddenly furbished up and polished until it shines like the shield of Galahad. Back on the Earth you wouldn’t give this thing a second thought. You’d gulp a little, maybe, then you’d swallow it, if it were proved true, and you’d go ahead to track down that principle of decay and of disease we happen to call life. The principle itself would be only one more factor for your consideration, one more tool to work with, another bit of knowledge.
«But here you claw at the wall and scream.»
«Bayard!» shouted Forester. «Bayard, you can’t…»
«I can,» Lodge told him, «and I am. I’m sick of all their whimpering and baying. I’m tired of spoonfed fanatics who drove themselves to their own fanaticism by their own synthetic fears. It takes men and women with knife-sharp minds to lick this thing we’re after. It takes guts and intelligence…»
Craven was white-lipped with fury. «We’ve worked,» he shouted. «Even when everything within us, even when all our decency and intelligence and our religious instincts told us not to work, we worked. And don’t say you kept us at it, you with your mealy words and your kidding and your back slapping. Don’t say you laughed us into it…»
Forester pounded the table with a fist. «Let’s quit this arguing,» he cried. «Let’s get down to cases.»
Craven settled back in his chair, face still white with anger. Sifford kept on making fists.