CHAPTER XX


FLICKER OF HISTORY: When the alien is gone, when the locks are sealed up again, when he is alone and at last in possession of the great ship, Folsom sends back a message to the recalcitrant Bureau which did not understand him and refused to cooperate even after he told them the truth of the mission and what had happened to them. The message was extraordinary obscene and bears no place in the memoirs of a true spaceman and hero and is therefore omitted. Not to be paraphrased, either. I am sure that you will understand this: Folsom is sure as well, the two of us share this assurance. It had something to do, it can be hinted, with his real opinion of the Bureau.

Having done this, Folsom then sealed the ship in a final and devastating fashion, using certain emergency devices which were specifically to be utilized only in a state of the most absolute emergency such as attack by aliens, combustion of the planet, murderous attack by fellow crew members, etc. Ordinarily the pro­tective means are supposed to be secret, even from the com­mander, but Folsom was energetic and cunning and had a great captain’s heart so they were not. Secret from him that is.

Standing then at the porthole, looking out at the aspect of his world from the high place of the nose cone where he could see beyond the forest into the clearing, standing there and seeing the vil­lage in little off-flickers of vision, Folsom thought for a moment that he could see the natives gathered to celebrate their knowledge, thought that if he could only extend his vision that perilous last foot or so toward insight he would see exactly what use they would make of his knowledge but in the next moment he knew that it was all hallucinatory and that he saw nothing else, was looking, if anywhere, only at the scarred interior of his own, great, ruined heart: seeing this Folsom felt a flaming leap of insight unlike any that he had ever quite known, the insight painting his view of the world in many colors bright and dark and he leapt to embrace it; with the insight flaring then within he wrestled for a long, long time with it and lesser mysteries until at last, with a roar, his magnificent, grizzled, leader’s heart imploded upon him, little slivers of fragmentation puncturing his soul like ash . . . and there he lay, stretched across the destruct button that he did not quite have the will to push—because it would have destroyed the very future that he had, the only memory that he knew—for quite a while but eventually it was time to do something else and Folsom did it. Did the necessary. Although what it is, it is rather impossible to say; the Bureau being rather out of touch on this most ancient and terrible of topics.