His personna barely looks up, being otherwise occupied. “Goodbye then,” he says.
“Had to be done,” Scop says, “there was no other way; you must see that now.”
“I can’t be bothered,” his personna says, inspecting the rifle, the gleaming surfaces, shaping his hands around it, shaking it for solidity. “As you see I’ve got other things to do.”
“I just wanted to make it clear. I wanted to make it clear to you as well,”
“You’ve made everything clear. You’ve done everything that you could. Now leave.”
Scop sees that he is right. There can be no search for justification; the only answers must be within himself. “All right then,” he says, “all right if that’s the way you want it,” and before his personna can look up he has whisked himself out of the room, has detached himself utterly, moved elsewhere. Perhaps taking formal leave was a mistake; perhaps he should have left the situation as he found it but he has always been inclined toward sentimental gestures of this type. It may be for the best in the long run; no one can say that he did not make it clear at exactly what point he had given up. For he has given up. He has gone as far as he can within the present context, even further if he may say so (he will allow himself to say so) and now there is nothing else to do. There comes a time when history must be permitted to work out its own terrible equations, when a rational man out of a decent sense of awe will remove himself and allow that to be done. He has thrown himself into the machinery and done what he can; now it is out of his hands.
“Live,” Scop says in Dealey Plaza, “live,” he says hovering over the Games, “live,” he says to Malcolm and to Robert Kennedy and to Jack Kennedy, “live,” he says to Lee Harvey Osborn in the corridors and to King on the ledge in Memphis, “live and live,” he says and then he pushes himself to the fullest exertion, the fullest and most terrible exertion he has ever known and falls with the convertor wraps around him, the engines off, the convertor merely a shell, plunging and plunging a thousand yards beneath circumstance and as stone closes over him he knows (or at least he thinks he knows) what must happen next. And before. And over again.