‘It’s a little late to tell you this. But just before we took off, I was in charge of the air-lock. I let Driscoll slip away from the ship. He wanted to go. I couldn’t refuse him. I’m responsible. He’s back there now on mat planet.’
They both turned to the viewing port.
After a long while, Forester said, ‘I’m glad. I’m glad one of us had enough sense to stay.’
‘But he’s dead by now!’
‘No, that display down there is for us, perhaps a visual hallucination. Underneath all the tigers and lions and hurricanes, Driscoll is quite safe and alive, because he’s her only audience now. Oh, she’ll spoil him rotten. He’ll lead a wonderful life, he will, while we’re slugging it out up and down the system looking for but never finding a planet quite like this again. No, we won’t try to go back and rescue Driscoll. I don’t think "she" would let us anyway. Full speed ahead, Koestler, make it full speed.’
The rocket leaped forward into greater acceleration.
And just before the planet dwindled away in brightness and mist, Forester imagined he could see Driscoll very clearly, walking away down from the green forest, whistling quietly, all of the fresh planet around him, a wine-creek flowing for him, baked fish lolling in the hot springs, fruit ripening in the midnight trees, and distant forests and lakes waiting for him to happen by. Driscoll walked away across the endless green lawns, near the six white stones, beyond the forest to the edge of the large bright river.
The Headpiece
THE parcel arrived in the late afternoon mail. Mr Andrew Lemon knew what was inside by shaking it. It whispered in there like a large hairy tarantula.
It took him some time to get up his courage, tremble the wrappings open, and remove the lid from the white cardboard box.
There the bristly thing lay on its snowy tissue bed, as impersonal as the black horsechair clock-springs stuffed in an old sofa. Andrew Lemon chuckled.
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‘Indians come and gone, left this piece of a massacre behind as a sign, a warning. Well. There!’
And he fitted the new patent-leather black shining toupee to his naked scalp. He tugged at it like someone touching his cap to passers-by.
The toupee fitted perfectly, covering the neat coin-round hole which marred the top of his brow. Andrew Lemon gazed at the strange man in the mirror and yelled with delight.
‘Hey there, who’re you? Face’s familiar, but, by gosh now, pass you on the street without looking twice! Why? Because, it’s gone! Darn hole’s covered, nobody’d guess it was ever there. Happy New Year, man, that’s what it is, Happy New Year!’
He walked around and around his little apartment, smiling, needing to do something, but not yet ready to open the door and surprise the world. He walked by the mirror, glancing sidewise at someone going past there, and each time laughed and shook his head. Then he sat down in the rocker and rocked, grinning, and tried to look at a couple of copies of Wild West Weekly and then Thrilling Movie Magazine. But he couldn’t keep his right hand from crawling up along his face, tremulously, to feel at the rim of that crisp new sedge above his ears.
‘Let me buy you a drink, young fellow!’
He opened the fly-specked medicine cabinet and took three gulps from a bottle. Eyes watering, he was on the verge of cutting himself a chew of tobacco when he stopped, listening.
Outside, in the dark hallway, there was a sound like a field-mouse moving softly, daintily on the threadbare carpeting.
‘Miss Fremwell!’ he said to the mirror.
Suddenly the toupee was off his head and into the box as if, frightened, it had scuttled back there of itself. He clapped the lid down, sweating cold, afraid of even the sound that woman made moving by like a summer breeze.
He tiptoed to the door that was nailed shut in one wall and bent his raw and now furiously blushing head. He heard Miss Fremwell unlock her door and shut it and move delicately about her room with little tinkles of chinaware and chimes of cutlery, turning in a merry-go-round to make her dinner. He backed away from that door that was bolted, locked, latched, and driven shut with its four-inch hard-steel nails. He thought of the nights he had flinched in bed, thinking he heard her quietly pulling out the nails, pulling out the nails, touching at the bolts and slithering the latch…. And how it always took him an hour to turn away towards sleep after that.
Now she would rustle about her room for an hour or so. It would grow dark. The stars would be out and shining when he tapped on her door and asked if she’d sit on the porch or walk in the park. Then the only way she could possibly know of this third blind and staring eye in his head would be to run her hand in a Braille-like motion there. But her small white fingers had never moved within a thousand miles of that scar which was no more to her than, well, one of those pockmarks off on the full moon tonight. His toe brushed a copy of Wonder Science Tales. He snorted. Perhaps if she thought at all of his damaged head – she wrote songs and poems, didn’t she, once in a while? – she figured that a long time back a meteor had run and hit him and vanished up there where there were no shrubs or trees, where it was just white, above his eyes. He snorted again and shook his head. Perhaps, perhaps. But however she thought, he would see her only when the sun had set.
He waited another hour, from time to time spitting out the window into the warm summer night.
‘Eight-thirty. Here goes.’
He opened the hall door and stood for a moment looking back at that nice new toupee hidden in its box. No, he still could not bring himself to wear it.
He stepped along the hall to Miss Naomi Fremwell’s door, a door so thinly made it seemed to beat with the sound of her small heart there behind it.
‘Miss Fremwell,’ he whispered.
He wanted to cup her like a small white bird in his great bowled hands, speak soft to her quietness. But then, in wiping the sudden perspiration from his brow, he found again the pit and only at the last quick moment saved himself from falling over, in, and screaming, down! He clapped his hand to that place to cover that emptiness. After he had held his hand tight tight to the hole for a long moment he was then afraid to pull his hand away. It had changed. Instead of being afraid he might fall in there, he was afraid something terrible, something secret, something private, might gush out and drown him.