“I haven’t really had time to think about them.” He slipped his hands beneath his belt and lowered his head.
“What are you doing?”
“Thinking.”
“What?”
“That here I am on a perfectly good moon; I’ve just finished up a job, so I won’t have any worries for a while. Why not sit down and get some serious work done on my novel?” He looked up. “But you know, Mouse? I don’t really know if I want to write a book.”
“Huh?”
“When I was looking at that nova … no, after it, just before I woke and thought I’d have to spend the rest of my life in blinkers, ear and nose plugs, while I went noisily nuts, I realized how much I hadn’t looked at, how much I hadn’t listened to, smelled, tasted—how little I knew of those basics of life you have literally at your fingertips. And then Captain—“
“Hell,” the Mouse said. With his bare foot he toed dust from his boot. “You’re not going to write it after all the work you’ve already done?”
“Mouse, I’d like to. But I still don’t have a subject. And I’ve just gotten prepared to go out and find one—Right now I’m just a bright guy with a lot to say and nothing to say it about.”
“That’s a fink-out,” the Mouse grunted. “What, about the captain and the Roc? And you said you wanted to write about me. Okay, go ahead. And write about you too. Write about the twins. You really think they’d sue you? They’d be tickled pink, both of them. I want you to write it, Katin. I might not be able to read it, but I’d sure listen if you read it to me.”
“You would?”
“Sure. After all you’ve put into it this far, if you stopped now, you wouldn’t be happy at all.”
“Mouse, you tempt me. I’ve wanted to do nothing else for years.” Then Katin laughed. “No, Mouse. I’m too much the thinker still. This last voyage of the Roc? I’m too aware of all the archetypical patterns it follows. I can see myself now, turning it into some allegorical Grail quest. That’s the only way I could deal with it, hiding all sorts of mystic symbolism in it. Remember all those writers who died before they finished their Grail recountings?”
“Aw, Katin, that’s a lot of nonsense. You’ve got to write it!”
“Nonsense like the Tarot? No, Mouse. I’d fear for my life with such an undertaking.” Again he looked over the landscape. The moon, so known to him, for a moment put him at peace with all the unknown beyond. “I want to. I really do. But I’d be fighting a dozen jinxes from the start, Mouse. Maybe I could. But I don’t think so. The only way to protect myself from the jinx, I guess, would be to abandon it before I finish the last
Athens, June ‘66 – New York, May ‘67