Marchand bowed to the storm of applause.
Again his hearing aid saved his ears and cost him the next few words: "-and now that we are on the threshold of success," Fleury was booming, "it is altogether fitting that we should gather here tonight . . . to join in fellowship and in the expression of that grand hope . . . to rededicate ourselves to its fulfillment . . . and to pay our respects and give of our love to the man who first showed us what dream to have!"
While the AVC registered the power of Dan Fleury's oratory, Marchand smiled out on the foggy sea of faces. It was, he thought, almost cruel of Fleury to put it like that. The threshold of success indeed! How many years now had they waited on it patiently?-and the door still locked in their faces. Of course, he thought wryly, they must have calculated that the testimonial dinner would have to be held soon unless they wanted a cadaver for a guest. But still . . . He turned painfully and looked at Fleury, half perplexed. There was something in his tone. Was there-Could there be- There could not, he told himself firmly. There was no news, no breakthrough, no report from one of the wandering ships, no dream come true at last. He would have been the first to know. Not for anything would they have kept a thing like that from him. And he did not know that thing.
"-and now," Fleury was saying, "I won't keep you from your dinners. There will be many a long, strong speech to help your digestions afterward, I promise you! But now let's eat!"
Laughter. Applause. A buzz and clash of forks.
The injunction to eat did not, of course, include Norman Marchand. He sat with his hands in his lap, watching them dig in, smiling and feeling just a touch deprived, with the wry regret of the very old. He didn't envy the young people anything really, he told himself. Not their health, their youth, or their life expectancy. But he envied them the bowls of ice.
He tried to pretend he enjoyed his wine and the huge pink shrimp in crackers and milk. According to Asa Czerny, who ought to know since he had kept Marchand alive this long, he had a clear choice. He could eat whatever he chose, or he could stay alive. For a while. And ever since Czerny had been good enough, or despairing enough, to give him a maximum date for his life expectancy, Marchand had in idle moments tried to calculate just how much of those remaining months he was willing to give up for one really good meal. He rather believed that when Czerny looked up at him after the weekly medical checkup and said that only days were left, that he would take those last days and trade them in for a sauerbraten with potato pancakes and sweet-sour red cabbage on the side. But that time was not yet. With any kind of luck he still had a month. Perhaps as much as two.
"I beg your-pardon," he said, half-turning to the chimpanzee. Even smithed, the animal spoke so poorly that Marchand had not at first known that he was being addressed.
He should not have turned.
His wrist had lost its suppleness; the spoon in his hand tilted; the soggy crackers fell. He made the mistake of trying to move his knee out of the way-it was bad enough to be old; he did not want to be sloppy-and he moved too quickly.
The chair was at the very edge of the little platform. He felt himself going over.
Ninety-six is too old to be falling on your head, he thought; if I was going to do this sort of thing, I might just as well have eaten some of those shrimp. . . . But he did not kill himself.
He only knocked himself unconscious. And not for very long at that, because he began to wake up while they were still carrying him back to his dressing room behind the stage.
Once upon a time, Norman Marchand had given his life to a hope.
Rich, intelligent, married to a girl of beauty and tenderness, he had taken everything he owned and given it to the Institute for Colonizing Extra-Solar Planets. He had, to begin with, given away several million dollars.
That was the whole of the personal fortune his father had left him, and it was nowhere near enough to do the job. It was only a catalyst. He had used it to hire publicity men, fund raisers, investment counselors, foundation managers. He had spent it on documentary films and on TV commercials. With it he had financed cocktail parties for United States Senators, and prize contests for the nation's sixth grades, and he had done what he set out to do.
He had raised money. A very great deal of money.
He had taken all the money he had begged and teased out of the pockets of the world and used it to finance the building of twenty-six great ships, each the size of a dozen ocean liners, and he had cast them into space like a farmer sowing wheat upon the wind.
I tried, he whispered to himself, returning from the darkest place he had ever seen. I wanted to see Man reach out and touch a new home. . . and I wanted to be the one to guide him there. . .
And someone was saying: "-he knew about it, did he? But we were trying to keep it quiet-" Someone else told the first person to shut his mouth. Marchand opened his eyes.
Czerny was there, unsmiling. He saw that Marchand was conscious. "You're all right," he said, and Marchand knew that it was true, since Czerny was scowling angrily at him. If the news had been bad, he would have smiled- "No, you don't!" cried Czerny, catching him by the shoulder. "You stay right there. You're going home to bed."
"But you said I was all right."
"I meant you were still breathing. Don't push it, Norm."
Marchand protested, "But the dinner-I ought to be there-"
Asa Czerny had cared for Marchand for thirty years. They had gone fishing together, and once or twice they had gotten drunk. Czerny would not have refused for nothing. He only shook his head.
Marchand slumped back. Behind Czemy the chimpanzee was squatting silently on the edge of a chair, watching. He's worried, Marchand thought. Worried because he feels it's his fault, what happened to me. The thought gave him enough strength to say: "Stupid of me to fall like that, Mr.- I'm sorry."
Czerny supplied the introduction. "This is Duane Ferguson, Norman. He was supernumerary on the Copernicus. Smithed. He's attending the dinner in costume, as it were." The chimpanzee nodded but did not speak. He was watching that silver-tongued orator, Dan Fleury, who seemed upset. "Where is that ambulance?" demanded Czerny, with a doctor's impatience with interns, and the fullback in bellhop's uniform hurried silently away to find out.
The chimpanzee made a barking sound, clearing his throat. "Ghwadd"-he said-more or less: the German ich sound followed by the word "what." "Ghwadd did jou mee-an aboud evdial, Midda Vleury?"
Dan Fleury turned and looked at the chimp blankly. But not, Marchand thought suddenly, as though he didn't know what the chimp was talking about. Only as if he didn't intend to answer.
Marchand rasped, "What's this 'evdial,' Dan?"
"Search me. Look, Mr. Ferguson, perhaps we'd better go outside."
"Ghwadd?" The harsh barking voice struggled against the simian body it occupied, and came closer to the sounds it meant to emit. "What did you bean-did you mean?"
He was a rude young man, Marchand thought irritably. The fellow was tiring him.
Although there was something about that insistent question- Marchand winced and felt for a moment as though he were going to throw up. It passed, leaving him wobbly. It wasn't possible he had broken anything, he told himself. Czerny would not lie about that. But he felt as if he had.
He lost interest in the chimp-man, did not even turn his head as Fleury hurried him out of the room, whispering to him in an agitated and low-pitched chirrup like the scratching of a cricket's legs.
If a man wanted to abandon his God-given human body and put his mind, thoughts, and-yes-soul into the corpus of an anthropoid, there was nothing in that to entitle him to any special consideration from Norman Marchand.
Of course not! Marchand rehearsed the familiar argument as he waited for the ambulance. Men who volunteered for the interstellar flights he had done so much to bring about knew what they were getting into. Until some super-Batman invented the mythical FTL drive, it would always be so. At possible speeds-less than light's 186,000 m.p.s. crawl-it was a matter of decades to reach almost every worthwhile planet that was known.