WHAT HAPPENED TO WILLIAM COOMBES
Angela Rogers
The pattern existed, it was there, waiting to be deciphered; but what happened to Mr. Coombes demanded belief beyond mere credulity. After all, cats do survive, they prowl down plastic corridors as if they were in living jungle. They might touch the dust of Mars, really touch it, that is, and not just sense the feeling of it through plastic space-suit gloves. What Angela Rogers has to say in this articulate and intensively evocative and sensitive story is probably not best summed up in her last line; but, then again, perhaps that is really what happened to William Coombes. I do not think so myself, and I fancy neither will you, at the end...
* * * *
When William Coombes was a boy he thought that he could escape from enclosure into space. He ate his good food in the meal hall with his back pressed against another back and other arms brushing his, and watched soup run down the chin of the girl he faced. Or he lay awake next to his sleeping brother and heard each slight breath against the murmur of his parents’ voices and the continual soft sounds of people: walking past in the corridors, or turning on taps, or suddenly laughing behind their own unnoticed walls. He endured it easily because he knew he would stand alone on Mars and look across empty land to the horizon, or kneel and put his hand on the ground itself and dig his fingers into the sand.
On his fifteenth birthday he enlisted and within six years he did stand alone on Mars and look at space through a faceplate. And he knelt quite easily in his flexible suiting and let handfuls of sand run through his fingers. What he touched was not sand but his protecting gloves.
He learned that man is an animal adapted to live on Earth, and that when he pretends to leave it he must carry Earth with him in small, economical packets. He found that Earth on Mars was a cluster of pressure domes as clean and crowded as a Woburn community block, with the immigration programme always one step ahead of the expansion schedule. When he tried to walk away from Earth into Mars he could not. He was an alien in a space suit, still carrying his skin of Earth in a little envelope; not so economical as a dome but smaller, very small.
He came to think of himself as physically tied to Earth, but by a running noose. He had stood on roofs in Woburn and felt himself lost in the distances of the universe; but soaring between planes he was only aware of bulkheads and pressure margins and cubic centimetres of occupied space. And it took months from his life to move from one inner planet to another; years to visit Neptune; a lifetime probably to pass the bounds of the Solar system. Since he was trapped, it came to seem perverse to let himself live and die in small traps within a trap, and Earth itself grew in his mind.
He stayed with SPEC for thirty years. He was based with Supply, and spent most of the years doing social maths in small rooms. He was at Archangel for twelve years, Oban for three, Mauiai for six. He saw a lot of the world on short postings, but altogether he spent less than six years off-Earth: usually doing the same work in similar rooms. He had an unusual knack for logistics and moved up through the groups at great speed. That surprised me when he first mentioned it; but after seventeen years of Mr. Coombes’ reminiscences I know that Space Administration is mostly logistics and the supply of tranquilizers.
Yet he did extraordinary things. He helped to build the Alpha Centaury, stacked the colonists, and saw it drift away from the Sun towards the dark. He was nearly assassinated on Mercury during the riots, or thought it wise to say so. He trained before the Eight Hour War of course, when things were opulent, and during one month he was taken again and again in a small winged transport high above the buildings, miles, he said, and told to jump into the air. Time after time he stepped out of the transport into the wind and swam above the earth, in a sense falling and yet afloat. At a certain height above the roofs he had to pull a cord and a parachute would snap him back to safety. That was before he got to Mars and he pulled the cord always without question, even with relief.
Over the years he told me a lot about his life in SPEC, but for him the life was mainly logistics. He only mentioned what I would call adventures in passing, although he did talk of the training falls many times, and he returned obsessively to the experiments in Parker, and what happened to Rachel Kwe.
Venus is so inimical we don’t even mine there now; but in Mr. Coombes’ time they still hoped to colonize. It took three tries to establish Parker, and when they did get it up they were held behind its walls. They shipped in autoprobes and began to survey, but the write-off rate was too high and there was strong pressure to try one or other of the human adaption techniques which various groups were working on.
Mr. Coombes told me that they should have tried clones; but all work on clones had been banned after the Darkside riots. None of the alternatives was really viable, but they gave the contract to Unichem for a scheme which was no better conceived than the others, but was rather less ambitious. Probably someone said ‘Conservative’, and someone else ‘Ah! Safe’. So Unichem set up a unit at Parker and advertised for subjects.
