Автор неизвестен. This Moment of the Storm

Hence, when there is an available Stopover, it is utilized, to restore
mental equilibrium and to rearouse flagging animal spirits. This also
serves the purpose of enriching the life and economy of the Stopover
world, by whatever information and activities you may have in you.
Stopover, therefore, has become a traditional holiday on many
worlds, characterized by festivals and celebrations on some of the
smaller ones, and often by parades and world-wide broadcast interviews
and press conferences on those with greater populations. I understand
that it is now pretty much the same on Earth, too, whenever colonial
visitors stop by. In fact, one fairly unsuccessful young starlet,
Marilyn Austin, made a long voyage Out, stayed a few months, and
returned on the next vessel headed back. After appearing on tri-dee a
couple times, sounding off about interstellar culture, and flashing
her white, white teeth, she picked up a flush contract, a third
husband, and her first big part in tapes. All of which goes to show
the value of Stopovers.

I landed us atop Helix, Betty's largest apartment-complex, wherein
Eleanor had her double-balconied corner suite, affording views both of
the distant Noble and of the lights of Posh Valley, Betty's
residential section.
Eleanor prepared steaks, with baked potato, cooked corn,
beer--everything I liked. I was happy and sated and such, and I stayed
till around midnight, making plans for our future. Then I took a cab
back to Town Square, where I was parked.
When I arrived, I thought I'd check with the Trouble Center just
to see how things were going. So I entered the Hall, stamped my feet,
brushed off excess waters, hung my coat, and proceeded up the empty
hallway to the elevator.
The elevator was too quiet. They're supposed to rattle, you know?
They shouldn't sigh softly and have doors that open and close without
a sound. So I walked around an embarrassing corner on my way to the
Trouble Center.
It was a pose Rodin might have enjoyed working with. All I can
say is that it's a good thing I stopped by when I did, rather than
five or ten minutes later.
Chuck Fuller and Lottie, Eleanor's secretary, were practicing
mouth to mouth resuscitating and keeping the victim alive techniques,
there on the couch in the little alcove off to the side of the big
door to T.C.
Chuck's back was to me, but Lottie spotted me over his shoulder,
and her eyes widened and she pushed him away. He turned his head
quickly.
"Juss..." he said.
I nodded.
"Just passing by," I told him. "Thought I'd stop in to say hello
and take a look at the eyes."
"Uh--everything's going real well," he said, stepping back into the
hallway. "It's on auto right now, and I'm on my--uh, coffee break.
Lottie is on night duty, and she came by to--see if we had any reports
we needed typed. She had a dizzy spell, so we came out here where the
couch..."
"Yeah, she looks a little--peaked," I said. "There are smelling
salts and aspirins in the medicine chest."
I walked on by into the Center, feeling awkward.
Chuck followed me after a couple of minutes. I was watching the
screens when he came up beside me. Things appeared to be somewhat in
hand, though the rains were still moistening the one hundred thirty
views of Betty.
"Uh, Juss," he said, "I didn't know you were coming by..."
"Obviously."
"What I'm getting at is--you won't report me, will you?"
"No, I won't report you."
"...And you wouldn't mention it to Cynthia, would you?"
"Your extracurricular activities," I said, "are your own business.
As a friend, I suggest you do them on your own time and in a more
propitious location. But it's already beginning to slip my mind. I'm
sure I'll forget the whole thing in another minute."
"Thanks Juss," he said.
I nodded.
"What's Weather Central have to say these days?" I asked, raising
the phone.
He shook his head, so I dialed listened.
"Bad," I said, hanging up. "More wet to come."
"Damn," he announced and lit a cigarette, his hands shaking.
"This weather's getting me down."
"Me too," said I. "I'm going to run now, because I want to get
home before it starts in bad again. I'll probably be around tomorrow.
See you."
"Night."
I elevated back down, fetched my coat, and left. I didn't see
Lottie anywhere about, but she probably was, waiting for me to go.
I got to my car and was halfway home before the faucets came on
full again. The sky was torn open with lightnings, and a sizzlecloud
stalked the city like a long-legged arachnid, forking down bright
limbs and leaving tracks of fire where it went. I made it home in
another fifteen minutes, and the phenomenon was still in progress as I
entered the garage. As I walked up the alley (cane switched on) I
could hear the distant sizzle and the rumble, and a steady half-light
filling the spaces between the buildings, from its
_flash-burn-flash-burn_striding.
Inside, I listened to the thunder and the rain, and I watched the
apocalypse off in the distance.
Delirium of city under storm--
The buildings across the way were quite clear in the pulsing light
of the thing. The lamps were turned off in my apartment so that I
could better appreciate the vision. All of the shadows seemed
incredibly black and inky, lying right beside glowing stairways,
pediments, windowsills, balconies; and all of that which was
illuminated seemed to burn as though with an internal light.
