Long After Midnight (29 page)

 
          
The
old man read until he was hoarse, and then Bolton read, and then the others,
far into the night, when the machine stopped transcribing words and they knew
that Tom Wolfe was in bed, then, on the rocket, flying to Mars, probably not
asleep, no, he wouldn't sleep for hours yet, no, lying awake, like a boy the
night before a circus, not believing the big jeweled black tent is up and the
circus is on, with ten billion blazing performers on the high wires and the
invisible trapezes of space.

 
          
"There,"
breathed the old man, gentling aside the last pages of the first chapter.
"What do you think of that,
Bolton
?"

 
          
"It's
good."

 
          
"Good
hell!" shouted Field. "It's wonderful! Read it again, sit down, read
it again, damn you!"

 
          
It
kept coming through, one day following another, for ten hours at a time. The
stack of yellow papers on the floor, scribbled on, grew immense in a week,
unbelievable in two weeks, absolutely impossible in a month.

 
          
"Listen
to this!" cried the old man, and read.

 
          
"And
this!" he said.

 
          
"And
this chapter here, and this little novel here, it just came through,
Bolton
, titled 'The Space War,' a complete novel
on how it feels to fight a space war. Tom's been talking to people, soldiers,
officers, men, veterans of space. He's got it all here. And here's a chapter
called 'The Long Midnight,' and here's one on the Negro colonization of Mars,
and here's a character sketch of a Martian, absolutely priceless!"

 
          
Bolton
cleared his throat. "Mr. Field?"

 
          
"Yes,
yes, don't bother me."

 
          
"I've
some bad news, sir."

 
          
Field
jerked his gray head up. "What? The time element?"

 
          
"You'd
better tell Wolfe to hurry his work. The connection may break sometime this
week," said
Bolton
, softly.

 
          
"I'll
give you anything, anything if you keep it going!"

 
          
"It's
not money, Mr. Field. It's just plain physics right now. I'll do everything I
can. But you'd better warn him."

 
          
The
old man shriveled in his chair and was small. "But you can't take him away
from me now, not when he's doing so well. You should see the outline he sent
through an hour ago, the stories, the sketches. Here, here's one on spatial
tides, another on meteors. Here's a short novel begun, called 'Thistledown and
Fire'—"

 
          
"I'm
sorry."

 
          
"If
we lose him now, can we get him again?"

 
          
"I'd
be afraid to tamper too much."

 
          
The
old man was frozen. "Only one thing to do then. Arrange to have Wolfe type
his work, if possible, or dictate it, to save time; rather than have him use
pencil and paper, he's got to use a machine of some sort. See to it!"

 
          
The
machine ticked away by the hour into the night and into the dawn and through
the day. The old man slept only in faint dozes, blinking awake when the machine
stuttered to life, and all of space and travel and existence came to him
through the mind of another:

 
          
"..
.
the great starred meadows of space
.
.."

 
          
The
machine jumped.

 
          
"Keep
at it, Tom show them!" The old man waited.

 
          
The
phone rang.

 
          
It
was
Bolton
.

 
          
"We
can't keep it up, Mr. Field. The continuum device will absolute out within the
hour."

 
          
"Do
something!"

 
          
"I
can't."

 
          
The
teletype chattered. In a cold fascination, in a horror, the old man watched the
black lines form.

 
          
".
. .
the Martian cities, immense and
unbelievable, as numerous as stones thrown from some great mountain in a
rushing and incredible avalanche, resting at last in shining mounds . .
."

 
          
"Tom!"
cried the old man.

 
          
"Now,"
said
Bolton
, on the phone.

 
          
The
teletype hesitated, typed a word, and fell silent.

 
          
"Tom!"
screamed the old man.

 
          
He
shook the teletype.

 
          
"It's
no use," said the telephone voice. "He's gone. I'm shutting off the
time machine."

 
          
"No!
Leave it on!"

 
          
"But-"

 
          
"You
heard me—leave it! We're not sure he's gone."

 
          
"He
is. It's no use, we're wasting energy."

 
          
"Waste
it, then!"

 
          
He
slammed the phone down.

 
          
He
turned to the teletype, to the unfinished sentence.

 
          
"Come
on, Tom, they can't get rid of you that way, you won't let them, will you, boy,
come on. Tom, show them, you're big, you're bigger than time or space or their
damned machines, you're strong and you've a will like iron, Tom, show them,
don't let them send you back!"

 
          
The
teletype snapped one key.

 
          
The
old man bleated. "Tom! You
are
there,
aren't you? Can you still write? Write, Tom, keep it coming, as long as you
keep it rolling, Tom, they
can't
send
you back!"