William Coombes should have known better, but he imagined himself wading away from the squat domes of Parker into an unspoiled world, and he would have volunteered. He only had two years left to serve, but by that time he was a Marshall, and acting as Supply Co-ordinator to the settlements, so he couldn’t get a clearance. He worked out his time, but he was obsessed with the experiments on Venus. He transferred his own control unit to Parker, which was substandard and so plagued by contamination alerts that they slept in their suits, and he waited on the project.
* * * *
Unichem hoped to replace their subjects’ skin tissues with flexibly segmented carapaces similar to some successfully grown on Barbary apes. The Barbary tissue seemed to be completely impervious to the corrosive Venusian atmosphere, and impressively resistant to termites. It seemed at least possible that it would withstand High Zone pressures, and a most ingenious subcutaneous cooling process was also being discussed. There were problems. For a start men are not clinically interchangeable with Barbary apes. Then the impermeable carapace could not perform the normal functions of the skin, which had in some way to be continued artificially. Again, it was considered necessary to seal off all orifices except the nose and mouth. This required the replacement of the digestive and the destruction of the reproductive systems.
The end in view was a man who could travel with only an air pack and a cooling unit. He would be fed intravenously at base, and his blood would be washed clean as he slept. There would have been little purpose to it if they had succeeded.
Although the experiments were irresponsible, they were carried out with great care, so that when the first subject died only six had been processed at all, and the last one of those escaped relatively undamaged. The woman named Rachel Kwe was also still alive when Mr. Coombes left, but they had gone too far with her to be able to do more than keep her alive.
Rachel Kwe lived at that time in a plexiglass tank which was filled with a clear glutinous liquid in which she could move freely if slowly. Her head was encased in a bubble helmet from which a welter of pipes and cables ran up out of the liquid to a life support system above the tank. They had not attempted to grow the new tissue on her because they knew that it would kill her, but they had already spoiled her for the air of Earth, so she was trapped there.
He saw her once. She was drifting loosely upright in the middle of the tank; her body wasted, silvery and hairless; her face in its smaller case brown and impassive; her eyes closed. He had been told that she would ignore him; but when he had watched her for a long time her eyes opened and she looked at him and knew him. She drifted to the glass and her lips moved and the little speaker set in the tank said ‘Marshall’, and she put out her shadow hand and placed it on the glass as if to touch him. The glass was warm.
His face could only have shown despair. They looked at each other through the glass until the little speaker said ‘It would have been worse anyway’, while her lips moved and her eyes closed, and he turned away.
That was more than twenty years ago. Mr. Coombes was discharged and came home to Woburn. Rachel Kwe died ho doubt. Mr. Coombes was made Supply Officer then Manager at the Hockliff Plant, which like most plants at that time was damaged, obsolescent, and overburdened. It still is in fact, if you substitute the damage from twenty years’ wear for the damage from war, but we haven’t starved since he took over. We lived for four months on a kind of raw green gulp during the famine, but we did live.
There is a holly of him in the block data bank, taken when he enlisted. It holds the head and shoulders of a round-faced boy, with lank mousecoloured hair, eyes front and features composed for posterity. There is little to learn from the image: he doesn’t seem enigmatic or eager or indifferent. It is just a boy’s head put into the records. I can see that it could be William Coombes, although the most characteristic thing about it is the impression it leaves of anonymity: any number of men might have looked like that when they were boys. Only if you look at the boy’s eyes you see that they are pale and colourless: not blue but a washed-out yellow brown, at that moment focussed on nothing and seeming to have neither surface nor depth. They give a distinction to the boy’s face which I never saw in Mr. Coombes’, since one avoids the eyes of a living man. Unless you already knew that he was a mad plant manager, you would hardly have noticed Mr. Coombes.
I first met him when he started to walk home from the plant. That would be about two years after he came home. He had to report at the block office when he came in, and as he generally came in about twenty, and I had the evening shift, he usually reported to me. I was uneasy with him at first: this part of the world was badly hit during the Atlantic War - we are only fifty kilometres from Crater - and even now there is a general shelter order in force because of the radiation levels. Eighteen years ago the radiation levels were higher, the sick areas had only recently been closed, ‘clean’ air was even dirtier than it is now, and very few people went onto the roofs, let alone into the lanes. Mr. Coombes had asked permission to walk home regularly from the plant. To do it he would have to start by climbing through the highway, which was dangerous in itself, then make a long detour round Bryant, which is closed. He couldn’t hope to make the journey in much less than three hours: most of them spent below roof level.