Overhead, the living/not living insect-thing of fire stalked, and an
eye wearing a blue halo was moving across the tops of nearby
buildings. The fires pulsed and the clouds burnt like the hills of
Gehenna; the thunders burbled and banged; and the white rain drilled
into the roadway which had erupted into a steaming lather. Then a
_snapper_, tri-horned, wet-feathered, demon-faced, sword-tailed, and
green, raced from around a corner, a moment after I'd heard a sound
which I had thought to be a part of the thunder. The creature ran, at
an incredible speed, along the smoky pavement. The eye swooped after
it, adding a hail of lead to the falling raindrops. Both vanished up
another street. It had taken but an instant, but in that instant it
had resolved a question in my mind as to who should do the painting.
Not El Greco, not Blake; no: Bosch. Without any question, Bosch--with
his nightmare visions of the streets of Hell. He would be the one to
do justice to this moment of the storm.
I watched until the sizzlecloud drew its legs up into itself, hung
like a burning cocoon, then died like an ember retreating into ash.
Suddenly, it was very dark and there was only the rain.

Sunday was the day of chaos.
Candles burned, churches burned, people drowned, beasts ran wild
in the streets (or swam there), houses were torn up by the roots and
bounced like paper boats along the waterways, the great wind came down
upon us, and after that the madness.
I was not able to drive to Town Hall, so Eleanor sent her flyer
after me.
The basement was filled with water, and the ground floor was like
Neptune's waiting room. All previous high water marks had been
passed.
We were in the middle of the worst storm in Betty's history.
Operations had been transferred up onto the third floor. There
was no way to stop things now. It was just a matter of riding it out
and giving what relief we could. I sat before my gallery and watched.
It rained buckets, it rained vats; it rained swimming pools and
lakes and rivers. For awhile it seemed that it rained oceans upon us.
This was partly because of the wind which came in from the gulf and
suddenly made it seem to rain sideways with the force of its blasts.
It began at about noon and was gone in a few hours, but when it left
our town was broken and bleeding. Wyeth lay on his bronze side, the
flagpole was gone, there was no building without broken windows and
water inside, we were suddenly suffering lapses of electrical power,
and one of my eyes showed three panda-puppies devouring a dead child.
Cursing, I killed them across the rain and the distance. Eleanor wept
at my side. There was a report later of a pregnant woman who could
only deliver by Caesarean section, trapped on a hilltop with her
family, and in labor. We were still trying to get through to her with
a flyer, but the winds...I saw burnt buildings and the corpses of
people and animals. I saw half-buried cars and splintered homes. I
saw waterfalls where there had been no waterfalls before. I fired
many rounds that day, and not just at beasts from the forest. Sixteen
of my eyes had been shot out by looters. I hope that I never again
see some of the films I made that day.
When the worst Sunday night in my life began, and the rains did
not cease, I knew the meaning of despair for the third time in my
life.
Eleanor and I were in the Trouble Center. The lights had just
gone out for the eighth time. The rest of the staff was down on the
third floor. We sat there in the dark without moving, without being
able to do a single thing to halt the course of chaos. We couldn't
even watch it until the power came back on.
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 another
world, whose death had set me to running. Two trips to two worlds and
I had broken my bond with the times. But a hundred years of travel do
not bring a century of forgetfulness--not when you cheat time with the
_petite mort_ of the cold sleep. Time's vengeance is memory, and
though for an age you plunder the eye of seeing and empty the ear of
sound, when you awaken your past is still with you. The worst thing
to do then is to return to visit your wife's nameless grave in a
changed land, to come back as a stranger to the place you had made
your 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. That
was the _first_ time in my life that I knew the meaning of despair. I
read, I worked, I drank, I whored, but came the morning after and I
was always me, by myself. I jumped from world to world, hoping things
would be different, but with each change I was further away from all
the things I had known.
Then another feeling gradually came upon me, and a really terrible
feeling it was: There _must_ be a time and a place best suited for
each person who has ever lived. After the worst of my grief had left
me and I had come to terms with the vanished past, I wondered about a
man's place in time and space. Where, and _when_ in the cosmos would
I most like to live out the balance of my days? --To live at my
fullest potential? The past _was_ dead, but perhaps a better time
waited on some as yet undiscovered world, waited at one yet-to-be
recorded moment in its history. How could I _ever_ know? How could I
ever 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 of
my days was but a ticket, a visa and a diary-page removed? That was
my _second_ despair. I did know the answer until I came to the Land
of the Swan. I do not know why I loved you Eleanor, but I did, and
that was my answer. Then the rains came.
When the lights returned we sat there and smoked. She had told me
of her husband, who had died a hero's death in time to save him from
the delirium tremors which would have ended his days. Died as the
bravest die--not knowing why--because of a reflex, which after all had
been a part of him, a reflex which had made him cast himself into the
path of a pack of wolf-like creatures attacking the exploring party he
was with--off in that forest at the foot of Saint Stephen's--to fight
them with a machete and to be torn apart by them while his companions
fled to the camp, where they made a stand and saved themselves. Such
is the essence of valor: an unthinking moment, a spark along the
spinal nerves, predetermined by the sum total of everything you have
ever done, wished to do or not to do, and wish you had done, or
hadn'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 shot
that 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? Too
sophisticated. He just did the absurd without watching. Like running
back into a burning house after his favorite pipe and a can of
tobacco. --Devises religions? I saw people praying, but they weren't
devising. 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 the
water swirled about her armpits, and the little girl was holding her
doll up above _her_ shoulders, in the same way. But isn't that--the
love--a part of the total? Of everything you have ever done, or
wished? Positive or neg? I know that it is what made me leave my
post, running, and what made me climb into Eleanor's flyer and what
made me fight my way through the storm and out to that particular
scene.
