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Mr. Pale whispered, “Better take me up on this. Better die when you have the chance than live on for a million billion years. Believe me. I know. I’m almost glad to die. Almost, but not quite. Self-preservation. Well?”
The doctor was at the door. “I don’t believe you.”
“Don’t go,” murmured Mr. Pale. “You’ll regret it.”
“You’re lying.”
“Don’t let me die …” The voice was so far away now, the lips barely moved. “Please don’t let me die. You need me. All life needs me to make life worthwhile, to give it value, to give it contrast. Don’t …”
Mr. Pale was thinner and smaller and now the flesh seemed to melt faster. “No,” he sighed. “No …” said the wind behind the hard yellowed teeth. “Please …” The deep-socketed eyes fixed themselves in a stare at the ceiling.
The doctor crashed out the door and slammed it and bolted it tight. He lay against it, weeping again, and through the ship he could see the people standing in groups staring back at the empty space where Earth had been. He heard cursing and wailing. He walked unsteadily and in great unreality for an hour through the ship’s corridors until he reached the captain.
“Captain, no one is to enter that room where the dying man is. He has a plague. Incurable. Quite insane. He’ll be dead within the hour. Have the room welded shut.”
“What?” said the captain. “Oh, yes, yes. I’ll attend to it. I will. Did you see? See Earth go?”
“I saw it.”
They walked numbly away from each other. The doctor sat down beside his wife who did not recognize him for a moment until he put his arm around her.
“Don’t cry,” he said. “Don’t cry. Please don’t cry.”
Her shoulders shook. He held her very tightly, his eyes clenched in on the trembling in his own body. They sat this way for several hours.
“Don’t cry,” he said. “Think of something else. Forget Earth. Think about Mars, think about the future.”
They sat back in their seats with vacant faces. He lit a cigarette and could not taste it, and passed it to her and lit another for himself. “How would you like to be married to me for another ten million years?” he asked.
“Oh, I’d like that,” she cried out, turning to him and seizing his arm in her own, fiercely wrapping it to her. “I’d like that very much!”
“Would you?” he said.
That Bird That Comes Out of the Clock
“You remember people by the things they do,” said Mrs. Coles, “rather than by how their face looks or what their tongues say, while they’re doing what they do. Now, if you ask me, this new woman across the street and down two houses, Kit Random, that her name? She is, to put it mildly, a woman of action.”
Everybody on the porch looked.
There was Kit Random with a flower in her hand, in the garden. There she was drawing the shade in the upstairs window. There fanning herself in the cool dark doorway of her front porch. There making mosquito-delicate etchings under a lemon-colored hurricane lamp at night. There throwing clay on a potter’s wheel early mornings, singing in a loud clear-water voice. There shoving dozens of ashtrays into a kiln she had built of bricks. And again you saw her baking pies for God knows who in her empty house and setting them to cool in windowsills so men on the far side of the street crossed over, noses lifted, passing. Then, when the sun set, she swung in a great hairy hemp swing she had tied to the vast oak in her backyard. About nine at night, carrying a crank phonograph like the white Victrola dog in her hands, she’d come out, crank up the machine, put on a record, and swing in the giant child’s swing, being a poor butterfly or a red red robin hop hop hopping along.
“Yes,” said Mrs. Tiece. “She’s either a very shrewd woman up to her feminine tricks or—” And here she debated a moment. “She’s that little bird that comes out of the clock … that little bird that comes out of the clock …”
All along the street, women tapped their heads with knowing forefingers and looked over her fence, like women peering over a cliff, ready to scream at how high up they were, but all they saw was the nine o’clock backyard, as dim as a cavern full of sprouting leaves, starred with flowers, the phonograph hissing and clearing its throat before launching itself down the grooves of “June Night” or “Poor Butterfly.” And there, with the regularity of an unseen, but nevertheless ticking pendulum, back and for
th, one arm up to cushion her pink little pillow of cheek, sighing quietly to herself, was Kit Random, swinging in her swing, in rhythm to the things the phonograph said were poor about the butterfly or nice about the June night.
“Where’s she from?”
“No one knows.”
“What’s she doing here?”
“No one knows.”
“How long’s she going to stay?”
“Go ask her!”
