Chapter Twenty
THE TALE OF THE
GENEROUS TRAVELER
DESILVOCITY
THEPLANETGLISTER
“Everything is harder and takes longer,” Captain Marquez growled as he walked into the dining room with Koffield and Norla Chandray. Everyone else was there except DeSilvo, who tended to dine alone in the evening. The others were just finishing up their evening meal as the trio entered.
“And usually costs more money,” Koffield replied with a smile, sitting down beside him. “That was a long simulator run.”
“Yeah,” Marquez said, eloquent in his brevity. They had just completed their dozenth simulated run through a simulated FTL transition field in a simulated version of theDom Pedro IV ’s newly rebuilt control system. Marquez felt certain that he, for one, could now do the whole procedure in his sleep—and the sleep would by no means be simulated. He wastired .
Norla Chandray, who had been a step or two behind them on the short walk from the simulator to the dining room, laughed out loud as she sat down next to Koffield. “Thank the stars we’re not the ones paying forthis .” She gestured to indicate not only the dining room, but the whole of DeSilvo City.
Bolt, seated on the farside of the large circular table, looked up from his meal and frowned. “Whodid pay for it, do you suppose? I mean, DeSilvo stole it all, fair and square—but who, exactly, did he steal itfrom ? And how much was it? I mean, if you did the accounting, how much did he take from whom?”
“I doubt it would even be possible to come up with a meaningful answer,” Koffield said, accepting the plate that the serving robot offered him. “How do you put a price tag on the plans for that FTL drive? Or on a whole fleet of surplus transports that probably were ready to be put out for scrap? Or all the earthmoving gear salvaged from a dead city on a dead planet? That part isn’t theft—unless you argue that the diehards had first claim on it, because they were here first and had greater need.”
“At least the diehards are going to get some of it back,” said Yuri Sparten. Sparten and Norla Chandray were now off report and had more or less settled back into their old routines. Still, Yuri had quite unconsciously seated himself so as to be as far as possible from everyone else. He seemed quite comfortable there.
“Someof the diehards will,” Bolt replied. “Your friends at Last Chance Canyon, anyway.”
Sparten looked confused. “What are you talking about?”
“Think it through. Ah, sir.” Bolt clearly wasn’t quite sure about the etiquette of addressing Sparten. Was he still, technically, an officer? How much informality—let alone insolence—was acceptable under the current very unusual circumstances? He glanced at Captain Marquez, but Marquez was plainly too busy eating his dinner to provide any sort of guidance. He shrugged and moved on. “DeSilvo said he started searching for them the moment he came out of temporal confinement. He didn’t mean Last Chance Canyon in particular. He meant a diehard colony—and one that would suit his purposes. Probably it had to be close enough, and the right size, and maybe he had some other criteria.”
“So? He found them.”
“So why assume they were the only ones he found? A planet is a big place. What are the odds on his finding exactly the right sort of diehard group, exactly where he needed them,and no other groups at all ? It’s got to be that he shopped around.”
“What do you mean?” Sparten asked.
“He means that DeSilvo probably found a number of such groups,” said Wandella Ashdin. “It’s sad to say, but there has been enough experience with collapsed planets that studies have been made. From what I know of the subject, there are probably somewhere between a hundred and five hundred such groups surviving here on Glister, though the low end of that range is the most likely. Nearly all of them at least as difficult to find as Last Chance Canyon, with most of them far better hidden. They hide from each other, not from outsiders. Probably failing at the rate of five or ten a year, if the statistics are anything to go by—and it’s wars between the ones that find each other that do in most of them.”
“Hundredsof colonies?” Sparten asked in astonishment.
Norla cocked her head at him. “I thought you’d read up on the subject. You didn’t think Last Chance was the only colony, did you?”
“Well, I, ah, well—I didn’t really think about it,” Sparten admitted. “But—but if there are all those other diehards—how—what can we—”
“How do we help them?” Wandella Ashdin asked. “Is that it?”
“Well, ah,—well, yes,” Sparten said.
“Pretty easy,” said Sindra Chon as she worked on her dessert. “We don’t. We can’t.”
“But—but—” Sparten protested. “There has to besome way.”
“Whydoes there have to be? Because there isn’t. Sir. There really isn’t,” said Sindra Chon, exhibiting some of the same uncertainty about Sparten’s status that Bolt had. “The diehards would be the first to tell you that. Even if this was our place and our stuff, instead of DeSilvo’s—”
“And we just got done saying he stole it fair and square,” Dixon Phelby reminded her cheerfully. “It’s his, and he’ll make sure it stays that way.”