I didn't get there in time.
I shall never forget how glad I was that someone else did. Johnny
Keams 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 came
toward 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. Face
the 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 gun
at 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 me
and I heard the flyer's door open.
"Chuck!" I said. "We need you now! You can settle this thing
peacefully, 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 from
somewhere 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 find
us--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. I
turned 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 that
they were not seriously hurt. After I saw them cared for, I rejoined
Eleanor 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 had
happened so quickly. So many things had occurred during the past week
that 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 of
cobalt.
A cloudquake shook the heavens and chasms of light opened across
its dark landscape.
It was coming apart as we watched.
I heard a cheer, and I croaked in unison with it as the sun
appeared.
The good, warm, drying, beneficial sun drew the highest peak of
Saint 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 ruins
lying about your bedroom. This is one way of telling whether or not
something was only a bad dream, or whether or not you are really
awake.
We walked the streets in great boots. Mud was everywhere. It was
in basements and in machinery and in sewers and in living room clothes
closets. It was on buildings and on cars and on people and on the
branches of trees. It was broken brown blisters drying and waiting to
be peeled off from clean tissue. Swarms of skytoads rose into the air
when we approached, hovered like dragon-flies, returned to spoiling
food stores after we had passed. Insects were having a heyday, too.
Betty would have to be deloused. So many things were overturned or
fallen down, and half-buried in the brown Sargassos of the streets.
The dead had not yet been numbered. The water still ran by, but
sluggish and foul. A stench was beginning to rise across the city.
There were smashed-in store fronts and there was glass everywhere, and
bridges fallen down and holes in the streets...But why go on? If you
don't get the picture by now, you never will. It was the big morning
after, following a drunken party by the gods. It is the lot of mortal
man always to clean up their leavings or be buried beneath them.
So clean we did, but by noon Eleanor could no longer stand. So I
took her home with me, because we were working down near the harbor
section and my place was nearer.
That's almost the whole story--light to darkness to light--except
for the end, which I don't really know. I'll tell you of its
beginning, though...

I dropped her off at the head of the alleyway, and she went on toward
my apartment while I parked the car. Why didn't I keep her with me?
I don't know. Unless it was because the morning sun made the world
seem at peace, despite its filth. Unless it was because I was in love
and the darkness was over, and the spirit of the night had surely
departed.
I parked the car and started up the alley. I was halfway before
the corner where I had met the org when I heard her cry out.
I ran. Fear gave me speed and strength and I ran to the corner
and turned it.
The man had a bag, not unlike the one Chuck had carried away with
him, lying beside the puddle in which he stood. He was going through
Eleanor's purse, and she lay on the ground--so still!--with blood on the
side of her head.
I cursed and ran toward him, switching on my cane as I went. He
turned, dropped her purse, and reached for the gun in his belt.
We were about thirty feet apart, so I threw my cane.
He drew his gun, pointed it at me, and my cane fell into the
puddle in which he stood.
Flights of angels sang him to his rest, perhaps.
She was breathing, so I got her inside and got hold of a doctor--I
don't remember how, not too clearly, anyway--and I waited and waited.
She lived for another twelve hours and then she died. She
recovered consciousness twice before they operated on her, and not
again after. She didn't say anything. She smiled at me once, and
went to sleep again.
I don't know.
Anything, really.
It happened that I became Betty's mayor, to fill in until
November, to oversee the rebuilding. I worked, I worked my head off,
and I left her bright and shiny, as I had found her. I think I could
have won if I had run for the job that fall, but I did not want it.
The Town Council overrode my objections and voted to erect a
statue of Godfrey Justin Holmes beside the statue of Eleanor Schirrer
which was to stand in the Square across from cleaned-up Wyeth. I
guess it's out there now.
I said that I would never return, but who knows? In a couple of
years, after some more history has passed, I may revisit a Betty full
of strangers, if only to place a wreath at the foot of the one statue.
Who knows but that the entire continent may be steaming and clanking
and whirring with automation by then, and filled with people from
shore to shining shore?
There was a Stopover at the end of the year and I waved goodbye
and climbed aboard and went away, anywhere.
I went aboard and went away, to sleep again the cold sleep.
Delirium of ship among stars--
Years have passed, I suppose. I'm not really counting them
anymore. But I think of this thing often: Perhaps there _is_ a Golden
Age someplace, a Renaissance for me sometime, a special time
somewhere, somewhere but a ticket, a visa, a diary-page away. I don't
know where or when. Who does? Where are all the rains of yesterday?
In the invisible city?
Inside me?
It is cold and quiet outside and the horizon is infinity. There
is no sense of movement.
There is no moon, and the stars are very bright, like broken
diamonds, all.