It is easy to say now that he was sixty-four years old last year and still working, when most of his age, certainly most veterans, were dead. Without hindsight it seemed suicidal: a frightening sign of weakness in a useful citizen. And when permission was refused he went to the panel and got a medical clearance on therapeutic grounds.
It is unnerving when a man directly responsible for the food supply to half a million people is given such a lethal therapy. It suggests terrible disease; more terribly it suggests a diseased mind. But the world doesn’t foster serenity, and we put up with each others’ twitches when we can. When the food still came it was easy to shut one’s eyes to the walks. And Mr. Coombes was quite controlled; he had even married, although his wife was a shorthaul pilot so they weren’t together too much. His wife was young then, but they had no children.
For nearly twenty years of careful routine he lived in the same two rooms on this block. The routine was enlivened daily by the climb across the highway, and threatened by signs of age, but the only erratic element in it was the presence of his wife, who came and went according to uncertain schedules, and for whom his feelings must at least have been ambiguous. I won’t say that he seemed content, but at least he did not seem distressed. He functioned efficiently.
He disappeared last autumn when he was walking home one evening. People do disappear: quite a number according to the civil guard. Probably most of them just leave and join the migrant work pool. Maybe a few manage to forge identity seals and merge back into the State. Some must be dead: accidentally obliterated in a block clearance perhaps, or washed away in the gulley. People suicide in the gulleys, everyone knows, and their bodies are filtered out and identified and rendered down; but they don’t find them all.
I think Mr. Coombes had too much sense to join the pool at his age, and he was certainly too scrupulous to forge a seal. I don’t think he killed himself either, and I know he would never have chosen to die in a gulley.
I worry about him. There is no sensible reason to suppose that anything unusual happened to him; it is only unusual that he survived the walks for so long. He probably just died and was tidied away by a servitor. We sent out a couple of search parties who found nothing, and after three months there was a memorial meeting, and his wife filed for insurance and was moved away to a room at the port. Mr. Coombes’ deputy took over at the plant, and although we haven’t had a sweet ration for six months we are eating quite well.
* * * *
I worry about him I suppose because of the landing last spring. He was the main witness: the only witness who got a close look, and it left him disturbed and unlike himself. During the summer he was excitable, sullen, almost garrulous. He would sometimes interrupt quite different discussions to talk about the landing, and we prepared to pull in our belts. I may have given the impression that he did talk a lot about himself, but you must remember that I knew him for a long time. I picked up a lot of his history from odd references and by inference, but I might have seen the landing myself: he told us so often what he did, what he saw, what he felt.
At seventeen thirty one on the day of the landing he was in the highway, half-way up a ten metre ladder which connected a surviving section of pedestrian way with a makeshift catwalk. His feet were bare, because it gave him an illusion of safety to know that he could grip with toes and fingers as he climbed, and the sandals stuffed in the pocket of his coat swung as he moved and bumped against his shins. He knew it was seventeen thirty one because the rusty metal under his hand began to vibrate slightly, and a chip of concrete worked loose from the pillar he was climbing, bounced on a girder, and dropped away below. He thought if he hurried he might reach the catwalk before the super came over, but after a few rungs dust began to pour down the face of the pillar and he decided to hang on where he was. He clasped the ladder, half shut his eyes, and listened to the wheeze of a transport bedding down for the blow. He saw the whole pillar shake and then a slam of sound plucked at him and the ladder or the pillar moved. He could feel the grind of staples pulling from their mounts, but before he had time to be afraid the sound ebbed to a roar of wind and the wind died, and he could hear the transport again heaving off its rail. It started to move, scraped its rail with a wild screech, stopped, gasped, and heaved again, then swung past him in a cloud of dust. He could see people through the sealed windows all crushed indifferently together: talking quite happily or peering out at the highway, and instead of emphasizing his own freedom the sight seemed to enfold him. Friends near the windows recognized him and waved and cheered: he could see their mouths open wide then slowly close, their hands slap the glass above their heads, drawing him to them. He closed his eyes and when he opened them the transport had gone. He started to climb again, very carefully because the ladder shifted every time he moved.
The catwalk was very beautiful: a sliver of translucent crystal clipped at one end to the ladder head and at the other, fifteen metres away, to the parapet of a bombed underpass. It was SPEC surplus: used because it was available and the right length, and one of its characteristics was a low friction surface. A metal handrail had been fixed to one side of it, but over the years two crewmen had slipped and fallen, so later a length of cable had been slung across above head height.