“Right,” Chon agreed. “But even if wecould offer it all up, share it all out—what good would it do?”
“The food and equipment and supplies that’ll still be here after the decoy operation?” said Sparten. “It could keep a lot of people alive, that’s what!”
“How many, sir?” Chon asked. “And for how long? And then what? And will they share nicely? And what would it do to the big plans that DeSilvo has worked up?”
“I can’t answer all that,” Sparten protested. “Okay, it might cost us if we tried to help. It might not solve everything. But all you’ve given me so far are a lot of good reasons for doing nothing. There are always good reasons for doing nothing. Why not try?”
“You sound like the Generous Traveler,” said Dr. Ashdin.
“Who?” Sparten asked.
“It’s an old story,” she replied. “The Generous Traveler was a reasonably well-to-do young man who went to a far-off land to see what things were like there. He found the people were very poor, and the streets full of beggars. He gave a coin to the first beggar who approached him, and the next, and the next and the next. When he had no more money, he gave away all his possessions, one by one.
“Sometime later, when the Traveler failed to return, his friend went in search of him. His friend retraced the Traveler’s steps and found all the same beggars. All had long since spent the coins the Traveler gave and gone back to begging. Each of them pointed the way that the Traveler had gone. But when the friend got to the last beggar who had been helped by the Traveler, all that beggar had to do in order to direct the friend was to point to the beggar standing next to him—who was, of course, the Traveler.”
“The version of that I heard was about a teacher,” said Dixon Phelby. “On his way to teach farmers how to grow more food, or something. And because he gave away everything and got himself stranded, the farmers didn’t learn, and the people there starved.”
“We heard it about a doctor who never got to where the sick people were,” said Sindra Chon.
“Great, fine, so there are lots of different versions. So what’s the point of that story?” Sparten demanded.
“To relate a very cruel truth,” said Dr. Ashdin. “Wealth can be spread so thin that it does no good, and in fact increases poverty, by impoverishing the wealthy. The Traveler sets out to help everyone, and winds up helping no one—and needing help himself. In the teacher and doctor versions, and others like them, about an engineer or a builder, or even a simple repairman, he winds up making things far worse than they would have been because he never gets to where he could do some good. And you are quite right—that story can stand as a specious and selfish argument for not trying. The tale, or some version of it, becomes popular among the well-off, or at least the better-off, in a society that is growing poorer—such as Solace.”
“Even if wecould find the other diehard settlements, we could easily do more harm than good,” Koffield said in a gentle voice. “As Dr. Ashdin said, it’s the wars between the diehard colonies that kill most of them off. We might well set off such a war—and be among its first victims. But there’s something else I’d like to remind you of, Mr. Sparten. The day you first met Officer Chandray and me, on SCO Station. Right at the height of what came to be called the Big Run, with the whole satellite overrun with refugees. I trust you remember that day.”
“Yes, sir. As clear as I remember anything.”
“Something you said on that day struck me. You pointed out the endless refugees, and said something like ‘The worst of it isn’t that they took everything we had. The worst part was that they took it and made less than nothing out of it. They’re no better off than when they got here. It’s as if we had done nothing at all for them—and we did so much that it nearly killed the station.’ That’s very close to your words. Do you remember?”
Yuri Sparten shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “So, all right, I said that. Does that mean I was right then and wrong now?”
“You were, and are, wrong and right, then and now,” said Koffield. “That’s the hell of it. But the hope of it, the answer to it, is there, too. All of what’s been said can be boiled down to one thing: If you slice up the pie, the wealth, thin enough for everyone to get a slice, you can wind up with each person getting a slice so thin that everyone starves to death.”
“So that’s your hopeful answer?”
“No,” said Chandray. “The answer is to make another pie. Make a new world.”
“Write it larger, and that’s the whole show, the whole story,” said Koffield. “Ulan Baskaw saw that the way humanity was making new worlds was fundamentally flawed. The Chronologic Patrol and Earth’s government saw that, and could see nothing better to do than to slow expansion, make sure humanity made as few worlds as possible, retreated gracefully, and then, as best it could, shared out what remained for as long as it lasted. Earth—humanity—would be the Generous Traveler—but with no friend to come looking for him. We’re looking to do something mad and desperate—perhaps even something very wrong—to show the way out, to make that new world.”
