Dhalgren (72 page)

"Oh, yes."

"You were already in the city?"

"That's right."

"You said earlier you didn't see the whole thing though."

"I caught, I guess, now it must have been, the last ten or fifteen minutes. Roger came and woke me up to see."

"You saw it from
inside
the house then?"

"Well, first out my window. Then we went down to the gardens. I tell you, now, it was pretty strange."

The others laughed. "Hey," Paul Fenster said, half standing to look at the others seated. "We've just about got the Captain boxed in here. Why doesn't somebody move back, there?"

"That's all right. If I want to get out, I'll just bust on through."

"I imagine—" Madame Brown reached down to play with Muriel's muzzle—"you aren't any closer to an explanation than we are."

"I think that was about the strangest thing I ever saw, I'll be honest now."

"As strange as anything you ever saw in space?" from the man in purple angora.

"Well, I tell you, this afternoon was pretty… I guess you'd say, spaced out."

They laughed again.

The heavy blond Mexican with the blanket shirt rose from beside Tak and walked to the door, passing within a foot of Kid, and left. Tak saw Kid. With tilting head, he beckoned.

Kid, curious, went to sit in the vacated seat.

Tak leaned to whisper, "Captain Kamp…" A dozen others had pulled chairs up to listen to the crew-cut man in the green, short-sleeved shirt who sat in the corner booth.

Tak sat and folded his hands across the bottom of his leather jacket so that the top pushed out from his blond chest.

"What I want to know," purple angora announced, "…down, sweetheart, down—" Muriel had momentarily switched allegiances—"I want to know is, if it could possibly have been some kind of trick. I mean, is there any way somebody could have made that seem to happen? I mean… well, you know: in a man-made way."

"Well…" The Captain looked among his listeners. "He's your engineer, isn't he?" His look settled on Tak—who reared back with a high laugh.

That must be as self-conscious as I've ever seen him, Kid thought He'd never heard Tak make that sound before.

"No," Tak said. "No, I'm afraid that doesn't have anything to do with any engineering I'd know anything about."

"What I want to know—now what
I
want to know," Fenster said. "You've been in space. You've been on the moon…" He paused, then added in a different voice: "You're one of the ones that was actually on the moon."

Captain Kamp was only attentive.

"We've had here some sort of… astrological happening, and it's got us all pretty shook. I want to know if you… well, from being up on the moon, or like that, you might know something more about it."

Kamp's face ghosted a smile. Kid searched for the names of the astronauts from the four moonshots he'd followed closely, tried to recall what he could about the fifth. Captain Kamp crossed his arms on the booth-table. He wasn't very tall.

"Now it's certainly possible—" Kamp punctuated his southwestern speech with small nods—"that there's an astronomical, or better, cosmological explanation. But I'll be frank: I don't know what it is."

"Do you think we should worry?" Madame Brown asked in a voice with no worry in it at all.

Kamp, whose crew mixed grey and gold, nodded. "Worry? Well, we're all here. And alive. That's certainly no reason
not
to worry. But worry isn't going to do us much good, now, is it? Now yesterday—about this time yesterday—I was in Dallas. And if that thing was as big as it looked and really some sort of body in the sky, a comet or a sun, I suspect it would have been seen a long way off coming, with telescopes. And nobody told
me
about it."

"It sounds, Captain, as though you don't believe it's serious."

Kamp's smile said as much. Kamp said, "I
saw
it—some of it, anyway."

"Then," Kid said, and others turned, "you don't know how big it really was."

"Now that," the Captain answered, "I'm afraid, is it." His jaw was wider than his forehead. "Now you all, Roger too, described something which practically filled up half the sky. So obviously what I saw was only a little bit. And then there was the story about—George, was it?"

Tak looked around the room, frowned, and again whispered to Kid: "George was here a few minutes ago. He must have gone out just before you came—"

"Now I'm afraid nobody outside… of Bellona, saw that one. And Roger tells me he didn't either."

"I certainly did," Tak whispered.

"I certainly did!" someone cried.

"Well." Kamp smiled. "Not too many other people did, and certainly nobody
outside
Bellona."

