It was odd the way I felt. As though I had been frozen under the transparent ice of a small lake. Spring was coming and the ice grew thinner.
Each night I went to sleep thinking of Johnny driving down through the sky toward me at almost incalculable speed. Closer, closer, ever closer.
It was five weeks before the date when they were due to return. I was asleep in the barracks-like building assigned to the unmarried women of the base.
The great thud and jar woke me up and through the window I saw the night sky darkening in the afterglow of some brilliant light.
We gathered by the windows and talked for a long time about what it could have been. It was in all of our minds that it could have been the return of Destiny II, but we didn’t put it into words, because no safe landing could have resulted in that deathly thud.
With the lights out again, I tried to sleep. I reached out into the night sky with my heart, trying to contact Johnny.
And the sky was empty.
I sat up suddenly, my lips numb, my eyes staring. No. It was imagination. It was illusion. Johnny was still alive. Of course. But when I composed myself for sleep it was as though dirges were softly playing. In all the universe there was no living entity called Johnny Pritchard. Nowhere.
The telescreens were busy the next morning and I saw the shape of fear. An alert operator had caught the fast shape as it had slammed flaming down through the atmosphere to land forty miles from the base in deserted country making a crater a half-mile across.
“It is believed that the object was a meteor,” the voice of the announcer said. “Radar screens picked up the image and it is now known that it was far too large to be the Destiny II arriving ahead of a schedule.”
It was then that I took a deep breath. But the relief was not real. I was only kidding myself. It was as though I was in the midst of a dream of terror and could not think of magic words to cause the spell to cease.
After breakfast I was ill.
The meteor had hit with such impact that the heat generated had fused the sand. Scientific instruments proved that the mass of the meteor itself, nine hundred feet under the surface was largely metallic. The telescreens began to prattle about invaders from an alien planet. And the big telescopes scanned the heavens for the first signs of the returning Destiny II.
The thought began as a small spot, glowing in some deep part of my mind. I knew that I had to cross the forty miles between the base and the crater. But I did not know why I had to cross it. I did not know why I had to stand at the lip of the crater and watch the recovery operations. I felt like a subject under post-hypnotic influence — compelled to do something without know-ing the reason. But compelled, nevertheless.
One of the physicists took me to the crater in one of the base helicopters after I had made the request of him in such a way that he could not refuse.
Eleven days after the meteor had fallen, I stood on the lip of the crater and looked down into the heart of it to where the vast shaft had been sunk to the meteor itself. Dr. Rawlins handed me his binoculars and I watched the mouth of the shaft.
Men working down in the shaft had cut away large pieces of the body of the meteor and some of them had been hauled out and trucked away. They were blackened and misshapen masses of fused metal.
I watched the mouth of the shaft until my eyes ached and until the young physicist shifted restlessly and kept glancing at his watch and at the sun sinking toward the west. When he asked to borrow the binoculars, I gave them up reluctantly. I could hear the distant throb of the hoist motors. Something was coming up the shaft.
Dr. Rawlins made a sudden exclamation. I looked at the mouth of the shaft. The sun shone with red fire on something large. It dwarfed the men who stood near it.
Rudely I snatched the binoculars from Dr. Rawlins and looked, knowing even as I lifted them to my eyes what I would see.
Because at that moment I knew the answer to something that the astronomers and physicists had been bickering about for many years. There is no expanding universe. There is no tired light.
As I sit here at my writing desk, I can imagine how it was during those last few seconds. The earth looming up in the screen on the instrument panel, but not nearly large enough. Not large enough at all. Incredulity, then because of the error in size, the sudden application of the nose jets. Too late. Fire and oblivion and a thud that shook the earth for hundreds of miles.
No one else knows what I know. Maybe soon they will guess. And then there will be an end to the proud dreams of migration to other worlds. We are trapped here. There will be no other worlds for us. We have made a mess of this planet, and it is something that we cannot leave behind us. We must stay here and clean it up as best we can.
Maybe a few of them already know. Maybe they have guessed. Maybe they guessed, as I did, on the basis of the single object that was brought up out of that shaft on that bright, cold afternoon.
Yes, I saw the sun shining on the six-pointed star. With the binoculars I looked into the heart of it and saw the two dots and a curved line that made the flaws look like a smiling face. A ruby the size of a bungalow.
There is no expanding universe. There is no “tired light.” There is only a Solar system that, due to an unknown influence, is constantly shrinking.
For a little time the Destiny II avoided that influence. That is why they arrived too soon, why they couldn’t avoid the crash, and why I am quite mad.
The ruby was the size of a bungalow, but it was, of course, quite unchanged. It was I and my world that had shrunk.
If Johnny had landed safely, I would be able to walk about on the palm of his hand.
It is a good thing that he died.
And it will not be long before I die also.
The sea whispers softly against the rocks a hundred yards from the steps of my beach house.
And Destiny III has not yet returned.
It is due in three months.
But Not To Dream
Hobbies are funny; and you can really get lost in them.
Sara, the virtuous wife of Dr. Morgan Nestor of the Lavery College faculty, situated in Willowville, Ohio, planted sensible heels on the worn gray paint of the side porch and thrust off, the rocking chair tipping back almost to the point of no return.
Each time the chair rocked forward, the low heels thumped on the boards. Dr. Nestor sat ten feet away, and with each thump his head sank a millimeter lower over the paper he was reading. An interesting document — published by a fellow entomologist at an eastern university. But he couldn’t concentrate on it. Being of a statistical frame of mind, he knew that after fifty determined thumps, his good wife would start a conversation. And he knew that the odds against the conversation being pleasant were roughly ten thousand to one.
Often he tried to associate Sara with the deliciously helpless and winsome little female who had occupied the second seat in the third row in the first classroom of his teaching career, twenty-three years before.
He remembered wide gray eyes, fragile bones, cobweb hair and hands that fluttered. He gave Sara a sidelong glance. The wide gray eyes had narrowed. The fragile bones were buried in all too solid flesh. The cobweb hair had acquired the consistency of fine copper wire, and had turned steel gray. The hands no longer fluttered.
Her voice had the thin sharpness of a fractured flute.
“Who wrote that?” she demanded.
“This?” he asked weakly, waving the paper he had been reading. Morgan Nestor was a big man who had not become soft through years of sedentary life. He had faraway eyes and a lock of hair that consistently fell across the broad dreamer’s forehead. Though he did not realize it, he still caused frequent heart flutters among the coed population of Lavery College.