Sparten frowned and nodded. He spoke, staring down at the table, looking at no one. “And we can’t do it if we stay here looking for diehards that don’t want to be found, handing out food that isn’t ours to people who might kill each other and us to get a bigger share than we want to give them. I guess I knew all that already—but stars above, it’s grim.”
“It’s called poverty,” Wandella Ashdin said. “Humanity as a whole is getting poorer and poorer. The scale is so grand, the process so gradual, and masked by so many other events, that no one notices—but it’s happening, all the same. Our population is stable, or even declining a little. But the resources available to us are declining much faster. The solution, obviously, is not to share out the poverty more fairly—but to make new wealth by working harder and better.”
“And that work isn’t getting done right now,” Marquez observed, having demolished his meal while everyone else was talking. “Phelby, Chon, you’re supposed to be tracking status on everything. Where are we?”
The two were seated next to each other, and exchanged slightly worried looks. Phelby shrugged. “Well, sir, the key word in what you said issupposed . We’re doing our best to track everything, and DeSilvo’s agreed to work with us, of course—but we’re not getting a great deal of information from him. As best we can tell, the cargo-loading on theDom Pedro IV is going fine, and the checks we can do via telemetry are all good—but none of us has evenbeen on the ship yet. There’s no way of knowing anything for sure, and it’s not much use asking DeSilvo. I don’t think it’s that he’s deliberately keeping us out—it’s just that he’s so used to working alone.”
“And heknows this stuff,” said Chon. “Knows it backward and forward and inside out. If we try to help him with something—well, in the time it would take to explain something, he could have done it himself twice over.” She closed both her hands into fists and punched them both forward a little to emphasize her words. “He’seager .Hungry for it.”
She gestured toward the lower levels of DeSilvo City. “He’s at it, day and night, checking and rechecking everything, running new simulators, checking on our training, monitoring events in the Solace system, doing another tweak on his deception plan. I don’t know why he hasn’t collapsed from exhaustion—but he’s still going at full speed.”
“And he’ll keep at it until we peel him away from it,” said Dixon. “He wants it all perfect, perfect, perfect.”
Marquez grunted. “Wonderful. Better is the enemy of good enough, and perfect is the enemy of getting done. All right, so you can’t say all that much about whathe’s doing. How arewe doing?”
Phelby shrugged. “We’re ready. Except we’ll never be ready in a million years—pardon the expression. We’ve all gotten the briefings and training on Harmonic Gate Theory and long-range terraforming. We can probably all talk fast enough and wave our hands hard enough to be convincing. Ship handling—Chon, Bolt, and I have run the simulators on the new auxiliary craft.” The next aux ships were replacements for the two that had been destroyed near Mars. “We can manage the basic maneuvers in emergencies. I can’t speak for how far along your group is in training—but I think our group is at or near or maybe beyond the point of diminishing returns. And I think we’ve gotten about as far as we can in simulators.”
Marquez nodded. “Agreed. We’re in about the same place—though we might be a bit shakier on the new aux craft. Less sim time. But I don’t see how we could get much farther ahead than we are without getting in the real ships.”
Dixon Phelby smiled. “So you’re waiting for us to get ready, and we’re waiting for you?”
“And we’re both waiting for DeSilvo. That’s the real story.”
Sindra Chon frowned. “He’s had a hundred years to get ready. What’she waiting for?”
More than once, in the rare moments when he allowed himself a chance to rest, Oskar DeSilvo asked himself the same question. He had run large projects before, projects with high stakes and long time lines. Those issues shouldn’t have bothered him—and in truth, he didn’t think they did. But something was.
He was in his workroom, the one place, above all others, where DeSilvo the architect had labored to be sure that DeSilvo the workingman would be most comfortable, most at ease, most efficient. He had changed the room, adapted it, modified it, scrapped it and started over endless times as his tastes, his moods, had changed. What once had been an elegant, austere, gentlemanly scholar’s retreat had, over time, turned into something that resembled a one-man Mission Control Center, with display screens and datapads of all sorts on every wall and desktop.
The lights were dimmed to make it easier to see the displays, turning the rest of the room into warm dark shadows, cut here and there by lurid displays and bright, tight-focused task lights.
There were a half dozen service robots of various types in the room, two fetching and carrying datapads, fresh food and coffee, reference materials, and so on, two trying to keep the place organized as DeSilvo shifted from station to station, and two simply trying to guess which object or bit of information DeSilvo would want next. He was the queen bee, with all the worker bees clustered about, dancing attendance as he moved about the hive.