 
          
"The,"
typed the machine.

 
          
"More,
Tom, more!"

 
          
Odors of,
clacked the machine.

 
          
"Yes?"

 
          
Mars,
typed the machine, and paused. A
minute's silence. The machine spaced, skipped a paragraph, and began:

 
          
The odors of Mars, the cinnamons and cold
spice winds, the winds of cloudy dust and winds of powerful bone and ancient
pollen
—

 
          
"Tom,
your're
still alive!"

 
          
For
answer the machine, in the next ten hours, slammed out six chapters of
"Flight Before Fury" in a series of fevered explosions.

 
          
"Today
makes six weeks,
Bolton
, six whole weeks, Tom gone, on Mars,
through the Asteroids. Look here, the manuscripts. Ten thousand words a day,
he's driving himself, I don't know when he sleeps, or if he eats, I don't care,
he doesn't either, he only wants to get it done, because he knows the time is
short."

 
          
"I
can't understand it," said
Bolton
.
"The power failed because our relays wore out. It took us three days to
manufacture and replace the particular channel relays necessary to keep the
Time Element steady, and yet Wolfe hung on. There's a personal factor here,
Lord knows what, we didn't take into account. Wolfe lives here, in this time,
when he is here, and can't be snapped back, after all. Time isn't as flexible
as we imagined. We used the wrong simile. It's not like a rubber band. More
like osmosis; the penetration of membranes by liquids, from Past to Present,
but we've got to send him back, can't keep him here, there'd be a void there, a
derangement. The one thing that really keeps him here now is himself, his
drive, his desire, his work. After it's over he'll go back as naturally as
pouring water from a glass."

 
          
"I
don't care about reasons, all I know is Tom is finishing it. He has the old
fire and description, and something else, something more, a searching of values
that supersede time and space. He's done a study of a woman left behind on
Earth while the damn rocket heroes leap into space that's beautiful, objective,
and subtle; he calls it 'Day of the Rocket,' and it is nothing more than an
afternoon of a typical suburban housewife who lives as her ancestral mothers
lived, in a house, raising her children, her life not much different from a
cavewoman's, in the midst of the splendor of science and the
trumpetings
of space projectiles; a true and steady and
subtle study of her wishes and frustrations. Here's another manuscript, called
'The Indians,' in which he refers to the Martians as Cherokees and Iroquois and
Blackfoots
, the Indian nations of space, destroyed
and driven back. Have a drink,
Bolton
,
have a drink!"

 
          
Tom
Wolfe returned to Earth at the end of eight weeks.

 
          
He
arrived in fire as he had left in fire, and his huge steps were burned across
space, and in the library of Henry William Field's house were towers of yellow
paper, with lines of black scribble and type on them, and these were to be
separated out into the six sections of a masterwork that, through endurance,
and a knowing that the sands were dwindling from the glass, had mushroomed day
after day.

 
          
Tom
Wolfe came back to Earth and stood in the library of Henry William Field's
house and looked at the massive outpourings of his heart and his hand and when
the old man said, "Do you want to read it, Tom?" he shook his great
head and replied, putting back his thick mane of dark hair with his big pale
hand, "No. I don't dare start on it. If I did, I'd want to take it home
with me. And I can't do that, can I?"

 
          
"No,
Tom, you can't."

 
          
"No
matter
how
much I wanted to?"

 
          
"No,
that's the way it is. You never wrote another novel in that year, Tom. What was
written here must stay here, what was written there must stay there. There's no
touching it."

 
          
"I
see." Tom sank down into a chair with a great sigh. "I'm tired. I'm
mightily tired. It's been hard, but it's been good. What day is it?"

 
          
"This
is the fifty-sixth day."

 
          
"The
last
day?"

 
          
The
old man nodded and they were both silent awhile.

 
          
"Back
to 1938 in the stone cemetery," said Tom Wolfe, eyes shut. "I don't
like that. I wish I didn't know about that, it's a horrible thing to
know." His voice faded and he put his big hands over his face and held
them tightly there.

 
          
The
door opened.
Bolton
let himself in and stood behind Tom Wolfe's
chair, a small phial in his hand.

 
          
"What's
that?" asked the old man.

 
          
"An
extinct virus. Pneumonia. Very ancient and very evil," said
Bolton
. "When Mr. Wolfe came through, I had
to cure him of his illness, of course, which was immensely easy with the
techniques we know today, in order to put him in working condition for his job,
Mr. Field. I kept this pneumonia culture. Now that he's going back, he'll have
to be
reinoculated
with the disease."