So we talked.

Whether it was for five minutes or an hour, I don't really know.I remember telling her, though, about the girl buried on anotherworld, whose death had set me to running. Two trips to two worlds andI had broken my bond with the times. But a hundred years of travel donot bring a century of forgetfulness--not when you cheat time with the_petite mort_ of the cold sleep. Time's vengeance is memory, andthough for an age you plunder the eye of seeing and empty the ear ofsound, when you awaken your past is still with you. The worst thingto do then is to return to visit your wife's nameless grave in achanged land, to come back as a stranger to the place you had madeyour home. You run again then, and after a time you _do_ forget,some, because a certain amount of actual time must pass for you also.But by then you are alone, all by yourself: completely alone. Thatwas the _first_ time in my life that I knew the meaning of despair. Iread, I worked, I drank, I whored, but came the morning after and Iwas always me, by myself. I jumped from world to world, hoping thingswould be different, but with each change I was further away from allthe things I had known.

Then another feeling gradually came upon me, and a really terriblefeeling it was: There _must_ be a time and a place best suited foreach person who has ever lived. After the worst of my grief had leftme and I had come to terms with the vanished past, I wondered about aman's place in time and space. Where, and _when_ in the cosmos wouldI most like to live out the balance of my days? --To live at myfullest potential? The past _was_ dead, but perhaps a better timewaited on some as yet undiscovered world, waited at one yet-to-berecorded moment in its history. How could I _ever_ know? How could Iever be sure that my Golden Age did not lay but one more world away,and that I might be struggling in a Dark Era while the Renaissance ofmy days was but a ticket, a visa and a diary-page removed? That wasmy _second_ despair. I did know the answer until I came to the Landof the Swan. I do not know why I loved you Eleanor, but I did, andthat was my answer. Then the rains came.

When the lights returned we sat there and smoked. She had told meof her husband, who had died a hero's death in time to save him fromthe delirium tremors which would have ended his days. Died as thebravest die--not knowing why--because of a reflex, which after all hadbeen a part of him, a reflex which had made him cast himself into thepath of a pack of wolf-like creatures attacking the exploring party hewas with--off in that forest at the foot of Saint Stephen's--to fightthem with a machete and to be torn apart by them while his companionsfled to the camp, where they made a stand and saved themselves. Suchis the essence of valor: an unthinking moment, a spark along thespinal nerves, predetermined by the sum total of everything you haveever done, wished to do or not to do, and wish you had done, orhadn't, and then comes the pain.

We watched the gallery on the wall. Man is the reasoning animal?Greater than beasts but less than angels? Not the murderer I shotthat night. He wasn't even the one who uses tools or buries his dead.--Laughs, aspires, affirms? I didn't see any of those going on.--Watches himself watch himself doing what he knows is absurd? Toosophisticated. He just did the absurd without watching. Like runningback into a burning house after his favorite pipe and a can oftobacco. --Devises religions? I saw people praying, but they weren'tdevising. They were making last-ditch efforts at saving themselves,after they'd exhausted everything else they knew to do. Reflex.

The creature who loves?

That's the only one I might not be able to gainsay.

I saw a mother holding her daughter up on her shoulders while thewater swirled about her armpits, and the little girl was holding herdoll up above _her_ shoulders, in the same way. But isn't that--thelove--a part of the total? Of everything you have ever done, orwished? Positive or neg? I know that it is what made me leave mypost, running, and what made me climb into Eleanor's flyer and whatmade me fight my way through the storm and out to that particularscene.

I didn't get there in time.

I shall never forget how glad I was that someone else did. JohnnyKeams blinked his lights above me as he rose, and he radioed down:

"It's all right. They're okay. Even the doll."

"Good," I said, and headed back.

As I set the ship down on its balcony landing, one figure cametoward me. As I stepped down, a gun appeared in Chuck's hand.

"I wouldn't kill you, Juss," he began, "but I'd wound you. Facethe wall. I'm taking the flyer."

"Are you crazy?" I asked him.

"I know what I'm doing. I need it, Juss."

"Well, if you need it, there it is. You don't have to point a gunat me. I just got through needing it myself. Take it."

"Lottie and I both need it," he said. "Turn around!"

I turned toward the wall.

"What do you mean?" I asked.

"We're going away, together--now!"

"You _are_ crazy," I said. "This is no time..."

"C'mon, Lottie," he called, and there was a rush of feet behind meand I heard the flyer's door open.

"Chuck!" I said. "We need you now! You can settle this thingpeacefully, in a week, in a month, after some order has been restored.There _are_ such things as divorces, you know."

"That won't get me off this world, Juss."

"So how is _this_ going to help?"

I turned, and I saw that he had picked up a large canvas bag fromsomewhere and had it slung over his left shoulder, like Santa Claus.

"Turn back around! I don't want to shoot you," he warned.

The suspicion came, grew stronger.

"Chuck, have you been looting?" I asked him.

"Turn around!"

"All right, I'll turn around. How far do you think you'll get?"

"Far enough," he said. "Far enough so that no one will findus--and when the time comes, we'll leave this world."

"No," I said. "I don't think you will, because I know you."

"We'll see." His voice was further away then.

I heard three rapid footsteps and the slamming of a door. Iturned then, in time to see the flyer rising from the balcony.

I watched it go. I never saw either of them again.

Inside, two men were unconscious on the floor. It turned out thatthey were not seriously hurt. After I saw them cared for, I rejoinedEleanor in the Tower.

All that night did we wait, emptied, for morning.

Somehow, it came.

We sat and watched the light flow through the rain. So much hadhappened so quickly. So many things had occurred during the past weekthat we were unprepared for morning.

It brought an end to the rains.

A good wind came from out of the north and fought with the clouds,like En-ki with the serpent Tiamat. Suddenly, there was a canyon ofcobalt.

A cloudquake shook the heavens and chasms of light opened acrossits dark landscape.

It was coming apart as we watched.

I heard a cheer, and I croaked in unison with it as the sunappeared.

The good, warm, drying, beneficial sun drew the highest peak ofSaint Stephen's to its face and kissed both its cheeks.

There was a crowd before each window. I joined one and stared,perhaps for ten minutes.

When you awaken from a nightmare you do not normally find its ruinslying about your bedroom. This is one way of telling whether or notsomething was only a bad dream, or whether or not you are reallyawake.

We walked the streets in great boots. Mud was everywhere. It wasin basements and in machinery and in sewers and in living room clothesclosets. It was on buildings and on cars and on people and on thebranches of trees. It was broken brown blisters drying and waiting tobe peeled off from clean tissue. Swarms of skytoads rose into the airwhen we approached, hovered like dragon-flies, returned to spoilingfood stores after we had passed. Insects were having a heyday, too.Betty would have to be deloused. So many things were overturned orfallen down, and half-buried in the brown Sargassos of the streets.The dead had not yet been numbered. The water still ran by, butsluggish and foul. A stench was beginning to rise across the city.There were smashed-in store fronts and there was glass everywhere, andbridges fallen down and holes in the streets...But why go on? If youdon't get the picture by now, you never will. It was the big morningafter, following a drunken party by the gods. It is the lot of mortalman always to clean up their leavings or be buried beneath them.