Armageddon, 1970

Next morning, while Alan was still dressing and yawning, and Brave was clattering skillets in the kitchen, humming the
allegro con passionato
movement from "Hard Hearted Hannah the Vamp of Savannah," the door chimes bonged softly. Brave went to the spywindow, surveyed the caller, and shifted his grenade pistol to a handier position before opening the door. A stranger stood on the threshold.

"Ichabod Crane," said Brave to himself, and aloud, "Yes?"

"Ah," said the stranger, "you would be the tough egg with the unpronounceable name. Greetings, chieftain."

"How," said Brave with a straight face. "You want-um audience with great sachem?"

"That I do, Lo."

"Oh, gad," groaned the Indian, "if I hear that weary old jest once more I'll burst into tears and die. Come in, comedian. Dr. Rackham's dressing."

"Thanks. Forgive me for the godawful gag, friend. I haven't eaten breakfast yet and an empty stomach plays the devil with my sense of humor." He rattled over to a chair and sat down. At least, thought Brave, closing the door, you expected him to rattle. He was the longest and thinnest bag of bones ever seen on Long Island. Fully six feet eight, he was lean from the top of his narrow skull, which was covered by an inch-long mat of straight stiff blond hair, to the soles of his number twelve feet. If he had any fat in him at all it must have been a very lonesome blob of fat indeed, well camouflaged and utterly alone in a wilderness of stringy muscle, meager sinew, and shaving-slender bones. His green eyes, perpetually half-lidded on either side of a nose like the prow of a Chinese junk, were humorous and sharp and as bright as polished emeralds.

Brave said to himself, Here is a shrewd customer, who isn't one-tenth the fool he appears to be.

"You don't have an appointment with Dr. Rackham."

"No, I don't. A plump little meathead called Getty over at the central offices said he'd be here, and I popped over on the chance. I want to inveigle him onto a TV program of mine."

"Dr. Rackham is a busy man."

"So is President Blose of the U.S. of A., but
he
came on the program, Lo. Pardon me," said the man, "there I go again. It's second nature. I don't mean to offend, but I was a disk jockey once. Look, friend, my name is Jim McEldownie. I'm
Worlds of Portent
McEldownie."

"I'm
Lashings of Victuals
Kiwanawatiwa, and my eggs are scorching," said Brave, going out to the kitchen. "The books are counted, so are the pipes, and the first editions are booby-trapped. Don't get ideas."

"Injun, I could grow to love you," said McEldownie. "Listen, seriously, don't you ever watch TV?"

"I do not."

"That explains it. Existing in the dark like this, you wouldn't have heard of me. I run this klatch, see, called
Worlds of Portent
, onto which I entice various important and pseudo-important characters, and there I cajole and browbeat and query till they tell me all sorts of fascinating lies, and the public laps it up like a bunch of silly cats."

Unquote, the Siamese, rose out of her hygienic playbox and gave him a frozen glare. He recoiled. "My God," he said, "I seem to be offending everyone this morning. Forgive me, puss."

Unquote snarled and collapsed in a boneless pile of beautiful fur. Alan stuck his head into the room and said, "Where do you classify me?"

"Huh? Oh, hallo, Doc. You're important. Anybody from Project Star is important. Whether the same can be said for those officials of our mighty government who have gasped and babbled and turned blue on
Portent
, I'm not one to declare. How about it, Doc? Will you appear?"

"Talking about what? Fuel? That's all I really know."

"If you can talk for thirteen minutes about it, without violating any regulations or giving away secrets, I want you. Fuel is hot stuff with the space-minded John Q."

"What do you think, Brave? Should we do it?"

Brave said, "Too much time and no fun, that's how it sounds to me."

"Oh, I don't know. I've never been on the air."

"Please," said McEldownie, shuddering like a leafless willow in a high wind. "The phrase is 'on the space.' Air belongs to that outmoded, decadent, but apparently deathless medium called radio. There, I've said it. Have you got any mouth-washing soap?"

"A positive Hilton Boil," said Brave in the kitchen. "A real yokked-up comic. Wait till I've fed him and we'll hurl him out."

"All right," said Alan, "I'll do it. I'm a ham at heart. When do you want me?"

"Tomorrow night at eight vacant?"

"As vacant as—" he was going to say "Dr. Getty's head," but caught himself in time. The TV man's flippancy was contagious. "Quite vacant. Give Brave the directions and we'll be there."

Brave said, "Breakfast is on. There are three plates and food for two. I hope you eat lightly, Mr. Portent."

"McEldownie, but call me Jim. I eat like a bird."

The bird, thought Alan half an hour later, must be a starving turkey buzzard; he sighed and stood up. "We're due at work, Jim. See you at eight tomorrow, then?"

"Seven-fifteen. I have to brief you. Cheers, gentlemen. Apologize to the cat for me. I insulted it a while back and it's been burning holes in my neck ever since." He took himself off, still with the illusion of rattling bonily. Alan and Brave washed up and strolled down to their laboratory.

Nothing happened that day or the next, save for a thorough search for the missing welder, which turned up no trace of him. At seven-fifteen the two friends walked into the TV studio in Manhattan.

"Hi," said McEldownie, waving a long hand. "Sit down and let's gurgle about fuel." They did so. At one point the lean man said, "An idea. What if Brave were to stand behind you all through the program? It'd look impressive as hell. Sinister Indian guards scientist even on national hookup. 'No precaution too elaborate for our men,' says head of Project Star. How about it?"