He took another swallow of coffee—though his system was so awash in caffeine that another whole cup, or another whole pot, wouldn’t have had much additional effect—and tried once again to concentrate on the cargo manifest in front of him. There was one and only one ship in the universe that he could call upon to do his freight-hauling. There was no other ship that he could lay hands on that had both sufficient hauling capacity and the physical robustness to stand up to FTL conditions. TheDom Pedro IV was the only game in town—and he was well aware that, sooner or later, the game would be up—if not on the first round-trip, then the second, or the third, or the twentieth.
He had to prioritize the cargoes, make sure that only the most vital equipment was on the first run, that there were no items scheduled for the second run that would be useless without some gadget scheduled for the fifth—
Suddenly he shoved his datapad away from him and walked out of the room, ignoring the crowd of robots that scuttled out of his way as he moved. He stepped out into the corridor, walked purposefully to the far end, and stepped into the waiting elevator. “Topside Access,” he said, and the elevator car doors slid shut.
The car came to a halt, the door opened, and he stepped out into the unheated, windowless chamber that was Topside Access. The main feature of the place was the airlock, big enough for a small ground vehicle, though there was none such parked there. There was a rack of pressure suits in various bright colors off to one side of the lock door, but he did not bother with them.
There was also, incongruously enough, a very ordinary old-fashioned wooden coatrack, with a bright orange insulated coverall hanging from it, and a bright red parka hanging next to it. A pair of bright blue insulated boots stood next to them. Glister still retained a reasonably thick atmosphere: One did not, strictly speaking, need a pressure suit at all on the surface. The basic hazards were the absence of sufficient breathable oxygen and the cold. As long as one dressed warmly enough, and used a breathing mask, one could function perfectly well on the surface—for a short time, at any rate.
DeSilvo moved immediately to the coatrack and started putting on the outerwear. Coverall first, then boots, then the hooded parka. Finally, he put on a compact breathing mask, with a tank of compressed air hanging from the rack by a strap. He slung the strap over his shoulder, put on the mask, and adjusted the airflow. He pulled the hood of the parka snugly up around his head, put on a pair of bright orange mittens from the pocket of the parka, then moved toward the airlock.
There wasn’t much of a pressure difference between inside and outside, and the lock cycled quickly. A few seconds later, he was outside, standing on the frozen hell of Glister’s surface. He hadn’t done this in a long time, and he might well never get the chance again.
Heneeded to get to the surface, to come out, to be under asky, instead of in a tunnel or a compartment or spacecraft or a confinement chamber or a habitat dome. He could barely remember the last time he had been out in weather, out in the world, instead of sealed off away from it in one way or another. So much of humanity lived that way. They had even grown to prefer such a molelike existence, to fear wide horizons and open air as strange, unnatural.
The main facilities of Base Glister were built into the side of a hill. Topside Access stood in a hollow near the summit. The cargo transfer center was at the bottom, far below. From where he stood, DeSilvo could see the rubble pile the earthmovers had built over the cargo center airlocks and the end of the tunnel they had built to allow continued access. Soon the camouflage would go over the entrance, and over Topside Access, and over the landing field’s dome. Base Glister would vanish.
Vanish, and not be seen again.
He stared out at the steel grey landscape, cold enough to freeze a man solid if he stayed outside for very long at all. The wind howled and screamed overhead, and the cold bit into his skin, stabbed at his face. He looked up, at the blue-black sky, so dark it seemed as if he ought to be able to see stars in it, even at midday.
This might be the last time you are ever outdoors,he told himself. A terrifying thought, but not at all an unrealistic one. When was the most recent time before this that he had been outdoors?
The last time.Perhaps that was what frightened him so. It was getting to be close to the last time for lots of things in his life.And more than the last time, he thought.It’s your last chance, just like your friends in that canyon south of here . The last chance he had to redeem himself, to make good all the harm he had done, to rescue his reputation from the biographers and historians who would, sooner or later, surely learn the truth.And the last chance for everyone, he reminded himself. He had not the slightest doubt any longer—if this effort failed, and no other answer was found, then humanity would die. History itself would end.
No wonder I wanted to get out,he thought.Out and away from all that. He walked away from the airlocks of Topside Access and moved carefully downslope over the loose rock and hard-frozen ice, with no particular goal in mind beyond out, away. The wind shifted, and he could hear the earthmovers at work, just over the next rise. He walked over to where he could see them. They were nearly done with their work. Soon the rest of his grand base would be hidden under rock and ice, carefully arranged to resemble the “natural” appearance of this most unnatural landscape.
