«Then why not let me be me?»
«Because it's unnatural.» The tongue licked and dart-ed. «We all miss you. Tonight we piled all the grand toys in the midst of the wild room and ―»
«I don't want to hear it!»
«Well, then,» said the mouth, «I might just trot down and tell all this to your old gentleman friend ―»
«Don't go near him!»
«I might.» The lips moved in the shadows. «You can't stand guard on him forever. Some night soon, when you're asleep, someone might — tamper with him, eh? Scramble his electronic eggs so he'll talk vaudeville instead of Saint Joant? Ha, yes. Think. Long journey. Crew's bored. Practical joke like that, worth a million to see you froth. Beware, Charlie. Best come play with us».
Willis, eyes shut, let the blaze out of him.
«Whoever dares to touch Mr.Shaw, so help me God, I'll kill!»
He turned violently on his side, gnawing the back of his fist.
In the half-dark, he could sense dive's mouth still moving.
«Kill? Well, well. Pity. Sweet dreams.»
An hour later, Willis gulped two pills and fell stunned into sleep.
In the middle of the night he dreamed that they were burning good Saint Joan at the stake and, in the midst of burning, the plain-potato maiden turned to an old man stoically wrapped around with ropes and vines. The old man's beard was fiery red even before the flames reached it, and his bright blue eyes were fixed fiercely upon Eternity, ignoring the fire.
«Recant!» cried a voice. «Confess and recant! Recant!»
«There is nothing to confess, therefore no need for recantation,» said the old man quietly.
The flames leaped up his body like a mob of insane and burning mice.
«Mr.Shaw!» screamed Willis.
He sprang awake.
Mr.Shaw.
The cabin was silent. Clive lay asleep.
On his face was a smile.
The smile made Willis pull back, with a cry. He dressed. He ran.
Like a leaf in autumn he fell down the air-tube, growing older and heavier with each long instant.
The storage pit where the old man «slept» was much more quiet than it had a right to be.
Willis bent. His hand trembled. At last, he touched the old man.
«Sir?»
There was no motion. The beard did not bristle. Nor the eyes fire themselves to blue flames. Nor the mouth tremble with gentle blasphemies…
«Oh, Mr.Shaw,» he said. «Are you dead, then, oh God, are you really dead?»
The old man was what they called dead when a ma-chine no longer spoke or tuned an electric thought or moved. His dreams and philosophies were snow in his shut mouth.
Willis turned the body this way and that, looking for some cut, wound, or bruise on the skin.
He thought of the years ahead, the long travelling years and no Mr.Shaw to walk with, gibber with, laugh with. Women in the storage shelves, yes, women in the cots late at night, laughing their strange taped laughters and moving their strange machined motions, and saying the same dumb things that were said on a thousand worlds on a thousand nights.
«Oh, Mr.Shaw,» he murmured at last. «Who did this to you?»
Silly boy, whispered Mr.Shaw's memory voice. You know.
I know, thought Willis.
He whispered a name and ran away.
«Damn you, you killed him!»
Willis seized dive's bedclothes, at which instant Clive, like a robot, popped wide his eyes. The smile remained constant.
«You can't kill what was never alive,» he said.
«Son of a bitch!»
He struck Clive once in the mouth, after which Clive was on his feet, laughing in some strange wild way, wiping blood from his lips.
«What did you do to him?» cried Willis.
«Not much, just ―»
But that was the end of their conversation.
«On posts!» a voice cried. «Collision course!»
Bells rang. Sirens shrieked.
In the midst of their shared rage, Willis and Clive turned cursing to seize emergency spacesuits and helmets off the cabin walls.
«Damn, oh, damn, oh ― d―»
Half through his last damn, Clive gasped. He vanished out a sudden hole in the side of the rocket.
The meteor had come and gone in a billionth of a second. On its way out, it had taken all the air in the ship with it through a hole the size of a small car.