"You are alone!"
"I am alone. Many times I have longed--"
"Watch him Jim." Crick whispered. "This doesn't smell right to me."
"Do you mean to tell me that you alone built this apparatus?" Ronson
gestured toward the array of equipment in the room.
"This? This is only a part. It was a long task. Many weary years I have
spent here--"
"He's telling the truth, Jim," Jennie Ware whispered.
"But one pair of hands, to build all of this." Shock was in Ronson,
perhaps even greater shock than he had experienced in the cavern. He
stared at Les Ro. Respect was in him and admiration, if not liking.
"Then you are indeed a genius. The rumors were partly right, after all."
"Thank you."
"But why couldn't you get someone to help you?"
Sadness showed on Les Ro's face. "You have seen the people in the
drinking room below. Which of them could understand how an electron
circles in its orbit? Many times I have tried to train the brightest of
them. The result was inevitable failure. That is why, when you came--"
Longing came into Les Ro's eyes.
"Watch him, Jim," Crick whispered.
"I know it doesn't track," Ronson said. His voice grew grim and hard.
Bitterness boiled in it. He was facing his own frustration here, in
the failure of his deep hopes in coming to this place. A touch of pain
moving through his chest told him what that failure meant to him. He
gestured toward the cavern. "Out there I saw Martians destroying each
other. In this, they were wiser than they knew. The ones who died
quickly were lucky. The choice was between a quick death and slow,
horrible death from the radiation pouring through that place."
Pain and consternation showed on Les Ro's face. He seemed to hear only
Ronson's last words. "How did you detect the radiation?"
"With this." Ronson nodded toward his watch.
"This is wonderful. You humans actually have a reliable method of
detecting radiation! I have striven so hard to build such a device.
Let me see it." He moved toward Ronson as if nothing else were of any
importance in comparison to the detector.
"Stand back. Kus Dorken and Te Hold and the leper would not have
thought the radiation pouring through them was wonderful, if they had
known about it. Nor will Tal Bock, before he dies."
Real pain darkened the fine patina of the Martian's face. "Do you
really believe this of me?"
"I saw it happen," Ronson answered. "I was there. I saw Tal Bock
destroy Kus Dorken--"
"One moment, please." Les Ro's hand moved among the controls. Ronson's
hand tightened on the trigger. He held off firing. Somewhere a relay
thudded home. Power surged. The wall in the front of the room began to
glow with light.
"Wait, please! Walt!"
The leper came first through the swirling mistiness. He walked erect,
his back straight and his head up. The light of eager anticipation was
still in his eyes but something new had been added now--realization.
"But Tal Bock killed him. I saw it," Ronson whispered.
"No," Les Ro gently negated. "When Tal Bock attacked him, I put him
into a trance condition, to save him."
Ronson hardly heard the answer. His eyes were fixed on something else.
"The sores--" The sores were not gone but they had diminished in
size. Replacing the rotten tissue, new flesh had already begun to form.
"This is what he asked, when he came to me," Les Ro said. "This is what
he got."
"But this is a miracle."
Again Les Ro denied the statement. "This is natural law in operation,
though to you the laws may be unknown. Watch."
The leper would have dropped to his knees and kissed Les Ro's hand, but
the Martian forbade it, sending him to wait elsewhere.
Te Hold came through the swirling light--a Te Hold who was without
fear. Then, Kus Dorken came. He was still spitting sand out of his
mouth but the bluster and the bravado and the anger were gone from him.
He was a new Kus Dorken. Inside, he had been subtly changed. Flowing
outward, the change showed on his face as a gentle kindliness.
"He was a killer when I saw him first," Jennie Ware said. "Now--he
looks like a saint."
Les Ro smiled at her. "He will be a saint, from now on. He knows how
to be one, now. As to Tal Bock, he has not yet recovered from your
needles. When he does recover, he will come out of the cavern a saint
too."
"But why didn't you tell me about this?" Ronson whispered. "Why did
you just thrust me, and presumably the others too, in there without
warning. Why didn't you tell us?"
"To have told you, might have defeated my purpose, or prolonged its
achievement. I put all who come to me in the cavern. There, the killer
will try to kill, the coward will run, the brave man will fight. As
the killer tries to kill, he will use the reaction patterns he has
known all his life. As he uses them, I throw bursts of energy at him.
I disconnect the kill patterns. The energy penetrates right down to
the levels of the cells, and even goes lower than that, changing old
patterns--"
"New lamps for old," the girl whispered.
Ronson was silent. His thinking was perturbed, almost bewildered. What
Les Ro had said made sense. Reaction patterns had to change down to
and through the cellular level. If the patterns were struck by bursts
of radiant energy--but this was the method nature used! This was the
method of the _something_ they had sought but which had always
eluded them. The change in the cells that was called cancer--again pain
flicked through his chest--more often than not this change was brought
about by radiant energy operating on cellular structure! Les Ro had
organized this something, this wild talent of nature, and was making it
do useful work.
"But it did not work for me," Ronson protested.
"Human cellular structure and Martian cellular structure are
different," Les Ro answered. "This is the first opportunity I have had
to work with humans. More time is needed to produce the changes in
them. That is all." A beatific smile lit the face of the old Martian.
It went slowly away as his eyes came to focus on the girl. Ronson
turned, gasped when he saw what she was doing.
She was stripping herself. Without embarrassment and shame, she took
off her clothes. She stood before them, naked.
"A human woman!" Les Ro said.
"Outside, I'm a woman," Jennie Ware answered. "But inside I've got more
of the organization of a man than a woman. The result has been that
all my life there's been a fight within me. Instead of being a woman,
I have only succeeded in being a bitch, all jangle of nerves, always
trying to do what the men did, but knowing I really couldn't, because
I was a woman. I'm tired of this. I'm sick and tired of it!" Her voice
grew frantic for a moment. Then she was calm again.
"I want to be a woman. Do you think that if I went in there--" she
gestured toward the cavern, "that you could help me be a--woman?" The
appeal in her eyes and in her voice begged for one answer.
"I have never worked with a human woman--"
"Then use me as a guinea pig!" As if the answer were predetermined, her
chin up, with not a look behind her, she moved through the misty light
and out of sight--like Eve stepping into the Garden of Eden in the dawn
of a new world.
Les Ro's hands moved over the switches.
Jim Ronson dropped the needle gun. For a split second, he hesitated.
Then he walked toward the swirling light.
Les Ro's voice stopped him. "When you are cured, my son, when you are
finished in there, come back, and we will work together on the problems
of your world and mine. This I have dreamed of since the first day I
began work here, that someone with sufficient intelligence might come
to work beside me."
Ronson smiled, nodded. As he stepped into the mistiness, Les Ro's face
beamed at him, enhaloed, like a saint.
The girl was wandering through the shrubbery. She seemed not to see him
but when he came into step beside her, she looked up and smiled. Arm in
arm, they walked together, in a place that had been hell, but was now
heaven, waiting for the miracle to take place within them. And little
by little, in minute bursts of spurting quanta, Jim Ronson felt the
pain in his chest go away.
The girl beside him was no longer the bitter harriden who had almost
turned Pluto Dome upside down when she had been ejected from a space
ship that never returned. She was no longer the unhappy roamer who had
wandered the paths of the planets, defying all creation and herself.
She was becoming something else--a woman. The fact showed in the
gentleness of her smile.
His arm went around her and she came closer without hesitation. A glow
came up inside of both them, and grew stronger.