"You saw what happened today." Teddy, arms folded, leaned against the back of the next booth.

"Yes, I guess I did."

"You mean," Fenster jovially announced, "you went from here to the moon and back, and you didn't see anything on the way that would tell us something about all this thing this afternoon?"

Kamp said, "Nope."

"Then what use was it, I ask you?" Fenster looked around for somebody's back to slap. "I mean now what was the use of it?"

Someone said, "You haven't been with the space program a while…?"

"Now you don't really leave it. Just last week I was down for medical testing for long-range results. That I don't ever expect to stop. But I'm much less involved with it now than some of the others."

"Why did you leave?" the purple angora asked. "Was it your idea or theirs—if you can answer a question like that?"

"Well." This, a considered sentence. "I suspect they thought it was a touchier question than I did at the time. But I doubt they wanted me that much if I didn't want them. My interest in the space program just about ended with splashdown. The tests, the research work afterward, that was important. The parades, the celebrations, the panels, the publicity—I think the fun in that was exhausted a month after I came out of the isolation chamber. The rest—probably more so for me than for the others, because that's the kind of person I am—was just a nuisance. Also," and he smiled, "I've occasionally been known to pick up a guitar at a party and a sing a folk song or two. Nothing political, mind you. But they still frown on that sort of thing."

Everyone laughed. Kid thought: Is he for real?

And a second thought, like a stutter: My reaction is as fixed as his action. And Kid laughed, though later than the others. Two or three glanced at him.

"No," Kamp went on, "I suppose I saw myself as something of an adventurer… as much as a navy test pilot can be.
Apollo
for me was an adventure—practically an eight-year adventure, with all the preparation. But when it was over, I was ready to go on to something else."

"So you've come to Bellona," Madame Brown said, as Fenster said: "After the moon, where else
is
there?"

"Now, you're right…"

Kid wondered which question Kamp was answering.

"…but I'm just beginning to see that myself."

"Are you here in any official connection?" asked another woman.

"I'd imagine," Fenster said, "you're never officially disconnected."

"No. I'm here unofficially."

"What does that mean?" someone challenged.

Fenster scowled, offended for Kamp, who merely said, "They know I'm here. But they gave me no instructions before I came. They won't ask me anything about what I did or saw after I come back."

"Why don't we break up this Star Chamber?" Fenster stood. "Come on, the Captain is nice enough to talk to us all at once, but we've got to give the man a chance to circulate."

"Now this is quite informal," Kamp countered, "compared to what I'm used to. I would like a chance to walk around though."

"Come on, come on." Fenster made shooing motions.

Some rose.

The bartender rolled his cuffs above the blurry blue beasts and strolled to the counter.

Tak's chair scraped.

"Come on, now, let's let the Captain get himself a drink. Madame Brown, you look like you could use one too."

Kid shook his hands below the chair edge to stop the tingling.

Tak stood, stretched to tiptoe, looked around. "Wonder where George got off to. He was all curious when he discovered we had a genuine man in the moon with us."

They walked to the bar.

Teddy was returning chairs.

Once the dozen clustered at the Captain's booth dispersed, the place looked empty.

"I thought Lanya was here, maybe."

Tak's hands locked. "I haven't seen her. Madame B. might know where she is." And unlocked. "Hey, I saw the big advertisement in the
Times,
all over page three. Congratulations." Tak frowned. "By the way, what did
you
do at the coming of the great white light? Orange, I guess it was, really. You got any opinions to pass the time with while we wait to see if there's going to be a tomorrow?"

Kid leaned on meshed fingers. "I don't know. I didn't do anything much. I had some people with me. I think they were more upset than I was. You know, Tak, for a while I thought…" The bartender set down a beer bottle. "…no, that's silly." Kid pulled the bottle to him, leaving a sweat ribbon. "Isn't it?" The candles glittered in it.

"What?"

"I was going to say, for a while I thought it was a dream."

"If I woke up right now, I'd feel a lot better."

