Mr. Cheung estimated abysmally that it would be another two hours to Marathon. Everything he’d been feeling at the start of this journey — excitement, curiosity, an undirected gratitude, great fear — had been emptied out of him with repeated vomiting. His throat ached, and he trembled with weakness. The salt spray and diesel smoke thickened in his lungs as he gripped the rail without strength, looking forward to his death impatiently.
“Try some salty biscuit. Please, one bite,” Park-Smith yelled out amid the wind. A gust jerked the boat’s prow to port — this move was a new one, a kind of half-spin that left Mr. Cheung astonished at the world’s inexhaustible evil. The biscuit Park-Smith was threatening him with like a poisonous nugget was one more thing. Mr. Cheung didn’t want the biscuit and in fact hated the biscuit, but he indicated nothing. He’d found this discomfort to be an incredible teacher, one that had practiced him, right at the start of this trip, not to nod his head or shake it.
The young mate, a white boy, stayed at the bow and peered ahead for uncharted obstacles in this shallow water, while the Captain, also a youthful white, one from the famous Wilson family, responded to his signals with unexpected and excruciating shifts in their course. Mr. Cheung was the only seasick passenger. Other members of the Twicetown Society for Science — lumpy Maxwell, Park-Smith, Bobby Calvino, who would be dangerous without his wife and was already drunk — had been having a good time, and now looked bored. They’d been nearly three hours on the water, and the overcast heavens were getting even darker as night approached.
Below Key Marathon, Captain Wilson took the Catch through a channel and came at the largest town on the Keys from the Ocean side. The water was calmer here today. Mr. Cheung felt his nausea dissipating even before they docked behind the local slaughterhouse. The slaughterhouse had once been a hotel. The stripped, headless carcasses of several dogs and goats were hung from poles laid across the width of the swimming pool. A small man, apparently the only one working at this hour, tightroped across the poles with a bucket, casting spicy salt over the meat. As Park-Smith helped the Orchestra Manager along the pier and toward the streets, Mr. Cheung saw, through the glassless window behind the swimming pool, a dead goat laid out on the bar in the cocktail lounge. “Hold shut your nose, Tony,” Park-Smith warned him, but Mr. Cheung had already stopped breathing. The stink of the slaughterhouse kept everybody away. The buildings on this street housed only drifts of sand and the barnacled supplies of fishing boats.
By the time the four Society members had walked through several shanty collections, where families sat outside their doorways eating suppers of fish and rice and worrying about the weather, and then through a flat neighborhood where old houses had been torn apart and stacked into lumber, Mr. Cheung was completely revived.
“I can’t remember where the library is,” he told the others. “How far?” Now he was excited again. He tried to expect nothing, but they wouldn’t have had the Twicetown Society travel so far, wouldn’t even have condescended to invite them here, if the book weren’t important.
“Two more streets, I think,” said Maxwell, and Park-Smith said, “Two streets.”
According to Park-Smith, the Marathon Society for Knowledge had traded a boat for the book. It must be the one — the history they’d all been looking for long enough that they’d given up hope of finding it — the text that would explain the End of the World.
Thinking about the book put Mr. Cheung into a panic. “It’s dark, they might be starting already.” He picked up his pace. He was willing to leave the others behind if necessary.
The library was a stone building left upright where all the wooden ones had been torn down, and now it stood by itself at the edge of a field. Great steps marched up to its entrance, on either side of which a flagpole jutted from the walls, one dripping a ragged Florida state flag that hopped up fitfully in the wind to broadcast its crimson X, and the other one naked. Even before they reached the steps and passed between these flagpoles, they heard the buzz of voices from inside.
This was an occasion. As they entered, Mr. Cheung could see immediately that a lot more people than the Marathon Society’s thirty members were gathered here. Their bodies stifled the room with heat and breath and everybody was talking at once, at least fifty citizens in various postures on the cool floor of the main room. Most of them were white people from the merchant families, but there were fishermen and layabouts present, too, wearing shirts as at a wedding or a funeral, and there were even some desechados among them: Mr. Cheung saw a young blind man with a humped back, who held himself sideways in a corner and turned a grotesquely large ear toward the speaker at the front. Precious kerosene was being offered up in lanterns to give them light.
The generalized chatter trailed away and then resumed quickly after the Twicetown Society members had made themselves evident, hesitating in the doorway.
Roderick Chambers stood behind the only piece of furniture in the room, a wrecked Xerox device the size of two goats; behind him loomed the metal shelves holding the Marathon Public Library’s several hundred volumes. Backed up against this wall of words, he welcomed the Twicetown Society for Science with a lonely gesture of embrace, which he altered by bringing his hands together as in prayer and pointing at some vacant spots in the front row almost at his feet. People moved their legs for the new arrivals as Park-Smith led the way through those assembled. The ones by the wall made room without squabbling. It was the kind of courtesy Mr. Cheung would have expected during a disaster. He was pressed against a tiny dark woman with scraggly Negro hair who looked evil-tempered, but she smiled at him and wrapped her arms around her knees, giving him as much space as she could, and continued waiting quietly.
Roderick Chambers was responding to some kind of dissatisfaction among the Society members. “And then again,” he was saying, “running through all the possibilities, finding pretty much nothing. We’ve been a long time after a book like this book. We cut the only deal we could.”
“Sounds like no deal at all,” a voice called from the rest,
“We cut the only deal we could.”
“They got a damn boat. And we still don’t know what we got.”
“We got a straight guarantee about the pages — any missing pages, the deal is canceled. But aside from that, what we received is what we received. No more and no less.”
“We need an all-time policy laid down,” somebody said. “We usually look at the Table of Contents, and we better say from now on, always see the Contents.”
“Most of the time we buy by the kilo,” Roderick Chambers said. “We don’t even look—”
“When it’s a regular book, you mean to say. We see Contents on a high-price type, and this—”
“We cut the only deal we could,” Chambers repeated against a volley of comments, shaking his head and closing his eyes, “we cut the only deal we could, we cut the only deal we could—”