Kearsarge: (off) Oh, my holy mother. (He pops out, putty-colored.) George, get over here.
Iris: (curiously) What is it?
She goes over and disappears for a moment inside the boat, with Kearsarge and Horowitz. Off, she gasps. Then, one by one they climb out and stand looking at Flannel.
Flannel: What I got, blue horns or something?
Horowitz: Show him, Kearsarge.
Kearsarge beckons. There is a strange pucker of grim amusement on his craggy face.
Kearsarge: Come look, little feller. Then you can join our club.
Reluctantly, the big man goes over to the blister and follows Kearsarge into the lifeboat. Dolly after them, swing in to the instrument panel, under it and look up.
Lashed to the projecting lower end of the main thrust control is a silver can with a small cylinder at the near end.
Flanneclass="underline" (pointing stupidly) Is that . . . that the same thing that—
Kearsarge: A little smaller, but then you don’t need as much cyanide for a boat.
Flanneclass="underline" (angry) Who the hell put it there? You?
Kearsarge: Not me, feller. I just found it.
Horowitz: It’s been there all along, Flannel. Kearsarge is right: you belong to the club too. You sure it was Heri Gonza told you to take the boat?
Flannel: Sure it was. He couldn’t have nothing to do with this. (Suddenly it hits him) Jesus! I mighta—
Horowitz: We’ll have plenty of time to talk this over. Let’s pack up the testing stuff and haul out of here.
Flanneclass="underline" (to no one) Jesus.
Heri Gonza lay back in the projection room and sipped his beer and watched the stock shot of a Fafnir taking off from a rock plain. “You really get all that glop out of that book, Burcke, m’boy?”
“Every bit of it,” said Burcke, watching the screen.
“You know how it is in space, a fellow’s got to do something with his time. Sometimes he writes, and sometimes it’s fairy tales, and sometimes you can get a pretty good show out of a fairy tale. But when you do that, you call it a fairy tale. Follow me?”
“Yup.”
“This was really what went out on the air tonight?”
“Sure is.”
Very, very softly, Heri Gonza said, “Poor Burcke. Poor, poor ol’ Burcke.”
Closeup, hands turning pages in rough logbook. Pull back to show Burcke with book. He looks up, and when he speaks his voice is solemn.
Burcke: Time to think, time to talk it over. Time to put all the pieces in the same place at the same time, and push them against each other to see what fits.
Fade to black; but it is not black after alclass="underline" instead, starry space. Pan across to pick up ship, a silver fish with a scarlet tail. Zoom in fast, dissolve through hull, discovering fore-deck. The four lounge around, really relaxed, willing to think before speaking, and to speak carefully. Horowitz and Kearsarge sit at the table ignoring a chessboard. Iris is stretched on the deck with a rolled-up specimen sack under her head. Flannel kneels before a spread of Canfield solitaire. Horowitz is watching him.
Horowitz: I like to think about Flannel.
Flannel: Think what?
Horowitz: Oh ... the alternatives. The ‘ifs.’ What would Flannel do if this had been different, or that.
Flannel: There’s no sense in that kind of thinkin’—if this, if that. This happened, or that happened, and that’s all there is to it. You got anything special in mind?
Horowitz: I have, as a matter of fact. Given that you had a job to do, namely to cut out and leave us with our cyanide bomb at the start of the trip—
Flanneclass="underline" (aroused) I tol’ you and tol’ you that wasn’t a job. I didn’t know about the damn cyanide.
Horowitz: Suppose you had known about it. Would you have come? If you hadn’t come, would you have tipped us off about it? And here’s the question I thought of: if the first bomb had failed—which it did—and there had been no second bomb to tell you that you were a member of the Exit Club, would you have tried to do the job on the way home?
Flannel: I was thinkin’ about it, about what to do.
Horowitz: And what did you decide?
Flannel: Nothin’. You found the bomb in the boat so I just stopped thinkin’.
Iris: (suddenly) Why did that really make a difference?
Flannel: All the diff’nce in the world. Heri Gonza tol’ me to get in the lifeboat before fourteen an’ a half hours and come back and tell him how things went. Now if there was just your bomb, could be that Heri Gonza wanted you knocked off. There was an accident and it din’t knock you off, and here I am working for him and wonderin’ if I shoon’t take up where the bomb left off.
Iris: Then we found the second bomb, and you changed your mind. Why?
Flanneclass="underline" (exasperated) Whata ya all, simple or somepin? Heri Gonza, he tol’ me to come back and tell him how it went. If he tells me that an’ then plants a bomb on me, how could I get back to tell him? A man’s a fool to tell a guy to do somethin’ an’ then fix it so he can’t. He’s no fool, Heri Gonza I mean, an’ you know it. Well then: if he din’t plant my bomb, he din’t plant your bomb, because anyone can see they was planted by the same guy. An’ if he din’t plant your bomb, he don’t want you knocked off, so I stopped thinkin’ about it. Is that simple enough for ya?
Iris: I don’t know that it’s simple, but it sure is beautiful.
Horowitz: Well, one of us is satisfied of Heri Gonza’s good intentions. Though I still don’t see what sense it made to go to all the trouble of putting you aboard just to have you get off and go back right at the start.
Flannel: Me neither. But do I have to understand everything he tells me to do? I done lots of things for him I didn’t know what they was about. You too, Kearsarge.
Kearsarge: That’s right. I drive this can from here to there, and from there to yonder, and I don’t notice anything else, but if I notice it I forget it, but if I don’t forget it I don’t talk about it. That’s the way he likes it and we get along fine.
Iris: (forcefully) I think Heri Gonza wanted us all killed.
Horowitz: What’s that—intuition? And . . . shouldn’t that read “wants”?
Iris: “Wants,” yes. He wants us all killed. No, it’s not intuition. It formulates. Almost. There’s a piece missing.
Flannel: Ah, y’r out of y’r mind.
Kearsarge: Doubled.
Horowitz: (good-naturedly) Shut up, both of you. Go on with that, Iris. Maybe by you it formulates, but by me it intuits. Go on.
Iris: Well, let’s use as a working hypothesis that Heri Gonza wants us dead—us four; He wants more than that: he wants us to disappear from the cosmos—no bodies, no graves, no nothing.