Buried alive.He almost slipped and fell on his face as he walked over a loose pile of scree. He overbalanced and sat down suddenly. The cold hard stone jabbed at him, distinctly cold and uncomfortable even through his superinsulated clothing. He was starting to feel cold, feel his years. Perhaps, even, feel his own mortality. He stood up, slowly, carefully, painfully.
Ashdin’s words had cut to the bone. Cryocans, temporal confinement, empty tombs, all the rest of it—he had spent half his long life pretending to be dead. And even now, his grand plan was to entomb himself again, and to leave his treasure hoard buried beneath the frozen desert, with elaborate plans to fool the grave robbers from finding the place after he ascended, godlike, into the sky. All that was missing was the construction of a pyramid over the site; then the resemblance to the Pharaohs’ ambitions would be complete.
Cold. The cold was reaching into his bones, pulling the life from him, pulling him into the cold, cold ground. He turned back toward Topside Access, moving slowly uphill. Time to go back inside—perhaps forever. Time to be entombed for good and all inside one set or another of steel-and-concrete walls.
He looked up, toward the low concrete building—and saw to his astonishment that he was not alone. A figure, wearing a bright blue pressure suit with the swivel visor open, was standing by the entrance. It looked as if the person was calling to him, but the wind made it impossible to hear. DeSilvo lost his footing, and almost fell again. He recovered just barely in time and moved forward more carefully over the loose rock and ice.
The wind was picking up speed, cutting at his face. The breathing mask felt as if it had frozen to his face. He hurried toward the suited figure, peered into the helmet—and saw that it was, of course, Koffield. Who else could it have been? Koffield raised his hand and waved, and shouted something that was drowned out by the howling wind. DeSilvo could hear a loud roaring hiss—Koffield apparently had the suit’s oxygen line wide open. That let most of the oxy escape unused into the atmosphere, but left enough for Koffield to breathe.
DeSilvo got up close to him, and grabbed him by the arm to steady himself and draw Koffield closer.
He pulled his breathing mask off his face. “You found me again!” he shouted.
Koffield grinned and shouted back, “It was a lot easier this time!”
DeSilvo smiled, but made no further effort to talk. He was not in the mood for shouting. He put his breathing mask back on and pointed toward the airlock. Koffield nodded in return, and closed his helmet visor.
The two of them trudged back toward Topside Access, leaning hard into the cruel wind that pushed against them. DeSilvo slipped once again, and Koffield caught him, holding him up by one shoulder and the opposite arm, half-supporting him, guiding him forward. DeSilvo let it happen, let the younger man be the stronger one. He submitted to Koffield’s aid, gave in to it. For the brief moments of the walk back inside, DeSilvo had intimations of his own decrepitude, his own incipient frailty, long forestalled. How much longer could he hold it off, force his ancient body to play at being young and vigorous? What would it be like to rely on others for his care, to be needy, to be weak andold ?
They entered the airlock together. Koffield sealed the door and started the lock cycling. The two men stood without trying to speak as the air pumps worked. The airlock matched pressure with the interior, and DeSilvo opened the inner door.
The room that had seemed a cold and grey place just minutes before seemed a warm and welcoming riot of color after being out on the surface. The bright-colored pressure suits seemed to light up the interior. DeSilvo found he was shivering, in spite of his heavy clothing. He pulled off his mittens, stuffed them back in the parka’s pockets, removed the parka, and started to take off the breathing mask. Somehow the relative warmth of the place seemed to drive out whatever weakness the cold exterior had revealed in him. He felt suddenly revived, invigorated—indeed, he felt far better than he had in a long time.
Koffield watched him for a moment, then proceeded to get his own suit off, moving with the careful practiced speed and efficiency of a man who had entrusted his life to pressure suits many times.
“Howdid you find me?” DeSilvo asked.
“It wasn’t hard,” said Koffield, setting the suit’s helmet on the rack. “I was coming to see you. I was walking toward your study when you came out and went bowling down the corridor in the opposite direction. I called to you, but you didn’t seem to hear me. When I got to the elevator, I could tell by the indicator where you had gone.”
“But why did you follow me out there?” DeSilvo asked.
Koffield made a gesture that took in all of Topside Access’s one dismal room. “No windows up here. I was worried about you.”
Worried about what might happen accidentally, or what I might choose to have happen?DeSilvo didn’t ask, and Koffield gave no clue.Leave the ambiguity alone . “I see,” he said.
“Just out of curiosity, whydid you go out?” Koffield asked, his casual tone not altogether convincing.Just out of curiosity, did I just stop a suicide attempt?
