“The thing I don’t understand,” Mark would say, “is why a man like you wants to live here. I mean, it’s all right for me. No one cares about me, and I never gave much of a damn about anyone. But why you?”
“Here I have a whole world,” Charles would reply, “where on Earth I had to share with billions. I have the stars, bigger and brighter than on Earth. I have all space around me, close, like still waters. And I have you, Mark.”
“Now, don’t go getting sentimental on me—”
“I’m not. Friendship counts. Love was lost long ago, Mark. The love of a girl named Martha, whom neither of us ever met. And that’s a pity. But friendship remains, and the eternal night.”
“You’re a bloody poet,” Mark would say, half admiringly.
“A poor poet.”
Time passed unnoticed by the stars, and the air pump hissed and clanked and leaked. Mark was fixing it constantly, but the air of Martha became increasingly rare. Although Charles labored in the fields, the crops, deprived of sufficient air, died.
Mark was tired now, and barely able to crawl around, even without the grip of gravity. He stayed in his bunk most of the time. Charles fed him as best as he could, moving on rusty, creaky limbs.
“What do you think of girls?”
“I never saw a good one yet.”
“Well, that’s not fair.”
Mark was too tired to see the end coming, and Charles wasn’t interested. But the end was on its way. The air pump threatened to give out momentarily. There hadn’t been any food for days.
“But why you?”
“Here I have a whole world—”
“Don’t get sentimental—”
“And the love of a girl named Martha.”
From his bunk Mark saw the stars for the last time. Big, bigger than ever, endlessly floating in the still waters of space.
“The stars...” Mark said.
“Yes?”
“The sun?”
“—shall shine as he shines now, and heretofore.”
“A bloody poet.”
“A poor poet”
“And girls?”
“I dreamed of a girl named Martha once. Maybe if—”
“What do you think of girls? And stars? And Earth?” And it was bedtime, this time forever.
Charles stood beside the body of his friend. He felt for a pulse once, and allowed the withered hand to fall. He walked to a corner of the shack and turned off the tired air pump.
The tape that Mark had prepared had a few cracked inches left to run. “I hope he finds his Martha,” the robot croaked.
Then the tape broke.
His rusted limbs would not bend, and he stood frozen, staring back at the naked stars. Then he bowed his head.
“The Lord is my shepherd,” Charles said. “I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures; he leadeth me...”
SILVERSMITH WISHES
The stranger lifted his glass. “May your conclusions always flow sweetly from your premises.”
“I’ll drink to that,” said Nelson Silversmith.
Solemnly they both sipped Orange Julius. Outside the flotsam of 8th Street flowed eastward, to circulate with sluggish restlessness in the Sargasso of Washington Square. Silversmith munched his chili dog.
The stranger said, “I suppose you think I’m some kind of a nut.”
Silversmith shrugged. “I assume nothing.”
“Well spoken,” the stranger said. “My name is Terence Maginnis. Come have a drink with me.”
“Don’t mind if I do,” Silversmith said.
Some twenty minutes later they were seated on torn red plastic benches in Joe Mangeri’s Clam Bar and Beer Parlor, exchanging fragments of discursive philosophy as casual strangers meeting in New York’s Greenwich Village on a slow mild October afternoon will do. Maginnis was a short compact red-faced man with emphatic gestures and a fuzzy Harris tweed suit. Silversmith was a lanky thirty-two-year-old with a mournful face and long tapering fingers.
“So look,” Maginnis said abruptly, “enough small talk. I have a proposition to put to you.”
“So put,” Silversmith said, with aplomb. Not for nothing had he been brought up in the bewildering social complexities of Bayonne, New Jersey.
“It is this,” Maginnis said. “I am a front man for a certain organization which must remain nameless. We have a free introductory offer. We give you, absolutely free and without obligation, three requests. You may ask for any three things, and I will get them for you if it is within my power.”
“And what do I do in return?” Silversmith asked.
“Nothing whatsoever. You just sit back and take.”
“Three requests,” Silversmith said thoughtfully. “Do you mean three wishes?”
“Yes, you could call it that.”
“A person who grants wishes is a fairy.”
“I am not a fairy,” Maginnis said firmly.
“But you do grant wishes?”
“Yes. I am a normal person who grants wishes.”
“And I,” Silversmith said, “am a normal person who makes wishes. So, for my first wish, I would like a really good hi-fi with quad speakers, tape deck, and all the rest.”
“You are a cool one,” Maginnis said.
“Did you expect me to portray astonishment’”
“I expected dubiety, anxiety, resistance. People generally look with suspicion on a proposition like mine.”
“The only thing I learned at NYU,” Silversmith said, “was the willing suspension of disbelief. Don’t you get many takers?”
“You’re my first in a long time. People simply don’t believe it can be on the level.”
“Incredulity is not an appropriate attitude in this age of Heisenbergian physics. Ever since I read in Scientific American that a positron is nothing more than an electron traveling backwards in time, I have had no difficulty believing anything at all.”
“I must remember to put that into my sales pitch,” Maginnis said. “Now give me your address. You’ll be hearing from me.”
Three days later Maginnis came to Silversmith’s fifth-floor walkup on Perry Street. He was lugging a large packing case and perspiring freely. His tweed suit smelled like an overworked camel.
“What a day!” he said. “I’ve been all over Long Island City looking for just the right rig. Where shall I put it?”
“Right there is fine,” Silversmith said. “What about the tape deck?”
“I’m bringing it this afternoon. Have you thought about your second wish yet?”
“A Ferrari. A red one.”
“To hear is to obey,” Maginnis said. “Doesn’t all this strike you as rather fantastic?”
“Phenomenology takes these matters into account,” Silversmith said. “Or, as the Buddhists say, ‘The world is of a suchness.’ Can you get me a recent model?”
“I think I can put my hands on a new one,” Maginnis said. “With supercharger and genuine walnut dashboard.”
“Now you’re beginning to astonish me,” Silversmith said. “But where’ll I park it?”
“That’s your problem,” Maginnis said. “Catch you later.”
Silversmith waved absentmindedly and began to open the packing case.
Next Maginnis found him a spacious rent-controlled triplex on Patchin Place for $102.78 a month including utilities. With it, Maginnis gave Silversmith five bonus wishes.
“You can really do that5” Silversmith asked. “You won’t get into trouble with your company?”
“Don’t worry about that. You know, you’re a really good wisher. Your tastes are rich but not outrageous; challenging, but not incredible. Some people really abuse the privilege—demand palaces and slaves and harems filled with Miss America runner-ups.”
“I suppose that sort of thing is out of the question,” Silversmith remarked casually.
“No, I can come up with it. But it just makes trouble for the wisher. You give some slob a replica of the Czar’s summer palace on a ten-acre site in Rhinebeck, New York, and the next thing you know the tax people are buzzing around him like a holocaust of locusts. The guy usually has difficulty explaining how he managed to save up for this palace on the $125 a week he earns as a junior Comtometer operator, so the IRS makes its own assumptions.”