Mr. Coombes reached up for the cable with both hands and side-stepped towards the distant parapet with careful poise, balancing his weight above the board. He had no faith in his ability to haul himself to safety by hand if he lost his foothold. Some way above him were the speed rails and below him was a long drop to ground level. Several days of high winds had cleared the air, and although he could not see the ground road he could just discern the dark line of the Northampton gulley. Set between the high rails and the gulley, and bounded by the plant to the west and Southern Diversified to the east, were the Midlands throughways and the through rail, local roads and rails, the plant sidings and loading bays, and all the shunts and crossovers of the Bedford intersection. Embedded in the web were the ruins of abandoned systems: bombed flyovers and obsolete tube lines crumbled away, rotten but entrenched. They were shored up by scaffolding and site cast casings, and in turn they shored up systems still in use, but hardly less dilapidated.
The highway is all metal and concrete and simple plastics; only the speed rails use organics and they should be quite separate. There are two threads running from south to north and north to south, high above the whole mess. Their struts are rooted in the earth, which should take the full shock of the supers and leave the highway undisturbed; but at Hockliff the struts have grown into parts of the highway, to strengthen it, so when a super comes over everything trembles.
He had crossed daily for years, and because nothing ever quite collapsed he usually ignored the signals of decay. But sometimes on the catwalk, where he was most aware of his vulnerability, he saw danger and was afraid. He saw it as he looked down at the gulley, and stood with his eyes closed to gather courage. He had opened his eyes and was about to move again when he felt himself fall. He still clutched the cable above his head and his toes still clenched on the crystal board, but he knew he was falling and the high rails above him were falling too. Everything was toppling soundlessly inwards so slowly that he could see no movement, and he said those words in his mind: there is no movement, there is no movement; knowing that the words were true, but not believing them.
Perhaps he would have fallen if the vertigo had lasted for more than a few seconds, but it passed and he was left clinging to his perch with everything as it had been. A mist of rain eddied round him.
When he had crossed the rest of the catwalk and reached the remains of the Bryant underpass he walked out to what had been the middle of the middle lane; eased himself down; and sat there on the roadway for a while, listening to the cars on the road above and the juggers far below: comforted for once because they were customary sounds.
He had no fear of heights. After a while he climbed carefully down to ground level, but his caution was deliberate. His impulse was to let go, to float, to fall. He had schooled himself to accept stiff joints and unresponsive muscles and failing judgment, but had counted on warning signals. Now all his senses together had slipped out of his control and might go again and it was too abrupt. By the time he reached the ground he was shaking and didn’t know whether it was shock or some fresh sign of disintegration.
* * * *
He found a cat in the storm drain under the Bedford ground level filter. But now it was dark, and as always the drain was filled with the shaking roar of juggers on the filter road. It was a big drain-more like a tunnel, but he had to crouch over as he walked through it, and as he reached the outlet his hand brushed against fur and his bare foot kicked involuntarily and pushed something live into the diffuse light of the passing traffic. The animal sprawled loosely where he had kicked it, lying as if it was drugged, but when he touched it gently with his toe it winced and scrabbled aimlessly for a moment against the rough concrete, then lay still again.
He took his sandals out of his pocket and dropped them to the ground, then shuffled them on to his feet without bending. He touched the cat again with the edge of his sandal, but this time it hardly moved. He knelt down reluctantly, and lifted it gently into his arms. It lay with its eyes slightly open: a small plump animal with torn ears. It looked wrong, almost boneless. He thought it was dying.
It was difficult to get up again with both hands occupied, and he almost put the cat down again and abandoned it. But he was ashamed to leave it there to die. He held it with one arm, pushed against the damp wall of the drain with the other, and managed to stagger to his feet. He could take it over to the guardpost at Diversified and leave it with them.
He crawled back through the drain and went along the bank of the filter, looking for a gap in the Diversified fence. The bank was in shadow, only dimly lit by the lights of the ground filter reflected from the higher roads. The evening air was still quite clear though, and he could see the teeth along the top of the ten metre fence.
He was stopped by the hulk of a jugger, which had run off the road and done its best to climb the fence. The forward unit was draped over the sagging mesh, nose up as if it was trying to take off. The rear unit was actually balanced vertically behind it, nose down in the ditch, and he saw as he came closer that the end left on the road had simply been lifted clear with a couple of cables hitched to an overhead gantry. One part of the twisted fence had lifted away from its moorings and he stepped under it and round the heavy shadow of the suspended transport into the compound.