DeSilvo shrugged. It crossed his mind that, perhaps, Koffield had. “I wanted to get out.” It was not until the words were out of his mouth that he realized that he had committed his own ambiguity. Out for a walk, or out of the situation? Or, just—out?
“I see,” Koffield said again, in a careful tone of voice.
And suddenly DeSilvo found himself talking, explaining himself. He had been ready to fend off the challenge if Koffield poked or prodded—but somehow, the failure to challenge him was a pressure he could not resist. “I’m not sure I can say it any better than that,” he said. “I wanted—I want—to get outboth ways. A breath of fresh air, maybe my last ever. And yes—out. Out of this life, out of this secret war of mine, of ours, against—against my own failed achievements, my own failures.”
He paused and gathered his thoughts again. “Dr. Ashdin’s analysis was harsh, even brutal, but, I must confess, reasonably accurate, if not wholly so. But you were not the only ones judging me. Dr. Ashdin’s words forced me to judge myself. I haven’t thought of myself in a long time.”Another bit of ambiguity . “A strange thing for a man as self-absorbed as I am to say, but you know what I mean.”
DeSilvo gestured toward the floor, toward the workshops and simulators below. “All of that was for me, me, me. A place to build wonderful machines that I could play with, and take the credit for, so all of Settled Space would admire me. But give me the credit for abandoning all that and adapting this base to our present purposes when I saw it would be necessary. I could have gone forward with my original plan and let others worry over the fate of worlds. The inventions that would have come out of this place would have been of great benefit to many people, whether or not I created them, or merely rediscovered them.”
“Assuming you could have a found a way to prevent the Chronologic Patrol from ‘suppressing’ you and your inventions quite permanently.”
DeSilvo smiled. “Oh, I had plans to deal with that. I had plans for everything.”
“But what benefit would it all have really brought?” Koffield asked. “Your rediscovered inventions were suppressed for a reason—perhaps even a good reason. The people would praise your name, butyou’d know that you’d just made eventual collapse come sooner and harder.”
“That was what brought my plans crashing down—that understanding,” DeSilvo said. “But that understanding came solate. All my plans were close to complete. This place was ready. I was ready. I was at the end of endless planning and effort and scheming—and then, at that moment, I realized the truth about the coming collapse and my part in the collapse of Solace. But if I were to make amends, then I was merely at thebeginning of my labors. I had climbed the mountain to its peak, and discovered it was merely a foothill. And now, the same again. All of my efforts were to bring me to this point—where thereal work, far greater than what I have done, can begin. The political job, the engineering job, of organizing a new terraforming operation, a new kind of terraforming operation—while constructing the time-travel system at the same time.”
“And all that, just to prepare for thereal real work—a million-year terraforming operation,” said Koffield. “More mountains that turn into foothills. I don’t blame you for wanting out.I want out, for that matter.”
“Yes. Yes.” DeSilvo’s mood had crashed again. The way ahead seemed so hard, so long. “Out,” he said once more, his voice wistful and low.
But that was as much as he allowed himself. They had to keep going. They had to. “Still, that’s all to one side,” he said, failing to make his cheerful tone sound anything but forced. “We have work to do. A lot of it.”
He got his boots off, stood up, and stepped out of his overalls. He checked the purge and clean valves on the breathing mask, wiped it down, and hung it up exactly where he had found it. He hung the coveralls and parka carefully, and set the boots out by the coatrack, making sure all was neat and orderly, placing each item where it belonged.As if I’ll be back to use this gear tomorrow. The odds are good that that parka will still be hanging right there a hundred years from now, or a thousand. Once I’m gone, it won’t be used again. I might as well wad it up in a ball and throw it on the floor. But no. There was something in his soul, a need for order, a hunger to finish things properly, that would not let that happen. He put his things away carefully, as he spoke to Koffield over his shoulder. “What was it you were coming to see me about?”What was going to make you enter my most private place, and made you follow me up here?
“It’s time to go,” Koffield said.
Time to go back inside, down below, where it’s warm? Or time to quit making plans and act, time to close this place for good and all, leave Glister, and get on with the job? More ambiguity. He looked Koffield in the face, studied the calm, gentle, tired face for a moment.No, not ambiguity. Duality .Not one or the other. Both . “Yes,” he said. “Yes.” He moved toward the elevator and took Koffield by the arm, leading him along as gently, but as firmly, as Koffield had led him, out on the surface. “Come,” he said. “Let us be on our way.”