"No. Not that." Kid lifted his bottle once, twice, a third, a fourth, a fifth time from lapping rings. "When it was rising, I remember I went out to take a look from the back porch; and thinking maybe I was dreaming. Suddenly I woke up. In bed. Only, when I got up, later, it was still there. Finally, after it went down, I went to sleep again. You know, right now—" he smiled, to himself till it overcame the strictures of his facial muscles and burst stupidly onto his face—"I still don't know what I dreamed and what I didn't. Maybe I didn't really see any more than the Captain."

"You went to
sleep?"

"I was tired." Saying that annoyed Kid. "What about you?"

"Christ, I—" The bartender brought Tak's bottle. "What did I do?" Tak snorted. "I saw the light coming through those bamboo blinds I have, and I went out on the roof to take a look. I watched it rising for about three minutes. Then I freaked."

"What'd you do?"

"I went down into the stairwell and sat in the dark for about an hour or so… I guess. I'd got this whole paranoid thing about radiation—no, don't laugh. We might all start losing our hair in the next six hours while our capillaries fall apart. Finally I got scared of just sitting in the dark and went up to look again…" He stopped moving his bottle around the wet circle. "I'm just glad I don't have a heart condition. It stretched over so much of the horizon I couldn't look at one edge and see the other. I couldn't look at where the bottom was cut off by the roofs and see the top." Tak's bottle rumbled about. "I went back down into the stairwell, closed the door, and just cried. For a couple of hours. I couldn't stop. While I was crying, I thought about lots of things. One of them, by the way, was you."

"What?"

"I remember sitting there and asking myself if this was what the inside of insanity felt like—Ah, there: you've taken offense."

He hadn't. But now wondered if he should.

"Well, I'm sorry. That's what I thought, anyway."

"You were really that scared?"

"You
weren't?"

"I guess a lot of people around me were. I thought about all the terrible things it could have been—like everybody else. But if it was any of them, there wasn't anything I could do."

"You really are almost as weird as people keep trying to make us think you are. Look, when you come up short against the edge like that, when you discover the earth really
is
round, when you find out you've killed your father and married your mother after all, or when you look at the horizon and see something, like that, rising—man, you have to have
some
sort of human reaction: laugh, cry, sing, something! You can't just lie down and take a nap."

Kid lingered in the ruins of his confusion. "I… did a lot of laughing."

Tak snorted again. "Okay, so you're
not
that flippy. I'd just hate to think you were as brave as everybody keeps going on you are."

"Me?" This couldn't, Kid thought, be what the inside of courage felt like.

"Excuse me," the southwestern voice said from Kid's other side. "You were pointed out to me as… the Kid?"

Kid turned, with his confusion. "Yeah…?"

Kamp looked at it, and laughed. Kid decided he liked him. Kamp said, "I'm supposed to deliver a message to you, from Roger."

"Huh?"

"He told me if I came here I would probably meet you. He'd like—if it's all right with you—if you'd come up to the house three Sundays from now. He says that he'll be squeezing more time together, so it will be in slightly less than two weeks—now I don't know how you guys put up with that—" He laughed again. "Roger wants to have a party for you. For your book." The Captain paused with a considered nod. "Saw it. Looks good. Good luck on it, now."

Kid wondered what to say. He tried: "Thank you."

"Roger said to come in the evening. And bring twenty or thirty friends, if you want. He says it's your party. It starts at sunset; in three Sundays."

"Presumptuous bastard," Tak said. "Sunset? He might at least wait and see if there's a tomorrow morning." With his forefinger he hooked down his cap visor and walked off.

Kid was pondering statements to place into the silence, when Kamp apparently decided he'd try: "I'm afraid I don't know much about poetry."

Liked him, Kid felt. But for the life of him he didn't know why.

"I read some of Roger's copy, though. But if I started asking questions about it, now, I'd probably just end up looking worse than I already do."

"Mmmm."
Kid nodded and pondered. "You get tired of people asking you all those questions?"

"Yes. But it wasn't too bad this evening. At least we were talking about something real. I mean something that happened, today. It's better than all those discussions where they ask you whether, as an astronaut, you believe in long hair, abortions, race relations, or the pill."