Alan looked at Brave. He would not expose his friend to stupid ridicule. Brave winked. "Okay," said Alan. "But no gags."

"Abso-bloody-lutely. Play it for gravity. Show people that there is danger connected with the business. And I think there is," he added solemnly.

Alan stared. "Why do you say that?"

"I don't mean the TV, I mean your work out on Long Island. You can't tell me that nobody in the world wishes our country any ill, chum. We have enemies just as we always have had. Why else the ack-ack and force screens?"

Alan did not answer. He thought of Brave's prediction of trouble, and he was more impressed with this lanky comedian than he had been before that moment.

Thirty seconds before the program time he sat down at the round table opposite McEldownie, and Brave took up a forbidding posture behind his chair.

His host began to speak, and suddenly Alan realized why the tall blond irrepressible fellow had been trusted with a program of such gravity as
Worlds of Portent
. As the cameras rolled and the brilliant lights came on, the jester's motley dropped away from him and was replaced by a cloak of earnest sobriety. His fantastic appearance heightened the seriousness; it was as shocking and thought-producing as if a scarecrow had begun to talk Schopenhauer.

He knew precisely how much to say; when to sit back and let Alan do a monologue, and when to interrupt with a pertinent question. He was a genius at his work.

And then, perhaps four or five minutes after the telecast had begun, Alan became aware of two things, each quite extraordinary. First, Brave had disappeared. Alan glanced back over his shoulder and found the Indian had vanished. The lights were so bright that his vision did not extend to the walls of the studio, so he presumed that his friend was still there somewhere; but he had left the range of the cameras. And secondly, something was happening to Alan's mind.

He tried to analyze the trouble, but he could not do it. He could only touch a few salient points of it; the fact that although he was talking very learnedly, and with (so far as he could tell) lucidity and vigor,
he
was not controlling his tongue in the least. It was almost like being drunk; there seemed to be a small entity perched on the root of his tongue who was pulling the strings of speech. But whereas the drunken entity was malicious and got him into all sorts of rows and riots, this particular sprite was doing what seemed a fine job for him. He knew quite well that he himself was not forming or directing the words he spoke. It was unpleasant, to say the least.

And there was something else. His mind, freed of necessity to concentrate on the program, was somewhere off in space, listening intently ... listening to a voice from without and within, a voice that inhabited the cold wastes of time and infinity as well as the bone-bounded sphere of his brain.

Listen to me, Alan Rackham
, said the voice. Wordlessly, yet with words, from the farthest stretches of the galaxies and still existing in the core of his own intellect, cold as hoarfrost, hot as berserker's rage, gentle and persuasive as a doting mother, the voice said to him,
Listen to me
.

He would not listen. It was good and evil both together, and if he listened he would die. Yet it was said he would live. He would live forever; if time can be measured in terms of endlessness, he would not die. But he knew he would die. He struggled. The cameras picked up no hint of the travail. His face was intense and good-humored and his words were intelligent; and all the while he fought with the voice and would not listen. He fought it for an hour, and for a month, and till the end of the world came and beyond, and it spoke to him, fire and ice in the same words, but without words, and then he began to listen to it.

At this point six minutes of the telecast had gone by.

You are listening now
, said the voice.
You are listening, are you not?

I'm listening, God curse you.

I am taking you, Alan Rackham, as a bear takes a lamb, as a man takes a woman, as a hand takes a glove and the glove takes the hand.

I understand, curse you. Take me.

I am older than your whole race, and wiser than its cumulative wisdom, and I come from the stars.

Of course, you come from the stars. You are myself, and I understand you, friend.

Yes, I am yourself, wiser and stronger and older and beyond you in every way, and I am you. You are my servant, my slave, and myself.

Certainly, master. Why do you tell me things I have always known?

You are not obeying when you follow me, for you follow yourself, you who are now me.

You are God, are you not?
said Alan in his mind.
The Buddhists are right.

No. Not God. I am the atom and I am the intergalactic void, you and me and everything right and wrong. Have you learned your lesson?

It is a lesson I knew in the womb.

Now you are mine
, said the voice, approving without an iota's loss of the flame and frost of hatred and love blended flawlessly.

This is a pleasure beyond pleasure, sensation far above sensation. This is maelstrom descent and flying into the sun. This is the keenness of sexual transport to the nth power. I live for you.

Now you have it. Never forget it.

Never!
swore Alan.

Now forget it.

I have forgotten it.

Now what do you have to do for me?

Whatever it is you wish.

Truly you are mine. Now you have forgotten me.

I have forgotten.

Who am I?

Who are you?
asked Alan, perplexed.

Truly you have forgotten. What have you to say?

"So the problem of most importance confronting us then was, how can we carry enough of this fuel to get us to the moon and back? It took us seven years to solve that one, but as everyone knows, we did. Then Van Horne discovered the hitherto unknown properties of—" he was talking blithely, almost by rote, for this was history-book stuff; and there had never been any sprite guiding his tongue at all, nor any voiceless voice in the bitterness of the eternal chasm between the stars and there was no memory anywhere in his consciousness of such things, nor any lingering discomfortable feeling that he had known a thing now forgotten....