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The doctor turned in at the portway and saw the man lying on the bunk, and the man was tall and his flesh was sewed tight to his skull. The man was sick, and his lips fluted back in pain from his large, discolored teeth. His eyes were shadowed cups from which flickers of light peered, and his body was as thin as a skeleton. The color of his hands was that of snow. The doctor pulled up a magnetic chair and took the sick man’s wrist.
“What seems to be the trouble?”
The sick man didn’t speak for a moment, but only licked a colorless tongue over his sharp lips.
“I’m dying,” he said, at last, and seemed to laugh.
“Nonsense, we’ll fix you up, Mr….?”
“Pale, to fit my complexion. Pale will do.”
“Mr. Pale.” This wrist was the coldest wrist he had ever touched in his life. It was like the hand of a body you pick up and tag in the hospital morgue. The pulse was gone from the cold wrist already. If it was there at all, it was so faint that the doctor’s own fingertips, pulsing, covered it.
“It’s bad, isn’t it?” asked Mr. Pale.
The doctor said nothing but probed the bared chest of the dying man with his silver stethoscope.
There was a faint far clamor, a sigh, a musing upon distant things, heard in the stethoscope. It seemed almost to be a regretful wailing, a muted screaming of a million voices, instead of a heartbeat, a dark wind blowing in a dark space and the chest cold and the sound cold to the doctor’s ears and to his own heart, which gave pause in hearing it.
“I was right, wasn’t I?” said Mr. Pale.
The doctor nodded. “Perhaps you can tell me …”
“What caused it?” Mr. Pale closed his eyes smilingly over his colorlessness. “I haven’t any food. I’m starving.”
“We can fix that.”
“No, no, you don’t understand,” whispered the man. “I barely made it to this rocket in time to get aboard. Oh, I was really healthy there for awhile, a few minutes ago.”
The doctor turned to the orderly. “Delirious.”
“No,” said Mr. Pale, “no.”
“What’s going on here?” said a voice, and the captain stepped into the room. “Hello, who’s this? I don’t recall …”
“I’ll save you the trouble,” said Mr. Pale. “I’m not on the passenger list. I just came aboard.”
“You couldn’t have. We’re ten million miles away from Earth.”
Mr. Pale sighed. “I almost didn’t make it. It took all my energy to catch you. If you’d been a little farther out …”
“A stowaway, pure and simple,” said the captain. “And drunk, too, no doubt.”
“A very sick man,” said the doctor. “He can’t be moved. I’ll make a thorough examination …”
“You’ll find nothing,” said Mr. Pale, faintly, lying white and long and alone in the cot, “except I’m in need of food.”
“We’ll see about that,” said the doctor, rolling up his sleeves.
An hour passed. The doctor sat back down on his magnetic chair. He was perspiring. “You’re right. There’s nothing wrong with you, except you’re starved. How could you do this to yourself in a rich civilization like ours?”
“Oh, you’d be surprised,” said the cold, thin, white man. His voice was a little breeze blowing ice through the room. “They took all my food away an hour or so ago. It was my own fault. You’ll understand in a few minutes now. You see, I’m very very old. Some say a million years, some say a billion. I’ve lost count. I’ve been too busy to count.”
Mad, thought the doctor, utterly mad.
Mr. Pale smiled weakly as if he had heard this thought. He shook his tired head and the dark pits of his eyes flickered. “No, no. No, no. Old, very old. And foolish. Earth was mine. I owned it. I kept it for myself. It nurtured me, even as I nurtured it. I lived well there, for a billion years, I lived high. And now here I am, in the name of all that’s darkest, dying too. I never thought I could die. I never thought I could be killed, like everyone else. And now I know what the fear is, what it will be like to die. After a billion years I know, and it is frightening, for what will the universe be without me?”
“Just rest easily, now, we’ll fix you up.”
