And as, without a word, the Stranger picked Helen up in his arms, and carried her silently through the thinning blue smoke into the street, his face bore that same look of tragic regret, of serene acceptance.
That’s almost all there is to my story. Gene was arrested, of course, but it’s not easy to convict a man of murder of a woman without real identity.
For Helen’s body was never found. Neither was the Stranger.
Eventually Gene was released and, as I’ve said, is making a life for himself, despite the cloud over his reputation.
We see him now and then, and try to console him, tell him it might as easily have been Es or Louis or I, that we were all blind, selfish fools together.
And we’ve each of us got back to our work. The sculptures, the word-studies, the novels, the nuclear notions are not nearly as brilliant as when Helen was with us. But we keep turning them out. We tell ourselves Helen would like that.
And our minds all work now at the third level—but only by fits and starts, fighting the jungle blindness and selfishness that are closing in again. Still, at our best, we understand Helen and what Helen was trying to do, what she was trying to bring the world even if the world wasn’t ready for it. We glimpse that strange passion that made her sacrifice all the stars for four miserable blind-worms.
But mostly we grieve for Helen, together and alone. We know there won’t be another Helen for a hundred thousand years, if then. We know that she’s gone a lot farther than the dozens or thousands of light-years her body’s been taken for burial. We look at Es’s statue of Helen, we read one or two of my poems to her. We remember, our minds come half alive and are tortured by the thought of what they might have become if we’d kept Helen. We picture her again sitting in the shadows of Es’s studio, or sunning herself on the grassy banks after a swim, or smiling at us at Benny’s. And we grieve.
For we know you get only one chance at someone like Helen.
We know that because, half an hour after the Stranger carried Helen’s body from the Blue Moon, a great meteor went flaming and roaring across the countryside (some say up from the countryside and out toward the stars) and the next day it was discovered that the waters of the coal pit Helen wouldn’t swim in, had been splashed, as if by the downward blow of a giant’s fist, across the fields for a thousand yards.
The Enchanted Forest
THE DARKNESS was fusty as Formalhautian Aa leaves, acrid as a Rigelian brush fire, and it still shook faintly, like one of the dancing houses of the Wild Ones. It was filled with a petulant, low humming, so like that of a wounded Earth-wasp.
Machinery whirred limpingly, briefly. An oval door opened in the darkness. Soft green light filtered in— and the unique scent, aromatic in this case yet with a grassy sourness, of a new planet.
The green was imparted to the light by the thorny boughs or creepers crisscrossing the doorway. To eyes dreary from deep sub-space the oval of interlaced, wrist-thick tendrils was a throat-lumping sight.
A human hand moved delicately from the darkness toward the green barrier. The finger-long, translucent thorns quivered, curved back ever so slowly, then struck—a hairbreadth short, for the hand had stopped.
The hand did not withdraw, but lingered just in range, caressing danger. A sharp gay laugh etched itself against the woundedly-humming dark.
Have to dust those devilish little green daggers to get out of the wreck, Elven thought. Lucky they were here though. The thorn forest’s cushioning-effect may have been the straw that saved the spaceboats back—or at least mine.
Then Elven stiffened. The humming behind him shaped itself into fault English speech altered by centuries of slurring, but still essentially the same.
“You fly fast, Elven.”
“Faster than any of your hunters,” Elven agreed softly without looking around, and added, “FTL— meaning Faster Than Light.”
“You fly far, Elven. Tens of lightyears,” the wounded voice continued.
“Scores,” Elven corrected.
“Yet I speak to you, Elven.”
“But you don’t know where I am. I came on a blind reach through deep sub-space. And your FTL radio can take no fix. You are shouting at infinity, Fedris.”
“And fly you ever so fast and far, Elven,” the wounded voice persisted, “you must finally go to ground, and then we will search you out.”
Again Elven laughed gayly. His eyes were still on the green doorway. “You will search me out! Where will you search me out, Fedris? On which side of the million planets of the sos? On which of the hundred million planets not of the sos?”
The wounded voice grew weaker. “Your home planet is dead, Elven. Of all the Wild Ones, only you slipped through our cordon.”
This time Elven did not comment vocally. He felt at his throat and carefully took from a gleaming locket there a tiny white sphere no bigger than a lady beetle. Holding it treasuringly in his cupped palm, he studied it with a brooding mockery. Then, still handling it as if it were an awesome object, he replaced it in the locket.
The wounded voice had sunk to a ghostly whisper.
“You are alone, Elven. Alone with the mystery and terror of the universe. The unknown will find you, Elven, even before we do. Time and space and fate will all conspire against you. Chance itself will-”
The spectral FTL-radio voice died as the residual power in the wrecked machinery exhausted itself utterly. Silence filled the broken gut of the spaceboat.
Silence that was gayly shattered when Elven laughed a last time. Fedris the Psychologist! Fedris the Fool! Did Fedris think to sap his nerve with witch-doctor threats and the power of suggestion? As if a man—or woman—of the Wild Ones could ever be brought to believe hi the supernatural!
Not that there wasn’t an unearthliness loose in the universe, Elven reminded himself somberly—an unearthly beauty born of danger and ultimate self-expression. But only the Wild Ones knew that unearthliness. It could never be known to the poor tame hordes of the sos, who would always revere safety and timidity as most members of the human sos—or society—have revered them—and hate all lovers of beauty and danger.
Just as they had hated the Wild Ones and so destroyed them.
All save one.
One, had Fedris said? Elven smiled cryptically, touched the locket at his neck, and leaped lightly to his feet.
A short time later he had what he needed from the wreck.
“And now, Fedris,” he murmured, “I have a work of creation to perform.” He smiled. “Or should I say recreation?”
He directed at the green doorway the blunt muzzle of a dustgun. There was no sound or flash, but the green boughs shook, blackened —the thorns vanishing—and turned to a drifting powder fine and dark as the ashes carpeting Earth’s Moon. Elven sprang to the doorway and for a moment he was poised there, yellow-haired, cool-lipped, laughing-eyed, handsome as a young god—or adolescent devil—hi his black tunic embroidered with platinum. Then he leaned out and directed the dustgun’s ultrasonic beam downward until he had cleared a patch of ground in the thorn forest. When this moment’s work was over, he dropped lightly down, the fine dust purring up to his knees at the impact
Elven snapped off his dustgun, flirted sweat from his face, laughed at his growing exasperation, and looked around at the thorn forest. It had not changed an iota in the miles he’d made. Just the glassy thorns and the lance-shaped leaves and the boughs rising from the bare, reddish earth. Not another planet to be seen. Nor had he caught the tiniest glimpse of moving life, large or small—save the thorns themselves, which “noticed” him whenever he came too close. As an experiment he’d let a baby one prick him and it had stung abominably.