He had seen a service tunnel which should take him towards the guardpost, and he went back and walked through it by the light of a roadcleaner which rattled along behind him too slowly to be much of a danger. The servitor turned away down a side tunnel just as he emerged into a cleared site, and he was left quite suddenly in silence looking across the great canyon of bared earth confined by high blank walls.
It was quite unexpected. The canyon stretched away ahead of him so far that he could not see the far wall, and was hundreds of metres wide - almost as wide as its walls were high. He realized that the huge servitor parked in the corner nearest to him was a recycling unit: he had come across a block clearance in the few hours between dissolving and moulding. There were lights behind him in the mouth of the tunnel, and a roadway dewed with rain led out across the open space towards a vague glow of light which must be the same tunnel continuing. The rest of the vast plain was mud and stones. He could imagine it lapping the sealed walls.
The earth was only an infill of course. There was a stamp of half-dissolved plastic pushing from the soil at his feet, which must be a load point founded on a deep shelter platform. The deep shelter would spread under the soil just as the blocks spread above it. Still, the soil was real. He walked forward along the roadway into the darkness and stood there entranced, still holding the damaged animal unthinkingly.
There was a sound.
A short way away below the road another fragment of pillar had been left upright, and in its shadow something with a thin high voice was saying, or singing, ‘La-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-’ on one note, quietly.
‘La-la-la-la-la-la-la.’ Silence.
‘L-l-l-l-lll.’ A squeak. Silence.
‘Hhhhaaaaaaa ... Hhhhhhaaaaa ... Hhhhhhhaaa.’ Silence. Hallo?
‘Hallo?’ said Mr. Coombes.
‘Nnnnnnnn. Nnnnnnn.’
‘Hallo?’
‘Nnn-Nnn-Nn.’ No?
He scrambled down from the roadway onto the black earth and walked towards the stump of pillar.
‘Rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr’ trilled the voice sweetly. Perhaps it was alarmed. Perhaps it was growling. Perhaps it did not know he was there. He stopped and peered into the dark. He could just see the uneven ground where he stood, and the edge of the wet road behind him showed as a line of light, but below the stump was black dark, and the source of the voice was engulfed.
‘Hhhhaa... Hhhha...’ breathed the voice, and in concert the cat breathed: air shrilled in its throat and its ribs juddered under his thumb. He touched it helplessly, willing it to die.
It seemed to him as he stood that the dark became less dark, and then that it stayed black but was flecked with transitory points of light. And then it was black again for a moment, and then a single white flare expanded within reach of his fingers, died, flared again, and drifted away to the pillar. He followed it. Far away someone shouted and shouted again. He heard the shouts and their echoes, then a shouted reply and its echo and its echo; then a sector bell began to ring insistently, hardly audible at this distance. He heard the sounds and echoes of alarm, but he listened to the small voice, which went ‘Sssssssss ... Sssssssssss’ with the tiny sibilance of a whisper, and he looked at what he had supposed was a load point, where the white light shone on rock. Not on plastic but on creature rock, veined with green.
The voice said ‘Vul. Vul. Vul!’ With emphatic precision.
Afterwards his memory of the incident was flawed, and for at least a week he insisted that everything had happened on the plant roof, before he had left for home. He rebuilt his memory about the clear image of black flaking rock: faceted and glinting in the strange light, and about the unexpected feel of it when he reached out and nervously caressed it: that it was not smooth but gritty, even as it shone.
There is no clear account of what happened next. The group of guards who raised the alarm were too far away to see more than a suggestion of light. There had been radio interference on their spyviews, and its source was at least in the direction of the light, which faded away while they were still gathering at the far tunnel entrance. When they reached Mr. Coombes he was lying unconscious in the mud. They scanned the area before they carried him away to the post, but saw nothing notable. When they were questioned later they were reasonably certain that there had been no rock, no load point, no animal in the area.
Mr. Coombes was only certain of the rock. He could remember touching its solid crumbling surface, and he could remember believing that the cat was dead. By then he could only see light without definition, which pervaded everything. His own body seemed to have vanished into light. The cat’s tortured breathing had eased and he could feel it lying soft and relaxed in his arm, and then he just felt that it was dead. There was no obvious change: only the sense of dead weight. Even if his memory of the moment was sound he could only remember an impression, and soon after that he lost all sensation: even the light became indistinguishable from dark and his hands touched nothing and he stood on nothing and did not know whether what he heard was silence or some unrecognizable blaze of sound.
The first aid kit at the guardpost malfunctioned and soaked him in Destroy, which woke him up, but he was confused and only remembered slowly and imperfectly. SPEC set up a big investigation and held up the recycling for three days while they ran every sort of test on the site and found nothing. People as far away as Crater claimed that they had felt a moment of dizziness at about seventeen-thirty, and five civil guards agreed that there was some kind of light on the site, but there was only Mr. Coombes’ account for the rest.
Most people believed him, and I think SPEC was still interested, but his story had no pattern to it, and no place in the patterns of our experience. Interest faded, and it has probably been filed away with all the other trivia like cahias and ESP: things which may well occur, but which cannot be codified and exploited.
He remembered the final message of the voice in a dream, months later - long after he had pieced together the other fragments. ‘He was dreaming of something else when the voice said ‘Vul parahannis’ very clearly and fluently in its small monotone, and he woke up. He believed then that he remembered it, but he may only have remembered an earlier dream.
* * * *
That’s all really. As I say he was disturbed for a few months, but even that was less obvious after a while. He rang through one evening in November to say that he was just leaving the plant. I took the call myself and said ‘Thank you’, and ‘I’ll see you later then’, or some other obvious remark, and there was nothing at all in his voice or his words to distinguish that call from the ones he had made every evening for years. He didn’t come in, and at twenty-two I raised the alarm as a precaution: thinking that he had been delayed at the plant. At four we sent out a small search party to follow his route, and later that day there was a big sweep with as many volunteers as they could get from the pool and a lot of personnel servitors. People were very anxious and several citizens wanted to help; so they were issued with masks and deployed in the block lanes, where Mrs. Rhiak fell off a monorail and broke a wrist. There was no trace at all of Mr. Coombes.
To me there is a pattern in what I’ve told you, and of all its parts it is the cat which worries me most. Mr. Coombes was certain that the cat died, and I’m sure he came to believe that if it was not there the voice must have taken it. But I believe myself that it had been paralysed, then galvanized, by terror; and had simply run away: so that it should be the most ordinary element in the pattern: far more natural for instance than Rachel Kwe escaping from Earth to a glass bowl, and more credible than alien voices in the Midlands. But all those other things are just events. Very unusual events it is true, but Mr. Coombes had had an unusual life, and things which seemed to me unbelievable were a commonplace to him.
It is easy to explain the disappearance of the cat. What worries me; or at least undermines my reasoning with bad dreams, is that it completes a neat array of symbols. I think that for Mr. Coombes cats were a talisman of true survival. We survive too, but he saw the last small birds of his childhood die in the air, and the other free animals of his maturity: rats and people; scutter fearfully to the safe cages of their blocks and gullies, while cats still prowl down plastic corridors as if they were in living jungle. In the summertime they go on the roofs and stretch out in the sun: dozing on their backs like babies with their paws in the air, or they chase paper blown by the wind. In winter they sit by the heat vents and wash themselves and snap at the small insects blown up through the ducts, or they hunt through the service levels and eat the insects there. A cat lying with its eyes closed for hours in the sun might as well be anywhere at any time, and cats stalking mice through long grass a hundred years ago cannot have been more absorbed than our cats stalking cockroaches among the drying frames.
Mr. Coombes made himself stand easily in crowded cubicles and accept greetings and handclasps with a smile; and would see through the bars some underfed cat washing itself with its eyes closed, and he would envy it.
Now Mr. Coombes came to believe that the dead cat had gone through a door which he might pass alive. His only evidence was his own need and I believe none of it, and yet since he disappeared I worry. I know it is nonsense but I connect Rachel Kwe and the cat and Mr. Coombes and I imagine that the voice came again. Of course it didn’t because there was no vertigo, but I imagine that it came again and that William Coombes walked into it. He had always been obsessed with the possibility of escape, but I don’t think of him as escaping. He had already seen the only escape, in acceptance: there can be nowhere else to go that would have any meaning for a man.
I remember that when he found the cat he could not bring himself to leave it alone to die.
He was so bound to Earth that when he thought of escape he thought of translation to some other, empty, Earth. But suppose one escaped to something one could not sense, or could sense but not interpret: to be trapped in one’s own skin, or darkness or infinity or the little broken gyro of one’s own unoriented mind?
We have a song here which fits to the tune of Vostock Ferry. Its chorus goes ‘No one to share my bath. No one to share my bath. We’re five to a bed but that’s all I ask, No one to share my bath.’
Probably he just died.
* * * *